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”
We the undersigned artists, critics, scholars, and organizers are writing to express our support for the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonial rule and its apartheid system. We feel it is urgent to highlight the connections between the ongoing violence of … Continue reading “Free Palestine/Strike MoMA: A Call to Action”
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”
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”
