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”
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 work in The Right to Maim is crucial to understanding not only that the nature of settler colonialism is genocidal but also how that genocidal nature operates. Settler colonialism is, in each and every case, a state operation, … Continue reading “blackpalestinian breath”
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”
Building on the analytics she advanced in Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. In The Right to Maim, we see the tenuous inclusion of … Continue reading “Disabling Wounds: Genocidal Violence, Paradoxical Indigeneity, and the Logic of Elimination of the Native”
Is there a characteristically Gazan sentence? Could it be this one from Asmaa al-Ghul’s recent short story “You and I,” published in The Book of Gaza (Comma Press, 2014): “Drops of morning dew evaporate taking the pain with them, because … Continue reading “Gaza Fractures”
“No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.” A senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government purportedly once confided to a UN official that this was Israel’s goal for Gaza. Supressing without starving the population has been a prevalent … Continue reading “Putting Palestinians on a Diet”
In 2012, Social Text published a Periscope dossier on Palestine by a delegation of American Studies scholars to Palestine organized by USACBI. The following year, the first academic boycott resolutions were passed by the Association of Asian American Studies and … Continue reading “Solidarity and Radical Change”
Because I am a Palestinian, born to a “goy mother,” I do not have the option of leaving the blockaded Gaza Strip where I live to attend a conference, or a give a talk at any international academic institution. Along … Continue reading “BDS: Decolonizing Palestine”
In 2005, indigenous Palestinians issued the most authoritative call for international solidarity to come out of Palestine in decades. A broad coalition of unions, popular organizations, and civil society institutions representing Palestinians within the 1967 occupied territories, Palestinian citizens inside … Continue reading “BDS and Third World Internationalism”
The summer of 2014 was a crucial historical conjuncture in which Palestinian-Black solidarity both deepened and became more complex, as Angela Davis’s latest book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2015) was absolutely right to identify. The killings of Eric Garner, … Continue reading “An Anti-Racist Movement”
Embedded within each of the three goals of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)–the right of return for refugees, full legal equality within Israel, and an end to occupation and colonization of Palestinian land—is an appeal to … Continue reading “Strengthening Anti-Racist Politics within BDS”
When the editors of this dossier asked me to contribute, they suggested I look toward the future of BDS and think about what might await, and what should await, the movement as it moves forward. Where might its activists most … Continue reading “BDS Beyond Palestine”
Rumor has it that the American Studies Association is going down in flames. Since our membership voted by a 2 to 1 margin last fall to join the academic boycott of Israeli universities, the mainstream and tabloid press have … Continue reading “Circuits of Influence”
