Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War

256 Pages·2006·1.044 MB·English

by  Robin L. Riley, Naeem Inayatullah (eds.)

Interrogating Imperialism
Interrogating Imperialism
Conversations on Gender, Race, and War
Edited by
Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah
INTERROGATINGIMPERIALISMCONVERSATIONSONGENDER,RACE,ANDWAR
Copyright © Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah, 2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan
division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a
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is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-53536-1 ISBN 978-0-230-60171-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230601710
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robin L. Riley and Naeem Inayatullah.
Interrogating imperialism: edited by conversations on gender, race, and war/Robin L.
Riley and Naeem Inayatullah.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Solidarity across movements: women at war–Shame and rage: inter-
national relations and the world school of colonialism–Patriotism in the U.S. Peace
Movement: the limits of nationalist resistance to global imperialism–Deja’Vu: the
fantasy of benign military rule in Pakistan–Bewildered? women’s studies and the
war on terror–Trading places: juxtaposing south Africa and the U.S.–Valiant,
virtuous or vicious representation, and the problem of women warriors–Not just
(any) body can be a patriot: on time of empire both “here” and “there”.
ISBN978-1-4039-7462-4
1. United States–Foreign relations. 2. United States–Politics and government.
3. Feminism–Political aspects. I. Riley, Robin L., 1952-II. Inayatullah, Naeem.
JZ1480.159 2006
327.730082–dc22 2006047627
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Macmillan India Ltd.
First edition: 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword ix
Cynthia Enloe
1. Introduction 1
Naeem Inayatullah and Robin L. Riley
2. Bandung Women: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,
and the Necessary Risks of Solidarity 15
Elisabeth Armstrong and Vijay Prashad
3. Shame and Rage: International Relations and the
World School of Colonialism 51
Himadeep Muppidi
4. Patriotism in the U.S. Peace Movement: The
Limits of Nationalist Resistance to Global Imperialism 63
Shampa Biswas
5. Déjà Vu: The Fantasy of Benign Military Rule in Pakistan 101
Ayesha Khan
6. Bewildered? Women’s Studies and the War on Terror 129
Monisha Das Gupta
7. Trading Places: Juxtaposing South Africa and the
United States 155
Hannah Britton
8. Valiant, Vicious, or Virtuous?
Representation, and the Problem of Women Warriors 183
Robin L. Riley
vi Contents
9. Not Just (Any)body Can Be a Patriot: “Homeland”
Security as Empire Building 207
M. Jacqui Alexander
Afterword: Newly Seeing 241
Zillah Eisenstein
Contributors 245
Index 247
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Minnie Bruce Pratt for work that inspires us
and for early encouragement on this project. Thanks also to Cynthia
Enloe and Zillah Eisenstein for their careful attention to this collection.
We are particularly grateful to each of the contributors for producing
sparkling narratives, thereby turning editing into a labor of love, and
for cultivating a sweet solidarity.
Naeem thanks Robin L. Riley for acting as a continuous motivat-
ing force for this project; his colleagues in the Department of Politics
at Ithaca College for providing such a hospitable home; and Sorayya
and the boys for their profound joyfulness.
Robin thanks Naeem Inayatullah, who listened to early unformed
ideas about a book and helped make something happen; the partici-
pants on the Gender and War panels sponsored by the Women’s
Studies Program at Syracuse University who inspired this idea; and
Hannah Britton for enduring friendship. Finally, words fail to suffi-
ciently express my gratitude to Margaret Himley, who makes every-
thing possible.
This book is dedicated to Kamal Naeem and Shahid Naeem.
Foreword
Cynthia Enloe
Most readers will read this book’s engaging essays at a time when
both the U.S. invasions and subsequent occupations of Afghanistan
and Iraq have faded from the daily news. Print, radio, and television
companies are in the bad habit of reducing their journalist crews—or
pulling them out altogether—as soon as the “story” loses its simple
plot. This encourages all of us—their audiences—to have short atten-
tion spans.
That, in turn, has the result of politically deskilling us: we find our-
selves confused or impatient when new political parties start forming
and vying with each other in Afghanistan or Iraq; we can’t remember
the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims or why it matters; we
don’t learn how to trace the important relationships between the U.S.
government’s agencies and its key private contractors; we don’t know
how to make sense of water politics or oil politics; we pay attention
to Afghan or Iraqi women only when we glance at a short caption
under a photograph of veiled—or unveiled—women; we don’t hone
the skills needed to follow foreign influence unless we see an American
president or one of his cabinet secretaries landing on the overseas tar-
mac and donning a flack jacket.
Such deskilling is making us politically naïve. This then makes us
unreliable either as citizens of the United States or as citizens of the
world. We might be tempted to camouflage our lack of long-term
attention and analytical subtlety with offhand cynical remarks (“Oh,
it’s all about oil;” or “They’re just a bunch of warlords anyway”). But
cynicism is no substitute for persistent curiosity and nuanced under-
standing.
Thankfully, the authors brought together here by Robin L. Riley
and Naeem Inayatullah try to roll back our deskilled political naïvete.
First, their essays are written from the vantage points of both the
