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Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the AmericanStudies Association, October 17, 2003Author(s): Amy KaplanSource: American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 1-18Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068211 .

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Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today Presidential Address to the

American Studies Association, October 17, 2003

AMY KAPLAN

University of Pennsylvania

1 WOULD LIKE TO DEDICATE THIS ADDRESS TO THE MEMORY OF ttDWARD dAID, WHO

inspired so many of us. He taught us how to think about the workings of empire, the intimate connections between knowledge and power, and culture and violence, across the globe. He wrote and spoke with a passionate commitment to relating academic scholarship to the struggles of the world, without sacrificing the integrity of one to the other. He was also a truly public, international intellectual, and he was not afraid of controversy. I mourn the loss of his dashing presence, even in the face of terrible illness, and his powerful voice, which we deeply need to hear during these troubling times.

1. Empire

I write with a sense of urgency and bewilderment - urgency because I believe that our work must speak to the current crisis as the United States occupies Iraq and marshals violent force around the world and the government increases its authoritarian incursions against civil liberties, the rights of immigrants, and the provision for basic human

Amy Kaplan is the 2003 President of the American Studies Association as well as a professor of English and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture and The Social Construction of American Realism, and co-editor with Donald E. Pease of Cultures of United States Imperialism.

American Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (March 2004) © 2004 American Studies Association

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needs. We should have much to say about these critical times, from the diverse perspectives that come together - and don't come together - under the broad rubric of American studies. Yet I also wish to share my bewilderment, my sense that contemporary events have exposed certain limitations of our available tools and that they call for new questions and avenues of inquiry that we have yet to articulate.

Articulating the meanings and the histories of this crisis should be a part of our work. What the Bush administration calls the "war on terror" reduces the complex interactions of the United States with the world to a Manichean conflict "to rid the world of evil," a definition that evacuates the present moment of politics, history, agency, and struggle. As Toni Morrison has written, physical violence enforces the rule that "definitions belong to the definers - not the defined."1

I will focus on the dramatic redefinition of the American Empire in current public discourse in the United States. While the daily reality of U.S. imperialism isn't news to millions around the world, a decade ago the notion of the American Empire would have been rejected in the United States as a left-wing polemic, a contradiction in terms; it seemed to say more about the persons using the term than about the phenomenon itself. Yet today, across the political spectrum, policy makers, journalists, and academics are embracing the term and talking endlessly about empire. It's fashionable, in fact, to debate whether this is a new imperialism or business as usual, whether the United States should be properly called imperial or hegemonic, whether it is benevo- lent or self-interested, whether it should rely on hard power or soft power, whether this empire most closely resembles the British Empire or the Roman, and whether it is in its ascendancy or in decline.2 1 see a parallel with the way the word capitalism shifted after the Cold War from a subversive critical term used by socialists and Marxists to an apolitical word taken for granted. I don't, however, recall as much attention being called to the shift itself. I am not interested in joining these debates here but in discussing the language that frames them and how the word empire appears in a constellation of other words in the political lexicon, such as terrorism and homeland.

On the one hand, one can't help but welcome this development. At a time when the United States shuts itself off from the world it seeks to control, naming the empire has the potential to put us in conversation with critics around the world; it may help make the contours of U.S. power more visible, and thus subject to criticism. Indeed, since



VIOLENT BELONGINGS 3

antiquity, the idea of empire has always paradoxically entailed a sense of spatial and temporal limits, a narrative of rising and falling, which U.S. exceptionalism has long kept at bay. Some commentators today believe that the nomenclature of empire is being used now only to compensate for the actual weakness and incoherence of U.S. global dominance.3

On the other hand, I am disturbed that all this talk about empire conceals more than it reveals and makes certain kinds of utterances unspeakable. Along with other scholars, I have argued that the denial and disavowal of empire has long served as the ideological cornerstone of U.S. imperialism and a key component of American exceptionalism. So I feel blindsided when I find champions of empire making a similar argument for different political ends. Niall Ferguson, for example, in his popular revisionist history of the beneficence of the British Empire, chides America for being "an empire in denial," calling on it to accept its rightful heritage of the white man's burden.4 Indeed he quotes Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem, pointing out, as many of us have, that it was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt with the aim of encouraging the United States to annex the Philippines.

