Dispossession: The Performative within the Political, Cultural Imperialism the US war on "terror"

Hande Lara Sever

           This interview functions as an extension of Butler’s essay Undoing Gender.  In Undoing Gender Butler states that to encounter oppression requires one’s understanding of how lives are supported and maintained differentially. In the book Dispossession: The Performative in the Political Athanasiou extends this argument with the case of Abu-Ghraib “… of those politically reduced to insignificant human matter, or human waste. For instance, the US coverage of the events of Abu-Ghraib, where torture and spectacle converged in an atrocious photographic scene of grotesque degradation, the singularity of the detainees’ faces was intentionally erased- reduced to unilaterally exposed and interchangeably anonymous human matter.” With this example Athanasiou unpacks both Butler’s argument on the difference in maintenance of lives and Iris Young’s cultural imperialism. Young states “ To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meaning of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it as the Other.” As known, the photos released from Abu Ghraib represented Iraqis’ being tortured by American soldiers but another fact about these photos is that the tortured Iraqis’ were photographed while their faces were covered with bags which as Athanasiou states reduced them to anonymous human matter, since they lost their individuality. These photos fuction as a proof of  the vulgar effects of rendering human beings as the Other.

            Young says “… the dominant cultural products of the society, that is, those most widely disseminated, express the experience, values, goals, and achievements of these groups. Often without noticing they do so, the dominant groups project their own experience as representative of humanity as such.” Post 9/11 we only heard the American side of the story. On the other hand, no one even bothered to cover the other side of the story or answer simple questions as “As being an Afghani terrorist organization how is the Taliban linked to Iraq? While Taliban being the main target of the US how did Iraq enter the picture? Does or did Iraq really have/had weapons of mass destruction? Is this a war done for cheap access to oil? How legitimate is Colin Powell’s infamous speech at the UN headquarters? How many lives did Bush destroy while trying to bring ‘democracy’ to Iraq? In the book Athanasiou says “As you have shown, in the post- 9/11 context the role of the “victim” was strategically appropriated on behalf of the United States in order to legitimize its military aggressiveness against Afghanistan and Iraq but also to suppress possibilities for public critical reflection and discourse in the US.” So in this case Iraqis face what Iris Young calls cultural imperialism both on a mental and physical level as they are rendered as invisible within the social sphere and since more than one million Iraqis died during the American invasion of Iraq.

Side Fact:

For many years the American involvement within the Middle East is rendered as invisible which lead to a different narrative about the jihadi groups to be written. In an article published in 2006 the journal Mother Jones chronologically listed the involvement of the US in the region which opens doors for a person to be the judge for themselves on the war on terror.

Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/01/americas-devils-game-extremist-islam

Also the American Sniper is another recent example of cultural imperialism. As it renders Arabs as silent objects and initiates muslim hatred.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/24/american-sniper-anti-muslim-threats-skyrocket