Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America
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Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822368984 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/29/2017 |
| Series: | Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Katrina, American Exceptionalism, and the Security State
On Monday, September 5, 2005, Shailaja Bajpai wrote in the daily New Delhi newspaper Indian Express:
When CNN proclaims "State of Emergency" we expect to see Africa or Asia because that is where states of emergency occur, right? But when it describes ... "the United States of America," you don't know what to think. Not even after the catastrophic 9/11 did CNN expose the human toll of the attack. ... When Katrina swept Mississippi and Louisiana off their feet, suddenly everything was altered: we see disorder, chaos, suffering and yes, dead bodies in flooded New Orleans. ... Everyone the camera encounters cries out tales of woe; each correspondent looks like he's been hit by a minor tsunami. Like 9/11, coverage of Hurricane Katrina has changed the way we perceive America.
In Kenya's Daily Nation, Ambrose Murunga similarly wrote, "My first reaction when television images of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans came through the channels was that the producers must have been showing the wrong clip. The images, and even the disproportionately high number of visibly impoverished blacks among the refugees, could easily have been a re-enactment of a scene from the pigeonholed African continent." Another commentator in the same newspaper stated that the United States had shown itself to be an underdeveloped, rather than a developed, nation because it could not shield its population from these natural disasters as could a developed nation. In France, Le Progress published, "Katrina has shown that the emperor has no clothes. The world's superpower is powerless when confronted with nature's fury." From Spain, La Razón read, "It is clear that the USA's international image is being damaged in a way that it has never known before." In Business Times Singapore, there appeared an article that summed it up: "America's eroding credibility: Fallout from Baghdad and New Orleans makes it difficult for Bush administration to mobilize support."
All around the world, there was astonishment at the spectacle of misery unfolding in the United States. Through the "disaster marathon" showing the hurricane's impact across the US Gulf Coast, television viewers around the world were stunned at seeing — perhaps for the first time — reporters covering a major US metropolis as a disaster zone lacking a government that was able to help contain the disaster, or lessen its impact. The media coverage of desperate people, inadequate rescue operations, lack of coordination and communication, and the overwhelming visibility of African American women and children as victims all fueled speculation about racism and US power. Marcin Zaborowski, a Polish commentator wrote, "It is difficult to overestimate the effect the disaster has had on American politics and on America's perception of itself as well as on the role of the US in the world."
Just a year before, images of the Indian Ocean tsunami led to the mobilization of humanitarian aid from many countries. While the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 produced images of suffering and destruction in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia — among other nations — such images belonged to a long history of spectacularized "third world" suffering and of Asians needing US and European support. The Katrina news coverage showed suffering victims in the United States (many of whom were nonwhite women and children), dead bodies floating in the water, people being rescued from houses while others were left behind to die, and survivors without adequate resources. All of these images enabled comparisons to the third world. These comparisons indexed stereotypical images of disasters in Africa or Asia that have long been a staple of US television, radio, and news media. That so many of the Katrina victims were African American women was another connection to the global catastrophe media spectacle, as was the widespread focus on women with children as the primary disaster victims. For instance, reporters regularly called the survivors who were taken to the New Orleans Superdome sports arena "refugees." The term reflected the general perception that what was visible on television was unthinkable in a US context. Audiences were startled to see the spectacle of suffering, so normative and banal in global media coverage of so-called failed or developing states, or the "Third World," depict the United States. The fact that the disaster was in the United States made it different from disasters in other parts of the world, for while there were similarities of death and destruction with other international disasters, what was new was the astonishment of so many across the globe at the lack of government assistance.
Not surprisingly, ninety countries — small and big, poor and prosperous — offered aid to the United States, much of which was not accepted or went unused. Nations rallied to give aid to the United States, even as they used the opportunity to criticize President George W. Bush and his ineffective response. What ensued was a geopolitics of "disaster diplomacy," as people around the world assessed the US government's poor response and passed judgment on the US government and, especially, the Bush administration. In the public opinion expressed and circulated in UK newspapers, for instance, support and condemnation were both visible. In an article subtitled "But Why Does the World's Richest Nation Need Handouts?," the BBC reported that President Bush stated no aid was needed since "this country is going to rise up and take care of it." But, it was also revealed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had said, contradictorily, "No offers of assistance will be refused." While the ostensible goal of the BBC article was to publicize a call from the British Red Cross seeking help for Katrina's victims, it also provided a window into many UK opinions. The piece included a British Red Cross spokesman saying, "There are broader political questions about the response of the richest country in the world to such a disaster on its own soil. Hopefully they will be addressed in the fullness of time and lessons will be learned." The article concluded by wondering if anyone in Britain was going to help and included comments from its readers that framed the issue in terms of whether or not UK people should help the "richest country in the world." Not surprisingly, there were those who argued that anyone in need should be helped, but the article also included comments such as "to ask other nations for help, and then retaining wealth makes my skin crawl." Another person commented, "I will not be giving to this appeal. The United States is the richest country in the history of the modern world. They should be diverting their wealth into domestic social care programs not into imposing their economic will on the rest of the world. Maybe this is the wake-up call that the people of the US need."
