Princeton is offering a class for the upcoming fall semester that includes a book by Rutgers University’s gender and women’s studies Profe...
Princeton is offering a class for the upcoming fall semester that includes a book by Rutgers University’s gender and women’s studies Professor Jasbir Puar that accuses Israel’s military of purposefully maiming Palestinians.
The class, “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” is being taught by Assistant Professor of Near Eastern studies Satyel Larson, and included on the reading list is Puar’s book “The Right To Maim,” according to the catalog. The book argues that the Jewish state has supplemented the “right to kill” with the “right to maim” in order to create a “mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies,” according to a summary.
“Puar’s analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury,” the summary reads. “Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability’s interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.”
Smoke billows from Israeli air strikes in Gaza City, controlled by the Palestinian Hamas movement, on May 11, 2021. (Photo by ANAS BABA/AFP via Getty Images)
The class description explains that students will learn the “transdisciplinary field of trauma” and the efforts to decolonize around the globe, according to the class catalog. The course seeks to show how trauma is used in conjunction with “global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism.”
In 2016, Puar spoke at Vassar College in New York and accused Israel of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. She said that during her time studying “generational effects of maiming and stunting of children in Gaza,” many Palestinians believed that the bodies of their children killed in the conflict were “mined for organs for scientific research,” according to an article Puar wrote for Jadaliyya, a media outlet produced by the Arab Studies Institute.
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