Decolonisation in the 21st Century

What horizons can be conceived at a time of genocidal violence when the very materiality of Palestinian life-worlds is eroded day by day? In this chapter, I want to think about and through the vast arrays of practices and political visions that refugees, excluded by all nation-state configurations, have conceived and put in place historically. Together, these amount to a politics of remaining present in the face of settler colonial erasure and elimination. This is akin to Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance” (Vizenor, 2005), encompassing the politics of resistance and survival of indigenous peoples in North America. However, my argument is that refugees' political cultures are about more than remaining present and resisting erasure. They also provide a vision of a future anchored to and actualising a timespace prior to colonial contortions and nationalist configurations.