Sovereign Intimacy: University of California Press

By tracing an emerging media system of freelance filmmaking, privatized television, state institutes of care, and grassroots campaigns, Laliv Melamed reveals how these videos nevertheless avoid a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism, which is instead invited into the familiar space of the home. These intimate connections of memory and media exploit bonds of kinship and reshape larger relationships between the state and its citizens, enabling a collective disavowal of colonial violence. In Sovereign Intimacy, Melamed offers a poignant and critical view of the weaponization of home media and mourning in service of the neoliberal settler state.