Kathryn Medien:You recently published a tenth-anniversary edition of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Puar 2007, 2017b). What were your aims and motivations for writing that book? What has changed over the past ten years? Can you tell us a bit about the tenth-anniversary edition?
Jasbir K. Puar: I wrote Terrorist Assemblages informed by the intensive political organizing in which I participated in New York City after 9/11. The book foregrounded a relationship between modernity and queerness that had been generally refuted and rejected the idea of queerness as somehow always an illegitimate excess to nationalism. I fully grasped the schisms between the national queer subject and the perversely queer other, given all the artifacts and discussions that emerged after 9/11, heightened and intensified in the manner that assemblages work. The book was bred of political urgency. No one writes a book titled Terrorist Assemblages to get...
