Editorial Lorraine Johnson-Riordan and Damien W. Riggs
We write this editorial in the wake of a series of horrific events: the bombings in New York, Madrid, London, and today, for a second time, Bali. We write, too, in the context of the aftermath – draconian anti-terrorist measures, threats of deportation, the closure of mosques, bans on the burkah and hijab, all in the name of the ‘homeland security’ of Western liberal democracies. Nightly television news depicts violence escalating into civil war in Iraq, the centrepoint of the ‘war against terrorism’ and now riots on streets across France as alienated Arabs and African youth make visible their anger. However, in this frenzied warring, the hegemonic discourse around terror that has emerged in the West appears always to locate it on the ‘other side’. It’s what ‘they’ (who live in a ‘dim’, ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ culture, in George Bush’s words) do to ‘us’. On the other hand, events at Abu Ghraib, for instance, are virtually dismissed as the unfortunate aberrations of individuals. The escalation of racist attacks against Muslims since the London bombings is not understood as a continuation of what amounts to decades of similar attacks against Muslim communities living in the West, and centuries of Western imperialism. Dissent in this ‘age of terrorism’ seems difficult, even dangerous; acknowledging other sides to the story is virtually impossible.
It is all the more important, then, that spaces be created – as in this special issue – to begin to write alternative narratives of a terror coloured ‘white’; to acknowledge that terror manifests in both different and similar guises, in multiple sites and at multiple locations, and to examine the ways in which ‘white terror’ (conducted systematically within the project of Western imperial modernity) has historically, and lately, at this conjuncture we call ‘(post)Empire’ (that encounter of old and new forms of imperialism), produced the very events we witness today. It is this ‘white terror’ that, as Alfred Lopez (2005) notes in his Introduction to Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, is too easily covered over and left unexamined, that we want to bring to centre stage. We argue for more complex, more nuanced narratives and analyses in the hope of both reaching out for dialogue, political solutions and peace with those who have historically been regarded by ‘the West’ as its others. And we are heartened, as this issue moves towards publication, by the number of conferences and events that seek to interrogate notions of terror and examine the role that the struggle for white hegemony plays in its production at this conjuncture. We think it signals the timeliness of this issue.
Contributors’ responses to our call for papers represent a diverse range of disciplines (Critical Psychology, Sociology, Feminism, Cultural Studies, Critical Studies of Whiteness, Postcolonial studies, Literature) and a diversity of theoretical, methodological and political positions but also reveal some strikingly similar interests and themes. Foucault’s work on race wars, racism and the biopolitical state provides a platform for a number of papers. Derek Hook takes up what should be of considerable interest to readers, namely the notion of racism as a ‘technology of affect’. His central concern, he writes, in a series of papers, one of which is published here, is the ‘political task of governing particular affective attachments in liberal-democratic postimperial contexts’. We need, he argues, ‘to investigate contemporary forms of racism as an affective technology’. He links ‘formations of affect’ with political capital, ‘white terror’ with hegemonies of whiteness. Perhaps in contrast, Mike Hill, writing ‘with and against Foucault’, and focusing on two social movements in the US, argues that ‘life’ is now a matter of daily warfare (‘life is war’), ‘identity is a martial art’ and that ‘postmodern race war’ has moved beyond Foucault’s notion of the biopolitical state. Nowadays, Hill suggests, what appears to be a feature of life in the US is ‘an end of race conceived as bodies; an end to biological purity; an end to ‘whiteness’; and an end to ‘race’ as such’. Lorraine Johnson-Riordan presents a version of a chapter from her forthcoming book Race Wars. Her narrative of the Howard Government’s successful campaign to overturn Australia’s High Court Wik judgement (which found in favour of Indigenous people and which, in arguing for coexistence, threatened to turn upside down the time/space relations of the white nation established in imperial modernity) argues that white terror manifests in new and old guises. She explores the microtechnologies that drive this episode of race war as the state moves to reassert white hegemony in the face of the challenges from its historical ‘primitive’ other and, too, from the ‘home invasions’ of boatloads of Middle Eastern asylum seekers. Damien Riggs takes up the related question of belonging in his paper ‘What’s love got to do with it?’, where he examines the role that discourses of love play in reinforcing possessive investments in patriarchal white sovereignty, and asks whether white queer rightscampaigns are sufficient in the face of white terror.
Writing from New Zealand, Ross Kendall, Keith Tuffin and Karen Frewin also take up the broad theme of white terror in relation to Indigenous struggles for justice within historically white colonial states at this conjuncture of (post)Empire. They analyse discourses that circulated in the opening day of parliamentary debate over the Foreshore and Seabed Bill, and highlight the refusal of the (post)colonial state to concede to an arrangement in which Pakeha and Maori live together as two peoples. In their paper on whiteness, masculinity and the military, Ben Wadham and Jason Pudsey begin with a photographic image of a group of soldiers dressed in KKK-like hoods (supposedly taken in jest) and demonstrate connections between white terror and discourses of mateship and fraternity amongst the soldiers and the fraternity of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’. And, importantly, two papers by Damien McInerney and John Kaye (Australia) and Amanda Haynes, Eoin Devereux and Michael Breen (Ireland) focus on those nations’ relation to asylum seekers at this time of post)Empire. McInerney and Kaye are particularly interested in forms of mental illness produced by the white state’s bureaucratic management of asylum seekers in detention centres. They highlight some of the limitations of mainstream psychological constructs when applied to asylum seekers and argue for the importance of inserting the political into psychology’s response. In contrast Haynes, Devereux and Breen writing from Ireland are concerned with the Irish media’s negative representation of asylum seekers and the irony implicit in Ireland’s current turn to racial othering.
Together this collection of papers represents an important starting point for thinking through issues of white terror/(post)Empire. We hope it will contribute to further research, and new collaborations between scholars and activists working in multiple locations. We wish to thank the contributors for their interest and commitment to presenting their work in this special issue and for the privilege of working with them in what is surely ground-breaking and difficult research. In particular we wish to thank Valerie Walkerdine for her generosity, vision and support in providing us with the opportunity to create this special issue. Damien dedicates this issue to those scholars already working in the area who are committed to accountability and reflexivity, and who are willing (particularly those who identify as white) to work with their discomfort without seeking to necessarily solve or deny our role in white terror; and Lorraine dedicates this issue to a more peaceful future for the world.
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