Book Launch | The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony with Nasser Abourahme
Book Talk | The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony with Nasser Abourahme
September 10 | 6:30 PM
Harbour Centre | Room 1800 | Terasen Cinema
On September 10, the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and UBC Geography hosted Dr. Nasser Abourahme in discussing his new book, The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony.
91ÅÝܽ the Book
In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. That struggle, Abourahme demonstrates, is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.
91ÅÝܽ the Author
Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and currently assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He works between colonial history and political theory, and his writing can be found in places like Critical Times, Radical Philosophy, Cultural Critique, and Critical Ethnic Studies. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025).
91ÅÝܽ the Discussant
Brenna Bhandar is Professor in the Allard School of Law, UBC. She is author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership and a research associate at the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS.