PATRIOTS VOLUME 63. SEPTEMBER 2017. thenewinquiry.com @newinquiry

The New Inquiry Magazine is licensed under a creative commons license [cc-by-nc-nd 3.0] PUBLISHERS ROSENFELT RACHEL FRANCIS TSENG EDITOR IN CHIEF KOFMAN AVA EDITORIAL BOARD MAX FOX HORNING ROB SIDDIQI AYESHA DIRECTOR CREATIVE IMP KERR EDITOR MANAGING KYLIE BENTON-CONNELL SENIOR EDITORS BINYAM MAYA CANTÚ AARON WILLIE OSTERWEIL TIANA REID EDITORS BADY AARON CORNUM LOU CATHERINE MALCOLM HARRIS RAKIA RAVEN EDITOR SPECIAL PROJECTS SAM LAVIGNE WEB EDITOR LAURA CREMER PUBLICIST AND DEVELOPMENT LEAD LAURA THORNE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS RAHEL AIMA CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER JACKSON LAUREN M. MONALISA GHARAVI MARYAM TRIMMIER MIRANDA BOARD ADRIAN CHEN DACOSTA MARC HORNING ROB AELFIE OUDGHIRI ROSENFELT RACHEL ARIELLA THORNHILL MOIRA WEIGEL EDITORS EMERITUS ABRAHAMAIN ATOSSA HANNAH BLACK TIM BARKER JOSEPH BARKELEY BATTE ANWAR ALEXANDER BENAIM ADRIAN CHEN COOKE EMILY JESSE DARLING BRIAN DROITCOUR SAMANTHA GARCIA JURGENSON NATHAN KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED LENNARD NATASHA SARAH LEONARD ANNA MONTGOMERY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT ALIX RULE SALAS PACO DERICA SHIELDS TAYLOR VIRGIL FOUNDING EDITORS JENNIFER BERNSTEIN BORKOWSKI MARY ROSENFELT RACHEL PUBLISHERS RACHEL ROSENFELT FRANCIS TSENG EDITOR IN CHIEF AVA KOFMAN EDITORIAL BOARD MAX FOX ROB HORNING AYESHA SIDDIQI CREATIVE DIRECTOR IMP KERR MANAGING EDITOR KYLIE BENTON-CONNELL SENIOR EDITORS MAYA BINYAM AARON CANTÚ WILLIE OSTERWEIL TIANA REID EDITORS AARON BADY LOU CATHERINE CORNUM MALCOLM HARRIS RAVEN RAKIA SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR SAM LAVIGNE WEB EDITOR LAURA CREMER PUBLICIST AND DEVELOPMENT LEAD LAURA THORNE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS RAHEL AIMA CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER LAUREN M. JACKSON MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI MIRANDA TRIMMIER BOARD ADRIAN CHEN MARC DACOSTA ROB HORNING AELFIE OUDGHIRI RACHEL ROSENFELT ARIELLA THORNHILL MOIRA WEIGEL EDITORS EMERITUS ATOSSA ABRAHAMAIN HANNAH BLACK TIM BARKER JOSEPH BARKELEY ANWAR BATTE ALEXANDER BENAIM ADRIAN CHEN EMILY COOKE JESSE DARLING BRIAN DROITCOUR SAMANTHA GARCIA NATHAN JURGENSON KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED NATASHA LENNARD SARAH LEONARD ANNA MONTGOMERY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT ALIX RULE PACO SALAS DERICA SHIELDS VIRGIL TAYLOR FOUNDING EDITORS JENNIFER BERNSTEIN MARY BORKOWSKI RACHEL ROSENFELT MARI MATSUMOTO INTERVIEWED BYSABUKOHSO BY ALEXKARSAVIN AND MARAISKANDER CAPITALISM WITHAFLUFFYFACE LANGUAGE UNDERHOUSEARREST THE NUCLEARNATIONAL FAMILY BY MOHAMMEDHARUNARSALAI HANDS UP, DON’TSHOOT! BY GABRIELLEDACOSTA BY WILLIEOSTERWEIL LIBERALISM ISDEAD BY A. MAUREENTANT BY BRANDONBRYANT GREEN NIGHTMARES THE HAVOC OFLESS SYMBOLIC THREATS AMERICAN WOMAN BY JONNYBUNNING A SENSOR, DARKLY BY BRIANKAMANZI BY JASBIRK. PUAR BY SAMLAVIGNE BY JORGE COTTE SOFT BORDERS BY JACK GROSS FASH AT SEA BY RAFA RED MUST FALL C-SPAN 5 EDITORS’ NOTE

AS summer wanes, we find the globe seized by into a death trap. Black residents who fled their homes multiplying superstorms. In the ever growing man-made for nearby southern states were marked as “refugees,” catastrophe of climate change, these crises unfold along a title given to those for whom the nation reluctantly strictly drawn borders. Hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, makes space. Today, in 2017, the administration seeks to floods, and landslides lay bare the calculus of care as it is eliminate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in an divvied up along national lines. affirmation of what people of color have always known: In the Gulf of Mexico, concern is portioned out Patriots are born, not made. according to metaphorical proximity to the United States Nothing so tightly congeals which who counts as a of America. Politicians offer prayers for U.S. colonial person as the word “patriot.” A patriot is not just a person properties, the most they can spare for the black and brown but a human, imbued with all the rights to life that category people who call the islands home. And yet, even within affords. And so, the role of patriot is intoxicating. continental borders, additional borders further divide Those within its reach will fight for it, will die for it, the deserving and the left-for-dead. In 2004, Hurricane and, especially, will kill for it. They stand by their nation Katrina transformed the very black city of New Orleans through good and ill, even when the nation fails to hold up its end of the bargain. And when citizen interests are protesters, Rafa Red describes how any “militant action inseparable from oppressive state regimes, alternative viewed as an existential threat by fossil fuel companies is imaginaries in the hands of “the people” can look just as now likely seen as such by the White House.” terrifying as the structures they might replace. Much of Fossil-fuel corporations are not the only victors. this issue is motivated by who does and does not get to Willie Osterweil’s “Liberalism Is Dead” offers a vision of be a patriot, who is compelled to be so, who is afforded the near future crafted by corporatocratic libertarians, the protection for pledging allegiance, and who remains Silicon Valley counterpart to the reinvigorated author- vulnerable either way. itarian ethno-nationalism of right-wing fascists. In this The nation is strengthened by crisis, such that it flipside of fascism, the left fascists dream of a world must manufacture these crises to survive. The feminist where instead of “citizens, there will be customers and anti-capitalist activist Mari Matsumoto, in her interview consumers, CEOs and boards instead of presidents and with scholar Sabu Kohso, notes how Japan is “constantly congresses, terms of service instead of social contracts.” If seeking to absorb the endlessly expanding accident.” the nation-state no longer works as a conduit for capital Their conversation draws out linguistic associations let alone power for the Left, a revolutionary politics must between the disaster of the Fukushima nuclear facility seek new ways to destroy the unfolding fascist future. and the ensuing disaster of the nuclear family, in which Lest the corporatastic future tech visions be another slippage structures the sovereign’s relationship confused with workplace governance of old, companies to citizens as that of a father to his family. The contra- like Amazon and Uber communicate a new, humane dictions of a nuclear nation lay bare the contradictions workplace culture through office dogs. In “Capitalism of many national “families”: The sovereign tends to his With a Fluffy Face,” Jonny Bunning discusses how own power first before tending to those in his charge. “dogs on the job” are just another perk, implicated in Similar to Black evacuees displaced by Hurricane Katrina a larger push to garner good faith in “the new spirit and governmental neglect, Japanese residents forced to of management” and keep the unsavory parts of the evacuate are treated like “illegal immigrants” even as the industry—“institutional misogyny,” “shady data use,” official nationalist rhetoric uses the occasion of disaster “micro-waged jobs”—out of focus. to speak of strengthening the collective. Invoking both a In a much more disruptive technological venture, world without borders and a necessary shift in political Sam Lavigne offers C-SPAN 5, where you can catch all the consciousness, Matsumoto states that “to confront the latest “unadulterated hits of U.S. political dysfunction.” It’s post-Fukushima disaster situation, we need a much longer C-SPAN for the overbusy gig chasers in all of us. view: a planetary history.” Patriots need outsiders and so must invent a foreign This is the kind of longer view often argued for in threat lest the efforts to preserve their special status be in environmentally focused political movements, which face vain. In the Canadian imaginary of itself as a multicultural particular attacks from both national and transnational friendly neighbor to the north, as described in Jack Gross’s entities. In the violent fervor needed to preserve state “Soft Borders,” such violent enforcement is masked by a interests that are increasingly private business interests, bureaucratic apparatus and the technique of pushing the environmental activists are subjected to a foreignizing border out to create not “a geo-political line but rather a discourse, marked as mercenaries and terrorists with continuum of checkpoints.” And in “American Woman,” similar markers used to target other racialized peoples. In Jorge Cotte discusses a special myth sprung from the an overview of recent backlash measures against pipeline American West that now dominates the way U.S. culture conceives of heroism and disaster. 2017’s Wonder Woman economy of injury “promotes disability empowerment considers the possibility that heroes are a convenient at the same time that it maintains the precarity of certain national fiction, however by the “official conclusion, bodies and populations precisely through making them the threat against humanity is made external again.” In available for maiming.” America, the post-9/11 superhero has the additional task “A Sensor, Darkly” is a first-person account from 2015 of rewriting history, “offering opportunities for a spiritual Whistleblower of the Year Brandon Bryant on serving his rehearsal of disaster every summer.” country as a drone operator. Bryant found no glory his A racist campaign known as Defend Europe both work but is transparent about the job—killing people— suspended and reinforced borders in its transnational, and the ways in which the U.S. Air Force makes its troops seaborne attempts to prevent ships from transporting complacent, even comfortable with that role. “I was proud refugees across the Mediterranean. Mohammed Harun that I was good at it,” Bryant admits and recounts his futile Arsalai’s “Fash at Sea” connects aggressive anti-Islamic attempts to reconcile death and destruction within his policies in Europe to the organizing capabilities of fascist own living body. groups like Defend Europe. And while that particular The military is just one node in the web of national campaign was a failure, without consequences for fascists attachments that give the American flag its significance, the continental landscape remains ripe for another group as A. Maureen Tant discusses in “Symbolic Threats.” to take its place. The American flag is a true symbol, “a sentimental idea Alongside and related to these regimes of without substance” apart from the American lives it seeks citizenships, literature is also produced and distributed to represent and revere. Tant uses an artistic intervention most often along strict national designations. The author by German artists Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke in their creative or linguistic prowess is made to metonym- in 2014 to explicate a uniquely American sentiment about ically stand in for the wealth and worth of the nation. In the sanctity of a national flag, in contrast with German looking at how the queer author has been excluded from “patriotism-with-reservations.” The white flags stealthily national presence in Russia, the authors of “Language put in place of the stars and stripes abstracted a symbol Under House Arrest” situate current gay and lesbian poets already so far removed from the daily experiences of who champion more insurrectionary political practice people of color in America. within queer Russian literature’s history of approaching Like the flag, black experiences or “geographies,” ethno-nationalism. as Gabrielle DaCosta calls them, become shorthand Turning to Cape Town, Brian Kamanzi questions the through political discourse, heavy with meanings beyond “role and future of universities in one of the most unequal the localities they once stood for. In “The Havoc of Less,” societies on earth.” With a focus on the University of Cape DaCosta recuperates Black Panther Huey P. Newton’s Town, his essay “Must Fall” also considers university and theory of intercommunalism, which observes power student organizing across Africa and the Caribbean as as concentrated within a small global network that central sites of struggle in continuing decolonization. supersedes the nation as “the organizing principle of the Jasbir Puar looks at other forms of pride—namely, world.” Intercommunalism explains dramatic disparities discourses of disability pride and inclusion—in “Hands between Americans under one flag, one nation, and just as Up, Don’t Shoot!” Putting forth the concept of “debility” to importantly reiterates the importance of local, community mark how Black and other racialized persons are maimed organizing. by state injustices, Puar argues that the current liberal It’s a message we would do well to remember. JASBIR K. PUAR 7 Hands Up, Don’t Shoot! by JASBIR K. PUAR

The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to produce debility and sustain its proliferation

An excerpt from The Right to Maim, Duke University Press, October 2017. Copyright Duke University Press, 2017. (Excerpted without accompanying footnotes.)

THE intensification of the writing of this book, and the formulation of “the right to maim,” its most urgent political theoretical contribution, began the summer of 2014. This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty-one day Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli 8 HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT!

state to the tweeting of advice from Palestinians on present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial how to alleviate tear gas exposure. Descriptions of the rule—that of creating injury and maintaining Palestinian militarized containment of civilians in Ferguson echoed populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in those of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine. order to control them. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) It was not long before the “Ferguson to Gaza” frame have shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of starting taking hold as an organizing rubric. Ferguson- sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill. This is to-Gaza forums sought to correlate the production of ostensibly a humanitarian practice, leaving many civilians settler space, the vulnerability and degradation of black “permanently disabled” in an occupied territory of and brown bodies, the demands for justice through destroyed hospitals, rationed medical supplies, and scarce transnational solidarities, and the entangled workings of resources. This pattern appeared again during Operation settler colonialism in the United States and Israel. The Protective Edge; the number of civilian casualties comparisons, linkages, and affective resonances between was reported daily and justified through the logic of Ferguson and Gaza were not perfectly aligned, and they collateral damage, while the number of injuries was rarely did not always yield immediate alliances. But these efforts commented upon and never included in reflections of the were convivial in their mutual resistance to the violent daily toll of the siege. control of populations via targeted bodily assaults, and Shooting to maim in order not to kill might appear reflected desires for reciprocating, intersectional, and as minor relief given the proclivity to shoot to kill. Why co-constituted assemblages of solidarity. indeed were so many unarmed black victims of police One striking aspect of the connective tissue between brutality riddled with scores of bullets? But oscillations Ferguson and Gaza involved security practices mining the between the right to kill and the right to maim are hardly relationship between disability and death. Police brutality haphazard or arbitrary. The purportedly humanitarian in the United States toward black men and women in practice of sparing death by shooting to maim has its particular showed a definitive tendency to aim for death, biopolitical stakes not through the right to life, or even often shooting numerous bullets into an unarmed, letting live, but rather through the logic of “will not let subjugated, and yet supposedly threatening body— die.” Both are part of the deliberate debilitation of a overkill, some might call it. Why were there seemingly population—whether through the sovereign right to kill so few attempts to minimize the loss of life? The U.S. or its covert attendant, the right to maim—and are key security state enacted powerful sovereign entitlements elements in the racializing biopolitical logic of security. even as it simultaneously claimed tremendous vulner- Both are mobilized to make power visible on the body. ability. The police were merely “doing their job,” a Slated for death or slated for debilitation—both are dangerous, life-threatening one. This calculation of risk is forms of the racialization of individuals and populations the founding rationalization or the impunity of “the right that liberal (disability) rights frameworks, advocating to kill” wielded by U.S. law enforcement. for social accommodation, access, acceptance, pride, The might of Israel’s military—one of the most and empowerment, are unable to account for, much less powerful in the world—is built upon the claim of an disrupt. unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity, Fast-forward to the summer of 2016. July 10, 2016 driven by history, geopolitics, and geography. Alongside was the fourth day of Black Lives Matter protests going on the “right to kill,” I noted a complementary logic long in New York City, as well as in many other locations across JASBIR K. PUAR 9 the United States. During the previous week, the police Black Lives Matter actions including: “Hands up, don’t shootings of Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, and shoot!” and “I can’t breathe!” I remained in the middle, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had galvanized perplexed. This is not an either/or situation, but neither protests all around the country. The shooting and killing is it resolved by the commonsense logic of both/and. of five police officers during a Black Lives Matter rally Disability empowerment and pride are part of rights in Dallas had only amplified the lines of battle between discourses even as expressions of maiming, debilitation, civilians and law enforcement. The June 12 shooting in and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies an Orlando queer club magnified a homonationalist of violence and exploitation. discourse that posits Muslim homophobes as the primary What kinds of biopolitical fissures produce a danger to queer liberals of all colors, resulting in increased spectacle of disability empowerment and pride mere policing of LGBTQ pride events during the summer. blocks from a movement protesting the targeted debili- Bombings by ISIS in the previous month had targeted tation of an entire racialized population, contesting Nice, Istanbul, and Dhaka. Protesters started gathering at the production of disability that is central to state Standing Rock to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline. There securitization practices? The New York City branch were more shootings of black bodies to come. of the Peoples Power Assemblies (PPA), a part of the On this particular day, the main Black Lives Matter Movement for Black Lives, organizes a presence yearly protest in New York City was happening in Times Square. at the Disability Pride March. Participants carry Black Not far from this location, the Second Annual Disability Disabled Lives Matter banners, signs that say “Stop the Pride parade, marketed as a festival and celebration, was War on Black America” and “Support the Black Lives marching on Broadway from Union Square to Madison Matter Movement,” and placards noting that more than Square Park. International in scope, the parade included 50 percent of police shootings of black bodies involve veterans and actors involved in the development of the individuals with disabilities. It is a direct action rather United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons than a pride celebration, one demanding attention to both with Disabilities. I was in a part of Manhattan equidistant targeting of the disabled and targeting to disable, with from both activities, one being an action and the other distinctly different terms from empowerment and pride being an event. The relationship between the two rhetorics. As PPA member Colin Ashley put it, “Those on confounded me. I recalled that on June 24, Black Lives the sidelines either get it automatically and really cheer, Matter withdrew from the San Francisco Pride Parade, or seem completely mystified as to why we would be in citing fear of increased police presence in the parade the march. We feel it is necessary to go in order to disrupt post-Orlando. On July 3, Black Lives Matter, selected the normative messaging.” as the Toronto Pride Parade’s Honored Group, brought For its part, Black Lives Matter has been clear that the parade to a complete halt in order to demand a series people with disabilities are both survivors of injustice of conditions, including banning police from marching and also part of their assembly. Alicia Garcia writes that in the parade. I was struck by the discord between an “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and increasingly visible disability empowerment discourse in trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, human rights platforms, cultural productions, and public folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the discourse, and the divestment of Black Lives Matter gender spectrum. It centers those that have been margin- from narratives of pride, with dominant messaging at alized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to 10 HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT!

(re)build the Black liberation movement.” And yet, the overdetermined by “white fragility” on one side and the Movement for Black Lives received important feedback, racialization of bodies that are expected to endure pain, specifically from the Harriet Tubman Collective, “A suffering, and injury on the other. As such, the latter is Collective of Black Deaf & Black Disabled organizers, an understanding of biopolitical risk: to extrapolate a bit community builders, activists, dreamers, lovers striving from Claudia Rankine’s prose: “I am in death’s position.” for radical inclusion and collective liberation,” about And to expand: I am in debility’s position. the absence of any acknowledgement of or discussion The biopolitics of debilitation is not intended to about the impact of disability in black communities in advocate a facile democratization of disability, as if to their six-point platform released in August 2016. The rehash the familiar cant that tells us we will all be disabled intervention from the Harriet Tubman Collective not if we live long enough. In fact, depending on where we live, only highlights ableist frameworks of resistance; it also what resources we have, what traumas we have endured, raises questions about how, in this time of political what color our skin is, what access we have to clean water, upheaval and dissent, meetings, protests, and actions air, and decent food, what type of health care we have, could become more accessible to people with varying what kind of work we do . . . we will not all be disabled. debilities, capacities, and disabilities. Some of us will simply not live long enough, embedded Today the solidarity pathways between Black Lives in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus Matter and Free Palestine are rhizomatic and bountiful. of debilitation. Death’s position. Others, at risk because Pro-Palestinian antiwar activists will join PPA next year, of seeming risky, may encounter disability in ways that protesting both the targeting of disabled Palestinians by compound the debilitating effects of biopolitics. the IDF and the targeting to debilitate, part of a biopolitics not of disability alone but a biopolitics of debilitation. I contend that the term “debilitation” is distinct from DEBILITY, CAPACITY, DISABILITY the term “disablement” because it foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of Disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists becoming disabled. While the latter concept creates and in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility, hinges on a narrative of before and after for individuals modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, who will eventually be identified as disabled, the former institutional mandates, and discursive regimes. The comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual globalization of disability as an identity through human state of debilitation precisely through foreclosing the rights discourses contributes to a standardization of social, cultural, and political translation to disability. It is bodily usefulness and uselessness that discounts not this tension, the tension between targeting the disabled only the specificity of location but also the ways bodies and targeting to debilitate, the tension between being and exceed or defy identities and subjects. The non-disabled/ becoming, this is the understated alliance that I push in disabled binary traverses social, geographic, and political this project. The first presumes a legitimate identification spaces. The distinctions or parameters between disabled with disability that is manifest through state, market, and non-disabled bodies shift historically, as designations and institutional recognition, if not subjective position: between productivity, vagrancy, deviancy, illness, and I call myself disabled. But this cannot be the end of labor market relations have undergone transformations the story, because what counts as a disability is already from subsistence work to waged labor to hypercapitalist JASBIR K. PUAR 11 modes of surplus accumulation and neoliberal subject a continuum of debility and capacity. Quite the opposite; formation. They shift geographically, as varied cultural, I am arguing that the three vectors, capacity, debility, and regional, and national conceptualizations of bodily disability, exist in a mutually reinforcing constellation, habitations and metaphysics inhabit corporeal relations are often overlapping or coexistent, and that debilitation differently and sometimes irreconcilably, and issues is a necessary component that both exposes and sutures of environmental racism are prominent. They shift the non-disabled/disabled binary. As Christina Crosby infrastructurally, as a wheelchair-accessible elevator rightly points out, “The challenge is to represent the ways becomes a completely altered vehicle of mobility, one in which disability is articulated with debility, without that masks various capacities to climb stairs, in many having one disappear into the other.” I would add that parts of the world where power outages are a daily, if the biopolitical management of disability entails that the not hourly, occurrence. They shift legally, administra- visibility and social acceptance of disability rely on and tively, and legislatively, as rights-bearing subjects are engender the obfuscation and in fact deeper proliferation formed and dismantled in response to health care and of debility. insurance regimes, human rights discourses, economic In her work on bodily impaired miners in Botswana opportunism, and the uneven distribution of resources, who do not necessarily articulate their plight in relation to medical supplies, and basic care. They shift scientifically, disability, Julie Livingston uses the term “debility,” defined as prosthetic technologies of capacity, from wheelchairs broadly to encompass “experiences of chronic illness and to cell phones to DNA testing to steroids, script and senescence, as well as disability per se.” She demonstrates rescript what a body can, could, or should do. And they that historically many bodily infirmities “were not shift representationally, as discourses of multicultural regarded as disabilities: indeed they were ‘normal’ and in diversity and plurality absorb “difference” into regimes some cases even expected impairments.” I take up Living- of visibility that then reorganize sites of marginalization ston’s intervention with an important refinement: debility into subjects of privilege, indeed privileged disabled in my usage is not meant to encompass disability. Rather, subjects. I mobilize debility as a connective tissue to illuminate In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, the possibilities and limits of disability imaginaries and I think through how and why bodies are perceived as economies. Debilitation as a normal consequence of debilitated, capacitated, or often simultaneously both. laboring, as an “expected impairment,” is not a flattening I mobilize the term “debility” as a needed disruption of disability; rather, this framing exposes the violence of (but also expose it as a collaborator) of the category of what constitutes “a normal consequence.” The category disability and as a triangulation of the ability/disability of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of binary, noting that while some bodies may not be inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also recognized as or identify as disabled, they may well be to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation. debilitated, in part by being foreclosed access to legibility In a literal sense, caretakers of people with and resources as disabled. Relatedly, some bodies may disabilities often come from chronically disenfranchised well be disabled but also capacitated. I want to be clear populations that endure debilities themselves. Concep- here: I am not diluting or diffusing the identity rubrics tually, state, medical, and other forms of recognition of of disability by suggesting all bodies are disabled to disability may shroud debilities and forms of slow death some extent or another, or by smoothing disability into while also effacing the quotidian modalities of widescale 12 HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT! debilitation so prevalent due to capitalist exploitation bodies and populations precisely through making them and imperialist expansion. In my usage, debility signals available for maiming. precisely the temporospatial frame eclipsed by toggling In a context whereby four-fifths of the world’s between exceptionalizing disability and exceptional people with disabilities are located in what was once disability: the endemic. Relational forms of capitalism, hailed as the “global south,” liberal interventions are care, and racialization inform an assemblage of disability invariably infused with certitude that disability should to a constellation of debilities and capacities. If, in one be reclaimed as a valuable difference—the difference of definition, disability becomes a privileged category the Other—through rights, visibility, and empowerment by virtue of state recognition, another definition of discourses—rather than addressing how much debili- disability may well be that body or that subject that can tation is caused by global injustice and the war machines aspire both economically and emotionally to wellness, of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperialism. empowerment, and pride through the exceptionalized Assemblages of disability, capacity, and debility are status it accrues while embedded within unexceptional elements of the biopolitical control of populations and, in fact endemic, debility. The compounding of that foreground risk, prognosis, life chances, settler disability and poverty as a field of debilitation is certainly colonialism, war impairment, and capitalist exploitation. happening in the era of Donald Trump, whose efforts to My analysis centralizes disability rights as a capacitating completely eliminate any whiff of socialized medicine are frame that recognizes some disabilities at the expense only really remarkable because they definitively expose of other disabilities that do not fit the respectability the actual scale of disregard for human life, having blown and empowerment models of disability progress—what so far open so quickly. Access to health care may well David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term the “biopolitics become the defining factor in one’s relationship to the of disability.” non-disabled/disabled dichotomy. But the normalization of disability as an empowered Debility is thus a crucial complication of the status purportedly recognized by the state is not contra- neoliberal transit of disability rights. Debility addresses dicted by, but rather is produced through, the creation injury and bodily exclusion that are endemic rather and sustaining of debilitation on a mass scale. Debilitation than epidemic or exceptional, and reflects a need for is not a by-product of the operation of biopolitics but an rethinking overarching structures of working, schooling, intended result, functioning both as a disruption of the and living rather than relying on rights frames to provide non-disabled/disabled binary — as an in-between space accommodationist solutions. Challenging liberal — and as a supplement to disability, that which shadows disability rights frames, debility not only elucidates what and often overlaps with disability. I therefore do not offer is left out of disability imaginaries and rights politics; debility as an identity; it is instead a form of massification. it also illuminates the constitutive absences necessary My alternative conceptualization of the biopolitics of for capacitating discourses of disability empowerment, debilitation not only refers to the remaindering of what pride, visibility, and inclusion to take shape. Thus, I argue, the liberal inclusion of disability fails to fully embrace, disability and debility are not at odds with each other. but also points to the forms of violent debilitation of Rather, they are necessary supplements in an economy of those whose inevitable injuring is assumed by racial injury that claims and promotes disability empowerment capitalism. I therefore seek to connect disability, usually at the same time that it maintains the precarity of certain routed through a conceptual frame of identification, and JASBIR K. PUAR 13 debilitation, a practice of rendering populations available biopolitical end point or opposite of life. I am arguing for statistically likely injury. that debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim. This WHY BIOPOLOTICS? is what I call “the right to maim”: a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, The Right to Maim situates disability as a register “the right to kill.” Maiming is a source of value extraction of biopolitical population control, one that modulates from populations that would otherwise be disposable. which bodies are hailed by institutions to represent The right to maim exemplifies the most intensive the professed progress made by liberal rights–bearing practice of the biopolitics of debilitation, where subjects. As with Terrorist Assemblages, this book is maiming is a sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule, largely about what happens after certain liberal rights are justified in protectionist terms and soliciting disability bestowed, certain thresholds or parameters of success are rights solutions that, while absolutely crucial to aiding claimed to have been reached: What happens when “we” some individuals, unfortunately lead to further perpet- get what “we” want? In other words, how is it that we have uation of debilitation. come to this historical juncture where we can or must In The Right to Maim, I focus less on an important talk about “(white) privilege,” and “disability” together? project of disability rights and disability studies, which But my argument also makes a critical intervention into is to refute disability as lack, as inherently undesirable, the literatures of and scholarship on biopolitics, which and as the sign, evidence, or fetish of injustice and have been less likely to take up issues of disability and victimhood. I am not sidestepping this issue. Rather, I debility. Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation centralize the quest for justice to situate what material hinges on all the population measures that enable some conditions of possibility are necessary for such positive forms of living and inhibit others: birthrates, fertility, reenvisionings of disability to flourish, and what happens longevity, disease, impairment, toxicity, productivity. when those conditions are not available. My goal here In other words, these irreducible metrics of biopolitics is to examine how disability is produced, how certain are also metrics of debility and capacity. Biopolitics bodies and populations come into biopolitical being deployed through its neoliberal guises is a capacitation through having greater risk to become disabled than machine; biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a others. The difference between disability and debility liberal rationale (in some cases) or foil for the debili- that I schematize is not derived from expounding tation of many others. It is, in sum, an ableist mechanism upon and contrasting phenomenological experiences that debilitates. of corporeality, but from evaluating the violences of Biopolitics as a conceptual paradigm can thus be biopolitical risk and metrics of health, fertility, longevity, read as a theory of debility and capacity. Addressing education, and geography. disability directly forces a new, discrete component into Disability studies scholars such as Nirmala Erevelles the living/dying pendulum that forms most discussions and Christopher Bell have insistently pointed out the of biopolitics: the living dead, death worlds, necropo- need in disability studies for intersectional analyses in litics, slow death, life itself. These frames presume death order to disrupt the normative (white, male, middleclass, to be the ultimate assault, transgression, or goal, and the physically impaired) subjects that have historically 14 HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT!

dominated the field. The epistemic whiteness of the through U.S. settler colonial and imperial occupations, as field is no dirty secret. Part of how white centrality is a sign of the global reach of empire. In 2006, Livingston maintained is through the policing of disability itself: noted that “while four-fifths of the world’s disabled what it is, who or what is responsible for it, how one lives persons live in developing countries, there is a relative it, whether it melds into an overarching condition of dearth of humanities and social science scholarship precarity of a population or is significant as an exceptional exploring disability in non-Western contexts.” The same attribute of an otherwise fortunate life. These normative cannot be said ten years later. Crucial work now exists in subjects cohere not only in terms of racial, class, and southern disability studies; the relation of disability to gendered privilege; they also tend toward impairments U.S. incarceration, settler colonialism, and imperialism; that are thought to be discernible, rather than cognitive and a systemic critique of the military-industrial complex and intellectual disabilities, chronic pain conditions like and its debilitating global expanse. The reproduction fibromyalgia or migraines, and depression. of this violence through neoliberal biomedical circuits of capital ensures that human rights regimes impose definitions about what disability is, creating evaluations and judgments, and distributes resources unevenly with effects that reorganize and/or reiterate orderings and hierarchies. Further to this project of unmooring disability Maiming is a from its hegemonic referents, critical ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies have long source of value been elaborating the debilitating effects of racism, colonialism, exploitative industrial growth, and environ- extraction from mental toxicities. Yet these literatures, because they may not engage the identity rubric of the subject position of populations that the disabled person, are not often read as scholarship on disability As such, I seek here to connect critical would otherwise race theory and transnational and postcolonial theory be disposable to disability studies scholarship. From the vantage of these interdisciplinary fields, disability is everywhere and yet, for all sorts of important reasons, not claimed as such. Many bodies might not be hailed as disabled but certainly are not awash in the privileges of being able-bodied either. This project is thus less interested in The (largely unmarked) Euro-American bias what disability is (or is not), less interested in adding of disability studies has had to confront itself, as the to the registers of disability—for example including production of most of the world’s disability happens people of color with disabilities—and more driven by through colonial violence, developmentalism, war, the question: What does disability as a concept do? The occupation, and the disparity of resources—indeed, stigmatization of bodily difference, racialized bodily JASBIR K. PUAR 15 difference, often understood as bodily defect, is already medical-industrial complex, and the recapacitation of at the core of how populations come to be in the first whiteness that strategic manipulations of embodiment place. My project refuses to reify racialization as defect might afford; Israel’s complex program of rehabilitation but rather asks what other conceptual alternatives through the debilitation of Palestinian life and land; the are available besides being relegated to defect or its “rehabilitation” of the Israeli state as part of a biopolitical dichotomous counterpart, embracing pride. assemblage of control that instrumentalizes a spectrum The Right to Maim is absorbed with excavating of capacities and debilities for the use of the occupation the chunkiness of power more so than the subtleties of Palestine; the role of targeted debilitation whereby of navigating it. That is to say that assemblages can get Israel manifests an implicit claim to the right to maim stuck, blocked, frozen, and instrumentalized. Stories and debilitate Palestinian bodies and environments as a of dividuality are stories of control societies. Rather form of biopolitical control and as central to a scientif- than assuming a corrective stance, I am interested in ically authorized humanitarian economy. The framing contributing to and expanding the critical lexicon, of the right to maim haunts the book throughout, until it vocabulary, and conceptual apparatuses of biopolitical reaches its climactic and most forceful articulation in the inquiry on disability, especially for bodies and final chapter on debilitation as a biopolitical end point populations that may fall into neither disability nor unto itself. Observations from time spent in occupied ability, but challenge and upturn these distinctions East Jerusalem and the West Bank in January 2016 altogether. Throughout the text, multiple relationships underscore the effects of the collision between disability of disciplinary, control, and sovereign power are central rights practices and discourses, largely generated by to my analyses. Detailing the interface of technologies international nongovernmental organizations, and the of discipline and control makes the case for multiplying reality of the occupation as the primary producer of the relations of the two beyond teleological or debility. geographic deterministic mappings. While the rise of digital forms gives control an anchoring periodization and geospatial rationale, a reliance on this narrative WHEN WE BREATHE obscures the ongoingness of discipline and the brutal exercise of sovereign power, often cloaked in humani- In a series in the New York Times on “people tarian, democratic, or life preservationist terms. living with disabilities,” feminist disability studies Traversing a number of contemporary political scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson wonders why and social issues, my elaboration of debilitation as pride movements for people with disabilities “have potentiating capacitation is expounded throughout the not gained the same sort of traction in the American book: an examination of the spate of “queer suicides” consciousness” as the pride movements of “women, gay and the “It Gets Better” response that occurred in the fall people, racial minorities, and other groups.” Mentioning of 2010, foregrounding queer (theory) as a capacitation Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ rights movement as machine; the coalitional potential of trans people and examples of this traction, she responds to her musings: people with disabilities, examining the array of access, “One answer is that we have a much clearer collective delimitation, and foreclosure that trans bodies have in notion of what it means to be a woman or an African relation to discourses and alliances with disability, the American, gay or transgender person than we do of what 16 HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT!

it means to be disabled.” There is perhaps misrecog- is the story of a Palestinian resister shot dead for wielding nition of Black Lives Matter as a “pride” movement, a knife (if that) against an IDF solider who has the full not to mention that at an earlier moment in history, the backing of the world’s military might. “I can’t breathe!” disability rights movement often marked itself as both captures the suffocation of chokeholds on movement in intertwined with and following in the path of the black Gaza and the West Bank as it does the violent forces of civil rights movement. Analogies between disability and restraint meted out through police brutality. “Hands up, race, gender, and sexuality tend to obfuscate biopolitical don’t shoot!” and “I can’t breathe!” are, in fact, disability realities, as Garland-Thomson’s clunky list of identifi- justice rally cries. cations attests. Movements need to be intersectional, The Right to Maim therefore does not seek to answer says Angela Davis, and the rapid uptake of this seasoned the question, where is our disability pride movement? observation is invigorating and hopeful. This invocation Instead, it hopes to change the conversation to one of intersectional movements should not leave us intact that challenges the presumption that the distinction with ally models but rather create new assemblages of between who is disabled and who is not should fuel accountability, conspiratorial lines of flight, and seams a pride movement. I explore if and how this binary of affinity. effaces the biopolitical production of precarity and (un) In the midst of the Movement for Black Lives, the livability that runs across these identities. The project, fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the struggle for then, is not just one that hopes to contribute to intersec- socialized health care in the United States, the demand tional movement building, though let me insist that this to end U.S. imperial power in the Middle East (Israel, is crucial from the outset. That is to say, Black Lives Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen), what constitutes the Matter and the struggle to end the Israeli occupation of able body is ever evolving, and its apparent referents Palestine are not only movements “allied” with disability are ever shrinking. What is an able body in this context? rights, nor are they only distinct disability justice issues. What is a non-disabled body, and is it the same as an Rather, I am motivated to think of these fierce organizing able body? Layers of precarity and vulnerability to police practices collectively as a disability justice movement brutality, reckless maiming and killing, deprivation, and itself, as a movement that is demanding an end to so destruction of resources that are daily features of living many conditions of precaritization that debilitate many for some populations must not be smoothed over by populations. At our current political conjuncture, Black hailing these bodies as able-bodied if they do not have Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, the or claim to be a person(s) with a disability. In the wise protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect words of disability studies scholar and prison abolitionist sacred grounds and access to water: these are some Liat Ben-Moshe, “It does not matter if people identify as of the movements that are leading the way to demand disabled or not.” “Hands up, don’t shoot!” is not a catchy livable lives for all. These movements may not represent slogan that emerges from or announces able-bodied the most appealing or desired versions of disability populations. Rather, this common Black Lives Matter pride. But they are movements anchored, in fact, in the chant is a revolutionary call for redressing the debilitating lived experiences of debilitation, implicitly contesting logics of racial capitalism. It is a compact sketch of the the right to maim, and imagining multiple futures where frozen black body, rendered immobile by systemic racism bodily capacities and debilities are embraced rather than and the punishment doled out for not transcending it. It weaponized. RAFA RED 17 Green Nightmares by RAFA RED

Fossil fuel resistance and repression are escalating

TERROR is defined by the power it threatens. Blocking the flow of carbon energy is terrifying to the fossil fuel industry and its sphere of influence. The crushing repression of anti-pipeline movements in today’s law-and-order era shows how 18 GREEN NIGHTMARES

far the terror label has stretched to encompass not has nothing to do with protecting the environment and only oppressed groups often deemed enemies of the everything to do with shutting down the American state, but even old white liberals more accustomed to economy and hurting everyday Americans.” performing civil disobedience in less dangerous times. At the forefront of the movement to slap envi- The resurgence of “eco-terrorism” allegations in partic- ronmental activists as terrorists has been billionaire ular shows how the rich can sic the state on organizers Kelcy Warren and the company he chairs, Energy who threaten their profit margins. Transfer Partners. Leaked documents revealed that You could see the backlash forming a year ago. In the company hired a security firm called TigerSwan to October, five people stationed at critical pipeline valves conduct counterterror operations on the movement to in four states shut down the flow of millions of barrels stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, which it labeled “an of oil sands. The sands were being transported from ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious Canada to the United States through lines owned by component.” The mercenary set the tenor for patrolling Enbridge, Spectra Energy, TransCanada, and Kinder the pipeline, acting as a resource and coordinator for Morgan, whose combined earnings in 2015 were some- multiple law enforcement agencies and facilitating where around $7 billion. The activists stated in a press the arrests of hundreds of people. “It’s just terrorism,” release that they were compelled to act because they Warren said of protesters to the Dallas Morning News believed there existed “no plausible means or mecha- last October, emerging from the shadows after plonking nism” by which fossil fuel extraction could be stopped over one hundred thousand dollars into Donald Trump “on the timeline now required by any ordinary, legal and RNC coffers. The company is now alleging in means.” Scientific consensus has confirmed again and court that Greenpeace, Earth First!, and other groups again that even under the U.N.’s Paris Agreement, the are liable for inciting terrorist acts and vandalism when Earth will continue warming to a degree that ensures protests against the pipeline were at their height. Oil today’s flooding, species extinction, severe heat, and now flows through the line, and Warren’s winning chaotic weather patterns that will intensify and kill horse now controls the country’s vast counterterrorism millions of people by 2100. apparatus. The activists who shut off the valves were nearly With the industry holding the reigns of govern- all white and middle-aged, and at least one had once ment power, any militant action viewed as an existen- worked for a few environmental non-profits. They’re of tial threat by fossil fuel companies is now likely seen as a generation and demographic familiar with performa- such by the White House. It was Secretary of State and tive civil disobedience and its necessary acquiescence former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, after all, who last to state forces; one activist stressed the facts that she March called carbon energy “the lifeblood of economic made safety calls to the company and waited over an growth,” a sentiment repeated nearly verbatim by the hour for the sheriff to come and arrest her. But despite conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Insti- activists’ privileges of being white and bourgeois, the tute (connected to Exxon through various financial and reaction from the industry was alarmist. “The steps professional channels), whose director, Myron Ebell, taken by these individuals to sabotage pipelines,” said oversaw the transition of the Environmental Protec- David Holt, president of the Consumer Energy Alliance tion Agency. The president has called out anarchists oil and gas trade group, “clearly show that their agenda and other radical groups by name, emboldening their RAFA RED 19 persecutors and prompting paranoia that any protester up about 1.4 percent of global energy consumption in could now be charged with economic terrorism (not as 2015, a rate that has remained relatively flat the last few of this moment). years. A big part of why oil and gas are so profitable is that companies can manipulate supplies to create arti- ficial scarcity; they can’t do that with sunlight, which is everywhere. THE nature of environmental resistance defies To act outside of our carbon-fueled political arrange- temporal boundaries by definition, which can make it ment—to manually shut off the flow of tar sands oil from even scarier to carbon barons. To cut the flow of carbon point A to point B—is to risk being labeled a conspiracist, is not only a revolt against present conditions for the extremist, or terrorist. This is at least in part because the sake of the future, but also a “full scale onslaught on the propellant logic of fossil capital produced the materials structural nightmares bequeathed by the past,” as Andreas that compose the political system in which we live, argues Malm writes in his book Fossil Capital. That is: A war Timothy Mitchell in Carbon Democracy. The book against infrastructure built by dead masters of the Earth complements Malm’s study of fossil capital by tracing how to keep us locked in a fossil fueled civilization long after the processes behind its accumulation, including wars, our own deaths. The rising tides that will swallow coastal coups d’état and other political upheavals have shaped cities are fed by already-built exhaust pipes, refineries, the dominant political consensus since industrialization. and power plants that are spewing carbon right now. And Even free-market orthodoxy is tied up in carbon: The even if this infrastructure were to be shut off or smashed false consensus among the victors of the Second World this moment, we would still not be freed from the effects War that oil and gas supplies were limitless inspired their of locked-in greenhouse gases for at least a few decades. belief that nation’s economies grew based on the “speed Struggle against the fossil fuel economy in the present and frequency with which money changed hands,” rather alleviates us from the legacy of carbon infrastructure in than their accumulation of gold, land, and coal. The order to liberate our future. It is also, in Malm’s formula- increasingly complex expertise needed to work in oil and tion, anti-capitalist. gas production also legitimized a form of politics that He argues that the development of a fossil fuel-pow- used supposedly rational economic calculation to manage ered civilization is inseparable from advances in capital- geopolitical uncertainty; the Trump administration sees istic accumulation, a process he calls “fossil capital value “a positive energy relationship” with the Gulf states as part creation.” Nations have always seen attacks on capital as of its anti-terrorism strategy. Toward the end of his book, attacks on the nation itself. After locating the roots of the Mitchell suggests that the elites’ ability to manage crises fossil economy in property relations on the British Isles, in this way without risking global social rupture may be he develops a theory of carbon combustion as a material on the wane. requirement for value creation. Because the valorization of capital has been based in rising fossil fuel consump- tion since the beginning of industrialization, companies UNCERTAINTY about that want to develop renewable sources of energy today the future, together with a mass crisis of legitimacy face steep obstacles to profitability. Renewables like in the global liberal order shown by extreme wealth wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal power only made inequality has created a power vacuum for the oil-rich to 20 GREEN NIGHTMARES exploit. Trump’s election was a coup for the class of oil in the past. Much the same way that ETP argues in its moguls who modeled their mass deception of carbon’s lawsuit that research by environmental groups high- dangers using the tobacco industry’s playbook. As presi- lighting investors in DAPL incited economic disrup- dent, he has expanded the industry at a rapid clip, and has tion, the group Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty’s an affinity for the industry: during the campaign, he had (SHAC) campaign in the early 2000’s targeted finan- personal investments in TransCanada, Kinder Morgan, ciers of the vivisection contractor Huntington Life and Energy Transfer Partners, all recent targets of direct Sciences. SHAC aggressively harassed investors, action by fossil fuel opponents. The ideology of the customers and stockbrokers in Huntington, eventu- carbon lobby is currently submerging large swaths of the ally getting it delisted from both the London and New federal government even as icebergs melt into the oceans York Stock Exchanges. ETP currently argues that the and mass species die-offs continue. “coordinated strategy to interfere with financing for the If the consequences of climate change become so banks” began when Food and Water Watch published horrible that even Trump can’t ignore them, he may turn research on DAPL financiers. to methods like carbon capture, a corporate favorite. The For SHAC, their successes had criminal conse- method uses stratospheric sulfate aerosols, both of which quence. Seven of them who ran a website supportive require different forms of environmental manipulation— of SHAC actions, known as the SHAC 7, were charged one by capturing carbon waste from the sky and depos- in 2006 under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, a iting it into the ground, and the other by spraying sulfur law passed to punish actions that either instilled fear in into the stratosphere to absorb heat. Billionaires Bill employees of animal enterprises or forced them to lose Gates, and Richard Branson are among top financiers of profits. The SHAC 7 case also motivated Congress to pass such geo-engineering techniques, while other proponents the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) that same include the elite conservative think tank American Enter- year, which updated the terms of the older bill. While prise Institute (where Dick Cheney is a board member) criminal charges for organized crime haven’t been brought as well as corporations like Exxon, Shell, BP. Far from against groups like Greenpeace yet, there are hundreds, reducing human impact on the Earth, these methods including alleged organizers of actions against DAPL, would be another means by which the rich and profes- who are headed to trial on felony riot and conspiracy sional class could experiment on the planet at everybody charges. Current trends and the carbon extremism of the else’s expense, and continue to profit off of carbon (now federal administration could mean the feds will go after through its maintenance, not just its combustion). big green nonprofits in ways they hadn’t before. Law and order won’t tolerate fossil fuel disruption. That’s frightening, because our melting and dying Hitting them too hard in their money maker has always world demands escalation against the fossil fuel regime been dangerous, and pursuing environmental groups and its fossil capital accumulation. Especially if you’re and other organizers with RICO and conspiracy like under 50 years old. Our words and actions are being mobsters and terrorists is a method to cripple move- weighed against the profit margins of the richest compa- ments regardless of legal outcome. The racketeering nies in the world, and the capitalist logic animating a suit brought by Energy Transfer Partners against Green- ravenous security state is clearer than ever. It’s terrorism peace and others seems like a privatized version of to starve fossil fuel companies of capital. It’s also criminal cases brought against animal rights organizers freedom. JACK GROSS 21 Soft Borders

By JACK GROSS

The soft patriotic trust in Canada’s softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction

IS Canada anything besides not-America? In the Canada celebrates multiculturalism; Canada is not weeks surrounding the 150th anniversary of Canada’s brash like the United States; Canada’s Prime Minister Confederation, which took place on July 1, op-eds in is not Donald Trump but instead a “glamorous and the American media engaged in the semiregular ritual internationally recognized . . . celebrity of progressive of defining Canadian identity. Stephen Marche, a politics.” But the outpouring of patriotic sentiment that Toronto-based writer for the New York Times, delivered one would anticipate from a major national birthday a pitch-perfect rendition of Canadian patriotism in his was absent—and this was a triumph. For Marche, report on the sesquicentennial, writing that “Canada, at as for countless other proponents of the national the moment, has a lot to celebrate.” Canada is bilingual; non-identity, “Canada’s reluctance to celebrate itself is 22 SOFT BORDERS

actually something worth celebrating. . . . Patriotism is declaration came four years after an overhaul of for losers.” Canadian immigration law that, in 1967, eliminated With Marche expressing the virtue of negative a patchwork of discriminatory race and nationality patriotism (Canada is less clearly evil than other Western restrictions in favor of a skills-based point system to countries), another Times columnist, writing a few assess and admit migrants. Larger influxes of nonwhite days later, offered a more calculated, positive account immigrants moved to Canada, and the patriotic national of Canada’s soft patriotism, positioning the country myth transitioned from that of a settler nation to that as an object lesson in how to craft bulwarks against of a multicultural nation of immigrants. In a telling xenophobic nationalism. Canada, Amanda Taub passage in Taub’s Times article, she quotes immigration argued, had not fallen victim to the mainstreaming minister Ahmed Hussen, himself a former refugee, of white-nationalist movements across Europe and who cites the “luck of geography” as a significant the U.S., because of a series of strategic political and factor in widespread support for immigration and legislative actions, starting with Liberal Prime Minister multiculturalism. (A 2010 poll indicated that roughly Pierre Trudeau’s announcement of a national policy of two-thirds of Canadians say that immigration levels are multiculturalism in 1971. “about right.”) “We have the luxury,” Hussen says, “of Trudeau’s declaration came at the end of a being surrounded by oceans on three sides, and then by years-long commission on the issues of bilingualism the U.S. border.” The implication is both obvious and and biculturalism, and, while primarily symbolic, impossible to overstate: Distance from the migrant-pro- included a framework for fostering minority cultural ducing Global South gives the Canadian public a sense initiatives and access to French- and English-language of confidence and trust in the regularity of incoming programs for immigrants. Speaking in the House of migrants—and affords the Canadian government a Commons, Trudeau said, “Although there are two level of control only dreamed of by the more publicly official languages, there is no official culture, nor does violent border regimes of Europe and the United States. any ethnic group take precedence over any other.” The speech, made just a year after the FLQ, a Quebecois separatist organization, kidnapped and murdered an Anglo politician in Montreal, sought to dampen THE first Canadian immigration laws were domestic cultural tensions by acknowledging the concerned with the twin nation-building goals of simple fact that Canadian “culture” had neither a single promoting settlement and managing undesirable nor a double face. Instead, it had many, any of which would-be settlers. The first cabinet position that dealt could be superimposed on top of the white settler with immigration was the Minister of the Interior, base. Parliament assented to the policy directive, and, whose portfolio married federal land management, eleven years later, with the Canadian Charter of Rights Indian affairs, and natural-resource extraction. and Freedoms, Canada became the first country in the (The office was succeeded by the more aptly named world to enshrine multiculturalism in law as a guiding Minister of Immigration and Colonization.) Much constitutional principle. of the early law dealt with facilitating the passage of Placing multiculturalism in constitutional legal European migrants to and through Eastern seaports. text refigured the image of the settler state. Trudeau’s Legislation and debates around exclusions—which JACK GROSS 23 included “paupers” and disabled people without family misinformation about maltreatment during border members—were focused on the maintenance of a inspections, and refused to provide Black people with steady influx of settlers to inhabit and farm the thinly the appropriate certification required to enter Canada populated Prairie Provinces. The country, put simply, by rail as “bona fide” farmers. These measures were needed immigrants to continue colonizing. intended to prevent immigration before it happened— In 1885, when Parliament passed the Chinese to limit the contact that undesirable immigrants could Immigration Act, the first large-scale restrictive have with the border. immigration legislation in Canada, the racist measure The early international enforcement of border was discussed as a matter of political sovereignty. security was a cooperative project. An agreement Chinese immigrants were a threat because they could between the U.S. government and several Canadian elect—or become—Chinese officials, warned Prime transportation companies allowed the U.S. to extend its Minister John A. Macdonald, and bring “immorality” immigration laws and enforcement capacity to Canadian and “eccentricities” “abhorrent to the Aryan race and seaports. U.S. immigration officials were stationed Aryan principles . . . upon this House.” Decades later, at Canadian ports, and signatory companies were with the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, this claim required to refuse landing for immigrants headed to the to sovereign control over the racial makeup of Canada United States if their documentation was insufficient was extended inland. The law—which effectively or they were found to be inadmissible under U.S. law. eliminated the arrival of Chinese people into Canada for Responding to the restrictions, immigrants crossing over twenty years—required those of Chinese descent, through Canada en route to the U.S. began marking even if born in Canada, to register with the government Canada as their final destination and then moving to the to prove their compliance with the new restrictions. U.S. later on. If someone who took this route was later The desirable Canadian settler—white, hardworking, found by authorities in the United States—in prison, unlikely to become a charge of the state—was separated almshouses, or hospitals—they would be deported back from the suspicious, policed, racialized immigrant both to the company that had landed them in Canada, at the at and within the border. company’s cost. The agreement introduced a large-scale The vision of the impenetrable nation and its information-sharing program, with U.S. officials at the sovereign right to self-composition also extended border equipped with ship manifests to cross-check beyond Canada’s territorial limits. In the 1910s, while non-Canadians attempting entry. eminent xenophobe Frank Oliver was Minister of the Efforts like these—partnerships forged between Interior, and in the context of significant pressure national governments to limit the movement of people from white citizens’ groups calling for a ban on Black beyond their own boundaries—were part of the migration, Canadian immigration officials campaigned project of self-definition for Canada as an emergent to dissuade Black American farmers from migrating independent white settler state. As the U.S. and Canada north to Canada. Agents stationed in Oklahoma encouraged the rise of a global migration system at responded to requests for information by prospective the turn of the century, they introduced restrictions Black immigrants with letters detailing the poor on the kinds of people allowed to move within it. conditions of life for Black people north of the border. Canada’s border, as the above examples demonstrate, They paid Black community leaders to disseminate was continuously redefined by laws and policies that 24 SOFT BORDERS

could be enforced within, at, and outside its territorial border violence that attended the shift to the race-blind boundaries. points system, but the strategies of enforcement remain The narrative that casts Canada’s immigration continuous—constitutive of a border regime that, 50 system as exceptionally welcoming coalesced largely years later, upholds Canada’s lauded commitment to around its leading role in developing refugee-reset- multiculturalism. tlement programs in the latter decades of the 20th century. There are, of course, gaps in that positive narrative—most notably the refusal of the MS St. Louis, which sent hundreds of Jewish refugees back IN the early 2000s, Canada and the United States to Europe, where over two hundred were murdered in developed a shared approach to border security that the Holocaust—which have been incorporated into departs from typical understandings of how the state the story of an intermittently shameful national past. polices its limits. The centerpiece of their cooperative But these more marginal examples of restriction— agreement is the Multiple Borders Strategy, whose inland Chinese registration, anti-Black propaganda, driving purpose is succinctly articulated by the cooperation with U.S. immigration enforcement— Canadian Border Services Agency: “Push the border are indicative of anti-immigrant strategies that police out.” movement beyond the border. The explicitly racist The strategy both prefigures and enacts a measures necessitated a public disavowal of racist reconceptualization of the border. In a 2003 statement

“Pushing out the border” means enacting a roving border wall with no oversight and no ability for migrants to appeal their refusal JACK GROSS 25 of mutual understanding between the two governments, Country Agreement, asylum seekers are compelled to they write: claim refugee status in whichever country they first arrive in. A 2010 report jointly issued by U.S. Customs Recognizing that moving the focus of control of the and Border Protection, the CBSA, and the Royal movement of people away from our shared land border to overseas . . . enables Canada and the United States Canadian Mounted Police, acknowledged that, through to manage more effectively their movement into and the agreement, “Canada sought to limit the significant within North America. . . . At every checkpoint along the travel continuum . . . there is an opportunity for irregular northbound movement of people from the the Participants to link the person and the document United States who wished to access the Canadian and any known intelligence. refugee determination system.” Publicly marketed Under this enforcement strategy, the border is as a “burden sharing” initiative, the STCA effected a understood “not as a geo-political line but rather a precipitous, albeit temporary, drop in the number of continuum of checkpoints.” In practice, this means that asylum claims made at the border. These measures, the function of border control is exported beyond the regardless of their efficacy, are part of an effort for territorial limits of Canada, with an increasing number Canada to circumvent its obligation to process asylum of “liaison officers” (formerly called “migration claims, which are only triggered when a claimant is integrity officers”) stationed at an increasing number processed at the border. “Pushing out the border”— of locations worldwide, whose stated objective is to either through international interception programs “combat irregular migration.” or the “burden sharing” exportation of asylum-claim The purview of these officers is incredibly wide, processing to the United States—means enacting a encompassing a range of intelligence-gathering and law roving border wall with no oversight and no ability for enforcement–related activities, and their purpose is to migrants to appeal their refusal. intercept potential migrants before they reach Canadian These cooperative control policies produce and soil. Data obtained from the CBSA on its liaison officer protect the understanding of Canada’s immigration program and published by the Harvard Immigration system as uniquely welcoming. Lacking a racialized and Refugee Law Clinic in 2012 indicates that, between land border that the nativist imaginary can cohere 2001 and 2012, 73,000 people were intercepted by around—and at which egregious examples of state these officers. Extending the border beyond Canadian repression and neglect take place—Canadians are soil means that, for immigration purposes, the state’s able to take pride in an immigration system based limits are any place worldwide at which one’s identity on a meritocratic points system and internationally and intent can be interrogated. Restricting access to the praised refugee resettlement efforts. Exporting border state—and the legal protections it is compelled to give violence—both by its own agents and in collaboration to migrants—begins at or before the point of departure. with other enforcement regimes—outside of Canada In tandem with the 2004 Safe Third Country allows the managed order of its immigration system to Agreement—another bilateral initiative between the be read as organically produced, and all immigrants as US and Canada—the Multiple Borders Strategy signals the recipients of Canadian fairness and benevolence. a comprehensive effort to limit the ability of people Trust in this system has become a bedrock of to move and arrive at Canada’s physical border, where Canadian public opinion and self-estimation. A 2012 refugee claims can be made. Under the Safe Third study by political scientists from the University of 26 SOFT BORDERS

British Columbia and UC Berkeley demonstrated a invitation to those fearing violence under the Trump positive correlation between patriotism and support administration. (This “invitation” came in the form of for immigration and multiculturalism. (The inverse a characteristically anodyne and viral tweet made after was true for the United States.) Proud Canadians— Trump’s attempted Muslim ban in January: “#Welcom- who balk at the vicious nativism south of the border— eToCanada,” Trudeau wrote.) understand immigration and cultural tolerance as That this gesture toward Canada’s distinctness part of their national identity. But this broad support, from U.S. immigration policy has pushed Trudeau to bolstered by domestic and international rhetoric about make increasingly rigid statements about the rule of law the good nature of Canadian multicultural society, relies is a brittle irony. Echoing Jason Kenney, he said recently, on a bureaucratic chauvinism. This false piety surfaces “If we are a country that is open to immigrants . . . it in paradoxical arguments: Protectionist discussions is because Canadians have confidence in the integrity of immigration in Canadian politics take the form of our immigration and refugee system.” This PR of a defense of the generous spirit that supports it. campaign of dissuasion has also dispatched members Jason Kenney, a Conservative politician known for of Parliament to diaspora communities in the US— his restrictive immigration stance, was a frequent to Haitians in Florida and, most recently, in antici- mouthpiece of this sentiment. In 2010, he invoked the pation of TPS being revoked for citizens of El Salvador, good faith of the Canadian patriot in support of a bill Honduras and Nicaragua, to Central Americans in Los roundly criticized for the restrictions and penalties Angeles. Pablo Rodriguez, an Argentine-born Liberal it could place on asylum seekers, saying that failure MP, said, about his trip to LA, that the goal was to to pass more restrictive laws would “put at risk the communicate that Canada’s immigration system is one broad public consensus . . . in favor of immigration that “works, and has to be respected.” and refugee protection.” In place of the border wall, a The soft patriotic trust in the softly administered nation’s generosity under threat from “line jumpers” border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction. and “bogus refugees.” For widespread goodwill towards immigration to take Such contradictory logic is not limited to the a less trivial effect it would have to divorce itself from Conservative party. The rare immigration-related the fantasy of total control. Positive rhetoric around scandals in Canada display an agreement that cuts immigration and multiculturalism is a salve to the settler across the political spectrum—the most salient subject state’s ongoing colonial violence, and maintains its of immigration debate is how to defend the well-oiled foundational exploitative relationship to nonwhiteness. bureaucracy. This summer, a large influx of Haitians The liberal satisfaction that boasts Toronto’s status as crossing the U.S. border into Quebec has brought the most multicultural city on Earth is predicated on this rhetoric back into popular circulation. The an immigration system that sees the entire world as motive for the crossings has been widely attributed a site for the management and prohibition of human to the Trump administration’s promise of increased movement, and requires its neighbors to do the same. deportation enforcement and the suspension of To claim a comparative innocence in an age of violent Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Critics, who borders—either through feigned passivity or the see the crossings as evidence of a system gone awry, posture of active beneficence—is itself a tool of border have blamed Justin Trudeau for extending a blanket violence. JONNY BUNNING 27 Capitalism With a Fluffy Face by JONNY BUNNING

The latest way tech companies have promoted their questionable self-image as the antithesis of old, evil corporations is to open their offices not to unions, but to dogs

WHEN Boris Levinson presented his had accidentally begun using his dog Jingles to treat paper, The Dog as Co-Therapist, at the American children with severe psychological difficulties eight Psychological Association annual meeting in 1961, he years before. The results were wonderful. Withdrawn confessed to having once dismissed its central claim patients unresponsive to treatment, those on the verge as “much too unorthodox.” Levinson, a professor of of institutionalization, played with Jingles and then clinical psychology at Yeshiva University in New York, slowly opened up to Levinson, earning the dog a regular 28 CAPITALISM WITH A FLUFFY FACE

job and prompting its owner to share his findings. hefty allies: Freud and Winnicot, Bowlby and Harlow, Levinson ended the talk with a proposal to use dogs neurochemistry, military hospitals, blood pressure systematically in this capacity, perhaps in the form of studies and Midwestern nursing home residents. a Canine Counseling Corps for Children: “A dog corps Therapy animals had become credible. served this country heroically in the performance of Nowadays dogs regularly comfort the stressed military tasks in World War Two,” he concluded, “Why and depressed in college libraries, hospitals, retirement not as psychotherapeutic aides?” homes, and disaster zones. Their most intriguing The assembled experts thought the idea was workplace to date, though, has been in and around the hilarious—one asked, laughing, whether Levinson corporate campuses of tech companies. From Google’s split his fees with Jingles. But as similar stories came to pet policy to the “Dogs of” Amazon and Uber to Mark light from unlikely places, the therapeutic use of dogs Zuckerberg’s semi-celebrity pooch, Beast, Silicon Valley gradually gained credence as a serious notion. Dogs loves dogs, and isn’t afraid to show it. Promoting what turned out to have already been used successfully to cultural theorist Andrew Ross has dubbed ‘no collar’ help patients recuperate in hospitals and the military. culture, tech firms have long been famous for boons Recently published letters revealed that Sigmund ranging from free lunch to gyms to video game rooms. Freud’s beloved Chow Chow, Jofi, regularly sat in on his So perhaps it’s not surprising that the latest way for tech sessions—one patient grumbled that Freud was “more companies to promote their questionable self-image as interested in Jofi than he was in my story”—and that the antithesis of old, evil corporations is to open their Freud believed the presence of the dog helped patients offices not to unions, but to dogs. relax into the analysis. By the 1970s, two psychiatrists in Ohio, Sam and Elizabeth Corson, began studying the phenomena systematically, reporting significant physiological and psychological benefits for all kinds of IT would be easy to see these professions of patient interacting with therapy animals in a range of puppy love as a cynical distraction from the problems institutional settings. ignored or created in the quest to ‘disrupt’ us all into Levinson aided this transition by rebranding ‘pet a brighter future. Don’t worry about the housing therapy’ as the more respectable sounding ‘human/ crisis, institutional misogyny, shady data use, PTSD companion-animal therapy’ or ‘H/C-AT’—anemic inducing outsourced content moderation, or the boom acronym or wry pun depending on how you look at of micro-waged jobs, such companies seem to say, just it—while grounding it in contemporary psychological look at this picture of a cute Corgi. theories of attachment, development, and object Yet the love affair is also a symptom of the changing relations. Adding an extra layer of seriousness to his role of affect in labor in the past two decades. Affect endeavors, he even provided a biochemical explanation has emerged as a key part of managing a workforce, of the therapeutic phenomenon, claiming that contact conceived as a group of thinking, feeling, sharing beings with animals produced neurological effects similar to who, potentially, might not see their interests as fully morphine. aligned with those of their employer. You might giggle at Levinson, Jingles and a few kids In industrial and organizational psychology these in 1961, but two decades later they were backed up by problems are understood as part of ‘organizational JONNY BUNNING 29 commitment,’ a field rooted in the theories of Elton as social, emotive individuals. “You can attract the best Mayo and Chris Argyris, and revitalized in the late smart creatives with factors beyond money: the great 1980s when attracting and retaining workers was still things they can do, the people they’ll work with, the considered necessary, but benefits and stable contracts responsibility and opportunities they’ll be given, the were not. To add to the trouble, critiques of staid office inspiring company culture and values, and yes, maybe life had moved from counterculture to mainstream, even free food and happy dogs sitting desk-side.” prompting management to adjust accordingly. How to solve the problem of giving less material compensation to potentially restless employees without sacrificing productivity or turnover? DOGS are good at attracting employees The work of several psychologists and management and great for PR, but their role in reducing stress and theorists gave an answer. Taking feelings seriously—that fostering sociability—the benefits first promoted by is, treating employees as something more than bodies Boris Levinson—are now used to herd employees to be disciplined—offered a solution the growing toward more industrious working days. The initial conundrum. Studies suggested that even relatively small silliness of dogs on the job threatens to obscure (and concessions, especially when discretionary, had consid- paradoxically helps enable) their serious role: handling erable effects on employee commitment. Although the living, feeling ‘human resources’ of the post-in- none of this research mentioned dogs, arguments dustrial workplace. for cuddly management resonated with the animals’ Google is likely the most developed in its officious emergent therapeutic powers. embrace of dogs, going so far as to claim that “affection Silicon Valley has excelled in expanding on these for our canine friends,” as the company’s code of “soft” approaches to workplace governance. In their conduct puts it, “is an integral facet of our corporate 2014 book, How Google Works, former CEO Eric culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company . . .” Schmidt and Senior VP Jonathan Rosenberg share Employees are allowed to bring their dogs to the office, management lessons from the company, which revolve which executives suggest improves socializing, boosts around collaboration, minimal hierarchy, and the belief morale, and encourages short, productivity boosting that fun and productivity are not mutually exclusive, but breaks. And yet, the pet policy is careful to note, complimentary. “To be effective,” the two executives bringing a dog to work is a privilege: a discretionary tell us, employees “need to care about the place they benefit rather than an automatic right. work.” How do you get someone to really care about This constrained largesse is not limited to the an advertising company like Google? The executives Googleplex, though. Consider ‘Puppyforce,’ a special give a spirited defense of extreme pay disparities as one unit for employees bringing dogs to work at Salesforce, way of attracting and retaining superstar employees. a cloud computing company. The space is isolated from Yet in the flaunt-shy world of tech, hard cash is not the rest of the office to stop unwanted barking from the most valuable kind of capital. “Smart creatives,” or disrupting business. Physically containing the dogs’ ideal-typical Silicon Valley employees, “place culture at unruliness in this way offers a safeguard to profitability. the top of the list.” And the best way to generate that But why simply box up the subversive power of puppies more ephemeral incentive is by appealing to employees when you can sublimate it into a simulacrum of a labor 30 CAPITALISM WITH A FLUFFY FACE

dispute? In April 2016 the Salesforce blog offered up a of constant care. Wag! aims to make dog ownership spoof mutiny of its office dogs: “We’re the ones barking easier for people like its founder, a self-styled “busy orders today! Our humanagers threw us a bone and left tech entrepreneur from LA,” who wanted a dog but was the door to Puppyforce wide open . . . we’re taking over worried about the commitment. The platform borrows and terriering things up.” Of course, the more tangible its organizational model from ride-sharing companies, consequences are a little less seditious than that. One offering a pool of on-demand dog walkers and sitters employee, quoted in Fortune magazine, noted the to attend to dogs at short notice. Customers, former effects of the pets: “I think it elevates everyone’s mood,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick among them, can call up a she says. “And at the end of the day it makes me more carer, monitor their walk via GPS, and then receive a productive too.” report with a write-up and photo, all for around $20 per Dogs on the job, though clearly just one part of thirty minute session. As with so many other platform a broader trend of workplace reorganization, nicely services, managerial control does not need to stride condense the new spirit of management: humane ahead of the bowed worker, as it once did, so much as gestures to conveniently align employee sentiment with lounge around, the power of the rating replacing the companies whose underlying business models remain stopwatch. wholly corporate. And this dynamic of pseudo-peer- Seattle based Rover.com (tagline: “We’re the dog to-peer interactions veiling status differences and profit people”), with more venture funding than Wag!, is well motives flourishes out of the office, too. For those who set to dominate the fast-growing market for app-me- can’t take their furry friends to work, two startups, diated pet care services. It’s the Airbnb of dogs, relying Wag! and Rover.com, offer on-demand dog walking, on a rich ecology of reviews, ratings, and self-narration day care, and boarding services, allowing busy dog to create trust, and relying on advance arrangements owners to enjoy the perks of pets without the hassle rather than immediate availability. It’s not hard to

Dogs on the job condense the new spirit of management: humane gestures to conveniently align employee sentiment with companies whose underlying business models remain wholly corporate. JONNY BUNNING 31 understand why people would want to leave their pets in against a more authentic existence. Pet therapy was safe hands, and one of the more significant but underap- powerful because of that connection, but by the same preciated features of app-mediated matchmaking token it remained limited, as it could never resolve the markets is giving a new way to do it: trust can be underlying causes of alienation. To see liberation in conferred from party to party without recourse either such therapeutic innovations without connecting them to a unifying belief system (the trustworthiness of the to systemic change, he thought, was akin to “chasing a Protestant businessman, visible in his habits of dress) shadow.” or to a privileged form of expertise (the credit-rating Today changing the world has become the agency, its industrial successor). Now competence can boilerplate promise of any business pitch; critiques be expressed through the accumulated judgments of all of alienation fuel new genres of self-discovery and past users, or, to say the same thing, management itself markets for ‘wellness.’ As dogs get assimilated into these has been outsourced to all customers. narratives, it seems worth pondering what alternatives The result is that the classic features of affective might exist. labor—the smile of the flight attendant, the gestures We don’t need to appeal to Arcadian states of of the waiter—mesh with newer genres like profile nature or bemoan the disappearance of the old dog self-narration, pictures, or GPS, to allow a temporary days to do this. It would be odd to argue against people manager to select hires and then asses performance. having freer, more fun working conditions, or against The relationship entails risk on both sides, but is here dogs having more attention. Yet we can still wonder resolved firmly in favor of the paying party, who gains about the effects of repurposing dogs to provide the a previously unprecedented ability to manage at a kinds of support once demanded through political distance and determine future employment prospects. organization. We can remain skeptical of the way pets As with official pet policies, though, that structural are cynically used to reinforce social stratifications, inequality is obscured by the staged fiction that client, in which low-wage workers without job security are service provider, and digital intermediary are friendly tightly policed—with a smile, from a distance—as equals united by their love of dogs. they service the dogs of the rich. And we can question As clear 20th century divisions between work and the culture in which remarkably utopian specters of leisure collapse, the two historical roles for canines— play and plenty are rehabilitated as a discretionary dogs with jobs and dogs as pets—have collided. But perk for the few, managed in a corporate playground, now domestic dogs are no longer simply, in the words rather than promoted as a desirable political goal for of Donna Haraway, “commodities and consumers the many. Perhaps the most appropriate reaction to of commodities”; they are workplace therapists, the changing role of dogs in contemporary capitalist productivity enhancers, and clients of app-mediated society is therefore neither fawning boosterism nor on-demand services. cranky pessimism. Perhaps, to echo Levinson’s call for All this would likely come as a surprise to Boris a (presumably public) Canine Counselling Corp, these Levinson. To him, technological society was the changes allow us to glimpse the possibility of a more problem, the cause of alienation “not only from our radical animal welfare state, in which dogs and the rest inner beings, but also from nature and our natural allies, of us are able to enjoy a good life together, regardless of the animals.” To interact with animals was to brush pay or productivity. 32 LIBERALISM IS DEAD Liberalism is Dead

By WILLIE OSTERWEIL

Silicon Valley’s techtopian libertarianism points to a disruptive left fascism for the 21st century , 2011

LIBERALISM is dead. Like Liberalism, and its preferred governmental other dead historical forms, for example Christianity or form liberal democracy, is collapsing because the cinema, liberalism lumbers around zombie-like, continuing nation-state—the concept that animated liberalism to define lives and wield material power. But its place in the and gave it historical force through the European wars dustbin of history is already assured. It has no future; it is and revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries—

just a question of its long, slow slide into irrelevancy. has transformed from a necessary tool for capitalist Grace Loving Machines of by Over All Watched WILLIE OSTERWEIL 33

development to a hindrance to growth. Capitalism won from crypto-fascism to out-and-out fascism nears an epochal victory in the Cold War and has spread to completion. all but the most distant reaches of the world. But it has This three-decades-long ideological and organi- done so amid a long crisis of profitability, beginning in zational transformation on the right has not been the 1970s, that leaves the world system teetering atop matched with an equivalent strengthening of American elaborate debt and logistics structures. This increasingly liberalism. Rather the 2016 electoral losses of the brittle system relies on instantaneous modes of global presidency, both houses, and most governorships transmission and constant access to world markets to illustrate the inefficacy of the liberal project and its keep money circulating. As a result, borders and nations empty vision. The Democratic #resistance, rather than have become most profitable through their absence. offering a concrete vision of a better world or even a And so capitalism, to stave off its demise, has begun better policy program, instead romanticizes a “center” eating its favorite children. status quo whose main advantage is that it destroys Contra anti-materialist “leftists” who claim that the environment and kills the poor at a slightly slower the Far Right has risen in response to online identity rate than the Republicans’ plan. Liberalism isn’t politics, the resurgent ethno-nationalist Right has failing because the Democrats have chosen unpopular emerged in response to these dual collapses of nation leaders. It is instead a result of the material limits of and capital. This Right looks to fill the political the debt-dependent economic policy to which it is and libidinal void left by zombie liberalism and to devoted. Neoliberal economic policy has produced reinvigorate and reorganize a “nation” capable of growth through a series of debt bubbles, but that surviving the slow-burning capitalist crisis. As with all series is reaching its terminal limits in student and Far Right projects, it seeks to achieve this by restricting medical debt. Liberalism today has nothing to offer the concept of the citizen and those favored with but the symbolic inclusion of a small number of token political and social rights solely to the straight white individuals into the increasingly inaccessible upper male property owner, as it was in the good old days of classes. naked settler colonialism. Once sufficiently organized As liberalism collapses, so too does the left-right and empowered, such a nation of propertied men could divide that has marked the past century of domestic happily flourish under a corporatocratic police state, a politics in the capitalist world. The political conflict dictatorship of capital stripped of protections for the of the future will not be between liberalism (or its , 2011 workers who produce their wealth and openly genocidal friendlier European cousin, social democracy) and a toward those not deemed true members of the nation. conservatism that basically agrees with the principles This genocidal attitude toward “unnecessary” of liberal democracy but wishes the police would swing populations, a constant feature of American statecraft, their billy clubs a lot harder. Instead, the political has become increasingly visible of late in mainstream dichotomy going forward will be between a “left” and American politics. Republicans have been trying to “right” fascism. One is already ascendant, and the other murder millions of Americans via health-care “reform” is new but quickly growing. in Congress while Trump turns dog whistles into air Jürgen Habermas and various other 20th century horns and an ethnonationalist movement sprouts Marxists used “left fascism” as a generic slander like fungus in his shadow. The American Right’s slide against their ideological opponents, but I am using it All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Loving Machines of by Over All Watched 34 LIBERALISM IS DEAD

to refer to something more specific: the corporato- against Christianity. The Japanese state mythologized cratic libertarianism that is the counterpart of right the historical role and importance of the emperor and fascism’s authoritarian ethno-nationalism, forming the military in order to create a unifying Japanese culture, two sides of the same coin. When, in the wake of the while Mussolini’s fascists spoke of a “new” Italian man imminent economic downturn, Mark Zuckerberg runs who could prove himself through glorious imperial for president on the promise of universal basic income expansion in Libya. and a more “global citizen”-style American identity in But fascists will use any tool at their disposal to 2020, he will represent this new “left” fascism: one achieve their major aims: the total merging of the state that, unlike Trump’s, sheds the nation-state as a central and capital, the liquidation of independent civil society, concept. A truly innovative and disruptive fascism for and the suppression of the working class. That’s why the 21st century. in Italy and Germany the regimes at least initially used Rather than invoke Herrenvolk principles and the language and some of the techniques of socialism, citizenship based on blood and soil, these left fascists and both Hitler and Mussolini expressed an atheistic will build nations of “choice” built around brand loyalty aversion to Christianity (though to differing degrees and service use. Rather than citizens, there will be they ultimately reconciled their regimes with the customers and consumers, CEOs and boards instead of church), while in Spain and Greece fascists positioned presidents and congresses, terms of service instead of themselves as defenders of monarchy and church. social contracts. Workers will be policed by privatized Fascism doesn’t need a nation-state, but it does paramilitaries and live in company towns. This is, in require an ideological nation to capture the state. fact, how much of early colonialism worked, with its This was at least the theory behind ISIS’s caliphate, a chartered joint-stock companies running plantation theocratic movement that built a fascistic state based in microstates on opposite sides of the world. Instead of a rhetoric of a global Muslim nation of the truly faithful, the crown, however, there will be the global market: no the ummah, rather than a state strictly based in location empire, just capital. or ethnicity. Fascism has historically and indelibly been The nation-state has been the model for statehood associated with ultranationalism. The nation, a perfectly for so long now that we often use the concepts fungible and mythical construction, serves as an excellent interchangeably, but the left fascists of Silicon Valley tool in the hands of a fascist power looking to produce have long looked at Singapore with awe and longing. a cross-class alliance, unifying fragments of the middle The small, diverse, authoritarian city-state has created and working classes with the rich against “enemies” an incredibly wealthy class of managers by running internal and external. Jews, queers, Black people, the city not as a nation-state devoted to protecting or immigrants, trans people, Muslims, communists, and representing its citizens so much as a corporate haven whoever else is easily excised from a “nation” defined by for global capital flows. Silicon Valley’s “California and rooted in wealth produced by and through settler ideology” of libertarian pseudo-anti-statism, famously colonialism, empire, war, and capitalism. The Nazis analyzed and identified in the mid-nineties, has grown pointed to a heroic and mythical “Volk,” organizing and expanded for decades now, as has the Valley’s marches of citizens in peasant dress and sometimes material power. A world of tech-driven Singapores is advocating a syncretic Germanic paganism above and already mostly built, as the idea of “global cities” has WILLIE OSTERWEIL 35 become a reality, and capitalists spend their time and relationship and a business-customer relationship do their business from a dozen pieds-à-terre spread is that the brutality and exploitation of the latter is across the globe. masked behind layers of politeness and seduction, and The difference between state and nation-state so sometimes can be mistaken for generosity. We’ve will become increasingly clear as a new fascist politics already seen this confusion in action. Last February it of total corporate sovereignty comes into view. Its was a big news story when Apple refused to help the romantic dreams of fully automated factories, moon FBI crack the company’s iPhone encryption. Most colonies, and seasteads mirror the old Italian fascists’ people understood this as Apple standing up for its fetishization of technology, violence, and speed. customers, protecting their privacy rights. This was Packaged with a libertarian opposition to borders and an absurd misreading that requires that one willfully all-out wars, this left fascism will represent the new forget everything else Apple does with customer data. cutting edge of capitalist restructuring. In fact, it was a play for sovereignty, a move pointed In America, the right fascists find their base in at demonstrating the independence of Apple in agribusiness, the energy industry, and the military-in- particular and Silicon Valley in general from the state, dustrial complex, all relying heavily on state subsidies, a step toward the left-fascist politics of the future. war, and border controls to produce their wealth. In understanding the move as a form of protective Although they hate taxes and civil rights, they rely on noblesse oblige, Apple customers revealed nothing so American imperialism, with its more traditional trade much as their willingness to become customer-subjects imbalances, negotiation of energy “agreements,” and of Apple Nation™. forever wars to make their profits. But the left fascists, The left fascists, then, will try in the coming years to based in tech, education, and services, do best through wrest control of the Democratic Party. Some on the left global labor flows and free trade. Their reliance will inevitably support them in this effort, as they will on logistics, global supply chains, and just-in-time come bearing such policies as universal basic income, manufacturing, combined with their messianic belief a loosening of border regimes, a multicultural society, in the singularity and technological fixes for social and a multipolar world. Many will be bamboozled by problems, means they see the nation-state mostly as a these promises coming from the new tech billionaires, hindrance and the military as an inefficient solution to and they will provide cover for the left-fascist project of global problems. corporatocratic sovereign devolution. Both sides agree that the state should be used to It is a strange time, when fascists see the future cut wages, police the mobs, and eliminate regulatory more clearly than the revolutionary left. But the left oversight. The right fascists, the more traditional of the has so long imagined its route to power comes through two, want to solve the question of class war once and capturing the nation-state that it can’t see that such a for all in a final solution of blood and fire, while the method doesn’t even work for capital anymore. To left-fash imagine they can disrupt the class war away by crush fascism, we’ll have to dramatically reorient our creating much smaller and more easily controlled states understanding of the future. Revolutionaries have to and providing basic subsistence. get over their fetishization of both nation and state, and One side sees the people as subjects; the other, fast, if they hope to truly destroy this world, let alone customers. The difference between a dictator-subject having a shot at building a new one. 36 SYMBOLIC THREATS Symbolic Threats

By A. MAUREEN TANT

Flag worship hides the violence and division that truly shape a nation

WHATmakes a nation? Like the American that the promise of greater equality, that “we hold these dollar stripped of the gold standard, like the two truths to be self-evident” are proven again and again, by right-wing Presidents elected in the U.S. since 2000 brutal example, to be ideals not reflected in the reality of without a popular majority, like political boundaries American life, and are instead reiterated as capitalism’s on a geographical map, the concept seems increasingly cosmetic democracy, leads to two conclusions. Either

absurd. That American hospitality and wholesomeness, the individual realizes there is no common thread 1982 Marvin Mattelson, A. MAUREEN TANT 37

binding a nationality, and sees the false idea of a state the status quo’s nostalgia and complacency, that refusal as masking and upholding oppression, or they take to participate is a reminder of the sickening reality on a more abstract view, in the absence of a specific one. which a privileged status depends. Some abstract concepts uniting a nation: the anthem, a Such displays also invite inventive critique. In June mascot, a heartland, a flag. Americans have a notorious 2014, German artists Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias relationship with their flag, commodifying the symbol Wermke made an artistic intervention on the theme of as an extension of their reverence—or vice versa—and nationalist abstraction. Between three and five in the treating displays of red, white, and blue as pedestrian. morning they climbed the Brooklyn Bridge, lowered the One nation united under three colors: a sentimental two American flags flying over it, and replaced each with idea without substance. flags they’d sewn in the traditional star-spangled pattern, In his 1965 speech “On Evasive Thinking,” the but emptied of the usual red and blue: The replacement future Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel argued flags were entirely white fabric. Their project was a point that “the so-called prospects of mankind are nothing but of entry into understanding the ways in which abstract an empty platitude if they distract us from our particular concepts alienate rather than galvanize members of the worry.” He was addressing the tendency in Czechoslo- same nationality. vakian literature to circumvent the specific conditions of The statements of New York City police and reality: politicians published across local media following the white-flag intervention almost unanimously condemned A typical example is how reality can be liquidated with the the “prank” and “security breach” as a terroristic gesture, help of a false “contextualization”: the praiseworthy attempt to see things in their wider context becomes so formalized that instead of as though the desecration of the flag was a show of applying that technique in particular, unique ways, appropriate to a violence against the city, country, and police. That the given reality, it becomes a single and widely used model of thinking with a special capacity to dissolve—in the vagueness of all the Brooklyn Bridge was cited as “one of the most heavily possible wider contexts—everything particular in that reality. Thus secured landmarks in the city, constantly monitored by what looks like an attempt to see something in a complex way in fact results in a complex form of blindness. For if we can’t see individual, surveillance cameras,” as an AP report on the project specific things, we can’t see anything at all. And the more we know noted, indicates the point at which Wermke and Leinkauf only what is apparent about reality, the less we know about reality in fact. hit a nerve. Any NYPD embarrassment as a result of this project stemmed from the fact uncovered by the The American dream, the eagle, the Pledge of early-morning flag revision: Police presence and heavy Allegiance, etc. cannot stand in for the roughly 330 surveillance of a particular site do not serve the citizens million people living in the United States. Not only do whose protection the state claims justifies such practices. nationalist symbols fail to represent the vast populations This was what offended the NYPD—the exposure they’re meant to contain, they further the divide between of that reality, not post-9/11 fear. And rather than those born into the status quo and those who are punished addressing the distance between message and action, for failing to embody it. As Colin Kaepernick and his the police, local politicians, and media instead engaged allies in the NFL have demonstrated, public displays of in an abstract conversation about terrorist threats against American patriotism and respect for its national symbols American landmarks. are important sites of protest. If intervening in nationalist When Wermke and Leinkauf outed themselves to the rituals so privileged they pass as “convention” shakes up New York Times they explained their legal transgression Marvin Mattelson, 1982 Marvin Mattelson, 38 SYMBOLIC THREATS

as a mistake born out of cultural misunderstanding. “Few Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats had won the national election, people would care if we did the same thing in Berlin,” the party’s secretary-general started waving a little German flag, while singing along to a pop song. The chancellor spotted him and, Leinkauf said. A wholesome apology to reframe a project with a disapproving expression, took the flag from him and stuck it that they feared, perhaps, could bar them from future somewhere in a corner of the room. entry into the country. But whether or not they were massaging the truth of their intentions, the European Bittner (an editor for German paper Die Zeit) also parallel is useful. The white flag project (later titled points out in his op-ed that the German flag “was first “Symbolic Threats”) helps illuminate widely disparate used by the revolutionaries in the 19th century who conceptualizations among Americans and Germans fought bitterly for a united nation.” of flags and other symbols of national pride, which are That the black, red, and yellow German flag is also reflected in each country’s understanding of “national the flag of the Weimar Republic—the era that preceded values” and responses to police violence. Hitler’s dictatorship—might further explain differing public relationships with the flag along generational lines. Public displays of the swastika and other Nazi symbols (including the Nazi salute) are illegal in Germany, and TO wit, 2014 was also the year of Germany’s FIFA the post-WWII reinstatement of a tricolor German flag World Cup victory—the country’s first since 1990, represents an official shedding of Nazi imagery. German and first since reunification. That summer, soccer fans legal code surpasses the never-ending American debate painting their faces with the German flag, waving the flag about these symbols, which employs the national value at public viewings of matches, or decorating their cars of free speech as a front for a state-sanctioned white with black, red, and yellow were the subject of a familiar supremacy. national conversation. During the 2006 and 2010 World Cup matches German and British news media had already pursued questions about shifting German social norms—specifically regarding guilt as requisite CHRIS Kraus’s 2012 novel Summer of Hate to expressing national pride—and what flag-waving at illustrates how many Americans have quite a different soccer matches might mean in a place where patriotism relationship to their flag. The flag motif in Summer of is somewhat taboo. Hate underlines a liberal tendency toward privilege- Opinion pieces published close to the time blindness, unchecked assumptions of goodness and of Germany’s 2014 FIFA victory document the progress because we and our friends are not Republicans phenomenon of German patriotism-with-reservations (but maybe not much else, ideologically), and, more in the context of World Cup fever. Jochen Bittner’s New to the point, reflects the liberal “out of sight, out of York Times piece “Does Germany Need a New Flag?” mind” mentality. It isn’t until Catt Dunlop, the story’s exemplifies the debate: centrist antihero, is forced out of her elite sphere and into depressed southwestern landscapes that she’s Germans who regard themselves as liberal, educated and responsible to our country’s past view the flag as a specious symbol confronted with the reality of American conservatism. of nationalism, which is of course the most feared among the But Catt never understands that the flag-free, German vices. Last September, when the final polls came in showing that isolated, and homogenous liberal world in which she A. MAUREEN TANT 39 finds solace is the better half of a corrupt class structure. the firefighters at a ceremony in 2002 for the release of Like many liberals, Catt appropriately finds private a commemorative stamp based on the photo (“Heroes prisons, Joe Arpaio, and the justice system inhumane 2001”); a media controversy ensued when the New and horrific, but she never manages to see herself as York City Fire Department revealed plans to build a the beneficiary of class position, or a member of the statue based on the picture, with the white firefighters dominant class. depicted as different races (the statue was never built); Unfortunately, life often imitates art. Outside the and a 40-foot bronze monument to the event (“To Lift wealthy liberal bubble, Americans are particularly fond a Nation”) now stands in Maryland’s National Fallen of displaying the flag during times of xenophobic anxiety. Firefighters Memorial Park. The more a foreign element is believed to impinge on The narrative continued in PSAs like the Ad white, economically dominant groups, the greater a Council’s “Main Street USA.” The TV spot was one of patriot’s desire to fly their flag, promote “Americanism,” many the Ad Council and American advertising agencies and claim faith in the strength of the country. Through produced pro bono as a part of the 2002 “Campaign this kind of flag-waving, it’s possible to map the dominant for Freedom..” The ad depicts a residential street, with culture’s definition of a “threat,” and notions about what voice-over narration: “On September 11th, terrorists elements undermine American values. tried to change America, forever.” The image then fades For example, the picture of three firefighters flying to black, while the voice-over continues, “Well, they an American flag in the rubble of the World Trade Center succeeded,” at which point the ad fades in on the same on 9/11 (Thomas E. Franklin’s photo “Raising the Flag street, but now American flags fly from every home. Birds at Ground Zero”) became an emblem of resilience and a chirp and text on screen reads, “Freedom. Appreciate it. tool of government propaganda. President Bush hosted Cherish it. Protect it.” The spot was one of many about

Rather than addressing the distance between message and action, the police, local politicians, and media instead engaged in an abstract conversation about terrorist threats against American landmarks 40 SYMBOLIC THREATS

so-called American values: freedom of speech and ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, religion, individual privacy, and the country’s status as a “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers sanctuary for those fleeing corrupt regimes. Like all good in this society when the state makes better security and propaganda, these ads were brutally ironic, and could freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? have been read, in another context, as satire. They told Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On the story of cishet white America, but, more importantly, which caskets do we lay the flag? they represented the state’s narrative about healing and On the other hand, in the time after a domestic righteousness in the months immediately following terrorist attack carried out by white people, the media implementation of the Patriot Act, the declaration of a conversation that follows typically centers on gun control war on terror, and the construction of the Guantanamo and mental health, not “freedom,” resilience, strength, Bay detention camp. or a call for demonstrations of national pride. The 2012 The popular chant—this-is-what-dem-o-cra-cy- Aurora shooting, Sandy Hook, Columbine, the Isla Vista looks-like—rings false to many because the white, killings, and Dylann Roof stand as examples. We don’t physically able, and gender-conforming protestor is talk about American values after a white citizen commits protected in their gestures of “resistance” or solidarity, an act of terror, because flag-waving in the face of tragedy while the daily lives of black, brown, Muslim, trans, has always been inherently xenophobic. disabled, or otherwise “nonnormative” Americans are The fundamental accord between a liberal policed and penalized as if everyday life were an act of worldview that tries to disclaim its membership in a dissent. The police lynchings of Tamir Rice, Sandra brutal hierarchy and a conservative one displaying the Bland, Kiwi Herring, and Michael Brown, more than flag with pride can be made visible through artistic freedom of assembly or “rebellion” for just cause, are interventions like Wermke and Leinkauf’s “Symbolic what American democracy has always looked like, and Threats.” Replacing an American flag and flying a white depended upon. one in its place neither hides the reality of American American flag-waving obfuscates these and other society nor celebrates it wholeheartedly. At the least, abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and however, it refuses to participate in the American definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the flag-revering tradition as it currently exists. In removing legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, some of the flag’s signifiers (but maintaining its starred Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our and striped pattern) the artists played the patriotic traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on strategy at its own game. By abstracting the national “normal American life” (white suburban families). The symbol and abstracting the appearance of a New York message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless landmark by a small degree, the artists echoed the claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t national tendency to surpass complicated questions think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, of accountability and reparation. As such, the white now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence flag is also the perfect representation of a middle point of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think between American and German conceptualizations of instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were the flag. certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary The white flags over the Brooklyn Bridge neither citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” hid the symbol from view nor celebrated it. BRANDON BRYANT 41 A Sensor, Darkly

By BRANDON BRYANT

Bryant, who was named the 2015 Whistleblower of the Year by the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, is an air force veteran. His memoir originally appeared in Life In the Age of Drone Warfare, which will be published next month by Duke University Press. The essay collection was edited by Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan.

MY work as a sensor operator was mostly dark and but I never enjoyed it. boring. It was the kind of quiet work that suffocates the I trained and worked as a sensor operator nearly soul, body, and mind. There was not one day that I ever continuously from April 12, 2006 to April 17, 2011, enjoyed the experience. I was proud that I was good at it, when I was honorably discharged with eighty-three days 42 A SENSOR, DARKLY

of allowed terminal leave. person even made games on Excel spreadsheets for us to Training was pretty inconsequential. For me it play during lulls in mission time. Leadership, of course, was weird and confusing. It started on April 12, 2006, hated anything to do with sanity. with a montage video of strikes that had happened While I was doing the work itself, I was mostly over the past year; some sort of pseudo-“I’m a badass” bored with life but fascinated by the activity I saw. Day music played in the background. I had to do a ton in and day out I would be doing the same thing but of simulations simply to figure out the completely seeing a wide variety of activities—a dualism that has irrational menu keys. probably never existed in our culture on this scale of life I sabotaged myself twice because I got cold feet and death. It is almost enough to drive people mad. when thinking whether I could actually do the job. The My personal life was filled with mostly depression military used intimidation tactics to keep me doing and loneliness. I had so many questions about what was my job, namely, humiliation and ridicule, which I will happening, and all my leadership would do is tell me to address later. Training didn’t really provide the ability shut up, stop asking questions. I couldn’t talk about this to practice the basic skill set needed but provided the with any of my peers; the responses would be either that routine and methods to use. We would be told during I was “too emotional” or that “God will work everything training that being a sensor operator was an art form out.” It was incredibly heartbreaking to be left alone in and not a science. Through all of that, I excelled and the dark. struggled with convincing myself that it was all justified I sometimes felt like I was the eyes of the mission: and my intuition was wrong. picking up what we saw, acting on instinct, hunting The container that I worked from was called a people down, watching them live their lives like a ground control station, or GCS. It is similar in size to a Predator in the sky. It was exhilarating when we were Formula One Racecar trailer, with processing computers actually doing something, when we were studying our on one long wall and the operator stations at the far end. human targets. But the exhilaration doesn’t hide the There are fourteen monitors, two shared in the center discomfort, and when you’re finally alone with your detailing the pilot low side and mission coordinator thoughts before bedtime you feel a bit of your soul low side screens. The central monitors on each station crumble to dust. show the video camera feeds as controlled by the sensor While I did have doubts with how my life started in operator or the nose camera for the pilot in weather the military, I had sworn an oath. But in February 2012 I situations. found out that I was violating this oath by hunting down As a sensor operator, it was my task to control Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was also an the multispectral targeting system to provide the best imam for radical interpretations of Islam. I came in that picture possible for our intelligence analysts while being day in February to see the flight operations supervisor cognitively aware of all the activity going on, back up looking disturbed and very pale. the pilot as a copilot—who is unqualified to fly the I asked him what was up, and he told me that he aircraft but has in-depth knowledge on how to fly—and had just gotten off the phone with some very higher-ups, be able to guide munitions to target locations. If none who told him that we will now be flying armed over of that was going on, I just sat there and read: novels, Yemen, and if we have the ability to take out al-Awlaki, occasionally my old Kindle, or a graphic novel. One President Obama himself would call the crew to give the BRANDON BRYANT 43 order. I asked him why he was upset. He explained to sees. We usually viewed everything in infrared, as me that it was a direct violation to assassinate American that gives us the best clarity, although sometimes we citizens and that they deserved a fair and free trial in switched to what we call the “day TV” camera. The front of a jury of their peers. quality was pretty low, but we could manage to see For a second after that conversation, I felt the thrill things like color of the clothing, markings on vehicles, of being the sensor that took this guy out. I thought buildings, et cetera. Eventually we got a software about how it would finally legitimize my place in the update that allowed us to blend both infrared and day community. And then, just as suddenly, I felt a weird sort TV, which also gave us access to the low-light camera. of vertigo, a stretching of my reality, and I remembered With that, we were able to see things like if lights were why I wanted to get out of the community in the first on in a building or if a car was driving around without place: too much sickness, and my soul was too sick to its lights. stay in that filth. There are a few incidents that stick out to me from this time. The first was when I saw an American convoy hit an improvised explosive device on my first mission. I had felt like a total failure. The burning wreckage, the QUITE a few people compare flying screaming over the radio for backup, the frantic infrared drones to playing video games and actually make fun of activity on the screen while I was on the opposite side operators for it. When I had first starting talking about of the world allowing everyone to observe the tragedy my experiences, people would send me messages about of war: the men and women you fight with will die. how they also played video games and it made them feel The second event was the first time that I killed bad. Those were the mildest of them. While the skill set anyone. I was lonely, tired. I started having trouble is very similar—the ability to be aware of multiple things sleeping after that first mission. I didn’t want to be a at once while focusing on a single task—the comparison failure. I was angry that the people I had been tasked with games completely misses the point. to protect were killed by an unknown enemy. I wanted Being a sensor operator was nothing like a vengeance. I was a fool. When the flight operations first-person shooter. It was more like if a real-time supervisor told me I was going to shoot, I put up a strategy game had a baby with The Sims. And for me, half-hearted objection. My pain was at war with my the disconnect wasn’t from our targets but with myself. conscience. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I did it Another frequent comparison was with being an anyway. American sniper. But being a drone operator is what Getting into the ground control system was surreal. happens when you take somebody who should be highly- I can remember every moment like it was being recorded trained like a sniper, mass-produce him, and make it a lot by my body. It’s probably one of the few memories I have easier to get essentially the same results. You take away that I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to keep. The sun was the pride and honor, give the operators a false sense of pale, the wind blowing like it was straight out of hell, superiority and importance, and then claim that they with enough sand to get into uncomfortable places. It are essential to the war effort—essentially, a recipe for was hot for a January late afternoon. The inside of the disaster. GCS was cold, arctic even, and the only lights inside What we see is vastly different from what a sniper were from the multitude of computer monitors on the 44 A SENSOR, DARKLY

other side of the trailer. Two people who were not involved at all gave one There were five men on top of a hill underneath a another a high-five. One pilot made the remark that I single tree shooting down the north face at a convoy of had “popped my cherry.” The only thing I could think American troops. We were waiting for clearance when of was that I’d wounded my soul, violated a core belief they decided that two F-16s would be the ones to drop for—now that I think back on it, I’m not sure what. I bombs on this target. The Hell Fire missile didn’t have can no longer justify it to myself. But somehow I did, a large enough splash radius to get the desired weapons and it was slowly killing me, like a poison administered effect. The fighters had seen three individuals walking every day carefully enough to not be noticed by the north by northwest road about ten kilometers away, and victim. And I was damned. I learned the second lesson: they wanted us to put eyes on the coordinates. nothing can protect your own soul from doing harm to We found two of them arguing with each other and another. Only the living suffer in war, mostly those who the third seemingly terrified while looking up at the sky. fight it. He heard the bombs drop. He lagged behind slightly. We Those instances happened within the first three were given the confirmation that they had weapons and months of active missions. I had taken a total of five then given the 9-line with the cleared “Hot.” I was told shots, four that killed thirteen people, ten of whom I to place the crosshairs at the feet of the two individuals am unsure of their active role in our “war.” It would be in the front—better to get two than miss. nearly four years after the start of my deployment to Iraq The missile left the rail with 16 seconds of flight that I would get out. I had plenty of time to beat myself time. At 1.2 seconds after ring, the missile hit the up over everything and plenty of excuses to continue to speed of sound and, due to the loss of kinetic energy, do so. the sonic boom hit the target roughly four to eight When I finally left, I didn’t care about what anyone seconds before impact. The man in the back heard thought. The program was a diseased thing. Everyone the boom and ran forward. The missile impacted knew that I was at the end of my rope. I was going to right when he reached the front two. I had killed with leave and never look back. Or so I had thought. the push of a button—four clicks, to be precise. Life became cheap. When the smoke cleared, the man who had run to the other two was rolling on the ground, clutching APRIL 17, 2011, was my last day in the his leg in desperation, and I watched his life’s blood 3rd Special Operations Squadron. As I was saying spurt out to the rhythm of his heart. It was January in good-bye to the people I had once called my brothers the mountains of Afghanistan. The blood cooled. He and sisters in arms, one of the lieutenants gave me a stopped moving, eventually losing enough body heat parting certificate. It associated me with the deaths of to become indistinguishable from the ground on which over 1,626 individuals. All I could think about was the he died. quote from Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the “No one is coming to pick up the body parts,” our drop of the atomic bomb: “Now I am become Death, the customer said over chat. “Prepare for new target.” I don’t destroyer of worlds.” know how much longer the day was. I was in shock. I had once thought that I could leave with my People congratulated each other in the debriefing. thirteen dead: the thirteen who kept me from sleeping, BRANDON BRYANT 45 who assaulted my psyche in my modes of consciousness. in my nightmares. I was mocked and condemned for They became legion. I thought back to all the missions my actions by the legion crowd. My punishment was to I had witnessed. I couldn’t believe the numbers. I felt live with what I had done, to die a broken man without like my soul had fled. But I was still there. I hoped that I dreams. In my last true moment of clarity before the could still make things right. pain and drugs swept me away into the terror of the I ended up in the U.S. Air Force Survival Evasion voice, I pled for a chance to make things right. Resistance and Escape program. With my terrible That October, Der Spiegel’s Nicola Abé contacted experience in the drone program, I had to leave my me for an interview to get some answers about the service with good skills and the feeling that I had drone program. I told her I was willing to tell her actually served my country honorably. I had to wash whatever it is she wanted to know. Her duty is to off the filth that had anything to do with “drones.” inform the people of the truth that our government was A year and a half later found me in Texas going keeping from them. It was supposed to be my last act of through indoctrination after over four years of intense defiance before I planned to kill myself. The Veterans preparation. I had dreamed of this job since I joined. It Administration had refused to see me after my reserves was the one I had originally signed up to be. I fought squadron refused me medical treatment and medical to be there. discharge. They told me it was my fault, and I believed Within a few short weeks, my dreams (and my them. The only answer I could come up with was the body) were shattered in a training accident. I had samurai ritual of seppuku. wanted the position so badly that I convinced everyone Leading up to the release of the Der Spiegel article, I to let me continue training—broken face, injured spine, had convinced myself that more people would lend their and more. It was the single most physically painful voice to the outcry, that the people I left knew what was experience in my entire life. It paled in comparison to at stake and they would fix everything. I was wrong. the emotional and psychic pain I had been feeling. I told They attacked me for whichever reasons they wanted to myself that I would complete it no matter what or die justify to themselves. But I knew in my heart that what I trying. I had nothing else. had done was finally right. I only lasted six more days before I collapsed on One of the board members who gave me the the death truck march. My team had been beautifully 2015 Whistleblower of the Year Award told me she had supportive of me the whole time. They wanted me to believed that a murderer did not deserve the prize. I told succeed because they saw how badly I wanted it. And her I agreed. My original speech declined the award. I I had hoped to keep encouraging them to push forth did believe, and still believe, that I am unworthy of it. and conquer. I remember arguing with one of the Many people that I knew and told about the nomination cadre members, then all of a sudden feeling extremely had tried to convince me to accept it, saying it was a light-headed. I was only out for a few seconds of eternity. validation of what I had been saying. While I could I woke up with the same cadre member standing over me understand that reasoning, it didn’t sit well in my heavy with a concerned look on his face. I kept my eyes tightly heart. My little brother had told me that I was his hero, shut because I couldn’t believe my fate, didn’t want to and while I didn’t believe I was worthy of that title, I believe it was possible. wanted to act like it for him. I couldn’t let anyone go In the hospital, my dead stood in judgment of me through what I experienced. 46 LANGUAGE UNDER HOUSE ARREST Language Under House Arrest

By ALEX KARSAVINand MARA ISKANDER

Foregoing a mere politics of visibility, queer Russian poets seek new forms of agitation and proletarian solidarity

IN seminal gay Russian writer Yevgeny Kharitonov’s to have sex, their sexuality thwarted both in speech and “One Is Like This, Another Is Different,” nameless in action. Featured in Kharitonov’s posthumous Under young men play with and are played by a charade of House Arrest, this story adeptly captures the tone of identities, worn and sloughed off in between sentences. ’70s Petersburg’s queer underground. Following the A well-off straight man is forcibly evicted by a member of misadventures of gay Russian men as they navigate the the working class, each assuming the other’s vestments city’s chaotic cruising scene, Under House Arrest links and accompanying material benefits. One of these men, romantic success to their ability to master an argot of using the network of his new identity, attempts to fulfill misdirection and double entendre, a conspiratorial a long-held sexual fantasy with a pop idol. The two men language that has its limits. who do end up in bed with each other are so unmoored In the story “How I Became Like This,” the narrator by this game of heterosexual pretense that they’re unable necessarily claims “that of course he prefers it with ALEX KARSAVIN AND MARA ISKANDER 47 women,” while sleeping exclusively with men. By not answer when hailed? The temporary answer was “sexual risking a direct reveal, these story protagonists’ mutual minorities,” as queer Russians felt that the Western labels recognition as queer hinges on their ability to recognize “lesbian,” “gay,” and “bisexual” at best ossified the fluid each other’s performance as performance. Recognition nature of Soviet homosexuality, and at worst represented between queer subjects finds itself here deeply rooted a sort of importation of Western ideology. Only in the in heteronormative mimicry, symptomatizing political past ten years has the vernacular shifted to “queer,” a term reality. Queerness, when denied visibility, presents which seems to better match the Russian experience of itself less as an identity and more as a subversive act, minority sexuality. However, to turn around in Russia and contingent on the language of the dominant order. ecstatically embrace your subjectivity as queer is to sign a Yet the protagonists in “One Is Like This, Another virtual death warrant. Is Different” are ultimately unable to fulfill that act. How does queer literature adapt to this political Kharitonov would go on to obliquely lament this situation? Kharitonov argued that for the autocratic shadowy half-life queers experienced, proclaiming, “We Soviet Union, an increase in queer visibility was are fruitless fatal flowers . . .” Protesting their inability impermissible because the active presence of gay men and to live visibly and form their own organizations and women in day-to-day life would threaten to undermine a vernacular, Kharitonov’s book depicts a time in which state-coiffed vision of a collective Soviet homogeneity. queer subjection is under house arrest, along with its Today, the administration has realized that language. visibility is not threatening, that it is useful to have In more recent times, the Head of the Chechen enemies in clear sight, and that this bolsters a nationalist Republic (a federal subject of Russia), Ramzan Kadyrov, project. How does queer literature navigate itself has said, “You cannot arrest or repress people who just away from its current neoliberal strivings for passive don’t exist in the republic,” while concurrently waging a acceptance toward a more radical goal of a mobilized campaign of abduction and torture against supposedly revolutionary queer subject? If queer literature is to nonexistent gay or bisexual men. While this may read establish itself in Putin’s Russia, it will have to embrace as a cruel act of erasure by Kadyrov, it is an accurate its insurrectionary potential. It cannot hope to do so description of a certain strain of queer subjectivity in the under the employ of a literary language that hides itself present day. The roots of this invisibility can be found in within the dominant order—if it is to survive, it must the Soviet era, where in order to avoid arrest, homosex- attempt to transform it. uality was less an identity than an activity of contingent Part of the antigay message touted by the Kremlin relation. today is a Frankenstein rehash of Soviet origins: that the The stealthy slang of the time referred to queer body is one of foreign contaminants. In the 1930s, homosexuals as being “one of ours,” “on theme,” or socialist-realist writer Maxim Gorky pronounced in an simply “blue.” While “theme” and “one of ours” alluded open letter, “Destroy the homosexuals — Fascism will to identity/performance in a plain way, “blue” referred disappear,” providing an ideological basis for the recrim- to an imagined link between blue-blooded nobility inalization of marginalized sexualities on the grounds of and homosexuality in Czarist Russia. Perestroika led national security after the early Soviet Union’s decrimi- to an emergence of queer subjectivity into the public nalization of homosexuality. Often referred to in Stalin’s sphere, but to what or whom would these queer subjects times as the “foreign illness,” Soviet medical handbooks 48 LANGUAGE UNDER HOUSE ARREST

routinely pathologized homosexuality as something literary scene revolving around St. Petersburg. In predominantly exclusive to capitalist societies. This the late 1980s, queerness started to emerge from the linking of queer identity to foreign incursion continued underground in the form of small, short-lived journals well into the Cold War, when the United States reprised such as Theme. By 1993, the first queer-aligned Germany’s role as ideological bogeyman. Since 2012’s publishing house, Argo Risk, had been established by the mass protests around Vladimir Putin’s reelection, the scene’s forerunner Dmitry Kuzmin, providing important state has attempted to consolidate power by embarking on publishing infrastructure. The first exclusively queer a widespread media campaign that portrays the growing periodical, RISK, also edited by Kuzmin, was published demand for LGBTQ rights as a Western incursion into in ’95, followed shortly, in ’97, by Kolonna Publications’ Russian sovereignty. The state, by linking queerness with “Thematic” series. The writing in these journals was lush the specter of Western invasion and pedophilia in official and pointedly apolitical, marked by lively formal experi- and unofficial rhetoric, indirectly sparked a wave of mentation and depiction of queer life as the underground targeted violence, labeled as “patriotic reprisals,” against quotidian, with features inherited from forebears like LBGTQ minorities, including Kadyrov’s campaign in Mikhail Kuzmin, Gennady Trifonov, and Yevgeny the Chechen Republic. Kharitonov. Kuzmin describes the work from this period Weathering this history of persecution and as either veering into stark escapism or contenting itself repression, queer life engaged in a small but buoyant with lip service to a decadent queer past in the process

If queer literature is to establish itself in Putin’s Russia, it will have to embrace its insurrectionary potential ALEX KARSAVIN AND MARA ISKANDER 49 of being re-excavated. Some writers hoped to reignite a Wary of his contemporaries’ growing alignment common theme with their queer forebears and chose to with nationalism and proclaiming that literature “play dainty games with antiquity,” a throwback to the no longer has revolutionary potential “in the era of Silver Age of poetry. In doing so, they hoped to create a multimedia entertainment,” Kuzmin dedicated himself parallel queer reality away from the mainstream. What wholesale to creating a project of Russian literature they had more importantly created was an alternative exorcised of the specter of politics. He passionately to the state-owned presses. Kuzmin’s Argo, RISK, and advocated for a queer literature that exists mainly for the Vavilon Series quickly established themselves at the sake of the queer subject, its main gaze directed towards forefront of Russia’s alt-literary scene, creating an outlet a more tolerant future audience, one that he reminded us for Russia’s underserved intelligentsia. is destined to be “inevitably queer.” Kuzmin subscribed to the old Joseph Brodsky maxim that an author’s only sense of patriotism is to language itself—so-called higher literature exists outside the purview of politics. THE exception to the obsessive formalism of In our correspondence, he proposed that the goal of the scene in the ’90s was the revolutionary subject found queer literature was to “search and witness everything in the poems of Yaroslav Mogutin. Politically aggressive, that’s going on and preserve the results for the future,” tonally orgiastic, and militantly queer, his corpus stood thus posing the literature he promotes as an archive in stark contrast to the resigned queer poetry coming out of queer memory. The question remains, however—a of RISK. Where Mogutin differed was in his commitment queer memory of what, of where? Ironically, Kuzmin’s to opposition, but what he shared with the rest of his elision of explicit nationalism has left his project open contemporaries was a focus on the individual, and what he to co-optation by nationalist projects. illustrated in his work was the ease with which the opposi- We can find a similar path with famed Russian tional nature of underground sexual-minority activities postmodernist writer Vladimir Sorokin. Despite could be co-opted into a protofascist nationalist project. structurally and aesthetically breaking with Russian By limiting his imagination to the nation, Mogutin recast literary tradition, Sorokin’s early works were decidedly queerness as just a facet of his ethno-nationalist identity apolitical—he referred to literature as “pure aesthetics, politics (he claims to be ethnically Norwegian in interviews like pictures or pottery.” As a writer, he gained awards now). We can see similarities to the case of Eduard Limonov, and other accolades, receiving press as a vibrant example poet turned nationalist opposition leader, who engaged in of Russian literature, eventually being referred to by a one well-documented homosexual encounter just to see contemporary as a “plaything of the mass media,” a tool what it was like, in order to emerge with his masculinity of the nationalist project, saying, Look, Russian writing intact. Operating at the level of national identity has its is good now, too! His first overtly political work, Day of limits, especially when state power can easily determine the Oprichnik—a science-fiction satire of traditionalist the winner between competing discourses, since national Moscow in 2028—was translated into English in 2010, identity is written by the party with the guns. In this case, and while a New York Times interviewer suggested that the state decided that the limits of Russian identity stop at at that time in his career, Sorokin believed political “sexual minorities,” and it certainly does have more guns change was possible, his actual quotes were more than a few exiles. depressing. “What is happening now is not stagnation, it 50 LANGUAGE UNDER HOUSE ARREST

is destruction, it is collapse. It’s a form of the collapse of word” and insisting that words must become acts. The a state. And you know—how can you affect that?” new generation of political poets found a sympathetic Kuzmin’s detractors argue his stance is symptomatic home in the journal Translit, founded in 2005 by the of the mindset that had enveloped the Russian liberal poet Pavel Arseniev, and were active in the now infamous intelligentsia en masse during the late Soviet era. Seminal 2011–12 protests at Bolotnaya against Putin’s reelection. poet of the radical Left Kirill Medvedev characterizes Arseniev’s contribution to this was convincingly this worldview as one in which the subject self-de- poetic, a banner reading “ВЫ НАС ДАЖЕ НЕ scribed as “victim and a minority” claims to be “crushed ПРЕДСТАВЛЯЕТЕ.” This simple pun spread through beneath an impersonal ideological mass.” The literature rallies and demonstrations: “You don’t even imagine/ of the ’90s and ’00s, in Medvedev’s view, “inherited from represent us.” Though meant for a legislature betraying Soviet underground poetry the impulse for subjective its citizenry, this is a potential accusation to the state self-expression when presented with repressive circum- hailing the invisible queer. stance.” The poet is stuck “detailing his own emotions and constructing the image of himself in parallel with that of new Russian capitalism.” Creative self-deter- mination might have been the only tool available to PUBLISHING these poets a writer in the Soviet era, but continuing to claim the presents its own set of difficulties. A monopoly of centrally same thing post-1989, Medvedev argues, is a lot more approved mainstream presses has effectively barred small tenuous. Neither mainstream ethno-nationalist fervor and medium-size publishers from national distribution. nor Kuzmin’s quietism are directions he would like Confined to their regions, independent publishers (by poetry to articulate itself toward. Kuzmin’s estimates) routinely limit their circulations to To leftist poets like Medvedev, and a newer under 500, with a select few going up to 2000, to avoid generation of queer poets like Galina Rymbu, Dmitry unwanted governmental attention. For a country the size Gerchikov, Lolita Agamalova, and Oksana Vasyakina, of Russia, this is akin to a gag order. In 2013, Russia’s this new direction should also have its roots in Russia’s legislature passed a law banning “homosexual propaganda,” past. Not the past of an ethno-nationalist heritage using the familiar rhetoric of protecting children. Following mined by both the ruling United Russia party and this, major bookstores refrained from carrying queer the Communist Party of Russia, but rather its initial literature to avoid facing fallout from the state, further commitment to the Left, to socialism. They wish to put limiting distribution to a shrinking list of sympathetic forth political poetry in the active tense through both liberal establishments. text and activism, arguing that poetic practice should With the combination of the gay-propaganda law both embody the class struggle and be accessible to and the monopoly of state presses to contend with, those struggling within the working classes. Sometimes poets have again taken up the practice of samizdat, this involves recusing oneself from words entirely. In referring to the Soviet activity of self-publishing and 2003, Medvedev began a five-year self-imposed exile self-distribution, to avoid the censor. Lesbian poet from producing new work, citing his growing disgust Oksana Vasyakina describes how she recently resorted with an opportunist literary establishment he holds to this practice to release a collection of poems titled responsible “for having devalued and cheapened the Wind Rage, dedicated to women who are survivors of ALEX KARSAVIN AND MARA ISKANDER 51 violence: “It was apparent to me that no one would be for example. willing to publish these texts otherwise, or if they did, the The breadth of dialogic work extends to events and circulation would be very limited.” In the pre-glasnost camps, like the feminist summer camp that Vasyakina Soviet era, samizdat meant small-scale typewritten would have attended this August, which was to bring or carbon-paper copies of works passed through together feminists to discuss poetry and feminism for interlocking circles of friends. Today samizdat refers autistic women, among other topics. The camp was to be to self-publishing more generally, in the age of easily held at Krasnodar, a scenic subtropical city in southern transmissible PDFs and the laser printer. To Vasyakina, Russia overlooking the Kuban River. It never took place, Wind Rage is part of a political project that encompasses as the campers were confronted by locals and the police a variety of mediums, something that exceeds poetry as and made to leave the city and region. declarative record or witness. She sees herself and her Three years ago, prompted by a worsening political fellow poets, such as Galina Rymbu and Dasha Serenko, climate, Kuzmin entered self-imposed exile in Latvia, as exploring “new medias and mediums, to be employed reasoning that “Russian culture need[ed] bases beyond as cultural and political propaganda.” They publish their Russia’s borders.” Perhaps, because his source material traditional poesy alongside their activism on the infinite was quotidian, his project of preserving Russian queer scrolls of social media, manifesting the medium-ag- identity turned out not to require direct engagement nostic nature of poetic practice. with Russian people. Meanwhile, the queer writers Part of these poets’ shift to a register of activism is remaining in Russia are of the activist sort, and either born from a particular consideration of their audiences— conversant with or entrenched within the nonnationalist in Galina Rymbu’s case, the multifaceted working-class Left. Meanwhile, Pew polling shows that most Russians milieu to which she addresses herself in phantasmagoric are satisfied with the way Putin is handling his office, verse. In a recent interview, she explains that, to her and that Russians believe Russia has increased in mind, “poetry should be a form of public speech and international stature. A poll in 2015 found that 21 thought, written as if there is someone else present, percent of Russians wanted LGBT people “liquidated,” someone concrete.” As poetry is a public medium, when and 37 percent wanted them “separated from society.” In Rymbu writes, “there is a community around [her], contrast, 18 percent of Russians were for liquidation in classes of people, even [her] friends.” 1994, and 23 percent for isolation. This growing tendency to do away with aesthetic However briefly it lasted, visibility was a trap, and with autonomy blurs the line separating the poet from those these trends, even the sad consolation prize of neoliberal she addresses, creating a living dialogic body. In straight tolerance has been foreclosed as an option. Yet the new, feminist poet Dasha Serenko’s work, her dialogic body is nonnationalist Left is gaining traction. By aligning with a one-person protest sign displaying, on different days, them, by writing for them, queer poets can hope to cast a poster about sexism, ableism, homophobia, or another their lots with the fate of an increasingly radical proletariat concern, held up while she rides the Moscow metro to class. Ever since Bolotnaya, the need for this position has and from work. Here the dialogue is directly spoken grown increasingly clear. By presenting a more populist with inquisitive passersby, or by the audience contextu- message, queerness can hope to find common ground in alizing the work using the Internet to search and verify the voicelessness and political invisibility it shares with her poster’s claims about domestic violence statistics, Russia’s grossly underrepresented working class. 52 THE NUCLEAR NATIONAL FAMILY The Nuclear National Family

MARI MATSUMOTO interviewed by SABU KOHSO

The Fukushima disaster exposed fissures in Japanese society that its familial politics tries to paper over

An edited excerpt from Rebellious Mourning, AK Press, September March 2016). Then came the radioactive contamination. If 2017. Copyright AK Press 2017. it had been just the so-called natural disaster, it might have been possible for us to materialize a paradise built in hell or mutual aid society amid the zone of devastation, hand in hand with its natural resilience. But the second disaster IN the history of nuclear disaster, Fukushima stands instantaneously deprived us of all power to intervene in out in its singularity. There, two kinds of disasters were the radioactive terrain. intermixed: the earthquake/tsunami, and the nuclear This is a new challenge not only for anti-nuke explosion. On March 11, 2011, nature and civilization discourses and movements but also anarchism or anti- collapsed in the worst imaginable manner. The first authoritarian politics in a broad sense. Interviews with catastrophe was tragic enough—with 15,894 deaths, Mari, a Japanese feminist, anti-capitalist activist, and 6,152 heavy injuries, and 2,561 missing persons (as of writer, can attest to that. When I first interviewed her, on MARI MATSUMOTO INTERVIEWED BY SABU KOHSO 53

June 12, 2011, three months after the disaster, an anarchic It has been five years since the disaster. How has sensibility was dramatically in evidence. The complexity the situation changed? of people’s emotions—grief (over the losses), fear (of the It has taken five years for the public to know how coming devastation), panic (due to uninformed dread), criminal the responses of the government have been. In rage (against nuclear capitalism and the state), and part this has to do with the temporality of the nuclear even joy (tied to the possibility of a regime change)— disaster, which necessitates time for the victims and generated an affective power that fueled a wide range evacuees to settle in and reflect on their situations. Around of grassroots organizing, from everyday struggles such 2013, the nuclear disaster was finally acknowledged as as do-it-ourselves radiation monitoring and voluntary a “man-made disaster” by the government. Meanwhile, evacuation, to all sorts of anti-nuke actions, including thanks to journalists’ tireless investigations, the fact was legal actions against Tokyo Electric Power Company clarified that TEPCO had totally neglected measures to (TEPCO) and the Japanese government. protect against the effects of a tsunami for over 10 to 12 In the second interview, which took place on July years. 1, 2016, Mari explains what happened to the affective After the earthquake, a tsunami with a 15-meter climate during the time in between. The complexity of the wave hit the reactors. TEPCO was not unaware of such a emotions, once collectivized in an ensemble, could have possibility. It repeatedly ignored warnings by specialists. been the strongest weapon for organizing a resistance In fact, up until four days before the accident, the movement, but by the time of our second interview, discussion concerning the need to take measures had they had been overshadowed by the nationalist empathy gone back and forth between TEPCO and government for the industrial and commercial reconstruction of agencies. The international code for nuclear policy states Fukushima. This is largely due to the conformism that that it must be prepared for even a situation that may has long dominated Japanese society, wherein the nation arise once in 10,000 years. TEPCO not only ignored it is assumed to be a big family ruled by the emperor, to but also made special efforts to do away with it. Even which family, township, municipality, and civil society are after the accident, the government has subtly covered up deemed subunits. Even the annual Hiroshima commem- the evasion. All in all, the people realize they have been oration is not totally free from nationalism. consistently tricked and deceived by the authorities. It Yet Mari believes that the magnitude of people’s was some independent bloggers, journalists, lawyers, sufferings post-Fukushima sustains the potential of and reporters who strived to reveal all this. With the affective politics to decompose this nationalist empathy. retrospective revelations, the victims were naturally To achieve that, however, the struggles must shift their infuriated. In this sense, the five years have been spent perspective: from shortsighted political goals to aims preparing evidence for lawsuits—about 40 cases with related to the enduring quality of radiation contami- over 10,000 plaintiffs. So criminal actions, too, will nation, both temporally and spatially. follow. Although the legal fight has its limitations, this development requires attention.

All in all, the government has done nothing for or even harmed the disaster victims. In the first place, the government refuses to count 54 THE NUCLEAR NATIONAL FAMILY

the number of—if I may use this term—the refugees. degrees. Not only in Fukushima but also Tokyo, an It has to do with its intention not to define who are unprecedented number of residents have been and refugees. The problem is that the category of those who will be affected by radiation. The fact is made more are desperately migrating in fact and the legal category and more invisible, however, buried by inattention. of refugees are not in sync. This is because the Japanese What do you think is creating this situation? government, if it grasped the actual number, would There are many factors on both personal and social not be able to deal with it unless it gave up “business levels. Those who live with dangerous contamination as usual.” Therefore, it would rather underestimate the don’t want to think about, admit, and confront the fact, number by refusing to accept the reality. By paying though they know it in their subconscious, because attention only to the forced evacuees, it chooses to acknowledging it would force them to join along with a ignore the voluntary evacuees from Fukushima, not to radical change in all existential dimensions. Reinforcing mention those from Tokyo, and even treats them like the denial is the sense of equilibrium that has been socially “illegal immigrants.” shared in the postwar period. Among the many things that have been said about catastrophe in the contemporary Meanwhile, radiation-related illnesses have been history of disaster, the most dreadful is the revelation increasing, haven’t they? that the seeds of the catastrophe had been embedded in Yes. Children’s thyroid cancer has evidently the midst of the everyday life of the highly consumerist increased. Even the government acknowledges it, society; the possibilities of planetary catastrophe have although adding a strange proviso that more cases been so deeply internalized in the high-consumerist and may be discovered because of its obsession to nitpick. controlled society called Japan. And to say it in reverse, But we all know that at some point in the future, the even a catastrophe of this magnitude is quickly absorbed government will be forced to admit the reality. So far, it into the everyday process of social reproduction. has looked into the situation only in Fukushima but not in adjoining prefectures. So the people have been investi- When I visit Japan, walk around the city, and gating the cases by themselves; for instance, in Kashiwa watch television, I am shocked by the normalness of City in Chiba Prefecture, there are as many as 173 cases. consumer life as well as the images of joy in embracing In addition, leukemia among the nuclear workers has it—of food, technology, culture, and tourism— drastically increased. As someone has said, radiation is an co-existing with the radioactive contamination. ideal poison, because of the difficulty of proving causality That is to say, tragedy certainly co-exists in various in court. respects. What is the status as well as the features of people’s emotional responses—rage, sorrow, dread, My friends and I, both in and outside Japan, anxiety, and so on? imagined that a radical change would come inevitably. One thing I can say is this: There are certainly But in five years, the situation is going in the opposite physical losses, such as health, home, family, subsistence, direction, toward the reinforcement of pronuclear and and so forth, but public discourses often emphasize the pro-rearmament nationalism. And yet the disaster “loss of home” or “deprived community”—namely, the continues—since March 11, the majority of people loss of what cannot be reduced to a monetary value. All have become disaster victims in different ways and in all, these expressions are saying that invisible things MARI MATSUMOTO INTERVIEWED BY SABU KOHSO 55 that are indispensable for constituting individuals—a earthquake and tsunami victims, who have physically lost place to live and act, mutual relations, and the ways and homes, families, and means of subsistence. Still, in this means of life—are largely destroyed. case, where the nuclear disaster immediately followed, What can one do when this happens? There are no another spatiotemporal dimension that is unthinkable formulas to deal with such situations. So people must for us was imposed, spreading like a social cancer and continue to record what happens, how the situation depriving us of any cathartic solution. In the second changes, and how they feel about it. For instance, it took dimension, mourning is bracketed, because the effects about 20 years for Michiko Ishimure to begin writing of radioactive pollution are hard to prove as causes. We her magnum opus Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, after her need time—until an undeniable number of clinical cases engagement with the Minamata mercury poisoning. The appear, probably after 10, 15, or 20 years, and nobody power of the novel, which involves real enunciations and can then deny the effects as data—or the cathartic phase, events of the victims along with their movement, exists which involves a full and massive attack against the in her persistent documentation and commemoration of nuclear regime, won’t come. the everyday endless purgatory for oceanic lives, animals, At this moment, the cancer patients along with children, farmers, fishers, and so on. Only by this strategy their families focus more on cure than political action— of persisting in the unbearable temporality can the events that which can be organized based on a solid causal of even an absurdity that refuses interpretation spark recognition. For that matter, the victims of Hiroshima resistance from time to time. The Fukushima nuclear and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition even disaster, too, is very much an event of temporality and today, more than 70 years after the bombs. They are still feeling. And our strategy to confront it must be based on suspended in devastation. All in all, for the struggles collective, persistent recording and memorializing. against nuclear power, the crux is how we manage to In the entirety of social apparatuses, forces are in confront the unbearably long temporality, based on full gear to make us forget about and nullify all the events observations and recordings of the situational and sensual around the accident. The coming Tokyo Olympics 2020 mutation. Therefore, at this moment in the struggle is the symbolic machine for a nationwide obliviousness, against radioactive pollution, sorrow and mourning seem but in the larger picture, the civilian use of nuclear power to be futile. has always involved such effects from the outset. Nuclear accidents and the resulting illnesses involve a time lag What are you going to do from now on? that does not follow clean-cut regularity, from which There are many things to be done. But I believe the oblivion effects are made to develop. basis for all projects is to patiently observe what is going The nuclear disaster doesn’t have an end, and on and listen to people’s voices. It seems to me that what therefore healing by mourning is out of the question is lacking is the will to see through the event: what it at this point. What unites us is rage, which is the basic involves, where it leads, what are the effects to whom and weapon to organize ourselves to fight against nuclear what ... Generally speaking, perspectives of social and capitalism and the state. But in the five years after, rage political movements are too shortsighted. seems to have been replaced by counterparts—apathy After Fukushima, we saw a dramatic upsurge of and resignation—leading to passive onlooking rather the anti-nuke movement for two years. But after the Oi than engagement. Mourning is solidly shared among the nuclear plant was restarted in spite of the mass direct 56 THE NUCLEAR NATIONAL FAMILY

action to blockade it, the movement quickly stagnated. The ultraconservative Abe administration came into Ungraspability or spatiotemporal indeterminacy power, realizing the reform of the U.S.– Japan security exists at the core of nuclear accidents and radioactive treaty toward Japan’s militarization. Thereafter it has contamination. Radioactivity, which is invisible, been doing almost whatever it wants to do. No protest omnipresent, and everlasting, has come to determine movements and no progressive politics have been able our future. In my adolescence, the so-called no-future to stop it. Its policies are centered on a kind of shock thing was in fashion, yet it has now become reality. doctrine and the politics of spectacle that constantly shift After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during Japan’s postwar its ostensible focus in order to fade from our attention. period, an obsession with apocalyptic imagery—such as To fight against this, we should not just respond to its in Godzilla, Japan Sinks, and Akira—flourished in mass moves but also construct multilayered strategies based representation. But I think that to confront the post– on the non-spectacular developments of events—such as Fukushima disaster situation, we need a much longer the increasing number of people getting sick or refugees view: a planetary history. In this sense, I am interested having lives like fugitives—that are invisible in the media in the recent debates on the Anthropocene. and incalculable in statistics. Political discourses circulating around today’s Even before Fukushima, nuclear problems were Japan, including those of the sociopolitical movements, always made to be obscure, as exemplified by the issues even feminism and anarchism, avoid dealing with the of nuclear workers and radioactive contamination. As crux of the event. I would see an ultimate potency for analyzed in the inspiring book by Olga Kuchinskaya, emancipation if not healing not in these discourses but The Politics of Invisibility, on the political situation after instead in the rumors and panics—the fundamental Chernobyl, nuclear politics is based on invisibility instead power to awe deriving from people’s dread and rage. of open debate on scientific truth. In Japan, various safety This is to initiate our thoughts about what is really standards have been set and reset after Fukushima, which troubling or unsound. This is the only basis for resisting have nothing to do with scientific consideration but are the status quo, which is constantly seeking to absorb the pure political decisions made tacitly for the benefit of endlessly expanding accident. As Yu-Fu Tuan stresses nuclear industries. in his Landscape of Fear, a community that has lost the power to fear will perish. How would you describe the situation people Meanwhile, as evident with the so-called anarchists face in Japan after Fukushima? in today’s Japan, claiming to be an anarchist and A phrase from the book Voices From Chernobyl by confronting a life in anarchy are two different things. Svetlana Alexievich speaks to it well: Those who grasp people’s autonomous actions after the disaster as anarchy and go along with them anarchis- Something occurred for which we do not yet have tically are limited. According to my observation, I can a conceptualization, or analogies or experience, something to which our vision and hearing, even our see anarchist practice in those who have been actively vocabulary, is not adapted. Our entire inner instrument engaged in people’s autonomous projects to deal with is tuned to see, hear or touch. But none of that is possible. In order to comprehend this, humanity must irradiation rather than those who have organized a go outside its own limits. large-scale anti-nuke movement. A new history of feeling has begun. I myself am a feminist, but when I see those who MARI MATSUMOTO INTERVIEWED BY SABU KOHSO 57 take care of the health of their families—or more intelligence and information-sharing network to fight straightforwardly, “mothers”—struggling so radically, against the pronuclear status quo. It is necessary to I feel embarrassed to think in the name of feminism. analyze the present situation, involving the incapac- Those people who live the anarchic situation don’t know itated sociopolitical movements and the complexity of the -isms such as anarchism, Marxism, and feminism. sovereign power. We need, to repeat, patient observation and sharp analysis. If we can share them, we can rise up I see that in the exploitation of these existences, for rebellion, together with nuclear workers and care there exists the political core of the Fukushima workers. Trusting the potency of the people and sharing dilemma. If so, it is necessary to discover the moment information and analysis would be the best means of in which to transversally connect these modes and organizing. It goes without saying that demonstrating practices of existence. Would that be possible? Is and campaigning for election are far from enough. patiently recording and observing radiation and What’s necessary is less about stronger protests than a illnesses—or a certain strategy of information and rebellion on wider, existential dimensions. collective intelligence—helpful for that? For a year or two after 3/11, the majority That has to be done, but we don’t know how to do experienced the state of anarchy with fissures running that precisely yet. But the problem is that the discursive across the social space and everyday life. People were realm on the Fukushima disaster, including journalism, enraged, feeling ferocious, with a desperate need to media, and academia, has proved futile in terms of dealing exert justice. The defeat of the movement was due to the with the invisible exploitation of these existences. It organizers who could not tolerate the state of anarchy is a sine qua non to break out of the form of conven- beyond their control. They could not deal with people’s tional method and thought to tackle the problematic power to live, grudge, rage, and panic. They sought to and then share the results widely. This incapacity has direct the mass impetus toward a well-mannered organi- revealed the institutional limit of discourses. People zation, a civil institution, with enlightened attitudes point out the power of what’s commonly called the on politics and science. This was responsible for the “nuclear village,” the network of pronuclear authorities, stagnation today. stretching out in the central and local governments, Now it is evident that the waste from the melted core bureaucracy, companies, industries, academia, and of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors cannot be removed. media, which constantly discredits and incapacitates This has long been known, but now it is being revealed the spreading and exchange of critical information. But bit by bit by the authority. But the people don’t seem to according to my observation, a village-like network be infuriated any longer. “Oh, we had known it”—this where all anomalies are immediately silenced or ejected sense of déjà connu seems to prevail among the public. entraps all realms of political and intellectual practice This is the scariest thing. This is precisely the extension of in Japan even before the conspiratorial operations of the mechanism inherent in nuclear power that Günther the nuclear village. Anders (1902–92), a German philosopher and antinuke I value the work of some independent bloggers, activist, pointed out in terms of “apocalyptic blindness” researchers, and journalists who dedicate themselves [Apocalypse-Blindheit]. So it is necessary for us to be to analyzing what is happening. But I feel the need of shocked, to fear anew. My hope is then to be enraged more collaborative efforts toward building a collective together—more than ever. 58 AMERICAN WOMAN American Woman

By JORGE COTTE

Wonder Woman unsettles superheroes from within a national tradition that demands their existence

