Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism
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Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism
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Overview
The contributors address a range of topics, paying particular attention to the dynamics of gender and race. Their essays include a surprising reading of the ostensibly liberal movies Wag the Dog and Three Kings, an exploration of the rhetoric surrounding the plan to remake the military into a high-tech force less dependent on human bodies, a look at the significance of the popular Left Behind series of novels, and an interpretation of the Abu Ghraib prison photos. They scrutinize the national narrative created to justify the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the ways that women in those countries have responded to the invasions, the contradictions underlying calls for U.S. humanitarian interventions, and the role of Africa in the U.S. imperial imagination. The volume concludes on a hopeful note, with a look at an emerging anti-imperialist public sphere.
Contributors. Omar Dahbour, Ashley Dawson, Cynthia Enloe, Melani McAlister, Christian Parenti, Donald E. Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Malini Johar Schueller, Harilaos Stecopoulos
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/29/2007 |
| Series: | New Americanists |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 514 KB |
About the Author
Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. He is author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain.
Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English at the University of Florida. She is the author of U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 and The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism From Franklin to Kingston and a coeditor of Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies.
Read an Excerpt
EXCEPTIONAL State
Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New ImperialismDUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3805-5
Chapter One
JOHN CARLOS ROWECulture, US Imperialism, and Globalization
The return of what was once termed gunboat diplomacy in the first decade of the twenty-first century as part of the new global order endorsed repeatedly and abstractly by George H. W. and now George W. Bush's regimes could not have occurred without the prior work of culture. In what follows, I make a simple, important point: US cultural production, the work of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno termed "the culture industry," conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised militarism and jingoistic nationalism now driving US foreign policy. In its inevitably globalized forms, the US culture industry continues to produce the deep divisions between local resistance and subaltern imitation so characteristic of colonial conflicts from the age of traditional imperialism to the neo-imperialisms of our postindustrial era. And the culture industry today does its work in ways that encompass a wide range of nominally different political positions, so that in many respects left, liberal, and conservative cultural works often achieve complementary, rather than contested, ends. In this respect, little has changed since Horkheimer and Adorno argued in1944 that "even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system."
As the US military raced toward Baghdad, there was considerable criticism of the embedded reporters allowed to report the war under the special conditions imposed by the Pentagon and Department of Defense. Most of the criticism assumed that such reporting was biased or censored. When a Newsweek photographer was caught doctoring on his laptop a photograph of an encounter between Iraqi civilians and US military personnel, his firing seemed to vindicate the news magazine of prejudice. Antiwar activists circulated two photographs of Iraqi demonstrators tearing down a monumental statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad: the first was a familiar photograph in the news of demonstrators beating on the sculpture's foundation and then, with the help of an Abrams tank, toppling the hieratic image of the defeated dictator. In the second photograph, not displayed in the popular press or evening news, the camera provides a wide-angle view of the scene at the square, where access roads have been blocked by the US military and the supposedly populist demolition of the statue has been theatrically staged by US forces. In a thirdphotographcirculatedontheInternet,thesameIraqisactivelyinvolvedin attacking the Baghdad statue are shown "one day earlier" in Basra, where they are preparing to board US military aircraft for transport to Baghdad-identified in this photograph as members of the "Iraqi Free Forces."
Such exposures of US military propaganda during the war have continued in news coverage of the putative rebuilding of the political and economic infrastructure in Iraq. The current debate regarding who was actually responsible for the disinformation regarding weapons of mass destruction used as the principal justification for the invasion of Iraq is the most obvious example of public concern regarding the federal government's veracity. For such propaganda to be successful, there must be a willing audience, one already prepared for certain cultural semantics adaptable to new political circumstances and yet with sufficient regional relevance as to make possible the very widespread confusion between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, between a secular Iraqi state tyranny and an Islamic fundamentalist guerrilla organization. How was it possible that such a preposterous war could be permitted by Congress and by the US population? The answer is not simply that the Bush administration ignored the numerous international protests against the preparations for war and its eventual conduct. Nor is the answer simply that when the war began, the Bush administration controlled the news and staged symbolic events to fool the public, although there is plenty of evidence to support these claims. The cultural preparations for a supposedly just war and for the United States as global policeman did not occur overnight; they are our cultural legacy from the Vietnam War and integral parts of our emergence as a neo-imperial nation since 1945. Central to this legacy is the conception of the United States as a discrete nation that nonetheless has a global identity and mission. Although traditional imperialism works by way of expansion from a national center, US imperialism since Vietnam has worked steadily to import the world and to render global differences aspects of the US nation-in short, to internalize and hypernationalize transnational issues.