This uncanny mirroring makes me wonder about the limits of my own approach, which we might call a method of exposure, one that reveals the repressed violence embedded in cultural productions or that recovers stories of violent oppression absent from prior master historical narratives. At this political moment, in an administration committed to secrecy and deception, lies and acts of violence appear hidden on the surface, and the unpacking of a complex ideological construct often seems irrelevant.

The language of exposure is part of the current discourse of empire: "People are now coming out of the closet on the word empire," said the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."5 The metaphor of coming out is striking, part of a broader trend of appropriating the language of progressive movements in the service of empire. How outrageous to apply the language of gay pride to a military power that demands that its soldiers stay in the closet. Ferguson too writes that America "is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name."6 In praising Bush for speaking what Ferguson calls "The 'E' Word," he is not referring to the love between men, but is showing that Bush isn't a sissy, "unlike his predecessors, who thought




peace could be brought by touchy-feely peace talks, Mr. Bush has grasped that military power is key: the magical spear that heals even as it wounds."7 This inversion of peace and war also turns domination into victimization, masculine heterosexual violence into illicit sexuality, oppressed by the effeminate politically correct crowd. In this light it might not be surprising to read the following in the Wall Street Journal: "A decade ago, being against empire would have been like being against rape. To all but the perverse few who cheered for the wrong side in Star Wars movies, 'empire' was a dirty word. Today, it has re- emerged, newly laundered."8 Can rape too be laundered? Is outing the empire a contemporary version of manifest destiny?

This coming-out narrative, associated primarily with neoconservatives, aggressively celebrates the United States as finally revealing its true essence - its manifest destiny - on a global stage. We won the Cold War, so the story goes, and as the only superpower, we will maintain global supremacy primarily by military means, by preemptive strikes against any potential rivals, and by a perpetual war against terror, defined primarily as the Muslim world. We need to remain vigilant against those rogue states and terrorists who resist not our power but the universal human values that we embody. This narrative is about time as well as space. It imagines an empire in perpetuity, one that beats back the question haunting all empires in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians: "One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era."9 In this hypermasculine narrative there's a paradoxical sense of invincibil- ity and unparalleled power and at the same time utter and incomprehen- sible vulnerability - a lethal combination, which reminds us that the word vulnerable once also referred to the capacity to harm.

Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the "reluctant imperialist."10 In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be constitution- ally unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the moral authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-interest merge in this narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the United States can save the people of the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an




uncivilized state. As Robert Kaplan writes - not reluctantly at all - in "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "The purpose of power is not power itself; it is a fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society."11 This narrative does imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the end of empire only when the world is remade in our image.

This is also a narrative about race. The images of an unruly world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed modernity, recycle stereotypes of racial inferiority from earlier colonial discourses about races who are inca- pable of governing themselves, Kipling's "lesser breeds without the law," or Roosevelt's "loosening ties of civilized society," in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In his much-noted article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "The American Empire," Michael Ignatieff appended the subtitle "The Burden" but insisted that "America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden."12 Denial and exceptionalism are apparently alive and well. In American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the racism of empire and examine the dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are becoming racialized through the interplay of templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial Orientalism.

These narratives of the origins of the current empire - that is, the neoconservative and the liberal interventionist - have much in common. They take American exceptionalism to new heights: its paradoxical claim to uniqueness and universality at the same time. They share a teleological narrative of inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the embodiment of universal values of human rights, liberal- ism, and democracy, the "indispensable nation," in Madeleine Albright's words. In this logic, the United States claims the authority to "make sovereign judgments on what is right and what is wrong" for everyone




else and "to exempt itself with an absolutely clear conscience from all the rules that it proclaims and applies to others."13 Absolutely protective of its own sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the entire world a potential site of intervention. Universalism thus can be made manifest only through the threat and use of violence. If in these narratives imperial power is deemed the solution to a broken world, then they preempt any counternarratives that claim U.S. imperial actions, past and present, may have something to do with the world's problems. According to this logic, resistance to empire can never be opposition to the imposition of foreign rule; rather, resistance means irrational opposition to modernity and universal human values.

