Critical theory and ‘gray space’: Mobilization of the colonized

Abstract

The paper draws on critical urban theories (CUT) to trace the working of oppressive power and the emergence of new subjectivities through the production of space. Within such settings, it analyzes the struggle of Bedouin Arabs in the Beersheba metropolitan region, Israel/Palestine. The paper invokes the concept of ‘gray spacing’ as the practice of indefinitely positioning populations between the ‘lightness’ of legality, safety and full membership, and the ‘darkness’ of eviction, destruction and death. The amplification of gray space illuminates the emergence of urban colonial relations in a vast number of contemporary city regions. In the Israeli context, the ethnocratic state has forced the indigenous Bedouins into impoverished and criminalized gray space, in an attempt to hasten their forced urbanization and Israelization. This created a process of ‘creeping apartheid’, causing the transformation of Bedouin struggle from agonistic to antagonistic; and their mobilization from democratic to radical. The process is illustrated by highlighting three key dimensions of political articulation: sumood (hanging on), memory‐building and autonomous politics. These dynamics underscore the need for a revised CUT, which extends the scope of spatial–social critique and integrates better to conditions of urban colonialism, collective identity and space, for a better understanding of both oppression and resistance.