Abstract
Orientalism and War is a necessary and timely contribution to the study of military power. Its central commitment is mapping out how orientalisms – regimes of truth that constitute East and West as ‘two putatively separate worlds’ (p. 4) – make and remake war, and revealing how war makes and remakes orientalisms. Taking cues from Said, though not limited to his work, each impressive chapter sheds light on the production of institutional and everyday ‘expertise’ about the ‘other’ and about how the prioritization of the ontological and existential security of the Western ‘self’ facilitates wars that themselves produce new sources of threat and new orientalisms.
On the morning I had planned on turning in this review, I awoke to two pieces of news which further confirmed that orientalism remains a ‘rich pool of resources by which to represent events and their authors’ in times of war (p. 9). The first was that insurgents had seized control of the Iraqi city of Mosul. A US State Department spokeswoman claimed it exemplified ‘the need for Iraqis from all communities to work together to confront this common enemy and isolate these militant groups from the broader population’. As Gusterson’s chapter highlights, the insurgent plays a key role in securing the identity, desires, and actions of the righteous Western ‘self’. What we can see in the US State Department statement is the distancing of the US from the creation of the conditions that have made such violence possible. Instead, a refocusing of the ‘problem’ as one of a divided Iraq where natives are too caught up in sectarianism to commit to the fledgling democracy the US has worked so hard to provide is offered.
As Chowdhury astutely notes in his chapter, depictions of the Orient are not meant to be accurate. They are tools for the Western ‘self’ to grasp and justify its own desires about the world and what it should look like. As Barkawi and Stanski point out in their introduction, when military operations go ‘awry’, as they almost always do, it ‘undermines the claims and reputations of those who initiated them’ (p. 8). Oriental convictions can thus prove highly generative in such circumstances. This is also the case for the second story, on the start of the trial of 4 former Blackwater employees accused of killing 14 Iraqi civilians and wounding a further 18 in 2007. Their legal team argued that the crux of the case was ‘whether the defendants believed that deadly force was necessary to defend themselves from an insurgent attack’. In multiple chapters (by Cummings, Gusterson, Owens, Gregory) the ‘insurgent’, the depersonalized, faceless, and savage other, bent on killing civilians and in the most terrible ways possible, is revealed as one of orientalism’s hallmark figures. As Gusterson’s and Owens’s chapters both reveal in particular, though the insurgent’s acts of savagery can be real, as a figure, the savage other obscures the savagery of the self. Furthermore, as Gregory notes, in Western cultures beset by racial hierarchy, we not only find misrepresentation and erasure of Western violence but openly spoken convictions that the savagery of the other warrants death, not only of insurgents but of civilians ‘to save the body politic’, lest savages may be among them (Gregory, p. 175). The posing of the question as one of whether Blackwater employees believed themselves to be under threat is made intelligible by such orientalist tropes.
Another theme illustrated by these news stories and the volume is orientalism and war’s capacity to breach linear notions of time and, in so doing, give rise to new orientalisms that seek to right the overturned. Many chapters reveal a West haunted by ‘past’ military misadventures, of wars re-enacted over and over, skewing ‘the present’. Others reveal the weight of struggles to reinstate identity through sanctioned ideas of remembrance (Mälksoo’s), or the spectral qualities of killing at newfound speeds and proximities (Ansorge’s). What is also suggested (notably in Mills’s, Porter’s, and Pham and Muppidi’s chapters) is that the Western self remains forever haunted by the other’s refusals to accept orientalisms or indeed by the other’s embrace of orientalist representations. As Pham and Muppidi suggest, there is perhaps nothing more unsettling for Western identity than having its desires and actions ‘rendered futile by the other’s agentic reception’ (p. 113). The aforementioned attempts to make the seizure of Mosul and the violence of Blackwater intelligible as the failings of ‘others’ suggest a haunted Western self for whom the production of orientalism is an ongoing task. Though it may be tempting to see this as a never-ending cycle, in tracing points of rupture, haunting, and remaking, this volume offers scope for further interrogation of the politics of orientalism and war, and with it, the destabilization of both.