Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Vol 29(2), May 2023, 82-86; doi:10.1037/pac0000680
Decoloniality and decolonization are epistemic and active processes that disrupt the coloniality of power. This article centers the voices of a Palestinian father, and his son, Hassan, in their opposition to settler-colonial dehumanization. The defacing of 15-year-old Hassan occurred when he was shot and killed by the state apparatus, taken from his family and loved ones, and kept in a freezing space of no life. His father’s refusal to accept Hassan’s frozen body as a dehumanized one made him read Hassan’s teared-up eyes, wounded mouth, and face as resistance to his undignified death. The father challenged the necropenological weaponization of his dead child’s body and transmutation of grief through his act of refusal. The father’s decolonial praxis that disrupted the state’s affective economies requires that we imagine a different world away from necropolitical unchilding, disrupt relations of power and violence, and engage with the living power of those persistent faces in narrating their humanity against their unchilding. By centering the face as a decolonial praxis, this article looks at the way the securitized erasure of Hassan’s face is intimately connected to settler-colonial racial ideologies and the political work of its power structure. It necessitates searching and reading beyond what is dictated by hegemonic modes of analysis, enabling possibilities of life amidst death, and building decolonial praxis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)