In November 2023, I presented a paper entitled “Settler Colonialism as the Automation of Attritional Warfare,” based on South Africa’s history of racialized governance, at Duke University and at the University of British Columbia. This is the revised version of … Continue reading “Epistemic Debilitation and the Erasure of Genocide”
In August, I attended a screening of Aurora’s Sunrise at the New Plaza Cinema. The documentary depicts the annihilation of Armenian lifeworlds in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. In August, the film was received as … Continue reading “Where Scenes of Catastrophe Reappear: On Armenian and Palestinian Solidarities”
In a 2001 telephone interview with the New York Times from Vienna, Johann August Schülein, then president of the Freud Society of Vienna, said of Edward Said’s disinvitation, “A lot of members of our society told us—they can’t accept that … Continue reading “Theory as Stone”
Two weeks after Israel began bombing Gaza, I was messaging with a close friend who now lives in New York. I had long known her to support Palestinian liberation, but now her tone was different. She expressed that too many … Continue reading “Justice Without Exception: Zionist Narrative and the Crisis of Liberalism”
A curious strength emerges when lying on the earth in solidarity with the dead. On October 26, 2023, I joined a die-in on the USC campus as a faculty ally. There, in the act of laying my body on the … Continue reading “Lying Down to Stand Up for What Is Right”
The following is a humble presentation I shared as a recording to the event A Faculty Teach-In: Palestine, Cease Fire Now! Settler Colonialism, Palestinian Liberation, and Solidarity, held on November 7, 2023 at the Arab American Cultural Center at University … Continue reading “A Dispatch from Ramallah in the Time of Genocide”
My characters change the course of the war. Now, that didn’t happen, because my characters didn’t exist. But if they had have existed everything that happens [in the movie] is fairly plausible.-Quentin Tarantino While newspapers around the world, including, notably, … Continue reading “Figurations of Naziism as a Foil for (Violent) Revenge Fantasies: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and the Making of a “New White Man” Post-9/11”
Andrea Abi-Karam’s most recent book is Villainy, published by Nightboat Books last year. Jasbir K. Puar is a member of the Social Text Collective and the author, most recently, of The Right to Maim (Duke UP, 2017). Here the authors … Continue reading “Andrea Abi-Karam and Jasbir K. Puar: Correspondence 2021”
In an attempt to shed new light on transnational solidarity, Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple UP, 2020) poses a question: How can we think of Palestinian (and Black) liberation when history repeats itself … Continue reading “Palestinian Liberation and the Limits of the Present: A Review of Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea“
Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: Domestic Inspectors”
In Gore Capitalism, transfeminist intellectual Sayak Valencia gives us a vocabulary, a taxonomy to articulate a horror that before 2010 we did not have words to name in Mexico. We had the numbers, the statistics, the hard, cold data to … Continue reading “Gore Capitalism and the Contemporary Grammars of Violence and Resistance”
This Social Text Periscope dossier offers reflections on Jasbir Puar’s work from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. With The Right to Maim’s release occurring on the tenth anniversary of Terrorist Assemblages, … Continue reading “Introduction: Relation, Exception, and the Horizons of Critique in Jasbir Puar’s Work”
Jasbir Puar’s argument in The Right to Maim of Israel’s deliberate debilitation of Palestinians—by bodily and psychological injury, social exclusion, economic stunting, and political encumberance—is a poignant one. Indeed, one simply has to turn on the news to see tens … Continue reading “Maiming Palestinian Time”
The above image shows a Palestinian man who is a double leg amputee (as a result of being shot by the Israeli Defense Forces) who is sitting on the ground in a sandy area with barbed wire behind him. His … Continue reading “Weaponizing Disability”
In a recent presentation at Pratt Institute, Jasbir Puar noted that she often works with shadow terms, or third terms that hides behind two oppositional and binarized concepts. Puar went on to explain that she borrowed the idea of a … Continue reading “Debility’s Shadow in Extractive Zones”