In the United States, many discussions in national newspapers focused on whether the United States could expect aid and support from other countries, particularly because Americans were represented as selflessly rescuing developing countries in international crises. Bradley Jones, in his research on media and Hurricane Katrina, points out that the national image of Americans as global good Samaritans was the framework for third world comparisons. The New York Times reported Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as saying, "We have seen the American people respond generously to help others around the globe during their times of distress. ... Today we are seeing a similar urgent, warm, and compassionate reaction." Both Rice and the Times ignored the pervasive international and national negative commentary on the role of the US government. At the same time, foreign nations' efforts to help were rebuffed by some in the Bush administration, who considered these efforts as an affront to the ability of the United States to help itself. Iran offered help, which was refused because the US State Department said that it came with a condition of lifting the embargo on oil sales. Greece offered free cruise ships to house the many who had lost their homes, but was turned down. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a Florida-based company, Carnival Cruise Lines, a contract of $192 million to provide housing and meals to evacuees, though it was emergency workers who ended up using the ships. CorpWatch, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that monitors corporate corruption, suggested that the DHS awarded Carnival the contract because Carnival was an important Republican donor. The ships were never used for the purpose for which they were intended. In the hurricane's aftermath, as the General Accounting Office and other governmental agencies and NGOs assessed how foreign aid had been dealt with, many across the political spectrum concluded that the superpower status of the United States got in the way of its ability to help those in need. In their report from 2011 "Accepting Disaster Relief from Other Nations: Lessons from Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill," the conservative Heritage Foundation concluded that "an unresponsive policy toward foreign offers of aid can also have negative diplomatic consequences, potentially alienating important allies whose assistance the United States needs on other issues." It noted that while by "late February 2006 foreign countries had offered or pledged a total of $854 million in cash and oil," there were embarrassing problems such as the 400,000 UK Ready to Eat (RTE) meals that were refused because they included UK beef, which the US had banned in earlier legislation due to fear of Mad Cow disease.
The global media spectacle surrounding Katrina portrayed the superpower in ways that departed from the normative script of US exceptionalism that has been a part of US culture, media, and politics through the second half of the twentieth century. Occurring in the aftermath of 9/11, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that proclaimed US military might, and circulated by the power of digital media, Katrina was a shocking transnational spectacle. While many were not astonished by the images of the earthquake in Haiti of 2010, the US war in Iraq of 2003–present or even 9/11, Katrina's images surprised viewers around the globe. The bungling of foreign aid further signaled US governmental incompetence, becoming one more piece of evidence of US similarity to long-standing images of developing and third world states.
Media Geopolitics and State Effect
One reason Katrina's images had such a global impact was transnational media networks, which enabled the technological proliferation of images transmitted instantly through satellites, fiber optic cable, and digital technologies. As a television and photojournalism staple, disaster coverage reporters could not avoid covering what was going on, from the storm to its aftermath, as such stories almost always deliver high ratings and viewer numbers. As Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes argue, disasters have become ever more important as media events enabled by mobile recording and transmission technologies. Increasingly, such events upstage the broadcasting of ceremonial events, and the state may not be able to ideologically control them. Liebes suggests that we increasingly watch "disaster marathons," rather than the news bulletins of the broadcast television era. Kevin Fox Gotham asserts that Hurricane Katrina coverage is an example of recent changes in the news media spectacle of disasters, in which the characteristic features of entertainment — ephemerality, fragmentation, immediacy, and intense drama — determine the representation of tragic events and catastrophes." In the case of Katrina, these features, with unprecedented speed and circulation, supported an implicit comparison with Asian and African countries, leading to a particular state effect of waning US power.
The framings and narratives accompanying the images also helped to produce the global reception that I narrated at the beginning of this chapter. In a transnational media context, the images revealed that in the United States, neoliberal retrenchment of welfare had produced an impoverished population that did not have the resources to help itself and that the US government would not do what was necessary to assist it. Offers of aid, as well as the context of the Iraq War and the war on terror, added to that perception. The application of developing world catastrophe narratives to New Orleans, an important US tourist destination, caused the images to have widespread effect.
