Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity

Notes

. 2 1 3 N O T E S Introduction 1. “About the ICTY,” http://www.icty.org/sections/AbouttheICTY (emphasis added). 2. A number of studies have theorized the relationship between “race” and “culture” in the twentieth century. See, for instance, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1991); Pierre-André Taguieff, “The New Cultural Racism in France,” trans. Russell Moore, in Telos 83, Spring 1990, 118–22; Richard T. Ford, Racial Culture: A Critique (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. Looking at a variety of representational sites, I build on Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd’s definition of culture. They argue, “Rather than adopting the understanding of culture as one sphere in a set of differentiated spheres and practices, we discuss ‘culture ’ as a terrain in which politics, culture, and the economic form an inseparable dynamic” (1). See their “Introduction,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–32. 4. Among the proponents of empire, this book addresses in some detail the writings of Robert Kaplan (in the first chapter) and Michael Ignatieff (in the first and fourth chapters). 5. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capi­ talism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 11. 6. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 147. 7. Ibid., 145. 8. This, of course, is a myth. Puritans sought to form a religious state, expelled heretics, and certainly do not fit the mold of religious tolerance attributed to them today. 9. David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6. 10. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 241. 11. See Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 12. As Asad notes in Formations of the Secular, secularism is not just about the separation of church and state or tolerance; rather, it produces a narrative 214 . n o t e s t o I n t r o d u c t I o n of transcendence, “an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self” (5). 13. Writing about the Philippine context, Neferti Tadiar contrasts Spanish imperialism and U.S. imperialism in terms of their differing Christian conceptions of redemption : “Under Spanish colonialism, God may have already been the white Father, but under U.S. imperialism, he gains a benevolent countenance. In contrast to the distant Spanish God, the Protestant God of U.S. imperialism is benevolent, close, and ‘humanly near.’” See Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 236. 14. W. E. B. Du Bois’s history of the Reconstruction era powerfully demonstrated that slavery determined “the whole social development of America,” and that “black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale.” See Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Simon and Schuster, [1935] 1992), 13, 5. Du Bois argues that more than simply exemplifying the contradictions in U.S. democracy, the legacy of slavery has continued to determine “the limits of democratic control” (13). While the project of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War held the revolutionary promise of accomplishing democracy in the United States, Du Bois shows that ultimately the needs of Northern industry and Southern planting reproduced the system of racialized exploitation and disenfranchisement. Nearly a century later, the civil rights era seemed to once again represent an opportunity for radical social, economic, and racial change. 15. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13 (emphasis added). 16. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. See, for instance, Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Ameri­ cans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). 19. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, xvii. Melamed argues that post–World War II and post–Cold War racial logics can be divided into three racial systems of...