The Monster Within: What Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter Can Tell Us about Terror and Desire in a Post-9/11 World

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has taken on an Orientalist discourse for its foreign policy.¹ President George W. Bush has declared famously that the world is either with the United States (Western civilization, Christian enlightenment, law and order, progress) or with the terrorists (Oriental barbarism, Islamic feudalism, chaos and destruction, stagnation). The Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act further distinguish between insider and outsider, citizen and foreigner, patriot and infidel.² Many conservative commentators have also revived Orientalist essentialisms such as Islam's supposed incompatibility with Western-capitalist-democratic modernity,³ thereby requiring full-scale "nation building."⁴ Initially this concept referred to post-Taliban Afghanistan, but it now extends to Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea (the "axis of evil"). Some declare outright that America must police the world as a "globocop."⁵

An imperialist rhetoric aims, understandably, to stem the terror of suicide bombers and attain the desire of national security. But is Orientalism sustainable in our globalized times? I argue "No" for two reasons. First, globalization obsolesces Orientalism. Originally developed by European imperial powers to rationalize colonialism, Orientalism granted to the white man a moral authority to invade foreign lands and peoples even when crass material exploitation belied its "civilizing mission." This ideology ill suits today's world, despite neoliberal globalization's near-hegemonic standing, because globalization's impact lies precisely in its cosmopolitan difference.⁶ Nation, race, and culture may powerfully mark identity, provoking terror and desire when threatened or promised. After all, "suicide bombers" and other guerrilla radicals throughout the world sacrifice their lives—and those of others—precisely for these reasons. But "the West" and "the Rest" no longer divide into such clear-cut entities, no matter how much this illusion excites the national psyche. Nation, race, and culture flow too dynamically into one another today to allow fixations on geography. "National interest" no longer correlates easily with "domestic" priorities in contrast to "international" ones, be they of trade, war, or terrorism.⁷ The postcolonial world has learned much, also, about global power relations since the two world wars. What some in Bush's White House or Blair's Parliament or even Berlusconi's Rome would pass as "new," "twenty-first century," or "emancipatory," many in New Delhi and Cairo and Jakarta recognize as all too familiar, nineteenth century, and colonial.

Americans understand this phenomenon implicitly. They grapple with it daily, given America's own multicultural, multiethnic population. The World Trade Center (WTC) exemplified American power in global finance, but it also housed a miniworld of races, cultures, classes, and, simply, lives. Given that Americans live and work in the world's most globalized society, how could the Bush administration—or any state agency, for that matter—expect them to return to an earlier era of border-enforcing "homeland" or "security"? Globalization demands market porousness, not national enclosure. Such fluidity of interests renders government's job more difficult, as it must remain relevant to retain credibility. As this essay will show, an Orientalist discourse of virtuous self versus evil other may seem effective in the short term, but it cannot endure over the long term.⁸

There is a second, more profound reason for Orientalism's ultimate failure as a foreign policy discourse. It did not work even at the height of Western imperialism and colonialism. Orientalism aimed to divide the world into a European self versus a native other. The self represented enlightenment, mastery, and rationality; the other, its complete and utter negation. Colonialism's civilizing mission was founded on this premise. Hegel's master-slave dialectic, however, uncovers a crucial criterion for this relationship: the master requires recognition from the slave to be the master. Postcolonial analysis...