The Right to Maim – Duke University Press
*A class offered this fall by Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies is being blasted by conservative media outlets over its inclusion of the book, “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability” on the course’s syllabus.
The course, NES 301: The Healing Humanities — Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South, is scheduled to be taught this fall by Satyel Larson, an assistant professor specializing in women, gender, and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa.
FoxNews.com recently reported that the course itself, per its description, teaches that “Black people can be considered ‘disabled’ due to the purported systemic racism they face.”
FoxNews.com, which incorrectly named the source material “Permission to Maim,” went on to report: “The book argues that Black people, along with other groups the author – Jasbir Puar – deemed to be oppressed by systemic racism, can be considered ‘disabled’ since the supposed structures in place limit their agency in society.”
FoxNews.com summarized the course description as “focused on concepts steeped in critical race theory and webbed in ‘capitalism’ as on the same plane as the mistreatment, discrimination and prejudice against gay people – also called ‘homophobia.’” But Princeton’s course description points out: “Re-orienting healing as a decolonizing process enables students to re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism.”
Publisher Duke University Press, in its description of “The Right to Maim,” says that Puar, “uses the concept of ‘debility’—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar’s analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical beings by designating them available for injury. 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.”
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