SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in settler colonial contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricting economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank.