Hemispheric Histories of Violence and the Modern Subject

In the past decade or so, scholars in American studies and affiliated disciplines have turned away en masse from “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” arguing that uncovering the violence at the center of the modern subject, and of modern liberal thought, is no longer either surprising or useful. The methodological project associated with Michel Foucault, Toni Morrison, Edward Said, and many others, of reading against the grain of canonical texts and interrogating seemingly liberatory situations to uncover the “abiding presence” of imperial, racial-capitalist, heteropatriarchal structures, has lately been dismissed as a bad faith, dead-end enterprise, productive of smug condescension rather than radical change.¹ The idea that those invested in left-scholarly endeavors should (or, at least, should attempt to) abandon ideology critique in favor of more peaceful, reverent approaches to cultural texts and the contemplation of affective states is now the reigning orthodoxy in the field; with a few eloquent exceptions, American, queer, and literary studies scholars have roundly proclaimed the uselessness of “paranoid” projects of exposing violence.²

However, even as many recommend abandoning the hermeneutics of suspicion, historians and other scholars, often in partnership with activists, continue to uncover details of the egregious systemic violence committed during the twentieth century, often in the name of modern capitalism and state building. If such accounts of violence no longer surprise or galvanize us, as so many scholars and critics have asserted, what use are they to us, as scholars, teachers, guilty imperial citizens? Might there be mechanisms and causes of this violence that even “we” (whether construed as American studies scholars or broadened to include other scholars, our students, friends, communities) do not know? If we already know about the violence, does this excuse us from reading about the details?

This essay addresses these questions of the political utility of scholarly accounts of past and ongoing systemic violence by examining four books that consider this violence in a hemispheric context. Taken together, the four books demonstrate the breadth of scholarship that continues to pursue the broad task of uncovering violence and connecting it to state and imperial power. All the books under consideration here are centrally concerned with epistemology: they trace how states and other institutions construct the knowledge that permits staggering levels of violence, but also present us with possibilities for deconstructing this common sense and combating the systems that produce it.

The most straightforwardly genealogical of the four books is Suzanna Reiss’s We Sell Drugs, which traces the origins of the so-called War on Drugs to World War II and its immediate aftermath. Reiss takes as her starting point the fact that “while the United States spends billions of dollars attacking ‘illegal’ cocaine, the country remains both the largest stockpile of coca leaves in the world and the largest stockpiler of ‘legal’ cocaine” (8). She traces the rhetorical fusion of “drugs” and “war” back to the self-serving distinctions made by US-based pharmaceutical companies in concert with officials from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the US government. Reiss uses the history of coca leaf cultivation and consumption as a window into the production of the difference between illicit “addictive” drugs and licit narcotic substances that might energize and improve populations, contending that the distinction between them was constructed to consolidate US state and corporate power.

In early chapters, Reiss meticulously reveals how the United States and the United Nations laid the groundwork for the binary between legitimate pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs in the middle of the twentieth century. Even before the United States entered...