When the London tube bombings happened in July, I panicked like many others, thinking of who I knew in London. When one is inextricably bound up in the links that occur in the web of Anglophone countries, one obviously feels these events — not just in terms of a generalised sympathy or solidarity, but in terms of the real, intimately lived relationships that one might have with certain people internationally. One looks up friends, or they check in, etc. When you live in a country that has a lingering imperial relation to Britain and membership in the advanced capitalist world of nation-states, like I do, this reaction is inescapable, whatever your critique of those relations. Because I have friends there.
But part of my own response to the incident in London also reminded me of something I witnessed in the wake of 11 September, 2001: the assumption of a “we”, and the associated assumption that only “we” have a virtual sphere of everyday concern and affiliation that turns to viscerally sympathetic panic when disaster strikes. When the World Trade Center was destroyed, I saw this played out in various online communities and in the blogosphere: the panic of looking for friends and loved ones, and of frantic checkings in, was often lubricated in its public expression by a kind of structural narcissism — a narcissism that implicitly precluded the possibility that when horrible things happen outside of the Anglophone world, say in the Middle East, people there might also undergo a similar panic, and be frantically trying to reach relatives and friends. These “other people” also live in the pores of the Anglophone world — when shit goes down in the Middle East, which is often, there is always a frantic concern played out within the large Arab diasporas in Australia, Britain, the United States, Canada, etc.
With this realisation comes the reflexive recognition that there is a Western disapora, an imagined community whose ethno-national configuration is constantly riven by crisis, but which is usually rendered invisible by its insistent perspectival self-centering.
I think this cuts much deeper than the casual observation that in public discourse in the Anglophone world, “some lives are figured as more important than others”, because I’m talking not just about the values of “propaganda” or “media discourse”, but about the intimate, affective webs of lived social relationships and their abjection/denial in the space of the everyday. Underneath the Eurocentric notion that “other countries don’t have a civil society”, there is also the subconcept that the semi-intimate zone where private meets public — in a non-institutional sense — simply doesn’t exist for “cultural others”, for whom a state of animalistic barbarity is assumed to be natural. (Of course, challenging these assumptions also means unpicking the very terms on which they’re reactively based, such as “civil society”, “private” and “public”.)
The unfolding situation in New Orleans is a chilling demonstration of the limits of the Western diaspora. It’s undoubtedly the biggest news of the English speaking world at the moment, but as has been resoundingly stated by many others, those who could not escape have been condemned to die under the sign of indifference and disavowal via the operations of race and class. The overwhelming blackness and poverty of those who suffered and died in the past week isn’t testament to just the evil and incompetence of leaders, or the values of the media, but signifies a crisis in people’s everyday ability to conceive of the very idea of the social. The population of New Orleans nominally belongs to the Western disapora, but only just, so the semi-intimate panic that could connect to those dying there inevitably falls into the void that has already been established by the loopholes in that diaspora’s very foundational enactment. These people cannot belong to “our” public. Hence the constant, horrified characterisation of New Orleans as a Third World warzone by both conservative and liberal commentators.
The inability of liberals to deal with this crisis is best demonstrated by Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, who is horrified by the Army’s use of the term “insurgents” to describe those now under military fire in New Orleans:
We often hear the term used by military leaders or politicians to refer to armed entities in Iraq and other war zones overseas.
We are talking about fellow American citizens here — in America.
Not insurgents. Not refugees. Not enemies. Americans.
Such a desperate, abject(ing) attempt at reinscribing various boundaries of identity — note especially the “not refugees” — really just sums it up.
[ tags: whiteness, new-orleans, katrina, cultural-politics, race, diaspora ]
