Today’s outstanding academic gibberish comes to us courtesy of Vassar, where Wednesday night you can take in the following lecture:

Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters. Lecture by Professor Jasbir Puar

This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive, and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine. Calculation, computing, informational technologies, surveillance, and militarization are all facets of prehensive control. Further, the saturation of spatial and temporal stratum in Palestine demonstrates the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a “remote control” occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli “home invasions” through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest “open air prison” and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses, infrastructural chaos, and metric manipulation, what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?

Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 and an M.A. from the University of York, England, in Women’s Studies in 1993. She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the U.S., U.K., and Trinidad; gay and lesbian tourism; terrorist studies; surveillance studies; bio and necropolitics; queer theory; disability and debilitation; theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism; homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Puar’s forthcoming monograph, States of Debility and Capacity (Duke University Press, 2016) takes up the relations between biopolitics, disability, and forms of active debilitation pivotal to the operations of war machines and racial capitalism. The book will be among the first to appear in a new book series, ANIMA, which she co-edits with Mel Chen (author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke University Press, 2012).