Although these narratives of empire seem ahistorical at best, they are buttressed not only by nostalgia for the British Empire but also by an effort to rewrite the history of U.S. imperialism by appropriating a progressive historiography that has exposed empire as a dynamic engine of American history. As part of the "coming-out" narrative, the message is: "Hey what's the big deal. We've always been interventionist and imperialist since the Barbary Coast and Jefferson's 'empire for liberty.' Let's just be ourselves." A shocking example can be found in the reevaluation of the brutal U.S. war against the Philippines in its struggle for independence a century ago. This is a chapter of history long ignored or at best seen as a shameful aberration, one that American studies scholars here and in the Philippines have worked hard to expose, which gained special resonance during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Yet proponents of empire from different political perspectives are now pointing to the Philippine- American War as a model for the twenty-first century. As Max Boot concludes in Savage Wars of Peace, "The Philippine War stands as a monument to the U.S. armed forces' ability to fight and win a major counterinsurgency campaign - one that was bigger and uglier than any that America is likely to confront in the future."14 Historians of the United States have much work to do here, not only in disinterring the buried history of imperialism but also in

debating its meaning and its lessons for the present, and in showing how U.S. interventions have worked from the perspective of comparative imperialisms, in relation to other historical changes and movements across the globe.

The struggle over history also entails a struggle over language and culture. It is not enough to expose the lies when Bush hijacks words




such as freedom, democracy, and liberty. It's imperative that we draw on our knowledge of the powerful alternative meanings of these key words from both national and transnational sources. Today's reluctant imperialists are making arguments about "soft power," the global circulation of American culture to promote its universal values. As Ignatieff writes, "America fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires."15 The work of scholars in popular culture is more important than ever to show that the Americanization of global culture is not a one-way street, but a process of transnational exchange, conflict, and transformation, which creates new cultural forms that express dreams and desires not dictated by empire.

In this fantasy of global desire for all things American, those whose dreams are different are often labeled terrorists who must hate our way of life and thus hate humanity itself. As one of the authors of the Patriot Act wrote, "when you adopt a way of terror you've excused yourself from the community of human beings."16 Although I would not minimize the violence caused by specific terrorist acts, I do want to point out the violence of these definitions of who belongs to humanity. Often in our juridical system under the Patriot Act, the accusation of terrorism alone, without due process and proof, is enough to exclude persons from the category of humanity. As scholars of American studies, we should bring to the present crisis our knowledge from juridical, literary, and visual representations about the way such exclusions from personhood and humanity have been made throughout history, from the treatment of Indians and slaves to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Thus the current discourse about the American Empire embodies fantasies of a global monolithic order extending outward from a national center. How can we draw on our knowledge of the past to bring a sense of contingency to this idea of empire, to show that imperialism is an interconnected network of power relations, which entail engage- ments and encounters as well as military might and which are riddled with instability, tension, and disorder - as in Iraq today? And we must further understand how empire doesn't just take place in faraway battlefields, but how it exerts its power at home - in fact, in the interconnections between the domestic and the foreign, words already freighted with imperial meanings, and for which we need better vocabularies.




2. Homeland

The image of the American Empire also projects a fantasy about national identity: the war on terror, some would like to believe, has supplanted the so-called culture wars. The notion of empire recuperates a consensus vision of America as a unitary whole, threatened only by terrorists, but no longer contested and constituted by divisions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. We can see this through the use of the word homeland, a recent addition to the lexicon of U.S. national- ism, which gained currency along with empire, after 9/11, in the concept of homeland security. If empire insists on a borderless world, where the United States can exercise its power without limits, the notion of the homeland tries to shore up those boundaries. In the idea of America as the homeland we can see the violence of belonging

The word homeland has many connotations.17 It implies a sense of native origins, of birthplace and birthright. It appeals to common bloodlines, ancient loyalties, and often to notions of racial and ethnic homogeneity. Though U.S. national identity has always been linked to geography, these connotations represent a departure from traditional images of American nationhood as boundless and mobile. In fact the exceptionalist notion of the New World pits images of mobility against a distinctly Old World definition of homeland. A nation of immigrants, a melting pot, the western frontier, manifest destiny, a classless society - all involve metaphors of spatial mobility rather than the spatial fixedness and rootedness that homeland implies. Homeland also conveys a different relation to history, not a nation of futurity, but a reliance on a shared mythic past engrained in the land itself. It resonates with the notion of the heartland.

This unitary notion of the homeland (it's always used with a definite article) underwrites the resurgent nativism and anti-immigrant senti- ment and policy. Where is there room for immigrants in this fusion of nation and nativity? How many immigrants and their descendants may identify with America as their country or home but locate their homelands elsewhere, as a spiritual, ethnic, or historical point of origin? How many U.S. citizens see themselves as members of a diasporic community with a homeland in Ireland, Africa, Israel, or Palestine - a place to which they feel spiritual or political affiliation and belonging, whether literally a place of birth or not? Does the idea of America as the homeland make such dual identifications suspect and




threatening, something akin to terrorism? Are you either a member of the homeland or with the terrorists, to paraphrase Bush? And what of the terrible irony of the United States as a homeland to Native Americans?

