Palestine and the "War on Terror"

Palestine, the "war on terror" and the colonial present

One of the ironies of postcolonialism is the way in which many of its practitioners recognize Edward Said's crucial role in laying the foundation stones for its politico-intellectual project, only to pass over in silence the dispossession of the Palestinian people that animates the spirit of his examination of the sutures between "culture" and "imperialism."² Said's work has been immensely consequential. It has accentuated the ways in which power is inscribed in and through our representations of the world - which are thus never merely "mirrors" - and it has invited an interrogation of the multiple discourses through which difference and disjuncture are constituted within the modern geographical imaginary: including, crucially, primitivism and tropicality. But now that Orientalism is abroad again, revivified and hideously emboldened by the so-called "war on terror" following September 11, there are good reasons to revisit the site of Said's own preoccupations. Before he assumed office (the mot juste), George Bush announced with characteristic insight that "the past is over." On the contrary: as William Faulkner reminds us in Requiem for a Nun, "[T]he past is not dead. It is not even past." In this essay, I will show how the production of what Said called "imaginative geographies" continues to articulate the colonial present.

In Said's original discussion, imaginative geographies fold distance into difference through a series of spatializations. They multiply partitions and enclosures that demarcate "the same" from "the other," at once constructing and calibrating a gap between the two by designating in one's mind a familiar space which is "ours" and an unfamiliar space beyond "ours" which is "theirs." Said's primary concern was with the ways in which European and American imaginative geographies of "the Orient" combine over time to produce an archive in which things come to be seen as neither completely novel nor thoroughly familiar. Instead, a median category emerges that "allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing."³ This Protean power of Orientalism is immensely important because the citationary structure that is authorized by these accretions is also in some substantial sense performative: it produces the effects that it names. Its categories, codes and conventions shape the practices of those who draw upon it, actively constituting its object (most obviously, "the Orient") in such a way that this structure is as much a repertoire as it is an archive. This matters for two reasons. In the first place, as the repertory figure implies, imaginative geographies are not only accumulations of time, sedimentations of successive histories; they are also performances of space.⁴ In the second place, performances may be scripted (they usually are) but this does not make their outcomes fully determined; rather, performance creates a space in which it is possible for "newness" to enter the world. This space of potential is always conditional, always precarious, but every performance of the colonial present carries within it the possibilities of reaffirming and even radicalizing the hold of the past on the present or of undoing its enclosures and approaching closer to the horizon of the postcolonial.⁵

In what follows, I work with these ideas to expose the ways in which, in the wake of September 11, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has taken advantage of the so-called "war on terror" to ratchet up the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people.⁶ What is novel about this, I argue, is that it has taken place (literally so) through what Achille Mbembe calls a "necropolitics" - "a generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations" - whose performances of space seek to rationalize and radicalize colonial aggression. These performances assault not only politically qualified life - the space within which a Palestinian state is possible - but also "bare life" itself. ⁷

Ground Zeros

When the Bush administration took power on 20 January 2001, its foreign policy was one of global disengagement. Palestine was no exception; the White House closed its doors and elected for minimal involvement. Within days of...