Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Winner, 2023 Interdisciplinary Studies Section Best Book Award, International Studies Association

Winner, 2023 ISA-IDSS Book Award, International Studies Association

'In this highly original book filled with riveting detail and sophisticated theoretical engagement, Frances Hasso leads us down new paths, raising questions about missing bodies, gendered subjectivities, racial policies, and the nature of politics in Palestine. Drawing on unique oral histories of women who faced childbirth and loss, Buried in the Red Dirt shows how intimate stories of sexuality and reproduction are central to understanding the lived experience of the mandate period and after. Her ethnographic approach to archives brings a fresh sensibility, as she convincingly demonstrates that women’s reproductive choices have been based on the futures envisioned or feared for their unborn offspring rather than on nationalist discourses.’

Beth Baron - City University of New York

‘Exploring the connections between race, reproduction and death in modern Palestine, Frances Hasso sheds new light on the relations between settler colonialism, politics of public health and hygiene, trauma, forced exile, race, migration, birth and death. Her analysis of who is encouraged to give birth and who is not in a colonial situation and of Zionist and Western anxieties around birth rates ends with an illuminating exploration of death and futurity in Palestinian literature and film. This book is indispensable for all those interested in anti-reproductive desire as resistance in settler-colonial situations.’

Françoise Vergès - author of A Decolonial Feminism