COMING soon to a theater near you: One the birthplace of a distinctly U.S.-American myth. In harmonious community braces for an unstoppable threat. Only makeshift settlements, vigilantes and sheriffs collab- , 1970 one hero is equipped to combat the evil, defeat it, and restore orated to eradicate “outside” threats: bandits, gangs, and peace to mankind. indigenous peoples. This mindset was absorbed and This narrative is a familiar one for American popularized through fiction and performance, like Wild

audiences. Its origins lie in the 1800s American West, Bill Hickock’s famous shows, dime novels of the late 19th Woman Wonder JORGE COTTE 59

century, and, eventually, novels and adaptations of the threats as varied as villainous gods conquering planets early 20th and mid-20th century, such as The Virginian, (Superman nemeses Darkseid and Mongul) and gentri- a novel by Owen Wister from 1902 that was adapted fication in Hell’s Kitchen (Netflix’s Daredevil). The as a silent film, color film, and TV series. These stories institutions—a cacophonous city hall meeting in Jaws, narrativize the colonial sentiment by which the American an ultimately impotent U.S. government in Independence West—America, period—was “won.” Day, or cops—are incompetent or malignant, and Communities founded and maintained by genocide, otherwise ill-equipped to deal with the magnitude of whose contours were fuzzier than fiction allows, inspired the threat. Altogether, the monomyth guides these tales where foreign antagonists bent on disturbing the plots toward resolutions in which one outsider (good) peace face altruistic champions sent to restore order. Each saves the community from another outsider (bad). retelling of the American West made the myth of American Joining together stories as tonally distinct as the corny heroism more solid until the myth no longer needed to optimism of 1978’s Superman and the xenophobic anchor itself in the nation’s imagined West—the nation thrills of Fox’s 24, the monomyth is the through line of itself was enough. Philosopher John Shelton Lawrence American heroism. and theologian Robert Jewett call this type of narrative the Coming soon to a timeline near you: disaster “American monomyth,” and it is the formative story the U.S somewhere in the world, natural, manmade, or somewhere tells about itself. in between, causes destruction and loss of human lives. It is The American monomyth took shape most shocking. Horrific. But all is not lost. Heroes emerge from effectively within the comic-book superheroes who the rubble. Survivors. Everyday humans venturing into emerged in the late 1930s and early ’40s—Superman, flooded areas, saving strangers, lifting cars. Heartwarming Batman, The Spirit, Flash, Green Lantern, Captain tales born out of tragedy. Eventually, this will be archived. Marvel, Captain America, and Wonder Woman—and After all, a dollar sign must be put to the destruction, a spread to other American tales of heroism, in film number to the dead and displaced. and other mediums, throughout the 20th and 21st Immense in magnitude and incomprehensible in centuries: Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone movies, their destruction, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and plots in the Star Trek universe, hits like Independence other tragedies become homogenous in the language of Day, The Matrix, and Transformers, and the steady news coverage. Theorist Brian Massumi identifies what stream of superhero summer blockbusters. he calls the “affective conversion circuit.” The event In their 1977 study called The American Monomyth begins as an inconceivable disaster—reported while it and 2002 reprise, The Myth of the American Superhero, is still happening—remaining so until its costs can be Lawrence and Jewett identify a mythology that unites tallied. Reports are peppered with “zoom-in to human the most iconic fictional heroes in American culture. detail” segments, tales of selfless heroism, resistance, and Above different origin stories, (super)powers, and valiant survival that reassert human agency. Through such publishers, the American monomyth provides a story maneuvers the event is converted into an ambient hum of

, 1970 in which an outsider—the protagonist—must defend fear. The cycle is a part of everyday life: despair and the a community whose democratic institutions cannot moments in between. In the U.S., September 11, 2001, grasp the threat at hand. The outsider may be an alien, looms large as the catalyst, the ur-“atmosphere of fear” a mutant, a god, or simply a high school nerd, facing used to justify preemptive measures against disasters as Wonder Woman Wonder 60 AMERICAN WOMAN

yet not happened. Todd VanDerWerff agrees, arguing that these rewrites Superhero stories blossomed in the aftermath of turn into “borderline rituals, like a kind of exposure 9/11. Primed for audiences who remember the attack, therapy.” These interpretations conform to cinema the blockbusters that immediately followed September scholar Carl Plantinga’s explanation for the popularity 11 encoded America’s fear of attacks on urban centers. of “mass market narratives” that involve emotional pain Sam Raimi’s 2004 Spider-Man 2 embraces the threat of as “fantas[ies] of mastery and control.” Blockbusters do disaster in New York City with a runaway packed R train not evade tragedies and destruction but transform them, that nearly kills Peter Parker and the citizens on board. wrapping them up into a world with order and meaning. Though 2006’sSuperman Returns never mentions 9/11 Empowered heroes take the responsibility for finding explicitly, it is exactly five years since the hero was last meaning in tragedy and reasserting human agency in the seen on Earth when the movie begins in present day. The face of disaster. following year, Michael Bay’s bombastic Transformers As more time passes, films are positioned to respond reveled in urban destruction (many remarked, upon to their artistic and political predecessors in what cinema watching 9/11 news footage, that it looked like something scholar James N. Gilmore calls the “post-post-9/11 cycle.” out of a movie, such as Bay’s 1998 film,Armageddon ). Superhero movies of the past five years are compelled by “It is almost a relief when the next hit comes,” Massumi questions beyond the immediacy of threat, warping the writes on the response to disasters. “It is only another American monomyth. Vanderwerff identifies how movies bout of disaster that will enable the narrative balm to calm such as the Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012), Captain again the collective nerves of a humanity permanently on America: The Winter Soldier (2014), The Avengers: Age of low-level boil.” The superhero, as a defining post-9/11 Ultron (2015), and Captain America: Civil War (2016) movie genre, functions as a synthesized “narrative balm,” mobilize commentary on the security state that emerged offering opportunities for a spiritual rehearsal of disaster in the aftermath of 9/11. Nolan’s neoconservative films every summer. address the compromises of using violence and abusing Critics have therefore interpreted the post-9/11 freedoms to defend Gotham against foreign and domestic popularity of superhero films in the U.S. as both terrorists. Anthony and Joseph Russo tackle the lack of exploitative and therapeutic. Charlie Jane Anders trust in government and those with power that we trust to called superhero films an “escapist fantasy” that fulfills protect us, metaphorically or otherwise, in their Captain a desire to feel powerful “after an event that made us America series. feel powerless.” Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan cites scenes The American monomyth, already concerned with in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, World War Z, and purging malignant outside threats, is now informed Man of Steel that mine the imagery of 9/11 for the by a post-post-9/11 disillusionment with politics and now-iconic perspective of people evading a crumbling institutions. In his incisive review of Batman v Superman: urban center. In his book The Modern Superhero in Dawn of Justice, Walter Chaw points to a shift from the Film and Television, anthropologist Jeffrey A. Brown noble, heroic landscape of old to an America where “gods discusses how superheroes became a way for America to are capricious and maybe not on your side, and terrible replay 9/11, this time resulting in victory, and enacting things happen for no reason.” The purity and moral codes a remasculinization of the U.S.—an impulse that that defined the heroes of the 20th century, that justified mimics the state policy that followed the tragedy. Vox’s their use of violence, have been scarce in DC’s new JORGE COTTE 61 cinematic universe. In BvS, Batman is a devil, Superman a political (and then physical) battle within the team as a monster, and both treat human life as expendable. The the distrust bred by collateral damage becomes too great director behind the DCCU, Zach Snyder, has not been to ignore. “There’s a price for this,” says director Joss shy about his admiration for how Alan Moore’s Watchmen Whedon, referring to the destruction in superhero films. and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns tested the Age of Ultron and Civil War ask “whether the Avengers bounds and conventions of heroism. Both of Snyder’s are heroes,” which is to really question “whether hero as DC films have pushed his heroes into precarious moral a concept is still useful for society.” After some requisite ground, in a way many saw as a cinematic perversion of handwringing, the films respond affirmatively. beloved heroes. Marvel’s films, though known for a lighter tone, have also grappled with the moral mutability of superheroes. Following the backlash to Man of Steel’s disregard for WHATEVER disillusionment human life, Age of Ultron was praised for deliberately the genre may have registered, in its post-post-9/11 showing the team’s concern for human survival. But iterations, the production of superhero films has yet cataclysmic battles are never without casualties, as Tony to slow down. Of the top ten highest-grossing films Stark learns throughout Age of Ultron as well as Civil War. of 2017, half are superhero related, and at the top is The blurring lines between hero and threat catalyze both director Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman. The film tells films: Iron Man begets a genocidal artificial intelligence; the story of a god who doesn’t know she is one. Diana Captain America is saved by Scarlet Witch when she grows up amongst the Amazons on Themyscira, an redirects explosives into a nearby occupied building. Edenic island community that is hidden from Ares, the In Civil War, world leaders call for the regulation and god of war, who had tried to destroy them along with oversight of the Avengers. The central conflict becomes humanity. After American pilot Steve Trevor crash-lands

Blockbusters do not evade tragedies and destruction but transform them, wrapping them up into a world with order and meaning 62 AMERICAN WOMAN

on Themyscira, Diana and the Amazons learn that war and the disillusionment of recent post-post-9/11 films. has been raging outside their paradise for years. It’s Yet Jenkins cautions against viewer faith in a “good World War I and Trevor is a spy working with the British. guy who is going to shut down the bad guy.” Wonder He has discovered that the German General Ludendorff Woman’s worldbuilding advocates a perspective where is working with his chemist, Dr. Poison, to create a toxic everyone must take accountability. “There is no bad gas more powerful than any protective gear in existence. guy,” says Jenkins. “No one is coming to save us.” It’s a Diana, believing this can only be the work of godlike challenge to viewers walking into a movie theater and evil, leaves Themyscira with Trevor and heads to Europe expecting to see the monomyth fulfilled. to defeat Ares. This tension between the monomyth fantasy and What Diana wants is an epic showdown, but she its critique plays out in Diana’s interactions with war and is slowed by the bureaucratic details their search-and- the people trying to survive it. She was raised on a story destroy mission requires. Diana and Trevor travel to of humankind as flawed but pure creations who were London to report on Ludendorff but are dismissed by corrupted by Ares. When Steve Trevor arrives talking government officials who imagine an armistice is close of a “war to end all wars,” Diana knows it must be Ares, at hand. They need money, and they eventually find finally returned. Steve and Charlie lend doubt to Diana’s a backer in the form of Sir Patrick Morgan, an official certainty, emoting and occasionally vocalizing their advocating peace but sympathetic to their cause. skepticism that the cause of war lies with an individual. Skirmishes on the western front provide an opportunity But Diana remains steadfast in her belief in Ares’s role for Diana to display her unique talents, not against Ares in the conflict, and it remains an open question until the but rather against the relentless gunfire and mines of film’s finale. no-man’s-land. She succeeds and frees a Belgian village Though it dovetails with most elements of the with the help of a band of misfits Trevor has recruited: monomyth, Wonder Woman bucks direct visual references Charlie, a drunk Scotsman; Sameer, a Moroccan actor; to 9/11; it eschews urban wreckage, opting instead and The Chief, a Native American guide. The team for frontline confrontations and a gaseous weapon. infiltrates a German gala where Diana intends to seize By setting the bulk of its story in 1918 Europe, Wonder the moment to kill Ludendorff/Ares finally, only to be Woman transports spectators to a world less cynical stayed by Trevor himself. Ludendorff, safe and sound, about superpowers, where heroes are not yet something leaves the gala to test the gas on the nearby village, associated with destruction and casualties. And yet, killing everyone Diana had just liberated. Fueled by despite a multiethnic cast and plot that never reaches U.S. righteous rage, she rides off to kill Ares once and for all. shores, Wonder Woman is still undeniably American. Steve Written by Allan Heinberg, the first woman-led Trevor, the main representative from British intelligence, superhero blockbuster juggles its monomythic is a white American spy; the bad guys speak in accented inheritance and skepticism about the efficacies English; the team’s guide is a Native American in Western of superheroes. It taps into superheroism as the garb. Gal Gadot plays Diana with an earnestness that monomythic ideal while raising questions about the critic Angelica Jade Bastién likens to Christopher Reeve’s myths U.S. movies continue to tell. Jenkins’s Wonder Superman, a pure and selfless icon. Woman is Diana, a god who believes in the love and Wonder Woman’s split is mediated by two endings. In goodness of man. Her character rejects BvS’s sadism the first, Diana rides to a German outpost where she finds JORGE COTTE 63

General Ludendorff, the man she believes to be Ares, destroyed. “I could never be a part of that,” Diana answers. and they fight. Ludendorff flashes a gun, then a sword, As the monomyth demands, Diana and Ares have but Diana disarms him easily. The duel moves to the roof their final standoff. The battle is long and explosive, and of the building where Diana stands above him, sword in still Ares attempts to recruit Diana to his side. “They hand. With a yell, she brings the blade down and impales do not deserve your protection,” he says. Meanwhile, him where he lies. Electricity sparks beneath them and Trevor hijacks the German plane and destroys it and the world is quiet. Then the music begins to swell, stirring himself within Diana’s sight. “It’s not about what you strings and a soft piano melody. deserve,” she responds. “It’s about what you believe, The camera pans above Diana to capture her and I believe in love.” Diana, propelled by her procla- moment of glory. But a rumble is heard in the distance. mation, surges at Ares and emerges from the battle The camera moves closer on Diana’s face as she turns victorious. Jubilation follows. The German soldiers, free to observe war’s uninterrupted percussion. German from Ares’s influence, remove their masks. Survivors soldiers continue to fight while others load planes with cling to each other. The Chief hugs a German soldier. the chemical weapon that will decimate half of Europe. Diana has successfully transitioned from innocence “I killed him. Why are they doing this?” she asks Steve to disillusionment to faith. She has seen humanity in Trevor, “Why are they still fighting?” Her disillu- all its resilience and imperfections: villagers creating sionment openly questions the whole superhero ethos. community in the midst of war, generals that sacrifice “You don’t think I get it, after what I’ve seen out there?” young men, men sacrificing themselves to save people Trevor cries, echoing Jenkins’s own words. “You don’t they will never meet. These experiences ultimately think I wish I could tell you that it was one bad guy to bolster her commitment to fight for humanity, her blame? It’s not. We’re all to blame!” frustration meted out to Ares, the real cinematic villain. This penultimate ending questions a tradition of Once destroyed, peace can be restored. seeing our primary problems as external threats. We are At Wonder Woman’s official conclusion, the threat left with a slew of things that are not punchable: human against humanity is made external again. With Ares fallibility, greed, selfishness, myopia, complacency, lack defeated, the film transports us to a London square where of empathy, denial of power dynamics. The first ending British and American flags fly overhead and the crowd gestures to the beginning of work and hard questions, cheers. The costs of war are erased, replaced by smiling things that do not assuage fear and lead to cheers. The pictures of our martyrs. Diana’s belief in humanity’s problem left for humanity, it suggests, is humans. capacity for goodness, her idealism, is intact and repaid. Then Ares reveals himself. Trevor’s last words to Diana resonate, “I can save the Beneath Ludendorff’s immobile body, Ares materi- day, but you can save the world.” The story depends on alizes in the form of Sir Patrick Morgan, the same a recognizable evil to justify extraordinary violence, and politician who funded their mission in the first place. despite the moments that complicate the film’s faith, it In his monologue, Ares explains how he offered but did must return to the monomythic ending: purging evil and not order the evil deeds underwriting the war, indicting promising a world with resolution. Thereis a bad guy, the humans for their own impulse toward “the greatest film affirms, and someone is coming to save us. That’s a horrors.” He entreats Diana to join him in reclaiming promise that cannot be kept, but it will keep being made. the world, restoring the paradise that Zeus’s creations America, the myth, depends on it. 64 THE HAVOC OF LESS The Havoc of Less

By GABRIELLE DACOSTA

Huey Newton’s theory of intercommunalism reminds us not to lose sight of the everyday over the spectacular in contemporary discourses of crisis

WALKING around my grandmo- example, fewer trees here. There is also less space. You ther’s neighborhood in East Orange, New Jersey, I am struck notice, upon comparison, that the houses in East Orange by its absences in relation to its neighbors, the wealthier seem jammed up against one another. The concrete in the and whiter South Orange and Maplewood. There are, for sidewalks too seems to reflect this jamming: the slabs align GABRIELLE DACOSTA 65 at inconvenient angles, and the grass that grows underneath is powerful and important work. However, it arguably fights the concrete for light and air. trucks in a kind of sensationalism that is attuned mainly East Orange is 88 percent black. The spatial to catastrophic extremes. The problem with such an metaphor of “highness” and “lowness” we use to speak approach is that it threatens our sensitivity to the daily about class hierarchies in American society is inscribed realities of lack and neglect that characterize black space in the topography of East Orange and its white, suburban in America. These realities that precede crisis deserve as counterparts. To travel from the tree-lined hills—the much attention as the crises themselves, for it is arguably land of fresh air, vintage knickknack shops, luxury sports the havoc of having less in these places that makes the cars, the meticulous labors of the landscape architect— tragedies that come to both define and obscure them to the choked heat and dilapidation of East Orange, one possible. In overlooking the putatively banal and daily has to descend. With this limited access to oxygen are for the spectacular, we risk jeopardizing any attempt to the oft-rehearsed statistics of lack that are in danger of understand crisis and to prevent it. becoming run-of-the-mill in discourses on inequality in America: my grandmother’s neighborhood hosts underresourced public schools, crumbling amenities, low property values, and low-income households. My THIS tension between the sensational and the grandmother has lived here for 20 years, but in her mundane in political thought and work was a preoccu- remaining years, she says, she dreams of moving “to a pation of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party better neighborhood.” in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Panthers are often There are many such cities in America. And many remembered for their militant aesthetic and advocacy similar microcosmic neighborhoods and communities. of revolutionary violence. However, a lesser-known Such places—today’s Flint, today’s Ferguson—perhaps aspect of their project was the restoration of the black languish in their obscurity until moments of catastrophe community in the wake of the havoc of less. Addressing and tragedy launch them into the national consciousness. what the state had done (or, more accurately, not done) I imagine that East Orange is what these places felt like for black people through practical means was at the prior to their immortalization. Often sleepy, often quiet, heart of their mission. haunted by neglect. Huey P. Newton, leading theoretician of the Today we deploy the names of America’s black Panthers, developed this perspective on struggle out of geographies in order to propel narratives that serve our an at times close and at times tenuous relationship to political and historical imagination. These geographies Marxism-Leninism. In their writings, the Panthers link become symbols, substitute names for the political their own political and philosophical project to Mao, theme to which they refer. “Ferguson,” for instance, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh (whom Newton referred to as “Uncle has become shorthand for police shootings. Through Ho”), Fanon, and Che. Theirs was a lineage of adaptation repeated invocation in political discourse, the word has and praxis. Newton, like his forebears, approached a become full, pregnant, freighted. It has come to mean Eurocentric Marxism with rigor and dedication, yet things that exceed its geographical specificity and the altered and qualified its theories to suit the conditions lives of the people who constitute it. of his historically specific conjuncture. Newton used the This process of symbolization and signification prism of Marxism and Leninism to analyze the conditions 66 THE HAVOC OF LESS

of African-America. For him, the subject of revolutionary series of “survival programs.” These programs took on history was no longer Marx’s industrial working class but a variety of forms—some very well-known today— rather the lumpenproletariat, or what Marx had pejora- including free medical clinics, free busing to prisons, tively termed the “dangerous class,” which is to say the free food programs, free clothing and shoes programs, outcasts, the ghettoized, the beggars, the gangsters, and free pest control, police-alert patrols, and others. the unemployable. Newton’s Marxism was a Marxism The most popular iteration of the survival for the despised, a class-politics for the sub-classed and programs was the breakfast program, in which the local de-classed. Panther chapters served free food to their respective From this tradition Newton culled a kind of revolu- communities in collaboration with local churches. tionary pragmatism, deploying theoretical conclusions Breakfast programs were sustained by volunteer efforts, with less concern for dogmatic theoretical exactitude financial contributions from the community, and food than for practical utility and political accuracy. In donations from local businesses. Massive giveaways a 1967 essay entitled “In Defense of Self-Defense,” became public and media attractions, lodging images Newton described the “true definition of politics” as of the Panthers in the public consciousness. All were “the desire of individuals and groups to satisfy their essentially designed to combat the practical and basic needs first: food, shelter, and clothing, and immediate difficulties of black, urban life. They were security for themselves and their loved ones.” In 1966, explicitly articulated as attempts to fill a void left by the the Oakland chapter of the Party had, under the aegis failure of the federal government to provide resources of Newton and Party chairman Bobby Seale, begun a as basic as food to black communities.

These realities that precede crisis deserve as much attention as the crises themselves, for it is arguably the havoc of having less in these places that makes the tragedies that come to both define and obscure them possible GABRIELLE DACOSTA 67

The programs’ immediate practical function the way by the interferences of COINTELPRO). The and their ideological relationship to the project tension was posed more explicitly as an argument of the Panthers has some bearing on the question concerning the correct timing of revolution. One of the mundane versus the sensational in political faction, led by Eldridge Cleaver, maintained that imagination and work. In Huey P.’s theoretical writings, revolution was imminent and moved to prepare the there is a persistent negotiation between revolutionary people for armed insurrection. The second faction, led glamour and dogged practical effort. For the Panthers, by Newton, moved more toward community building the survival of the people was, on one hand, the truest and politics. Newton denounced Cleaver in a 1971 form of politics: that is, black people’s right to live in essay entitled “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver human and decent ways. On the other hand, it was a from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the temporary stage in the revolutionary process. In this Black Panther Party from the Black Community.” In it vein, Newton wrote of the black community that “there he accused Cleaver of a haste tantamount to counterrev- must be a total transformation, but until that time that olutionism. He suggested that Cleaver’s judgment of the we can achieve total transformation, we must exist. In political situation had been impeded by an “either/or,” order to exist, we must survive, so, therefore, we need sensationalist attitude that cut him off from the people’s a survival kit.” reality. The veracity of these judgments was perhaps One sees in Newton’s writing an estimation of clouded by factionalism and the shrouded misdirections meeting these bare necessities as the only “true” political of the FBI. Nevertheless, the dichotomy was present and act. At the same time, revolutionary transformation articulable enough to become the Party’s most severe lingers as a distant and desired horizon. For Newton internal ideological divide. the former—survival—took a kind of sequential precedence over the latter—revolution. Nevertheless the two coexist as dynamic and inseparable components of an encompassing revolutionary project. In a 1972 ONE of Newton’s major theoretical innova- collection of his writings and speeches entitled To Die tions was the idea of “intercommunalism.” He used this for the People (originally edited by Toni Morrison), concept to characterize the ideological position of the Newton writes, “To go out, one must go deep. But Panthers in 1970. In brief, Newton claimed that due to to go deep, one must also go out.” Newton imagined the nature of imperialism, the nation had ceased to exist the community as something like a base from which as the organizing principle of the world. Rather, power the broader project of world transformation could be had been concentrated into the hands of a small ruling built. The community was the depth and the soul of circle who then exerted a homogenizing influence the revolution. The world was the “out,” the temple of around the world. In a speech delivered at Boston its unfurling. Revolution would be not an event but a College in 1971, Newton defined the “community” as process. “a comprehensive collection of institutions which serve Yet the tension between the daily, anonymous toil the people who live there.” The ruling circle of the of “serving the people” and the spectacular rhetoric and world, he claimed, had expropriated many institutions aesthetics of the gun would persist into an ideological from the communities of the world, such that they no rift, which in 1971 tore the Party in two (helped along longer worked in the interest of the people but rather 68 THE HAVOC OF LESS

worked for the rulers. themselves from traditional socialist “internationalist” Newton’s theory of intercommunalism could be labels, which reaffirmed and legitimated the idea of used to explain how, today, black communities suffer such the nation. Calling themselves “intercommunalists” neglect, even in immediate proximity to the immaculate allowed the Panthers to frame the importance of the neighborhoods of the wealthy and white. Intercommu- community in relation to a revolutionary vision for nalism articulates the process by which the institutions the wider world. It allowed them to retain a grasp on of a country serve and protect some and underserve or the local when the rest of radical thought seemed to express hostility toward others. Police brutality and the be moving global. Such insight pivoted upon Newton’s shootings of black men are a poignant example of this. critical observation about the state’s neglect and Hospitals, where black patients receive less medical care, abandonment of the black American community. From pain medication, and psychiatric help than their white this, Newton was able to identify simultaneously what counterparts, offer another sterling American example. the imperialist project had wrought for the subjugated I remember my father confirming the truth of this once, peoples of the world. after a story on National Public Radio prompted me to ask him about it. “It’s true,” he said of the doctors. “They just can’t empathize with you.” Newton must have observed such contradictions, WHEN I look at East Orange, nearly 50 still with us today, while penning his theory. From his years after Newton first introduced the idea of “intercom- perspective in 1970, national and state institutions munalism,” I am struck by his prescience. That this side turning away from black people had happened in a of Newton and the Panthers’ thinking risks being lost to similar way across the world. He wrote, therefore, history behind unidimensional depictions of them as that “we see very little difference in what happens to a bellicose militants is perhaps due to the same victory of community here in North America and what happens the spectacular over the dogged, the sensational over the to a community in Vietnam. . . . We see very little daily. The Panthers were militants who advocated the use difference in what happens to a Black community in of force if necessary against the belligerence of the state. Harlem and a Black community in South Africa, a Black However, to take up only this side of their work is to community in Angola and Mozambique. We see very obliterate the nuanced theoretical and practical sensitivity little difference.” with which they approached and understood the black Newton observed that the ravages of imperialism community and its place in a wider world. had created this vast world of the underserved, which had When we look at the Panthers in this way, we recognize in turn engendered unique opportunities for a kind of the courage, humility, and love that went into their work. fluid solidarity beyond misleading and antique notions The power of this work is perhaps why the memory of the of national boundaries. Such insights seem perceptive, Panthers persists despite aggressive attempts by the state and even iconoclastic, in light of the dominance of to repress and manipulate their legacy. A contemporary internationalism in the radical political thought— emulation of this humility could begin with increased particularly anti-imperialist and Marxist strains—of attention to the life of the community, in local and careful the ’60s and ’70s. The Panthers called themselves ways. It is only through these small achievements that “revolutionary intercommunalists” in order to distance larger ones are possible. BRIAN KAMANZI 69 Must Fall By BRIAN KAMANZI