Although disaster marathons do participate in what Naomi Klein has called "disaster capitalism" and opportunities for capital accumulation, there were important moments in which Katrina's effects could not be wholly contained by capital and in fact revealed the contradictions of neoliberalism. Katrina's images became part of a broad international and transnational media whose numerous articulations and decodings could be ascertained neither in advance nor subsequently. Yet, there were some transnational commonalities among reactions to the United States as an exceptional superpower. While US television producers were unwilling to directly challenge the powers of state and capital, a broad array of international media producers criticized American neoliberal policy, the government's inattention to poverty, US racism, and its imperialism. The Indian Express quote presented at the beginning of this chapter was one of many such commentaries circulating across transnational media.
To overcome global disaster comparisons, US media makers created discrepancies in their coverage of suffering and death for US citizens. Media scholar Susan Moeller notes that American news organizations treated "American" victims with "more respect" by showing a distance between the viewer and the victims. Television producers did not, according to Moeller, present a large number of dead bodies laid out in rows, or grieving families, preferring to show wide-angle images of the destructive flooding. Media organizations stated they were trying to show "restraint in terms of just good taste," leaving out images of severed and bloated bodies found abandoned in debris, since the newscasts "air at the dinner hour."
Other comparisons of New York Times and the Washington Post media coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 also revealed such differences. The tsunami images depicted more unattended bodies (often lying uncovered on the ground), had greater focus on damages and relief work and survivors, and showed less interest in local or national political contexts. The latter's erasure in the tsunami is perhaps most telling for the transnational project of empire, in which mention of the work of local politicians and community groups is often erased in favor of reporting that focuses on Western rescue and humanitarian operations.
While US journalists also found ways to question the Bush administration, foreign news media more directly seized the opportunity to critique US news media and what they saw as its failures. As a New Zealand newspaper put it, "not for decades has there been such merciless questioning of the president and his administration by the US media." The same article reported that "never before ... have US reporters been so emotionally involved in a story to the point of being enraged." The article's author commented that the US media had come to have too cozy a relationship with the government and had become "part of the political establishment," so that television reporters did not have the skills or ability to cover such an event. "Used to reporting on comparatively harmless storms, heroically riding out storms with windblown hairdos, they were then confused with the 'Big One.'" The same article quoted a BBC reporter who asked whether Katrina had saved the US media.
A cartoon in the UK newspaper the Guardian by cartoonist Steve Bell depicted the international opinion that Katrina was a blow to the US's reputation (fig. 1.1). Bell referenced the storm's aftermath, in which the rescue operation became militarized. In Bell's drawing, the Statue of Liberty lies drowned in the water, as shadowy military figures roam the bridges. In doing so, Bell alluded to the emerging story that local police and the US National Guard had prevented those fleeing flooded neighborhoods from crossing the bridge to middle-class sections of the city.
The US national media was not unaware of international responses and took the opportunity to bring their concerns over the laggardly state response to the public through ventriloquizing the international coverage. The New York Times revealed that many Europeans blamed the Bush government for lack of environmental awareness, and for its lack of care for the victims. The Times suggested Europeans felt a "dismay ... mingling with sorrow." It mentioned a BBC report that focused on the "shameful" aspect of "the dark underbelly of [US] life," as white policemen mistreated black residents. It also reported that a French television station interviewed a US specialist who stated that the images "reveal to the world the reality in the Southern states; the poverty of 37 million Americans." The article concluded that the Katrina images "have tended to confirm the worst images of America that prevails in Europe, the vision of a country of staggering inequalities, indifference to the general welfare (especially during the Bush administration), and lacking in what Europeans call 'solidarity.'" The article enabled the New York Times to indirectly critique the Bush administration through presenting such opinions from abroad.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Exceptional Citizens? Saving and Surveilling in Advanced Neoliberal Times 1
1. Katrina, American Exceptionalism, and the Security State 33
2. American Humanitarian Citizenship: The "Soft" Power of Empire 59
3. Muslims, Missionaries, and Humanitarians 87
4. "Security Moms" and "Security Feminists": Securitizing Family and State 118
5. Digital Natives: Threats, Technologies, Markets 144
Coda. The "Shooter" 185
Notes 205
Bibliography 261
Index 309
What People are Saying About This
“This electrifying book makes a crucial contribution to feminist theory, the study of transnational capitalism, and the history of the security state. Thinking through the position of women and children, the construction of masculinities and patriarchy, and the complicity of certain forms of feminism, Inderpal Grewal offers an expansive, passionate critique of the United States as a global power. Timely, impressively researched, and brilliantly argued, Saving the Security State powerfully speaks to our moment.”
“In this important book Inderpal Grewal shows how the idea of the exceptional American citizen has emerged to replace the exceptional state. The improvement of self and racial Others, the oldest colonial game, now comes dressed up in late twentieth-century feminist clothing, making feminism itself an imperial formation. Tracing the emergence of the exceptional citizen through saving and surveillance, Grewal highlights how empire today is made possible, as it always has been, through the operation of patriarchy.”