The Right to Maim and Its Implications for Palestine Studies

This review essay is an attempt to read Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability in Palestine studies. It argues that by revealing how settler power, colonial violence, and imperial havoc shape the mechanisms, structures, and systems that target resistance, The Right to Maim both contributes to and disrupts the field of Palestine studies. Exploring the implications of Puar’s thesis about maiming as a tool of settler colonial violence within imperial frameworks, the book both disrupts the field of American studies and contributes to areas of inquiry around the study of Zionist violence against Palestine and Palestinians. This essay investigates the lines of Puar’s argument in relation to Palestine and as a challenge to discrete conceptualizations of field studies.