At a time when the rights of so-called aliens and immigrants have been abrogated by the Patriot Act, when they can be detained and deported in the name of homeland security, the notion of homeland itself contributes to making their lives terribly insecure. It polices the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign not simply by stopping aliens at the borders, but by continually redrawing those boundaries everywhere throughout the nation, between Americans who can somehow claim the United States as their native land, their birthright, and immigrants and those who look to homelands elsewhere, who can be rendered inexorably foreign. This distinction takes on a decidedly racialized cast through the identification of homeland with a sense of racial purity and ethnic homogeneity that even naturalization and citizenship cannot erase.

An odd thing about the use of the term homeland for the United States is that it refers often to a nation that lacks a state and territory, one to which a people or ethnic group aspires, such as Palestine, Kurdistan, or the Sikh, Tamil, or Basque homeland. Such groups are often viewed as underdogs whose legitimate claims to territory have been usurped by another state. In this vein, homeland also has a connection to the discourse of diaspora and exile, to a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia. In this meaning, homeland may evoke a sense not of stability and security, but of deracination and desire. This also seems to be an appropriation and inversion. The idea of America as aspiring to a lost homeland depends on evoking terrorism as the constant threat to sever Americans from their legitimate aspirations. Thus the idea of the homeland works by generating a profound sense of insecurity, not only because of the threat of terrorism but also because the homeland is a fundamentally uncanny place, haunted by all the unfamiliar yet strangely familiar foreign specters that threaten to turn it into its opposite.

This nostalgic notion of the homeland goes hand in hand with a modern security state, for the concept of homeland security emerged in the 1990s to integrate U.S. territory as one unit of command in a global map of military departments. Indeed, recently seven offices of homeland security have opened in different countries. Advocates for home-




land security argue for more government and military coordination, for the armed forces to be involved in this country as well, and for the state through surveillance and policing to intrude into all areas of civil life. Although homeland security may strive to protect the domestic nation from foreign threats, it is actually about breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside, about seeing the home in a state of constant emergency, besieged by internal and external threats that are indistin- guishable. Thus the notion of the homeland draws on comforting images of a deeply rooted past to legitimate modern forms of imperial power.

3. American Studies

What then do these debates about empire mean for defining the field of American studies? We need to think more creatively and critically about what we mean by internationalizing the field when Bush has his own vision of "a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests."18 For indeed empire is a form of transnationalism. What is the relation of our critique of the nation-state as the framework for knowledge to the administration's doctrine of limited sovereignty, the demise of all other national borders in the service of empire?

It seems obligatory in this forum to say something about the tortured name of American studies, which may seem frivolous right now but is indeed tied to the questions we have raised. We have to do more than expose the imperialistic appropriation of the name America and then turn away from it. While specifying the field as the study of the United States or recharting it as the comparative study of the Americas, we cannot lose sight of the power of "America" in American studies. We have the obligation to study and critique the meanings of America in their multiple dimensions, to understand the enormous power wielded in its name, its ideological and affective force, as well as its sources for resistance to empire. We have thought much about "national identity" in American studies, but we also need to study more about the differences among nation, state, and empire, when they seem to fuse and how they are at odds, to think of how state power is wielded at home and abroad in the name of America. Furthermore, we need to study how meanings of America have changed historically in different international contexts. Through our studies of political, literary, and



VIOLENT BELONGINGS 1 1

cultural images, we must understand how "America" is a relational, a comparative concept, how it changes shape in relation to competing claims to that name and by creating demonic others, drawn in proportions as mythical and monolithic as the idea of America itself. We also need to reinvestigate the phoenix-like issue of American exceptionalism, perhaps not by exposing its unexceptional nature but by conducting studies of comparative exceptionalisms. As Edward Said wrote in his new preface to Orientalism, all empires see themselves as exceptional.19

