LITMIR.BIZ

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Pakistan, war between India and Pakistan, the role of Pakistan as a proxy for U.S. power in the region—the braided stories, in other words, of empire and its aftermaths in South Asia. But Armitage’s focus was already fixed on the military project that would come to be known as the “War on Terror.” He was firm in his response. “No,” he insisted to his guest, “history begins today.”¹

      In the days and weeks following September 11, the refusal of history became a central trope of George W. Bush’s fast-building case for war. But the notion that history began on “9/11” was more than just a calculated neoconservative mantra. The idea was echoed, that autumn and thereafter, by columnists, critics, and cultural producers from across the political spectrum. In an essay published in the Guardian on September 14, 2001, the writer Jay McInerney foreshadowed the founding conceit of his own “9/11 novel” and so many others: “I have a feeling,” he wrote, “that everything will be ‘before’ and ‘after’ now. As I walked through the streets at midnight, I thought of Frank O’Connor’s line at the end of Guest of the Nation: ‘And anything that ever happened to me after I never felt the same about again.’”² In accord with the “before and after” frame signaled by McInerney, the scholarly response to the War on Terror has accented radical newness above continuity or genealogy. Since the opening stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, countless critics have highlighted the emergence of a new “state of exception”—a diagnosis that reinforces the notion of the post–September 11 world as a time apart.

      This book aims to resist and redress this assumption of historical rupture. It endeavors to show how the central political forms and ideas of the War on Terror both derive from, and reveal the persistence of, what I term the “long history of colonial modernity”: the five-hundred-year history of European empire and its afterlives. Comprising a history of the present, this book also examines how our present’s history is registered and reckoned with in contemporary culture. I begin by developing parallel genealogies of security and terror. I then turn to the question of how these conjoined paradigms—and the colonial rationalities and processes with which they intersect—are historicized in, and denaturalized by, works of theory and fiction.

      In one such novel, Teju Cole’s Open City, the narrator Julius, pausing from his contemplative walks around New York City, visits often with his friend and mentor Professor Saito, a Japanese-American veteran of an Idaho internment camp. Professor Saito is dying, and during one of their last conversations, the elderly man, looking back on the tumults of his lifetime, reflects on the confusion of war, the struggle to grasp the immensity of the suffering as it happens and the struggle to preserve it in memory: “There are towns,” he observes, “whose names evoke a real horror in you because you have learned to link those names with atrocities, but, for the generation that follows yours, those names will mean nothing. Forgetting doesn’t take long. Fallujah will be as meaningless to them as Daejon is to you.”³ The prosecution of imperial violence in the present, Professor Saito’s words intimate, is conditioned by the elision or disavowal of imperial pasts. This is a truism of which Armitage was keenly aware when he eagerly declared the advent of history in 2001. And this is the cycle of imperial erasure and reproduction that this book labors to counter—by tracing the imperial origins of contemporary political and cultural forms, and by reflecting upon the strategies of representation that bring those origins into relief.

      SECURITY, TERROR, AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

      When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened upon the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World helped precipitate the capitalist mode of production, the liberal state, new typologies of racial difference, and the discursive construction of Europe—and later “the West”—as the center of the world, the source and vanguard of historical progress.⁴ Today, in the moment of imperialism’s putative aftermath, the fundamental material and symbolic architecture of colonial modernity endures. The routes of continuity between the colonial past and postcolonial present are evidenced with an especial clarity, I want to argue, by the conjoined conceptual paradigms of security and terror.

      “Security” is the keyword of contemporary governance. Economic security, financial security, national security, food security, social security, border security, job security, human security, environmental security, energy security, homeland security, and so on—security pervades political discourse. A basic human want, a normative social good, security is also a mode of power. Provoked by the advent of Homeland Security in 2001, scholars have in recent years offered an extensive critique of the violence done by and in the name of security. This critique, however, has centered on the political forms of the present, and has—with few exceptions—left unexamined the relationship between contemporary security formations and the longer history of the modern security project.

      The security project emerged in the context of the settler-colonization of the New World and the innovation of capitalist social relations within Europe. One fundamental imperative of the nascent modern state, as John Locke affirmed, was to secure the processes of primitive accumulation—the extraction of resources, traffic in slavery, and enclosure of the commons—in both Old World and New. In accordance with Locke, Thomas Hobbes foresaw that the bourgeois logic of perpetual accumulation would require a corresponding, and likewise perpetual, expansion of political power—the limitless growth, in other words, of the security state. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Hannah Arendt observed that the early modern vision of Locke and Hobbes still obtained. “Lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down,” she wrote, “the original sin of simple robbery” must be constantly repeated;⁵ and the endless accumulation of capital, Arendt saw, necessitates the endless acquisition of political power. This truism is again brought into relief by the forms of “accumulation by dispossession,” to borrow David Harvey’s phrase, that prevail in the neoliberal moment—the forcing open of markets, the privatization of everything, the deliberate devaluation of assets and labor, the creation and manipulation of crises, the redistribution of wealth upward.⁶ All of these strategies of dispossession, which engender ever more pervasive social and economic insecurity, are made possible by the threat and actuality of state violence. In one definition, neoliberalism signifies the extension of market rationality to all spheres of human social life. Relatedly, neoliberalism describes the invention and intensification of methods of “securitization”—the seizure or fabrication of non-capitalized space, and the transmutation of non-colonized entities and geographies into a concern of the security state.

      The contradictions generated by processes of capitalist securitization are legitimated by, and deepen the effects of, racial thinking and practice. In its colonial origins, as David Theo Goldberg has observed, modern racial thought combined “naturalist” and “historicist” theories of difference.⁷ The Spanish theologian—and humanist—Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda insisted, in the sixteenth century, that the indigenous people of the Americas were incapable of civilization. His compatriot Bartolomé de las Casas—an historian and Dominican friar—countered that the Indian, if lagging behind culturally and spiritually, could, in time, attain membership in universalisms both secular and theological. The debate between Sepúlveda and las Casas has been rehearsed repeatedly in the centuries since, as colonial methods of exclusion and extermination have coincided with narratives of development, modernization, and assimilation. In the context of the War on Terror, the ostensibly discordant but frequently symbiotic interrelation of naturalist and historicist racisms is on stark display. The “clash of civilizations” thesis, first enunciated by Samuel Huntington in 1992 but recited with new volume at the onset of the War on Terror, condemns the other to eternal confinement in a space outside of history. What Mahmood Mamdani has described as the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” thesis, meanwhile, suggests that privileged subjects from the “backward” regions of the world are capable of modernity. Today as in the past, these two racial imaginaries work together to mark the line between inside and outside and condition the uneven distribution of social and economic security within the realm of political belonging.

      Both the securing of capitalist accumulation and the racial clarification of political order are enabled by the imagination and enactment of “emergency”—the politics of exception. Modern sovereignty

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