Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture

UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58h9331w ISBN 978-0-8101-3602-1 Author Mufti, Nasser Publication Date 2017-10-11 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Civilizing War The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on page 249. Civilizing War Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture Nasser Mufti northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data [to come] Names: Mufti, Nasser, author. Title: Civilizing war : imperial politics and the poetics of national rupture / Nasser Mufti. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series: FlashPoints | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014831| ISBN 9780810136038 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136021 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136045 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | English fiction— 20th century—History and criticism. | Civil war in literature. | Imperialism in literature. | Great Britain—Colonies—Civilization. Classification: LCC PR830.W37 M84 2018 | DDC 820.9/3581—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014831 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4811992. For Dodo, Abba, and Yasser (pay no attention to the epigraph!) Whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide. —hannah arendt, On Revolution Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3 part i. civility 21 1. A Glimpse of Social War 27 2. A Nexus of Fratricide 44 3. The Long Civil War 63 part ii. civilizing mission 81 4. Civil War, the Highest Stage of Civilization 85 5. Civil War, the Lowest Stage of Civilization 110 part iii. incivility 135 6. A Bend in the Historical Novel 143 7. Postcolonial Interregnum 160 Coda: Global Civil War 179 Notes 185 Works Cited 223 Index 241 Acknowledgments These pages could not exist had it not been for the sheer luck of the aca- demic job market. This afforded me the time and institutional support to make this book what it is. Who or what to thank for this, or whether gratitude is even appropriate in this context, I don’t know. Much easier to know is whom to thank for their guidance, skepticism, humor, feedback, patience, tough love, and goodwill. Sunil Agnani, Dina Al- Kassim, Étienne Balibar, Tamara Beauchamp, Carolyn Betensky, Adrienne Brown, Nick Brown, Mark Canuel, Joey Carnie, Alicia Christoff, Jeff Clapp, Pete Coviello, Mark Cunningham, Brock Cutler, Madhu Dubey, Harris Feinsod, Leah Feldman, Lisa Freeman, Sharareh Frouzesh, Richard God- den, Harvey, Rachel Havrelock, Kim Icreverzi, Anna Kornbluh, Lee Laskin, Andrew Leong, Walter Benn Michaels, Gianna Mosser, Aamir Mufti, Jessica Ostrower, R. Radhakrishnan, Sina Rahmani, Ringo, Roger Reeves, Zach Samalin, Chris Taylor, Rei Terada, Sonali Thakkar, Irene Tucker, Urchin, Ken Yoshida, the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, and the series editors at FlashPoints made these pages what they are. Conversations at the Chicagoland Junior Faculty Writing Group, the Chicagoland Junior Faculty Writing Splinter Group, the NAVSA Junior Faculty Writing Group, and the Institute for the Humanities Workshop at UIC helped make shots in the dark into rough drafts, and rough drafts into drafts. I am also grateful to Stuart Brisley and Maya Balcioglu for use of The Missing Text: Interregnum I (6 May–12 May), 2010 for the cover of this book. If the list above is relatively easy to compile, then acknowledging Kim is a no- brainer. An early version of Chapter 5 was published as “Kipling’s Art of War,” Nineteenth Century Literature 70, no. 4 (2016): 496– 519. xi Civilizing War Introduction “These people never fight civilized wars, do they? So much for calling it a civil war.”1 Such is the evaluation of the Nigerian Civil War by Susan Greville- Pitts, a British ex- patriot in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). It is easy to dismiss Susan’s state- ment as racist, or even defend it as anachronistic cultural insensitivity (the novel is set in the 1960s). Too easy. For at the heart of her comment is the affinity between “civil,” “civil war,” and “civilized.” All three have their etymological origin in the Latin word civis, which is also the root for citizen, city, civil, civility, and civilization.2 Susan’s claim is that the incivility of Nigeria’s civil war undermines its status as a civil war. For the conflict to be a civilized civil war, Nigerians would have to fight like civilized people— which, according to Susan, they are as yet incapable of doing. Susan’s wordplay makes it possible to think of the project of civilizing, otherwise known as imperialism, as the project of making civil war a possibility in places not yet civilized— namely, the colonies. In context, the Nigerian Civil War was the country’s first civil war as a postcolonial nation- state. But the logic of Susan’s state- ment erases the “post” in “postcolonial” because it calls for continued civilizing of “these people,” which, as the phrase suggests, means more than merely Nigerians, but all “these people” not yet civilized, not yet civil, not yet capable of fighting civilized civil wars. Still too easy. For an identical conjuncture of incivility and civil war proliferates in the rhetoric of today’s most prominent imperial 3 4 ❘ Introduction institutions. In 2003, the World Bank completed a study on civil war, the outcome of which was a policy report titled Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. In the report’s foreword, Nicholas Stern, chief economist of the World Bank at the time, states that ever since World War II, “the risk of civil war is much higher in low- income countries than middle- income countries.”3 Civil war, according to Stern, happens exclusively in the developing world and is inextricably linked to the forces of modernization. The report cites examples of civil wars in countries as diverse as Peru, El Salvador, Angola, the Demo- cratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan, all of which are collapsed into a single paradigm that is unique to the non- West. These civil wars, Stern argues, create “development in reverse” because they are “not just a problem for development, but a failure of development.”4 Civil war is a problem unique to the developing world, which in turn prohibits this world from ever becoming modern. As such, civil war is both a cause (a failure of development) and an effect (a problem for development)— disease and symptom. As a later chapter in the World Bank’s study explains, “Once a country has stumbled into conflict powerful forces— the conflict trap— tend to lock it into a syndrome of further conflict.”5 Clumsy countries who know nothing about the art of modern statecraft “stumble” at the thresh- olds of modernity into “the conflict trap.” These traps are so powerful that it takes a benevolent institution like the World Bank (which has complete confidence in its ability to tell apart victims from perpe- trators) to rescue such states by setting them free into the domain of Western modernity. In the name of development and with the alibi of civil war, the World Bank takes on the burdens of an uncannily famil- iar mission civilisatrice to “break the trap” of the developing world’s self- destructiveness. Hence the report proclaims: “The international community . has a legitimate role as an advocate for those who are victims.”6 Within the space of a few sentences, one of the world’s most powerful men in one of the most

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