I also believe that there are strategic reasons, nationally and interna- tionally, for maintaining the authority of American studies as a discipline. There are bills before Congress to fund the teaching of American history and civics in the public schools. As educators we should muster our authority to participate in these debates. Further- more, the State Department has a revived interest in American studies as an export to foster the "soft power" of empire. In one call for grants from designated Middle Eastern universities, for example, American studies is the single category in the humanities. We need to learn from the history of the Cold War uses of the field and use our authority to intervene in this process. We don't want to become naive missionaries of American studies, but I don't think we have the luxury to imagine ourselves on the outside, because we already are a part of empire. Yet we also need to create alternative venues for international conversations and to show that we have visions of American studies and of America that provide alternatives to the ones offered by the State Department. And we must use these occasions not only to present those visions but to listen as well. For example, I went to El Salvador under the auspices of the U.S. embassy, which, holding a traditional view of American studies, had no sense that the story of America could be told from the vantage point of El Salvador and the long history of the relations -

including imperialism, immigration, war, and economics - between the United States and Central America.

Let me make it clear that I am not advocating a return to a nationalist conception of American studies. Indeed this ongoing project of historicizing and defining the relational meanings of America is inconceivable without comparative studies and the perspectives of international scholars. The transnational turn in American studies has been crucial in decentering the tenacious model of the nation as the basic unit of knowledge production. It traces alternative spaces and



1 2 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

modes of belonging to collectivities not subsumed by the nation- state - whether the borderlands, the Black Atlantic, the Pacific Rim, the American hemisphere, diasporic communities, or urban networks - and it reconceives immigration as multidirectional movements. Today these critical approaches may contribute to insisting on limited sovereignty for the one nation-state that claims its exemption from those limits. What I'm asking is how both to decenter the United States and analyze its centralized imperial power. For this we need to turn to earlier transnational thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois. He used the framework of empire to explore how the United States was not a self- generating force in the world but was acted on by what he called the "interworking of all these effects" of many other forces, often movements for liberation from slavery and colonialism, and how its power was embedded in and interconnected with other global movements.20 We still need to learn what Du Bois realized in the "awful cataclysm" of World War I, that "the United States was living not to itself, but as part of the strain and stress of the world."21

4. Guantanamo

I'd like to turn to an important imperial location close to home, in the ambiguous border between the domestic and the foreign: that is, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Here contemporary empire building in the Middle East meets the history of imperialism in the Americas, pointing to an ominous transnational future. If homeland names a place that doesn't exist on a map, Guantanamo is a place for which there are no adequate names. Where is Guantanamo? In America, yes; in the United States, yes and no; in Cuba, well, sort of. In common parlance, the name conflates bay and base as though no distinction exists between Cuban geography and U.S. military rule.

In the naval base at Guantanamo, the U.S. has incarcerated close to seven hundred prisoners from more than forty countries, some under the age of fifteen, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan since January 2002. No charges have been brought against them. The United States has labeled them unlawful or enemy combatants and refuses to classify them as prisoners of war, an international status that would afford them the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which mandate humane treatment, an impartial trial, and limit to interrogations. Held in small, isolated cells and under intense surveillance, they are denied




access to legal representation and subject to unlimited interrogations and to indefinite terms of detention. They may be tried by military tribunals, which have the power to hand down death sentences without the right to appeal. According to the Department of Defense, as "enemy combatants in the global war on terrorism," they can be "lawfully detained until the cessation of hostilities."22 Yet we are told that this is a war without end. Twenty-three men have tried to commit suicide, many more than once, in response to their indefinite future. If the prisoners have been denied rights under international agreements, they also have had no access to the U.S. constitution to challenge their detention. The courts have ruled that the U.S. has no sovereignty over Guantanamo, even though it exerts total control there. This decision was based not on what the prisoners did or who they are but on where they are being held.23 According to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, "It is as if Guantanamo is on another planet, a permanent United States penal colony floating in another world."24

This floating colony is an uncanny shadow of the homeland itself. I end with Guantanamo because I believe that the kinds of interdiscipli- nary and transnational work being done in American studies can offer an important analysis of the "interworkings of all these effects" of empire. We can tell a series of interconnected stories about Guantanamo that disrupt the narratives, with which I began, that empire tells about itself.

