Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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""Exceptional State" is a timely and important collection of essays which together address crucial questions about change and continuity between the current imperial moment and the history of U.S. imperialism."--Amy Kaplan, coeditor of "Cultures of United States Imperialism"

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EXCEPTIONAL State

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................1Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller Introduction: Rethinking Imperialism Today..............................................37John Carlos Rowe Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization......................................................................60Donald E. Pease Between the Homeland and Abu Ghraib: Dwelling in Bush's Biopolitical Settlement..................................88Christian Parenti Planet America: The Revolution in Military Affairs as Fantasy and Fetish.......................................105Omar Dahbour Hegemony and Rights: On the Liberal Justification for Empire........................................................133Cynthia Enloe Updating the Gendered Empire: Where Are the Women of Occupied Afghanistan and Iraq?................................162Malini Johar Schueller Techno-Dominance and Torturegate: The Making of US Imperialism............................................191Melani McAlister Left Behind and the Politics of Prophecy Talk...................................................................221Harilaos Stecopoulos Putting an Old Africa on Our Map: British Imperial Legacies and Contemporary US Culture.....................248Ashley Dawson New Modes of Anti-imperialism......................................................................................275Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller Coda: Information Mastery and the Culture of Annihilation...............................285Bibliography......................................................................................................................301Contributors......................................................................................................................303

Chapter One

Culture, 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 in 1944 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...