Amnesty International: Book Club explores human rights stories from around the world through literature, aiming to bring awareness and action by reading.
Through this book club, together we can engage as readers and have a shared commitment to expand our understanding about global injustices. By asking questions and leaning into conversations designed to promote thoughtful group discussion, this reading group will open us up to the plight of others and hopefully in turn encourage us to take real action on the human rights issues the books raise.
Our next read will be:
The Right to Maim by Jasbir K. Puar
The Right to Maim is an influential and controversial book written by Jasbir K. Puar that largely uses the situation in Palestine to illustrate its concepts. Puar critiques modern activist frameworks like disability justice, trauma-informed practices, and queer studies with the aim of introducing needed nuance to apply these theories to deconstructing how governments and contemporary societies function, particularly colonial ones like Israel and the USA. Some key concepts are: debility vs. disability, biopolitics or how the state controls us in purely physical ways, and neoliberalism.
The author is a postmodern theorist who was clearly influenced a lot by Foucault, Deluze, and Guattari. It is denser than many books read in this group in the past and for that reason meetings will be split up by chapter, with the introduction being covered first and then two weeks later chapter 1, and so on.
At least 3 days before each meeting, a summary of the section to be discussed will be shared, including a list of key terms. It will not be necessary to attend every meeting in the series to get a lot out of the discussion.
- Meeting location: 徳布Debut Cafe 台北店, near Zhongxiao Xinsheng MRT station
- Series time and dates: 2 to 4pm, Sundays
- July 6: Introduction
- July 20: Chapter 1
- August 3: Chapter 2
- August 17: Chapter 3
- August 31: Chapter 4
- September 14: Postscript and where to go from here
A note from this book gatherings host, EJ:
I was really excited to be asked to facilitate some discussions about this book. In addition to works like The Wretched of the Earth, Whipping Girl, Sand Talk, and The Art of Not Being Governed, it has both helped me understand complex patterns of violence and fundamentally changed how I view the world and engage with it. Here is a link to a podcast discussion with the author:
Body Politics w/ Jasbir Puar | Death Panel Podcast https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/jasbir-puar-body-politics
Thank you for considering learning about Puar’s work and exploring it with me! Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I do want to warn you that, as the book discusses colonial violence, the content is sometimes graphic and can be very upsetting.