A journalist recently wrote that human rights attorneys have come to call Guantanamo a "black hole, a legal conundrum that emerged 20 months ago, as the first of the hooded and shackled men from Afghanistan began arriving at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."25 But we can show that this conundrum emerged at least a century ago, if not earlier. Historians can tell of the U.S. occupation of Cuba in 1898 and how it forced provisions on Cuba's new constitution that reserved to the United States the right to intervene in Cuba militarily and provided for the lease of naval bases. When the lease was renegotiated in 1934, its term became indefinite, subject to cancellation only by agreement by both parties. This open-ended lease, which continued through the Cuban revolution, makes Guantanamo a chill- ingly appropriate place for the indefinite detention of prisoners in what the administration has called a war without end against terrorism. Thus Guantanamo is a location where many narratives about the Americas intersect, about shackled slaves brought from Africa, the important role of Cuba in U.S. history, and U.S. intervention in the Caribbean and




Latin America. Today policy makers in the Western Hemisphere hold up the Monroe Doctrine as a model for global policy.

American studies scholars can also tell a related story of immigration, bodies, and borders, a narrative of the Haitian refugees in the 1990s for whom the cages of Camp X-ray were originally built, and to whom the courts initially deemed the Bill of Rights inapplicable. The refusal of refugee status and their indefinite term of detention were based a racist conflation of Haitian bodies and disease, in an institution- alized panic about the spread of HIV. Indeed this story would include a long chapter on U.S. imperialism in Haiti, and on the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention of the refugees on the high seas; it would include the militarization of the INS at the Mexican border as well, central to the new Department of Homeland Security today.

Scholars and activists in American studies working on the prison industrial complex furthermore show how the draconian changes can in the prison system within the U.S. - the uses of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, for example - circulate across international borders to make this penal regime in Guantanamo possible. From the perspective of legal studies, we can show how military tribunals, meant to separate the rights of citizens from those of aliens, are in fact doing much to erode them.

American studies would also tell a story of how earlier internments haunt the legal grounds of Guantanamo. Fred Korematsu recently filed a brief before the Supreme Court on behalf of the detainees there. Korematsu is a Japanese American who, sixty years ago, contested his internment order during World War II, and in a ruling that bears his name, the court upheld his conviction, citing the deference courts owe to military authorities during a time of war. Only decades later was his conviction overturned.

American studies could also tell the story of the cynical use of multiculturalism, as the defense department has advertised its tolerance and provisions for Islamic observances at Guantanamo while depriving the prisoners of basic human rights.

Guantanamo may also be a story of the future. We face the danger today that this floating colony will become the norm rather than an anomaly, that homeland security will increasingly depend on proliferat- ing these mobile, ambiguous spaces between the domestic and the foreign. It is not hard to imagine a new constitution for Iraq containing provisions for leasing extraterritorial U.S. bases, as Cuba's did a




century ago. This limbo space of Guantanamo may in fact become a new ground zero, a foundation on which both the American homeland and American empire are being rebuilt. But Guantanamo has also become the focus of international protest, from the families of the prisoners to artists re-creating the prison camp, from national govern- ments, to international nongovernmental organizations, from Nobel peace prize winners, to former U.S. prisoners of war.

Finally, we could tell a story of mistranslation. A recent headline in the New York Times read: "Fear of Sabotage by Mistranslation in Guantanamo."26 This refers to the fact that an undisclosed number of translators, both civilian and military, are being investigated or charged with mistranslating the interrogation of prisoners. This investigation accompanies charges against a military translator accused of spying for Syria, Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi (his charge sheet includes unlawfully delivering baklava to detainees), and charges against a Moslem chaplain, Captain Yussef Yee, for conveying information out of Guantanamo (both are U.S. citizens of immigrant background).27 Given the secrecy that surrounds Guantanamo, it's hard to sort out what this means. Which language was mistranslated? Pashtun, Farsi, Arabic, English, Russian? Given the notorious lack of language knowledge in the United States, who caught the fine-tuning of these mistranslations? Does this mean that interrogators were not hearing what they expected to hear? Was too much being withheld? Were the translators conducting an altogether different conversation with the prisoners about their experience? Or did the translators translate too much, more than answers to the questions asked, to transmit messages to families or information about conditions beyond Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay?

Even though historically translation has been key to the workings of empire, my broader sense is that this empire fears translation; it views all translation as potential sabotage. It cannot brook the necessity of mistranslation, that languages and cultural codes are not transparent to one another, but are in some measure always incommensurate and never a matter of one-to-one correspondence. That translation goes both ways. If this is an empire threatened by translation, then to speak both Arabic and English, or to practice Islam and be a U.S. citizen, have the potential not of building bridges and cultural exchanges, but instead of exciting the suspicion of treason, sabotage, and espionage.

