Abstract
Reviewed by: Debjani Chakravarty, Utah Valley University, USA
Basuli Deb’s Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture embodies a strong critique of globalisation, militarism, torture and terror. The book presents an exploration of how these terms and expressions are deployed to create widespread state-sanctioned structural violence. Deb’s scholarship fits within the transnational feminist tradition that strongly critiques cultures of neo-liberal/neo-colonial globalisation. The book promises to centre and present the viewpoint of communities of colour who are constructed as terrorists and undesirables. To deliver on this promise, Deb taps into varied forms of movement texts and resistance art that defy and transcend ahistorical ‘policy perspectives’ on terror. She challenges varied practices of ‘counter terrorism’ carried out by the US and other states that embrace and deploy nationalist/imperialist exceptionalism. In the introduction, Deb unpacks and defines crucial terms such as ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, ‘queer’ and ‘queering’ – the two latter terms are at the centre of her methodology. Deb creates conceptual bridges between European colonisation and US neo-imperialism, historicising various bogeymen – Communism, Islam, immigrants. This is timely scholarship in the context of the contemporary massive US military industrial complex and the spectacle of presidential campaigns as unabashed bigotry. The chapter titled ‘The US War on Terror’ interrogates – among other knotty questions – why brown women become chess pieces on the white imperial chessboard. Deb believes that transnational feminisms and queer politics need to join arms and analysis to resist militarisation, imprisonment, imperialism, Islamophobia and entrenched gender norms. These norms, explained lucidly through notions such as the ‘post 9/11 remasculinisation of America’ and feminist projects of ‘saving’ Afghan women – can be demolished by robust queer theory and political counterpublics. Western saviour feminism – she argues – is not extended to poor women or immigrants on American soil. She applies similar analysis to other chapters on Zionist settler colonialism and French colonial dictatorships. Her analysis ‘maps how terror morphs across temporalities to show the incomplete process of decolonization in a post-declaration world’ (p. 91). The commonalities she traces between Islamophobia and gendered politics in varied geo-political locations can be used as analytical tools to understand the common forms and spread of colonial oppression. Deb also analyses and explores varied art forms (such as theatre, cinema, literature and installation art) to find many instances of queer politics where gender and national identities become radically composite, difficult to pry apart and expose to a colonial gaze and simplification. Accounts of graphic violence mingle with description of defiant graffiti – ‘graffiti turns material, such as apartheid walls that set Israeli imposed territorial limits that now define Palestinian lives, into powerful cultural ammunition’ (p. 88). A sharp intersectional analysis sets this book apart from others. The book connects global Islamophobia with caste violence in India, tracing processes of British colonial criminalisation of communities and identities in collusion with existing caste oppression. Deb argues that the geopolitics of terrorism depends on ‘otherised’ identities for that elusive equilibrium of power through which neoliberal states hold their own citizens hostage in fear, demanding protection money and uncritical support. These otherised and criminalised identities are located in the intersection of institutionalised race, gender and sexuality – as well as religious, national and linguistic communities. Such identities and communities are not passive; they do upset the oppressive equilibrium by speaking out – through expressive art, cinema and other activist texts. They queer and subvert what it means to be a terrorist or a revolutionary, a man or a woman. Mutually exclusive identity categories are broken down to the chagrin of the colonial census takers and lawmakers, check-post guards and media gatekeepers. Narrators of resistance and critical thinkers can be a traumatised four-year-old girl such as in Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live; femininity switches to expressions of gender-transgressive vengeance such as in the case of Phoolan Devi or Algerian Pasionarias. This greatly upsets colonial race-gender formations; feminist filmmaking challenges the colonial-masculinist matrix of domination. This book does not merely tell stories and histories of catastrophe; the focus is more on the varied ways communities resist such domination and the consequences of that resistance. History keeps repeating itself and being revised, but militant and cultural resistance continues transnationally. There is a colonial code in place, but there are many re- and decoders engaged in queering the colonial versions of the normal and desirable. The book mines and examines scrambled political paradigms and fragmented origin stories of terror/ism, and would be valuable for classroom teaching. What is more valuable, however, is the call to rethink transitional feminist approaches and frameworks to study geopolitics, place and space. This book’s vision for transnational feminism is one I can get behind – a radical vision of political and epistemic justice.