The Camp, Inevitable: Technomorality and Racialization in the Prehistory of the Camp Regime

Chapter 1 is a prehistory of the United Nations’ Palestinian camp regime. It discusses the papers of the former director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Gordon R. Clapp, whose recommendations established the camp regime in 1949. Through the figure of Clapp, the chapter shows that the Palestinian camp regime emerged in not a strictly humanitarian but a techno-imperial moment in global history that sought to put displaced “idle” refugees back to work. To understand this camp regime, we must understand the racializing presuppositions that Clapp and his team brought to Palestine from the US South. The chapter posits that we can better apprehend these presuppositions and their combination of technical mastery, racial figuration, and normativity in the concept of technomorality. Read from the camps, via the long shadow of the US South and in the wake of decolonization, the chapter reinterprets the technocratic as an instrument of racial world formation.