Invisible empire: Visual culture, embodied spectacle, and Abu Ghraib

Radical History Review

Volumn 95, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 21-44

  Mirzoeff, Nicholas ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949171791     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-95-21     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). I will use Hardt and Negri's terms as being the major effort to provide a synthetic response to globalization without wishing to assent to all their proposals.
2. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2005);
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 53.
4. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii.
5. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
6. See Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
8. Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984), 46.
9. Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique (On the Shores of Politics) (Paris: La Fabrique, 1998), 177;
10. quoted in Kristin Ross, May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 22-23.
11. The term contact zone is borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt's study Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
12. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib [hereafter TP] (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1073.
13. Eric Schmitt, "Former Intelligence Officer Cleared in Iraq Abuse, " New York Times, March 12, 2005.
14. The Mikoshalek report of July 2004 makes this claim (TP, 650), whereas the earlier Taguba report had declined to even reproduce the photographs because of their "extremely sensitive nature" and so apparently as not to jeopardize prosecutions (TP, 416).
15. Statement of Luciana Spencer, Sixty-Sixth Military Intelligence Group, January 21, 2004, TP, 478.
16. See TP, 490, 492, 527, and 530.
17. Allen Feldman, "Abu Ghraib: Ceremonies of Nostalgia, " October 18, 2004, OpenDemocracy, www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-abu-ghraib/article- 2163.jsp.
18. Senator Patrick Leahy and members of the House of Representatives expressed concern regarding the use of private contractors in Abu Ghraib in June 2004, but they were rebuffed with a form letter stating an investigation was underway but classified. This was released following a freedom of information request by the American Civil Liberties Union; www.aclu.org/torturefoia/ released/122004.html (accessed December 20, 2004).
19. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 19.
20. Neil A. Lewis, "Detainee Seeking to Bar His Transfer Back to Egypt, " New York Times, January 6, 2004.
21. A two-part report in the New York Times, May 20-21, 2005, on detention deaths in Afghanistan caused little stir amid the filibuster furor of the time.
22. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
23. Zainab Bahrani, "The Aesthetics and Rituals of Occupation" (paper presented at the "The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture" symposium, New York University, October 10, 2004).
24. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 16.
25. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
26. Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others, " New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004, 25-28.
27. Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, " in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone, 1993), 12-13.
28. Reference cited in FBI e-mail (authors redacted), "Document Entitled Detainee Interviews (Abusive Interrogation Issues), " May 6, 2004, released following a freedom of information request by the American Civil Liberties Union; www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/122004 .html (accessed December 20, 2004).
29. Neil Lewis, "Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo, " New York Times, November 30, 2004.
30. See Carol D. Leonnig, "Further Detainee Abuse Alleged, " Washington Post, December 26, 2004;
31. depositions posted at the Center for Constitutional Rights Web site (www.ccr-ny.org);
32. and FBI documents obtained by the ACLU at www.aclu.org (accessed January 3, 2005).
33. Kate Zernike, "Newly Released Reports Show Early Concern on Prison Abuse, " New York Times, January 6, 2005. The reports were declassified in November 2004 and posted to the ACLU Web site at www.acIu.org/torturefoia/released.
34. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 50-59.
35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 78.
36. Cited in the annexes to the original Taguba report on Abu Ghraib and qtd. in Hazel Carby, "A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture, " November 10, 2004, Open Democracy, www.opendemoeracy.net/media-abu- ghraib/article-2149.jsp.
37. Ibid..
38. See James Allen et al., eds., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000);
39. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002);
40. and Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: Abrams, 2003).
41. Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from g/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 43-44.
42. "Commander's Report of Disciplinary or Administrative Action addressed to Commander 519th MI Battalion, Abu Ghraib, with CID reports of October 7, 2003, abuse incident attached, " released following a freedom of information request by the American Civil Liberties Union; www.aelu.org/ torturefoia/released/122104.html (accessed December 20, 2004). Also reported in the Fay-Jones report in TP, 1073-74.
43. "Redacted Documents Related to Detainee Abuse in the Vicinity of Ghecko, Kandahar Province, " July 2004, released following a freedom of information request by the American Civil Liberties Union; www.aclu.0rg/ torturefoia/released/122104.html (accessed December 20, 2004).
44. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 54.
45. Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995);
46. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodomelries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
47. Jesuit memoir of 1681 reproduced in a dossier published by Abraham Cahen, "Les Juifs de la Martinique au XVIIème siècle" ("The Jews of Martinique in the Seventeenth Century"), Revue des Etudes Juives (Journal of Jewish Studies) 2 (1881): 114-21 (my translation).
48. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 180.
49. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 200.
50. Marquis de Sade, La philosophic dans la boudoir (Philosophy in the Boudoir), in Oeuvres complétes du Marquis de Sade (Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade), ed. Annie Le Brun and Jacques Pauvert (Paris: Pauvert, 1986), 13:472 (my translation).
51. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
52. Mark Danner, "The Logic of Torture, " New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004, www.markdanner.com/nyreview/o62404-Road-to-Torture. htm.
53. Army Field Manual 34-52 (1992), Intelligence Interrogation, sec. 3-1.
54. The Taguba report noted the role of Manual 34-52 in March 2004, TP 462-63.
55. An FBI special agent was interviewed in Portland, Oregon, on May 18, 2004, and referenced "'Ego Up and Down' and 'Fear Up and Down, '" TP, 1205. The Fay-Jones report details the use of removal of clothing as an "'ego-down' technique, " TP, 1089.
56. Statement given January 16, 2004, relating to events in October 2003 at Abu Ghraib, TP, 524.
57. Goldberg, Sodometries, 4.
58. See Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).
59. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 90.
60. See Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, section 1.
61. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 78.
62. Quoted in Joseph Boone, "Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism, " in Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, ed. John C. Hawley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 47.
63. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii-xiv.
64. Ren, Descartes, Discourse on the Method, ed. David Weissmann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
65. For Spinoza, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
66. John Docker, 1492; The Poetics of Diaspora (New York: Continuum, 2001);
67. Spinoza, Ethics, trans, and ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
68. and Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988).
69. Spinoza, Ethics, part 2, prop. 13, 124.
70. Deleuze, Spinoza, 18.
71. Nadler, Spinoza, 304-9.
72. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 66. There is also a challenge for historians here to reconsider the so-called seventeenth-century crisis and its role in the formation of modernity.
73. See Lennard Davies, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 45.
74. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'imaginaire (The Imaginary) (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).
75. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 45.
76. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
77. Jacques Derrida, "Je suis en guerre contre moi-même" ("I Am at War with Myself"), Le Monde, August 19, 2004.
78. Jacques Derrida, Droit de regards (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), xxxvi (Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills, photographs by Marie-Franaoise Plissart [New York: Monacelli Press, 1998]).
79. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 22.
80. Jacques Rancière, "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 304.