United States and other countries—Trinidad, Pakistan, South Africa,
and so on. Most people in the world today routinely read works by
commentators situated outside their own countries. Talk to someone
from Singapore or Italy or Canada. Ask them whom they read or
x Interrogating Imperialism/Robin L.Riley and Naeem Inayatullah
watch or listen to. Most of them think it would be foolhardy to pay
attention only to observers from within their own societies. One of the
major risks of living in the United States today is that it is too easy to
surf the channels and imagine that one has a vast variety of news
sources to choose from, whereas in reality most of those sources are
either U.S. owned or, as in the case of those owned by Rupert
Murdoch, are designed to appeal to a specifically U.S. audience, treat-
ing as “news” only what seems directly relevant to Americans with
short attention spans.
Secondly, Riley and Inayatullah have invited to join them here a
group of writers and thinkers who are historically conscious, who
don’t think American imperialism reached liftoff only in response to
the attacks on the World Trade Center in September, 2001. Take a
quick poll among your friends and classmates: How many of them
(and you) spent serious time in their high school history classes dig-
ging into the commonly held American racial and economic presump-
tions that undergirded U.S. colonization of Hawaii? Of Puerto Rico?
Of the Philippines? Recently, I watched a PBS television documentary
called “The Massie Affair.” The filmmakers used archival footage,
trial transcripts, contemporary press coverage, and present-day inter-
views to tell of a sexual scandal in Hawai’i in the early 1900s—a scan-
dal that turned out to be far less about sex and much more about
racism, navy marriages, miscarriages of justice, and the ways in which
local Honolulu white residents and their official supporters in
Washington were governing their Hawaiian colony. This was all news
to me. And while I too had had no books or class discussions on
American occupation and rule of any of its colonies when I was in
high school (or, unfortunately, in college either), in the past decades I
had been trying to fill this gaping chasm in my understanding of
America in the world, encouraged by my friends from Malaysia, the
Philippines, Canada, and Mexico. Still, “The Massie Affair,” which
had caused a nationwide controversy a century ago, was today news
to me. Thus it is never too late to acquire a historical consciousness of
how and why and when Americans have launched invasions into,
and occupations of, other people’s countries. Reading—and now
rereading—this book’s historically minded authors is a good place to
start. Perhaps one could now begin a list, a candid list: write down
everything about U.S. past actions in the rest of the world that comes
as news to you as you read these chapters. Then—and this is a politi-
cal action—write next to each item on your list why you think you
were never told about this before.
Foreword xi
Third, these authors teach us how to become smarter about
unequal global dynamics by taking womenseriously. The authors you
are about to read here do take women seriously. They have learned
that if we ignore the ideas and the experiences of women, and if we
overlook or treat casually how women are imagined by policy elites,
media editors, and ordinary citizens, we are likely to fail to adequately
and reliably make sense of how the British, French, Spanish, Russians,
and Americans went about creating their international imperialist
projects. We are thus also likely to remain naïve about how the cur-
rent American government and its citizens are justifying their occupa-
tions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Women” is not synonymous with
“gender.” Yet both terms are important for making realistic sense of
how imperialism works—how it is justified, how it is imposed on oth-
ers, how it is made to seem “normal” to those in the invading or con-
trolling country, and how it has been and is being criticized and
resisted. “Women” refers to those people who are of the female sex;
women are amazingly diverse in their economic resources, their his-
torical experiences, how racialized notions are used by others to relate
to them, their sexual identities, and how they are located in this
world. Yet most women—in all their diversity—share the experience
of being treated as if they have little to teach us about how imperial-
ism works. If women are mentioned, it is chiefly as mere symbols of
the nation, as someone else’s justification for “civilizing missions,” or
as targets of sexual violence by men of the other, allegedly less honor-
able, nation/society/community/state. Of course, if you are reduced to
a symbol, a justification, or a target, no one bothers to take seriously
your own explanations, aspirations, and strategies.
Gender, by contrast, refers to the ideas of “femininity” and “mas-
culinity.” As such, gender is a tool for making sense of how and why so
many men find it reasonable and even necessary to try to turn women
into symbols, justifications, and targets. The manipulations of—and
confusions over and challenges to—conventional ideas about women’s
“naturally feminine roles,” “modern femininity,” and “respectable
femininity” are woven tightly into invading militaries’ recruitment
efforts and foreign-designed modernization enterprises.
Finally, all of the authors who speak to us in these pages urge us to
see politics more broadly. They are both stretching us to think in fresh
ways and stretching the very idea of what “politics” is. They are
showing us how understanding the causes and consequences of poli-
tics cannot be understood just by looking at people in official govern-
ment positions, or just at those people’s official policies. Instead,