Puar - Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times

PRAISE FORTerrorist Assemblages

By articulating terrorism, patriotism, and U.S. exceptionalism not only to race but also to homophobia, heteronormativity, and queerness, Terrorist Assemblages offers a trenchant critique of contemporary bio- as well as geopolitics. As an author on a hotly debated topic, Jasbir K. Puar is as gracious about acknowledging other authors contributions as she is unyielding in her interrogations of secular-liberalist epistemic conventions. This is a smart, admirably researched, and courageous book.

Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

A profound and challenging book that should be read widely and repeatedly, Puars latest work contains revelations about contemporary power that offer avenues for transforming academic knowledge and our own subjectivities.

Liz Philipose, Signs

Terrorist Assemblages is brilliant, hyperkinetic, and perhaps, most of all, ferocious. It is ferocious in its analysis and critique not only of networks of control over and unrelenting superpanopticism of queer, racialized bodies but also of queer, feminist, and critical race theory and activism.

Victor Romn Mendoza, Journal of Asian American Studies

Few points of identification, cherished political practices, or progressive claims are left unimplicated in Puars analysis of the war on terror. Terrorist Assemblages exemplifies the most difficult and yet most important work that critical theory can offer its readers and practitioners: a thoroughgoing interrogation of the inequalities, oppressions and injustices that shape the present, which refuses to leave its authors and readers own investments outside its critiques.

Elisabeth Anker, Theory and Event

Puar provides compelling and convincing examples of the unwitting effects of homonormative discourse.

Celia Jameson, Parallax

Jasbir Puars Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a powerful, energetic, and highly insightful read. The book absorbs a surprising amount of intellectual, political, and emotional labour. [R]eaders can have that rare and golden experience of emerging from these pages transformed. Indeed, the demands that Puar places on her reader are substantial, but the rewards well worth it. Cutting, courageous, and prescient, Terrorist Assemblages is well worth the read.

Deborah Cowen, Antipode

It is her ability to traverse the theoretical terrains between theories of affect and nonrepresentation as well as discourse and identity that exemplifies how these seemingly opposed poststructuralisms do, in fact, enrich each other and make Terrorist Assemblages a critically important work.

Lauren L. Martin, Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Terrorist Assemblages is a challenging and urgent book that pushes studies of the sexual beyond their comfort zone. The chapters offer a series of bold and creative readings that aim to rewrite emergent orthodoxies within both critical and not so critical discourses on the war on terror. Where such discourses perpetuate separation and distance, Puar strikingly demonstrates connectivity and coincidence.

Natalie Oswin, Social and Cultural Geography

Terrorist Assemblages will appeal to scholars who wish to push the limits of interdisciplinary thinking and writing. In both form and content, this book energetically experiments with different theoretical frameworks and disparate sources to produce fresh insights on a variety of issues. For these and many other reasons, Terrorist Assemblages is bound to become a mainstay in graduate courses across a range of disciplines, and will certainly be cited as a key text in scholarship that examines how discourses surrounding sexuality are mobilized in the service of war, nation-building, and imperialism.

Sean McCarthy, E3W Review of Books

Terrorist Assemblages is a rich and textured read that lays bare the perniciousness of liberal politics while asking for the hard work it takes to build radical solidarity.

Rupal Oza, Social and Cultural Geography

I think it only appropriate that we succumb to this projects velocity, that we explore Puars virtuosic, methodological interventions, while acknowledging the captivating intellectual performance at the heart of Terrorist Assemblages. Puar importantly provides a salient and scathing political critique of nationalism in its hetero, homo, religious and racialized incarnations.

Karen Tongson, Women and Performance

Puars project brings what we might describe as a racial politics of tolerance to the production of queers. In doing so, she challenges those of us engaged in human rights theory and advocacy for sexual minorities to a serious consideration of what it is that enables such advocacy to be effective in the first instance, and what the effectiveness of such campaigns means for the re-positioning of LGBT subjects in mainstream political economies. Her examination of terrorist discourses foregrounds a dimension of Foucaults characterization of contemporary power that has been largely ignored by theorists who take up this framework for speaking of power: namely, the instrumentality of death that is, the extent to which the protection and management of some life/lives is contingent on letting others die.

Margaret Denike, Feminist Legal Studies

terrorist assemblages

NEXT WAVE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN WOMENS STUDIES

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman

TERRORIST ASSEMBLAGES

TENTH ANNIVERSARY EXPANDED EDITION

with a new foreword by Tavia Nyongo and a postscript by the author

homonationalism in queer times JASBIR K. PUAR

duke university press durham and london

2007 Duke University Press

Foreword and Postscript 2017

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Text designed by Katy Clove. Cover designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Puar, Jasbir K., [date] author.

Title: Terrorist assemblages : homonationalism in queer times / Jasbir K. Puar.

Description: Tenth anniversary expanded edition. | Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. |

Series: Next wave | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017018936 (print) | LCCN 2017028923 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780822371755 (ebook)

ISBN 9780822371113 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 9780822371502 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : HomosexualityPolitical aspects. | TerrorismSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ 76.25 (ebook) | LCC HQ 76.25 . P 83 2017 (print) | DDC 306.76/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018936

Cover art: Imran Qureshi, Opening Word of This New Scripture, 2015. Acrylic paint and gold leaf on canvas. Overall 60 72 in. (each panel 60 36 in.). Imran Qureshi. Private collection. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Photo: Charles Duprat.

FOR SANDEEP SINGH PUAR

MAY 8, 1970 FEBRUARY 20, 2003

contents

Tavia Nyongo

What can queer theory teach us about the Global War on Terror? In the wake of the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida, such a question sounds less remarkable than it was in 2007, when the publication of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times first posed it. Much has changed since that year; homonationalists need look no further than to gay billionaire Peter Thielss speech to the Republican National Convention in that same summer of 2016 for evidence that their ideology has reached a political saturation point, in which even as xenophobic a political candidate as Donald Trump felt the need to begrudgingly embrace gay rights (in however opportunistic and temporary a fashion, as later betrayals would reveal). Queer theory is precisely what we need to think through the ruses and snares of a political culture ready to instrumentalize queers in one moment, and to viciously scapegoat us in the very next (as the hapless right-wing queer troll Milo Yiannopoulos learned to his regret). The interventionist writing project that culminated in the book-length study Terrorist Assemblages, as Puar notes in her afterword, emerged in the years following September 11 and the invasion of Iraq, and intensified after the U.S. war crimes in Abu Ghraib prison went public, an event that demanded a reckoning with how queer shame had become weaponized in a theater of war. The intervening years since this low pointdespite the arc of hope cast briefly by the presidency of Barack Obamahave done little to dull the urgency of these questions. And so, the release of this new edition of Puars landmark study is an event in itself. It calls for nothing less than the restoration of the critical ambition of queer theory in dark times.