BOOK DATA Laliv Melamed, Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. $85.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $34.95 e-book. 312 pages.

Laliv Melamed’s Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence unpacks the affective affordances of both official and vernacular memorial videos produced in conjunction with, or at the margins of, the programming for Israel’s National Memorial Day, a yearly event established in the early 1990s. While families grieve the loss of young soldiers––the poster boys of the nation––within the private sphere, their mourning also indexes affective membership to Israel. Grief and mourning are indeed a crucial component within Israel’s nationalist ideology. Largely informed by Lauren Berlant’s work on the affective politics of citizenship, Melamed’s astute analysis of the aesthetic forms of memorial videos demonstrates how the affectivity of these videos is related inextricably to sovereign politics (i.e., Israel’s settler...

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