It is commonplace, of course, to criticize the United States as one of the several first world nations to employ cultural media to market its products around the world. Neocolonialism generally connotes some complicity between a "multinational corporation covertly supported by an imperialist power," to borrow Chalmers Johnson's definition, and thus implies some entanglement of economic, political, and military motives. The globalization of consumer capitalism and the commodities of first world economies (often manufactured elsewhere) are identified as specific targets by political movements as different as the slow food movement in Italy, Earth First!, and al-Qaeda. Although the arcades and other defined shopping areas were developed in nineteenth-century Europe-Paris, Milan, Berlin, and other metropoles-the shopping mall is an American spin-off. With its emphasis on the city within a city, the linkage of entertainment and consumption, the faux cosmopolitanism of its international and regionally specific shops (Cartier, Montblanc, Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Texas Souvenirs) and its ubiquitous, often international food courts, the American shopping mall was developed in the 1960s and refined over the past forty years. Such megamalls as Minneapolis's Mall of America,Houston'sGalleria,andSouthernCalifornia'sSouthCoastPlazahave redefined the public sphere as a site of consumption and commodification both of products and of consumers.
Whether directly exported by US business interests or developed by multinational corporations to look like its US prototypes, the international mall is often traceable back to US funding, design, and marketing sources or models. A PBS Frontline report, "In Search of al Qaeda," which aired on November 21, 2002, includes footage of a shopping mall in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which is physically indistinguishable from European and American malls and includes many of the same stores. Of course, the reporter calls attention to the presence of the Mu'tawah or religious police, who stroll through this mall looking for unveiled women or illicit liaisons between unmarried men and women. "In Search of al Qaeda" constitutes a fine attempt by Frontline to explain the animosity felt by many different groups in the Arab world toward the United States. The mall in Riyadh represents quite clearly one common source of resentment: the rapid Americanization of Saudi Arabia and the tacit demand that everyday Muslim practices be adapted to the demands of the global market. From one perspective, the Mu'tawah operate comfortably within this typical mall, with its long, open corridors and the insistent appeal of its transnational commodities. In another view, the religious police seem already defeated by the cultural rhetoric of the mall, which encourages romance and consumption in the same freewheeling space. As Anne Friedberg has argued, the mall links consumer and psychic desires in ways that depend crucially on "the fluid subjectivity of the spectator-shopper."
Commodities are neither passive nor politically innocent; they are perpetually active in the specific kinds of desires they produce in consumers and work by means of the social psychologies of commodity fetishism analyzed by Karl Marx in Capital and the reification elaborated by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Specific consumer desires can also be traced back to hierarchies of specific kinds of capitalist labor. In modern, industrial economies, stores displaying high-fashion and leisure-class products, such as designer clothing for women and luxury products for successful men, proved central. The traditional display windows with their mannequins of elegantly dressed and sexually alluring women belong to the era of the large department stores and, while still a part of the postmodern mall, are challenged by stores displaying the most elaborate array of computerized bodily extensions and miniaturizations, labor-saving devices, and high-tech tools promising greater access to the primary source of wealth and power: the control and manipulation of information and its assorted hermeneutic and representational protocols. In the crush of the crowds defining the public space of the mall, the consumer is promised some individuality apart from just what forces him or her through the doors of his or her local Circuit City. Such identity depends, of course, on its promise of communication, but not so much with other people, especially those who may be different from this consumer, but apart from others in the notable privacy of postmodern life. The new laptops and Palm Pilots (PDAS) are prized for allowing us to negotiate the crowd as we travel through it, but then saving from this mob our informational work, which can be stored, sifted, and processed in the privacy of our own homes. Of course, the peculiar desire for representational power and authority fetishized in computer hardware and software is rapidly displacing the public sphere created by the late modern desire for more traditional commodities, such as fashion and luxury items. The mall is morphing into the Internet, an imaginary space so rapidly commercialized as to terrify even the most recalcitrant critic and sometime defender of consumer capitalism.
In spite of the admirable efforts of intellectuals to find emancipatory possibilities in the new technologies-alternatives to traditional social forms and practices certainly do exist today-the speed with which the Internet has been commercialized and hierarchized is symptomatic of the huge inequities dividing corporations that can afford access, individuals who merely use the technology (and are thereby used by it), and the majority of the world's population left entirely out of the new communicative practices. In What's the Matter with the Internet? Mark Poster recognizes most of these problems while stressing the "underdetermined" character of new digital technologies and thus their availability for new transnational politics: "The Internet affords an opportunity for a contribution to a new politics [and] ... may play a significant role in diminishing the hierarchies prevalent in modern society and in clearing a path for new directions of cultural practice." In Ambient Television, Anna McCarthy acknowledges the ideological consequences of television's portability and publicity in achieving a culture of surveillance such as Michel Foucault predicted, but she also imagines critical alternatives and interventions capable of disrupting and in some cases even transforming unidirectional television. Such alternatives, however, are pushed increasingly to the margins of the Internet and television. Most television scholars agree that the postnetwork era has reconfigured the industry only by allowing more corporate giants to share the wealth of television programming. Niche television and target audiences have led to a wider variety of television only within certain limits of the liberal-to-conservative political spectrum. Radical television, such as Dee Dee Halleck's Paper Tiger Television, goes virtually unwatched, is financially marginal, and is supported primarily by extramural grants. The networks long ago succeeded in defeating public-access cable as a populist alternative to one-way television, and the short-term future of interactive television, especially when integrated with computers and the Internet, is likely to be little more than an extension of the enormously profitable video-game market.
