Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism

by Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller, Editors
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2007
328 pp. Trade, $84.95; paper, $23.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-3805-5; ISBN 978-0-8223-3820-8.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jzilberg@illinois.edu

"However unpalatable certain regimes or societies may be at times, finding the means to express solidarity with and give aid to their peoples is preferable to acquiescing in the politics of war making and empire building, even when given a liberal veneer of progress and enlightenment."   Omar Dahbour, Exceptional State , p.128

Exceptional State is a timely collection of chapters on liberal imperialism. It seeks to distinguish between whether the United States is an effectively imperial or merely hegemonic state. In what amounts to a collective Bush bashing, the authors consider issues from colonial legacies to new modes of anti-imperialism, from torture to the Rumsfeldian notion of techno-dominance and more.   Arranged around three themes concerning technology, gender, and the Other, it will be accessible to a broad readership but will perhaps be of greatest interest to those academics in cultural studies and representation.   In light of the current soul searching about the limits of American power, the questioning of the notion and practice of humanitarian intervention, the militarization of aid and philanthropic imperialism, it makes for fascinating reading [1].

A book about "an empire . . . that dare not speak its name," Niall Ferguson's pithy words quoted to apposite effect here [2], Exceptional State will perhaps be applauded by those on the left, derisively received by intellectuals of more central and conservative ilk and most critically of all received by historians and political economists of all persuasions. It is essentially an anthem of a passionate American intellectual resistance to imperialism in the context of cultural studies today, an anti-imperial project explicitly responding to the Iraqi and Afghani imbroglios prior to the Obama presidency. In the Faustian light of the opening months of "Obama's Vietnam," it will be sure to stimulate further explorations in the paradoxes and unfortunate and inevitable conjunctions of liberal imperialisms and neoconservative worldviews such as millennialism and exceptionalism.

Above all, the introductory chapter rethinking imperialism today makes for compellingly urgent reading. As Dawson and Johar Schueller write there:

"Let us be very clear about one thing: imperial U.S. policies threaten the future of humanity and the planet in the most immediate way. By providing prominent and emerging scholars with a venue to analyze the cultural contradictions of contemporary US imperialism, we intend to highlight and challenge the role of US culture in perpetuating popular authoritarianism . . . . We thus intend out work to provide tools with which too dismantle coercive U.S. power both domestically and internationally." (p. 21)

Yet some will find this goal to be a somewhat fanciful idea of what such essays are capable of achieving. Moreover, they are somewhat uneven and in many cases prone to interpretive excess and simplistic anti-imperialist hyperbole. That critique aside, in addition to the particularly strong introductory chapter, it is in my view the chapter by Omar Dahbour's which stands alone as a serious intellectual contribution of the outmost significance to the problem at hand. Dahbour's chapter "Hegemony and Rights: On the Liberal Justification for Empire" describes the emergence of militant human rights approaches and the eclipse of passive humanitarianism. It is deeply instructive about the limits of attempting to enforce the universality of liberal values.

The other contribution of particular note is Johar Schueller's "Techno-Dominance and Torturegate: The Making of US Imperialism" which focuses on the use of torture in the war on terror and which represents one example of a continuing discourse and activity in the US Congress and civil society which is all the more significant in the current context of President Obama's capitulation on taking a more politically principled stand on the outsourcing of rendition, torture, degradation and murder [3].   In contrast, it will be interesting to see whether a critical academic discussion emerges on whether the evidence given for a national narrative justifying imperialism, specifically the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have been over-determined and especially the concluding claims for the potential power of an emerging anti-imperialist public sphere able to change American foreign policy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting and problematic chapters is "Putting an Old Africa on Our Map: British Imperial Legacies and Contemporary US Culture" by Harilous Stecopoulus. Following Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stecopoulus draws attention to the recent fascination in America for books about "darkest" Africa and argues that they serve as active agents in the promotion of an imperialist consciousness.   In posing the question "Why Victorian Africa now?" the answer given is this:

"[T]he appeal of those representations of old Africa lies in their peculiar capacity to offer a historical justification for US geopolitical power. The allure of Victorian Africa for popular culture has less to do with US interest in exploiting a poor part of the world . . . than it does with the way the bankrupt state of the content renders Africa an exemplary signifier for Western intervention." (p. 222)

As in the other instances concerning Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes that such representations embody a racist and essentialist view of Africa and the Other in general which under-girds and maintains US dominance in Africa and elsewhere. Not only does Stecopoulos, as do the other authors arguable, give far too much agency to the texts and images under analysis as to the effect and consequence on the reader but the interpretations are debatable no matter how appealing they are in terms of how seamlessly they serve the simple anti-imperialist agenda of the study. Nevertheless, wherever one might be coming from in the political spectrum, each of these chapters will be sure to inspire useful debate in the social sciences.

The overwhelming concern for popular culture, specifically literature, film and the mass media in creating and bolstering the public appeal of an imagined benevolent imperialism requiring a sustained history of foreign intervention for hegemonic interests is a key topic in many of the chapters. For the most part they argue that the fascination with violence and techno-domination is a central element sustaining the domestic political currency of American cultural imperialism today as is the trope of "saving brown women from brown men" while demasculating them during torture and consigning the women to passivity. As a consequence of the fundamental importance of all these issues in American society today, no less the regions that are experiencing the full brunt of the consequences of the war on terror, Exceptional State makes for an exceptional college text. It is worthy and by and large easy reading across the disciplines that will inspire intense debate, especially by war veterans returning to study in colleges and universities today and tomorrow.

One final question that may arise in readers' minds is if this book gives too much credence to the notion that the United States is an all-powerful imperial force rather than a struggling hegemonic power past its Cold-War zenith. In this, it is equally possible to argue that the geo-political reach of the U.S. is increasingly limited and strategic and more often than not highly compromised. There, some will surely conclude that reducing the U.S. government and its shifting foreign polices to a monolithic imperial power with a stable male dominating imperialist agenda so simplifies the situation, never mind the complex relations to other states, as to make this study more of a caricature of American intellectuals teaching in English departments than anything else. To so systematically ignore the positive role that the U.S. can and does play in the world, to some extent in some contexts, and the enduring value of the Jeffersonian Ideal, the very notions of the combined advancement of the enlightenment, liberty, and democracy as projected by the U.S. as a highly compromised super-power working in concert with foreign governments in crisis are all effectively tarred black with an undiscriminatingly broad imperial brush and feathered with intellectual fluff.

References

[1] See Steven Simon, "Can the Right War Be Won?: Defining American Interests in Afghanistan." Foreign Affairs July/August 2009: 130-137. Also see William Easterly, "Foreign Aid Goes Military!" The New York Review of Books vol. 55, no. 19, December 2008 Alex de Waal, "No Such Thing as Humanitarian Intervention: Why We Need to Rethink How to Realize the 'Responsibility to Protect' in Wartime," Harvard International Review , March 21, 2007.

[2] See Niall Fergusson's Colossus: The Price of America's Empire , New York: Penguin, 2004.

[3] For studies which emerged several years prior to the election, see Mark Danner Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror , New York: New York Review Books, 2004, Meron Benvenisti et al., Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture , Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004, Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Pratel, eds.,   The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and most recently Jane Mayer The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals , New York: Vintage/Anchor Books, 2009.