Reflections on Must Fall’s paradoxical call, student politics in South Africa, and the role of the university

AS I walked down University Avenue on an early, empty, bitter winter morning at the University of Cape Town (UCT), chants echoed in my ear—protest songs, the crackling of burning tires, and the bang and boom of bullets and stun grenades. Patches of charred concrete and tar sat tucked against the backdrop of the main hall, which stood tall, a pantheon looking out onto the city. The contestation over the heavy stone that frames this institution rages on, in open defiance of its declaration of superiority. The uprisings of 2015 and 2016, particularly those under the banner of #FeesMustFall, propelled an urgency, vibrancy, and militancy across many South African campuses in debates over the nation’s liberation narrative and the role and future of universities in one of the most unequal societies on earth. Over 20 years after the formal fall of the Apartheid regime, the inability of the mass democratic movement to use its new constitutional democracy to address the historical and ongoing impact of land dispossession, unequal education and healthcare institutions, and other ridges within our society has brought South Africa from its hopeful, transitional era to a time of resentment, decay, self-enrichment, and Photograph of scorched concrete under the landmark UCT building, which pessimism. was created by conflicts between private security staff and student protesters. The “Must Fall” movement and its relationship to The building, formerly named Jameson Hall, was renamed Marikana Hall by protesting students and workers, in honor of the miners massacred at the university as a site of struggle offers a glimpse into Marikana in South Africa in their fight for a living wage. Photo by the author. 70 MUST FALL

some colliding historical trajectories, opportunities for At the University of South Africa’s eighth Thabo subverting and mobilizing incompletely decolonized Mbeki Africa Day, scholar Mahmood Mamdani institutions like universities and constitutional delivered a public lecture titled “Africa and the democracies to build alternatives. We can begin to Changing World,” engaging present and historical consider the “Must Fall” movements, while emerging debates on universities in Africa particularly as they from university campuses, as dynamic, messy terrains relate to decolonization and globalization. Mamdani and sites of conflicts of the “interpersonal,” “national,” anchored his lecture on some of the key debates and “global.” Paradoxically, the call for what “Must around the “role of the university” in early postinde- Fall” shows the importance of inquiry, engagement, pendence moments. Two universities were described and mobilization as constructive support to enable the as broadly representing two contrasting visions: the emergence of alternatives to the oppressive, exploitative, older Makerere University in Uganda (est. 1922) and extractive status quo. represents the colonial university as the home of the Since the moment UCT’s central campus “universal scholar,” and the University of Dar es Salaam administration building was occupied in March 2015 in Tanzania (est. 1970, after independence) represents for #RhodesMustFall, university researchers, public the nationalist university as the home of the public intellectuals, and vice chancellors have gone to great intellectual. Mamdani then turned to the independent lengths to define, classify, and abstract the conditions of Pan-African research organization Council for the the “Must Fall” movement. The South African student Development of Social Science Research in Africa protesters are often described and depicted as large (CODESRIA, est. 1973), headquartered in Senegal. masses—led by charismatic leaders, adorned in familiar As a supranational institution, CODESRIA was banners, and met with police confrontation. What gets formalized through a founding charter that evolved missed with this popular protest iconography is the notion into a General Assembly for its members, forming that the people participating in these protests had ideas, the highest decision-making body, and a number of dreams, debates, and theorizations. From my experience standing committees dealing with specific areas of in the movement, participating in lectures (often with interest. visiting activist scholars) has formed an important pillar In the wake of the Must Fall movements, it is crucial for sustaining and building the movement. Packed lecture to remember that these academic institutions were built halls, loud choruses of protest songs, and passionate with the energy and hope of the national independence rebuttals are as much a part of “Must Fall” as the mass era of the last wave of decolonization movements after strike action where it garnered its infamy. the Second World War. In detailing the relationship Out of the countless events during this period, I between these movements and the often contested “role reflect on a number of contributions put forward by of the university,” Mamdani provoked his interlocutors activist-scholars directed at the South African student in South Africa to engage with the mass mobilization movement—not only to highlight and tackle the ideas both within and beyond universities by agitating for they put forward but also to emphasize and complicate our and consolidating curriculum reforms and institutional collective understanding of how intellectual engagement, shifts. This opens up the possibility of understanding political action, and theory are moving through time and the numerous emerging “Must Fall” movements in space at this juncture in history. South Africa as not simply campus movements about BRIAN KAMANZI 71 singular issues, such as student debt, but also containing instruments to carefully demarcate the boundaries the opportunity to sustain the mass mobilization of “acceptable” scholarship, making it increasingly necessary to address broader and fundamental demands difficult to sustain relationships among research, theory, for change and a better future. teaching, and community engagement. The university At the University of Cape Town in mid-2015, the has consistently attempted to curtail the growth of the #RhodesMustFall movement’s strikes and occupations African Gender Institute and the Center for African called for the removal of a statue of the infamous colonial Studies, and even close the latter. Crucially, Mama’s mining mogul Cecil John Rhodes. What is often forgotten address centered the realities and difficulties surrounding is that the occupation that ultimately led to the statue’s harsh funding climates that constrain the possibilities removal consisted of wide-ranging demands bringing for leveraging the university space as a site of struggle together many people and groups marginalized within in the present context of neoliberalism and permanent the university community. Among other connected austerity. Mama’s statements reverberated as a call to issues, those demands included: expanding financial “dig in our heels” and prepare for the long, arduous task aid, increasing benefits for workers, ending the use of of not simply raising issues through confrontation but labor-brokering practices, the removal of symbolism building networks of solidarity and resistance. glorifying UCT’s colonial heritage, curriculum reform in It was prescient advice. Just two years later saw opposition to Eurocentrism, and representation for Black massive fracturing and splintering within the student academics. movement at UCT. It was in this context that UCLA During this period we were incredibly fortunate to professor Robin D. G. Kelley delivered a seminar titled be addressed by a number of academics, including Amina “The Black Radical Imagination: A Different Way Out,” Mama, the African feminist, professor, and cofounder in June, hosted by the Centre for African Studies. Kelley’s of Feminist Africa, who had founded the African Gender discussion pivoted on the consistent assertion of the Institute at UCT. In her speech, Mama reaffirmed role of popular mass struggle in relation to the Black the importance of challenging the historical legacy of radical tradition. Kelley reflected on the student-driven colonialism within educational institutions and discussed publication UFAHAMU, which began with an activist her difficult experience working in UCT’s hostile orientation and engaged with African and Afro-diasporic institutional climate. She attributed her decision to come debates on radical politics. UFAHAMU published to UCT to a deep interest and investment in helping content ranging from overtly militant and activist- to establish an African—regional and continental— oriented to academic contributions, and it housed essays gender institute. As Mama’s tenure began through a deep from the likes of Walter Rodney and Ali Mazrui, both engagement in contexts where women were engaged in of whom were cited in Mamdani’s earlier-cited address intense struggle, she noted the difficulties she and her as central figures in the debates at Dar es Salaam and colleagues had experienced in putting gender studies Makerere. Kelley called on us to continue to strengthen on the intellectual agenda of the continental network transnational links and awareness within these learning established by CODESRIA. communities. Reflecting on her time at the institution, she Tracing this historical link between militancy and remarked on a strong push from UCT to assert a strict academic work, I began to see it as absent by comparison disciplinary focus, using administrative and financial today. While scholarship in postcolonial, African, 72 MUST FALL

Middle Eastern, ethnic, and critical race studies has States Congress and invigorated broader, renewed calls rapidly expanded in form and content, the relationship for political independence for the island. Leveraging off to mass movements is often relegated to the analysis of the buildup to the 2017 French presidential elections, the academic witness, for publishing pending review. French Guiana mounted a general strike involving over Kelley closed by emphasizing the need to acknowledge 37 labor unions and student associations, demanding and explore the limitations of the university as a space over €2.5 billion for the provision of basic services. Both while taking seriously the historical and existing efforts of these contexts demonstrate that in today’s struggles, to extend the boundaries of the elite university space organized labor and the participation of students are a through the support, and often fugitive planning, of consistent feature in the fight against the onslaught of popular education initiatives. neoliberalism. Following from Kelley’s thread, Pathways to Free While underreported, organized labor both on Education, a popular education collective emerging out of South African campuses and in broader society has played UCT, published “Third World Education & Social Welfare a significant role in what has broadly been categorized Programmes” in August 2017. Pathways featured an as the “Must Fall” student movements. Of course, there interview conducted between Donna Murch, a professor continue to be tensions along lines of ideology, strategy, at Rutgers University, and Khadija Khan, a Pathways and tactics. On the one hand, many call for the death of collective member. Murch draws attention to the 1960 the “Rainbow Nation” and notions of liberal nonracialism California Master Plan for Higher Education, which premised on permanent forgiveness for the crime of made state-funded secondary education tuition-free. This Apartheid and its accomplices. On the other hand, while reform broadened access to institutions such as Merritt wide-ranging solidarity consistently demanded, it remains College, which several of the soon-to-be Black Panther unclear what dreams and programs stand to replace the founders attended. fading mirage of Mandela’s liberated South Africa. As we It was within these institutions that Black stand at a moment on the verge of self-definition, bearing populations gained access to radical texts from all over the witness to a protracted social explosion, the death of the world. Murch discusses the later formation of liberation Rainbow Nation is an opportunity for healing, revolution, schools alongside free breakfast schemes, forming part and perhaps calamity, great loss, and sacrifice. of the broader “survival pending revolution” programs, Standing alongside the charred concrete and tar where women’s labor within the movement was central. below the Rhodes pantheon cast in heavy stone, I remain These historical trajectories speak to the importance convinced that no matter what happens, the university of understanding education not just in terms of the will have a role to play—for better or worse. As the calls fight to broaden access, increase financial support, and continue to ring for what next “Must Fall,” the struggle for consolidate gains within a paradigm of social democracy, what must emerge continues. It will not arrive through but rather as containing the potential to blow open the condescension and bad faith dialogues that ask, “What possibilities for something different. do the protesters want?” or “What is even their vision?” This can be seen in the contemporary Caribbean, Instead our dreams and nightmares will be forged in the where long, massive strikes at the University of fires sparked by the friction of our paradoxical realities Puerto Rico have stood firm in the struggle to oppose coming to a head. devastating austerity measures imposed by the United A luta continua MOHAMMED HARUN ARSALAI 73 Fash at Sea

By MOHAMMED HARUN ARSALAI

The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over

THE racist transnational campaign known European institutions can, and often do, snowball into as Defend Europe, whose signature tactic has been lasting material consequences. attempts to physically block ships transporting In May of this year, the Far Right activist campaign refugees across the Mediterranean, recently ended by Lauren Southern, a Canadian “alt-right” media in a series of setbacks ranging from the hysterical to personality formerly of Rebel Media, and Martin Sellner, the logistical in the last few months. In late August, an Austrian working with the neofascist Génération it halted its seaborne campaign. The captain, Kibris Identitaire group, began a sustained effort to malign Postasi reported, and others aboard the “C-Star” were the nongovernmental organizations conducting refugee arrested in July of this year for allegedly falsifying rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The group documents and for themselves hosting people without pounced on a false narrative originating with a leaked legal documentation. But while it is happy news that memo from FRONTEX, a Polish for-profit company Defend Europe’s immediate campaign ended in failure, with a €330 million budget that has been tasked by the the group’s enduring successes, including its propaganda European Parliament with patrolling E.U. borders and and celebrity networking, should be examined closely seas. In the memo, FRONTEX claimed that NGOs by all anti-fascists. The wins of Defend Europe in these conducting search and rescue missions off European instances show that the dangerous linkages between coasts were acting as a “pull factor” attracting both vigilante fascists and their enablers embedded within migrants and smugglers from Africa to Europe. 74 FASH AT SEA

The spread of disinformation from the FRONTEX to compete with widespread anti-refugee sentiment. It memo is part of a broader global trend where white was released just after Italy’s municipal elections, where nationalist propagandists disseminate false narratives politicians from across the political spectrum glided into favorable to Far Right politicians and damaging to their office by slamming refugees during their campaigns. enemies. In the U.S., the tendency of President Trump Throughout the campaign, politicians dragged NGO and his associates to retweet bogus but affirming news workers in front of the Italian parliament to answer stories has raised red flags among free-press advocates, but false allegations, all as they continued to approve new the reach of the FRONTEX memo shows that a similar anti-refugee laws, build more detention facilities, and phenomenon is occurring in Europe and specifically Italy, increase deportations. where it was picked up by politicians from both the Left The conspiracy theory’s penetration into mainstream and the Right. It was also taken up by Italian prosecutor Italian politics shows how successful subterfuge waged by Carmelo Zuccaro, who admitted in May to having “no an organized alt-right can be, in spite of Defend Europe’s evidence” backing his claims that NGOs were creating comical blunders. The campaign to stop migrant boats a “pull factor” for refugees. That didn’t stop Sellner and and spread disinformation is the alt-right’s version of other neofascists from exaggerating the already false direct action, and it has received support online from allegations from the FRONTEX memo, further alleging racists worldwide including David Duke, the former that the NGOs were colluding directly with smugglers to “Grand Wizard” of the Klu Klux Klan, as well as celebrity pick up refugees in Mediterranean Sea. racist and journalist Katie Hopkins. Along with other groups affiliated with the Far Aggressive policies that normalize the brutalization Right and identitarian movements in Europe and North of migrants are emboldening groups like Defend Europe. America, Defend Europe and its allies took to social The fire-breathing of the latter reinforces the former, media to call for action, globally, against an “Islamic leading to a world with higher and thicker walls. refugee invasion.” They pointed to the fact that young As of August 2017, Austria was threatening to send African men and boys comprise many of the asylum military troops to its borders to stop any flow of refugees seekers who continue to be rescued off the coasts of Italy, from entering the country. Extremists in Hungary and alluding to medieval anti-Islamic imagery to argue that Bulgaria were hunting for refugees in their national white Christians had a moral duty to purify Europe of forests, and in Germany, considered one of the more dark or Muslim bodies—especially and specifically Black “refugee-friendly” countries in the E.U., there were Africans. at least 3,700 recorded attacks on asylum seekers and The charges against NGOs were thoroughly refugees in 2016, a 200 percent increase of violence debunked in June by researchers Charles Heller and against refugees in the past year. Lorenzo Pezzani of the University of London’s Centre for In Italy, however, the disposition against refugees Research Architecture in a detailed report. They write has been particularly nasty, and has infected a large that “accusations have been founded on biased analysis swath of the political spectrum. which has deliberately singled out SAR [search-and- Anti-refugee opportunists and politicians like rescue] NGOs from the broader web of interactions that Matteo Salvini, of the Far Right Lega Nord (Northern together shape the dynamics and conditions of maritime League), as well as “soft left” politician Marco Minniti crossings.” But for all its rigor, the report wasn’t able of the PD (Democratic Party), helped spread false MOHAMMED HARUN ARSALAI 75 anti-refugee conspiracies. In a recent speech given based his campaign on “cleaning the streets of filth,” a at Genoa’s Piazza De Ferrari, cofounder of Far Right thinly veiled threat to immigrants and the poor. political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) “The left here has been in a state of slumber, Giorgia Meloni stood before the crowd of hundreds and and now we’re paying for it,” says Amalia Rossi, an proclaimed: “We have to keep our culture alive! We can’t anti-fascist activist based in Genoa. “It has only been a become the only nation in the world to pay for its own couple weeks since Bucci of Lega Nord became mayor invasion!” Such rhetoric echoes President Trump’s call of the city, and we (pro-refugee activists) are being to arms to “defend Western civilization” in Poland, as flooded with calls from refugees who have been arrested, well as the coded warnings about “white genocide” that detained, harassed, and fined up to €100 for begging.” have spread from a niche slogan among hardcore white A fine for begging is the standard anti-poor disposition supremacists to mainstream politicians. of capitalist nations, but the tactic is more sinister than The rhetoric has altered Italy’s political landscape. that: Refugees in the area typically do not have work During municipal elections in June, the unthinkable visas, meaning it’s illegal for them to get a job. If they’re happened in Genoa. Historically considered the backbone not begging, they’re pushed into the black market. That of anti-fascism since it became the first and only city makes it all the more likely that refugees will pick up a in Italy to free itself from fascist rule in 1945 without record, which makes them candidates for deportation. outside help, Genoa’s residents recently voted into power The system works as intended. a right-wing coalition led by the Far Right Marco Bucci, In order to stop the flow of migration from southern a member of Lega Nord and now Genoa’s mayor. Bucci to northern Europe, E.U. leaders enforce the Dublin

Historically considered the backbone of anti-fascism since it became the first and only city in Italy to free itself from fascist rule in 1945 without outside help, residents in Genoa recently voted into power a right-wing coalition led by the Far Right Marco Bucci. 76 FASH AT SEA

Regulations, or “first entry” laws, which trap asylum describes how organizations like the Traditional Britain seekers in the first European country they enter until their Group (TBG), Génération Identitaire, and Nazi Forum legal cases are complete. For the most part, this means groups are loosely coordinating their messaging through a asylum seekers have been stuck anywhere from six months National Socialist publishing group called Arktos Media, to several years in Greece and Italy with little to no institu- whose leadership is well-connected in the continent’s tional support for housing or working. By holding asylum business world. “The extensive international connections seekers in “first entry” countries, most of which already of the alt-right and extreme right, reaching right up to the resentfully operate under the thumb of richer nations like seat of power in both the USA and Russia,” the report Germany and France, northern European states provide concludes, “mean that the threat from the extreme right is scapegoats for fomenting fascism and racism in southern now at its highest since 1945.” European states such as Italy and Greece. Defend Europe Without the access to state power and global isn’t just a boat of racists trying to kill migrants at sea; institutions that the Far Right enjoys, Amalia Rossi, the as a propaganda project, it also acts as an accelerant for anti-fascist in Genoa, believes the left and anti-fascist increasingly deadly policy. movement across Europe and globally are going to have Leftists haven’t been the only side to oppose to do more than fist fight. “It’s not just about meeting Defend Europe. Local and international activists, them with force,” she says. “We can definitely challenge along with some refugees, responded to the news of them in the streets and beat them miserably, but then C-Star’s scheduled arrival at the Catania port on the they have the police to protect them. As we all know of coast of Sicily with a protest flotilla of small boats, course, many of these fascists are connected to the Far rafts, and canoes carrying banners reading, “CLOSED Right parties so they also have the support and protection FOR RACISTS” and “STOP THE ATTACK ON of the politicians. And with the right and even center-left REFUGEES,” to “symbolically block” the port. While repeating anti-refugee rhetoric to stir up hate and gain such symbolic actions can garner media attention, the votes, the media is mostly repeating this garbage,” Rossi broader panoply of anti-immigrant policies indicates says, adding that she believes it is similar for the U.S. Defend Europe’s cachet isn’t necessarily ebbing. The Beyond brawling with Nazis in the streets, research fact that it can successfully fundraise large amounts of and exposure of the networks backing fash at sea and money in a short time while also normalizing fascistic their ilk must continue being a critical component policy in mainstream discourse and law is a dangerous of anti-fascist struggle. The information revealed by and urgent matter, especially because anti-fascists don’t such research—namely, the breadth of the Far Right’s enjoy the same access to state power as our enemies. reach—is dangerous, because the inescapable truth In May, the U.K.-based publication Searchlight, is that those of us who can must do more. As Europe which gathers and analyzes intelligence on Far Right becomes increasingly desperate to deal with the influx extremism, released a report titled “The growing Nazi of refugees by disregarding and breaking international axis,” a 200-page research dossier that sheds light on laws, a principled approach for anti-fascists would be the growing “alt-right” white-supremacist phenomenon to inflict consequences on those who have orchestrated and the international far-right’s institutional power by and turned a blind eye to the deaths of the at least 2,400 revealing financial ties between high-level executives and people so far this year who have drowned trying to cross aristocrats in Europe and fascist organizing. The report from Libya to Italy. SAM LAVIGNE 77 C-SPAN 5 by SAM LAVIGNE

Straight noise, no chaser

C-SPAN 5 provides unadulterated program I wrote called Videogrep that creates supercuts hits of U.S. political dysfunction. Without any human of videos. It works by looking at the subtitle file or audio intervention, the C-SPAN 5 re-editing script downloads transcription of the video it is analyzing and finding the a video every day from the C-SPAN website, transcribes time stamps associated with specific phrases. The program, the audio, and then creates a new cut of the video which is named after the UNIX text-searching tool “grep,” consisting of only the moments when the most frequent allows you to treat video files as though they were written words in the transcript are spoken. The finished videos, media. condensing an endless stream of C-SPAN programming Encompassing an impossibly large corpus of political into manageable one-to-two minute clips, are then posted spectacle, talking points and general tedium, what follows is to Twitter. C-SPAN rendered in its most concentrated form: C-SPAN, Under the hood, C-SPAN 5 uses an open-source fully automated. 78 C-SPAN 5 Texaco Advertising, 1943