We yearn for each new electronic device, but the vast majority is finally useless to most consumers either because they do not know how to use them or have no use for them in the first place. What lures consumers to new digital technologies is the general promise of social communication, ironically just the ideal offered by Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology, but it is a false promise that substitutes complex programming and upgrades for socially meaningful communication. Designed to serve business and commercial needs, predicated on the increasing privatization of the public sphere, whereby the illusion of sociability is simulated in the radical alienation and paradoxical exclusivity of the home office, commuter vehicle, or the commercial airline's reserved seat, such devices produce specific desires structured by their ideological motivations. The imperial imaginary thrives on these desires, which once initiated are difficult to reverse or purge. Cultural apologists for the Americanization of the globe, like Francis Fukuyama, imagine that such homogenization will take us to that end of history fantastically dreamt by G. W. F. Hegel and other proto-moderns because such conditions will produce a political consensus. Fukuyama is certainly right that one-way globalization is likely to result in an international consensus, even if it is one we can hardly condone, which we know will be not only excruciatingly tedious but finally inhuman, and will require periods of incredible, unpredictable violence.
Such criticism of what may generally be termed a postmodern economy focused on information, communications, and entertainment products, including their integrated research and development components, may seem strangely anachronistic when applied to the contemporary global situation. Today, we confront the revival of traditional imperialism as the United States towers over all other human communities and exerts its unchallenged power in the most flagrantly militaristic manner. Not since the British Empire ruled the world by force and fear in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has there been such undisguised rule by military power. While recognizing important differences between contemporary US global rule in the twenty-first century and that of the British in the nineteenth century, Chalmers Johnson traces a historical genealogy from British to US imperial policies, especially in such critical regions as the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In Somalia and most of Africa, Kosovo, Serbia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Colombia, the Philippines, North and South Korea, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Iraq, and Iran, the United States works by open military action or threats. Such situations hardly appear to have much to do with the postmodern economics analyzed by theorists of postindustrial or late capitalist practices such as Ernest Mandel, Fredric Jameson, and David Harvey.
But there is an important relationship between the emergence of US military power, along with the complementary threats of inequitable and repressive policies toward peoples (especially but not exclusively non-US citizens) at home and abroad, and the capitalization of cultural exports ranging from Hollywood entertainment and television programming to digital technologies and their protocols for communication and work. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson's theory of "free-trade imperialism" is now half a century old, but the thesis of free-trade imperialism still explains a good deal about how traditional imperial military power should emerge with such prominence and frequency as a foreign policy at the very moment when globalization seems the nearly inevitable consequence of US economic triumphalism. Contemporary critics of US foreign policy like Chalmers Johnson have also recognized that free trade is often used as a rationalization for the conduct of multinational corporations and for the US government's development of so-called client states such as Israel and, until recently, South Korea.
Gallagher and Robinson refute traditional theories that imperialism-their principal example was British imperialism in Africa-proceeded historically from military conquest to consolidation of colonial rule only to be legitimated and transformed slowly through economic development. Gallagher and Robinson argue that free-trade policies generally preceded historically the militarization of colonies and that such military force was required only by the failure to negotiate trade agreements between metropolitan and colonial centers. Military force is thus held in reserve, not out of humane considerations, of course, but primarily for reasons of practicality and economy, while the imperial power promotes trade agreements-either for raw materials or finished products-with the appearance of favorable and equitable terms to both colonizer and colonized. It is only when this illusion of free trade is shattered that military force is required to reimpose imperial order, when the appearance of free trade can be resumed, under whose guise what in fact usually occurs is demonstrably inequitable exploitation of natural or human resources of the colony. As they write: "The usual summing up of the policy of the free trade empire as 'trade, not rule' should read 'trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary.'"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Rethinking Imperialism Today / Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller 1
Part 1: Technologies of Imperialism
Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization / John Carlos Rowe 37
Between the Homeland and Abu Ghraib: Dwelling in Bush’s Biopolitical Settlement / Donald E. Pease 60
Planet America: The Revolution in Military Affairs as Fantasy and Fetish / Christian Parenti 88
Hegemony and Rights: On the Liberal Justification for Empire / Omar Dahbour 105
Part 2: Engendering Imperialism
Updating the Gendered Empire: Where Are the Women of Occupied Afghanistan and Iraq? / Cynthia Enloe 133
Techno-Dominance and Torturegate: The Making of US Imperialism / Malini Johar Schueller 162
Part 3: Imagining Others
Left Behind and the Politics of Prophecy Talk / Melani McAlister 191
Putting an Old Africa on Our Map: British Imperial Legacies and Contemporary US Culture / Harilaos Stecopoulos 221
New Modes of Anti-imperialism / Ashley Dawson 248
Coda: Information Mastery and the Culture of Annihilation / Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller 275
Bibliography 285
Contributors 301
Index 303