Sovereign Intimacy – Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence

"Sovereign Intimacy is a thrilling contribution: methodologically impressive, philosophically rich, and politically committed. Melamed sifts through familial and bureaucratic ephemera to build an impressive media history of the weaponization of love and loss as settler feelings. This is first-rate work, vividly written, with exquisite attention to the difficulty--and necessity--of doing decolonial research in and with Israeli media archives."--Pooja Rangan, author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary

"With both theoretical and empirical richness, Melamed's book navigates the ways that private media practices are entangled with technologies of state power in Israel, thereby sustaining militarism as an intimate structure of feeling. Sovereign Intimacy provides a powerful example of what media studies brings to the study of settler colonialism."--Rebecca L. Stein, author of Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine

"In conversation with an impressive array of key texts and thinkers, Laliv Melamed radically recasts the notion of intimacy as a form of invasive statecraft. Through close readings of homemade memorial tapes for fallen IDF soldiers, an object generally overlooked by media scholars and cultural analysts, Melamed reveals the operations whereby the Israeli state seeps insidiously into the psyches of its Jewish-Israeli citizens. Sovereign Intimacy tracks the mechanisms by which the power of the state is rerouted through a very personal form of governmentality, one that almost eludes detection. At the same time the author resists succumbing to the sentimental demands of the objects under scrutiny, deftly identifying the collusion with the state and the military that these acts of mediated public mourning represent."--Alisa Lebow, creator of Filming Revolution