Polluting appropriations: Malevolent weathering of settler colonisation in Palestine

Abstract

This paper offers a novel take on settler colonisation as a process of appropriating space through pollution. In the context of Palestine and Israel, it illustrates how colonial pollution operates through various material forms that bind air to surfaces – stench, noise, darkness, smoke, fire, ash, and debris – hence constituting what is called ‘malevolent weathering’. In doing so, the paper relates inhabitation and claims of appropriation to contamination of space, arguing, first, that in the context of settler colonisation, polluting functions as a central enabling condition for dispossessive violence. In addition to showing how such contaminations occupy, hold and take space through proliferation of colonial dirt, it argues, second, that polluting creates malevolent weathers that are imposed to purify and clean(se) spaces in order to make them hospitable for settler (re)inhabitation. The paper concludes by framing contamination as a profoundly spatial process that functions through appropriation, weathering, and dispossessive cleansing of space.