And it this attention to the possibilities of translation in the literal and broadest sense to which American studies must turn today, to




contest the universalism of American exceptionalism and to participate in the "strain and stress of the world," which is interconnected in many more complex ways than through the military reach of empire.

I opened this address in mourning for a well-known individual. I remain troubled by the way popular support for U.S. militarism continues to rely on the manipulation of grief around the losses of 9/1 1, when the dead were counted, named, and recounted. The victims of violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere around the globe remain uncounted and unnamed by the U.S. government as a matter of political policy. The suffering of war and occupation is barely visible in the U.S. media. Even the U.S. military dead, a disproportionate number of whom are members of minority groups, may be counted yet are barely accounted for. We've learned from movements around the world that mourning and remembering the dead can be a form of militant protest. A global politics of anti-imperialism must also call on grief and mourning for the uncounted dead and the unrepresented suffering at the hands of the American Empire.

NOTES

1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 190. 2. References are too numerous to cite comprehensively. As Ivo H. Daalder and

James M. Lindsay noted, "In the last six months alone, as debate on Iraq peaked, the phrase

* American empire' was mentioned nearly 1,000 times in news stories" ("American Empire, Not 'If but 'What Kind,'" New York Times, May 10, 2003). For recent books on the subject in addition to those cited below, see Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999/2002); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt, 2000); John Newhouse, Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003); Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

3. See for example, Charles A. Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Knopf, 2002); Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003); Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: New Press, 2003).




4. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 370.

5. Quoted in Emily Eakin, "All Roads Lead to D.C.," New York Times, Week in Review, March 31, 2002.

6. Ibid. 7. Niall Ferguson, "The 'E' Word," Wall Street Journal June 6, 2003. 8. Alan Murray, "Political Capital: Manifesto Warns of Dangers Associated with an

Empire," Wall Street Journal July 15, 2003. 9. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982), 31. 10. See, for example, Sebastian Mallaby, "The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism,

Failed States, and the Case for American Empire," Foreign Affairs 81 (March-April 2002); "The Myth of the Reluctant Superpower," in Bacevich, American Empire, 7-31. My two narratives try to capture in broad strokes a much wider array of approaches to empire today.

11. Robert D. Kaplan, "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World," Atlantic Monthly, July-August 2003, 68-69.

12. Michael Ignatieff, "The American Empire: The Burden," New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 22.

13. Pierre Hassner, The United States: The Empire of Force or the Force of Empire, Chaillot Papers, no. 54 (Paris: Institute for Security Studies, European Union, 2002), 46. Available at http://www.iss-eu.org/chaillot/chai54e.pdf.

14. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 341-42. U.S. intervention in the Philippines has become a model for others as well. See Kaplan's "Rule No. 7: Remember the Philippines," in "Supremacy by Stealth," 80; and Michael Ignatieff, "Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)," New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003.

15. Ignatieff, "American Empire." The term soft power was popularized by Nye. 16. Viet D. Dinh, quoted in Daphne Eviatar, "Foreigners' Rights in the Post-9/11

Era: A Matter of Justice," New York Times, October 4, 2003. 17. See Amy Kaplan, "Homeland Insecurities: Transformations of Language and

Space," in September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? ed. Mary Dudziak (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 55-69.

18. National Security Council, "The National Security Strategy of the U.S.A.," September 2002, The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.

19. "Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires." (Edward W. Said, "Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition," in Orientalism [New York: Random House, 2003], xxi).

20. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1897), in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 74.

21. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 222.

22. Paul W. Cobb Jr., deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, quoted in Eviatar, "Foreigners' Rights," 7.

23. On November 9, 2003, the Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals filed on behalf of two groups of detainees at the United States naval base.




24. Michael Ratner, "The War on Terrorism: The Guantanamo Prisoners, Military Commissions, and Torture," Center for Constitutional Rights. Available at http:// www.ccr-ny.org/v2/viewpoints/viewpoint.asp?ObjID=oCjCc05Q9n&Content=142.

25. Jane Fritsch, "Guantanamo Detainees Lingering in Legal Limbo," Chicago Tribune, October 12, 2003.

26. Eric Schmitt and Thorn Shanker, "Fear of Sabotage by Mistranslation in Guantanamo," New York Times, October 7, 2003.

27. As we go to press, after Captain Yee had been held in solitary confinement for

nearly three months, and prosecutors still have not determined whether he was carrying classified papers out of Camp Delta. They have instead charged him with adultery and

keeping pornography on his government computer.



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