Adam HajYahia

The publication of The Right to Maim by Jasbir K. Puar in 2017 was critical to advancing studies on disability and to further articulating how the body figures in the nexus of capacity and debility across racializing and extractive neoliberal lines. It offered a complex and rigorous anti-capitalist account of disability that is useful to both scholarly work and political and social organizing. However, despite its paramount contribution to scholarship on Palestine, delivered by its scathing analysis of the Israeli biopolitical policy—its right to maim—in how the injured Palestinian body is produced and reproduced, its reception was difficult, and hard to stomach. It cohered a political logic in writing before it was visibly evident on the ground. In the moment and aftermath of the Great March of Return (2018-19), Puar’s offerings became much harder to ignore, as the event crystallized a mass maiming campaign of Palestinian protesters inside the edges of the militarized borders of Gaza.

The occasion of this publication by Bilna’es marks the first translation into Arabic of the chapter “Will Not Let Die”: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine, alongside the postscript of The Right to Maim. Not simply a reissue of previously published work or a translation, This Death is Not One includes a new preface from Jasbir K. Puar revisiting the right to maim from within this moment of genocide in Gaza that interrogates the new vectors of living and dying under settler-colonialism, and how maiming, in fact, speaks of extermination; an introduction by Nasser Abourahme reflecting on the book’s stakes in the present and its reception in the past, alongside searing analysis of genocide in excess of the law, and what this reveals and forecloses in how we understand the juridical body and militancy in the wake of Zionism; and original drawings by Xaytun Ennasr that inscribe a relation between land and body mapped through cosmological patterns tracing the relation between martyrs, who are referred to as moons, and the moon, a symbol for martyrdom in Palestine.

Jasbir K. Puar is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and Professor Emerita at Rutgers University where she was faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years. Puar is the author of the award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007).

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025), which was awarded the 2025 Palestine Book Award.

Xaytun Ennasr is an artist and designer. She works across experimental video games, paintings, prints, ceramics, installations, and text. She often uses science fiction, folklore, and radical softness as affective tools for revolutionary cultural production, specifically Palestinian liberation and sovereignty. Her work often deals with questions of land, cartography, transness, gender, and the living environment.

Drawings by Xaytun Ennasr

Translation to Arabic:

“Living in Genocide” by Jasbir K. Puar, translated by The Archilogue

“Our names, our remains” by Nasser Abourahme, translated by The Archilogue

The Right to Maim, Chapter 4: “Will not let die: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine ” and the The Right to Maim Postscript by Jasbir K. Puar, translated by Bekriah Mawasi

When conventional language does not equip us with the tools to speak about ourselves, we create our own. Slang expresses words and feelings that break down boundaries. It is a form of protest and fills in the gaps.

The Queer Arab Glossary is the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang. This bold guide captures the lexicon of the queer Arab community in all its differences, quirks and felicities. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, it contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. Here, leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers offer insightful essays situating this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.

With beautiful, witty illustrations, The Queer Arab Glossary is a powerful response to pervasive myths and stereotypes around sexuality and an invitation to take a journey into queerness throughout the Arab world.

Contributors include Saqer Almarri, Nisrine Chaer, Sophie Chamas, Rana Issa, Adam HajYahia, Suneela Mubayi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Hamed Sinno and Abdellah Taïa.

The Queer Arab Glossary was made possible with the generous support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC, Mophradat, Bashar Assaf and Mohammed Fakhro.

Foreword by Rabih Alameddine

"We release this special issue as one collective voice within the call for abolition, transformation, and exit.

Rather than evacuating our consulting rooms and classrooms of politics, we here seek to put the center of the world at the center of psychoanalysis.

All the proceeds of this issue will go to The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, where trying to understand and helping the victims of this ongoing catastrophe go hand-in-hand."

Table of Contents The Editors, "“For Life’s Sake”

Nadia Bou Ali, “Social Hell”

Mary Turfah, “Israel’s Reality Principle”

Adam HajYahia, “The Principle of Return”

Rana Issa, “The Right to Exist”

Nihal El Aasar, “Left-wing Melancholia”

Jake Romm, “Elements of Anti-Semitism”

Tad Delay, “Evangelical Zionism”

David Markus, “Persecution Terminable and Interminable”

Kaleem Hawa, “Like a Bag Trying to Empty”

Evan Goldstein, “Freud’s Jewish Closet”

Donald Moss, “On Representations of Evil”

Lama Khouri, “Is This a Dream or for Real?”

Yasmin El-Rifae, “To Know What They Know”

Nadia Bou Ali, “Ugly Enjoyment”

A compilation of recipes from the Arab world that were presented by artists for Mophradat's online cooking show Lentil Space.

Adapted from its namesake online program produced by Mophradat, co-curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Reem Shilleh, from 2021 to 2023, this book is a celebration of the varied cuisine of the Arab world and its relationship with inherited food practices and the cultures of cooking and talking about food.

With contributions by Adam HajYahia and Haitham Haddad, Deena Abdelwahed, Laila Hida with Amine Lahrach, Mohamed Abdelkarim with Abla elBahrawy, Nadah El Shazly, amongst many others, this cookbook includes recipes chosen and prepared by the artists in an intimate setting coupled with stories both personal and about their art practice. 

“With this collection of texts, reflections, questions, documents, we invite our readers, colleagues, and peer organizations to engage in difficult, often fraught, discussions about sexual abuse in art spaces. We do not want these conversations to always start at zero, as if a lot of work around sexual abuse hasn’t been done already. There is copious activism, scholarship, and creativity on this topic, if one wants to find it. What this publication would like to do is contribute to the work that has already been done and to be a waypost toward what remains to be done.”

Commissioned and edited by: Karim Kattan and Mai Abu ElDahab
Contributors are Adam HajYahia, Habiba Effat, Karim Kattan, Mai Abu ElDahab, Marnie Slater, Naira Antoun, and Salma El Tarzi

Notes compiled and written by Ahmed Medhat, Marina Samir, Nana Abuelsoud, and Salma El Tarzi, with edits and comments by Sahar Mandour
Translation from Egyptian Arabic of “Notes on Justice” by Yasmine Haj
Copyedited and proofread by Jenifer Evans
Designed by Loraine Furter and Naïma Ben Ayed