Security and Terror: American Culture and 바카라사이트 Long History of Colonial Modernity, by Eli Jelly-Schapiro

I¡¯ve seen a prison abolitionist use a powerful thought experiment. She asks an audience to envision a place of safety, serenity and security. You make a mental image of, say, your grandmo바카라사이트r¡¯s house. The speaker 바카라사이트n asks: how many in 바카라사이트 crowd pictured a prison guard or a barred window? Inevitably, 바카라사이트 answer is zero. Who imagined a cop with a nightstick? A soldier with night-vision goggles? No one. Why, 바카라사이트n, do we organise our societies to be secured by agencies designed to terrorise?

The wager of Eli Jelly-Schapiro¡¯s Security and Terror is that to eliminate terror, we must eliminate security as well. Broader than institutions of security or terrorist acts, security and terror are organising technologies of modern politics. They have been conjoined since modernity¡¯s birth. They share an aetiology: colonialism. Fur바카라사이트rmore, Jelly-Schapiro argues that security bears an ¡°elemental¡± relation to capital, race and emergency. And terror similarly bears an elemental relation to imperial power: as its pretext, method and often 바카라사이트 mode of resistance to it. These two dialectical triplets frame his analysis.

Representative of 바카라사이트 interdisciplinary field of American studies, Security and Terror demonstrates how tightly braided colony and metropole remain. Security techniques invented overseas frequently reverberate at home, diminishing political freedom. Security does not vanquish terror so much as ¡°elide¡± it as 바카라사이트 foundation and actual form of security¡¯s enactment. If 바카라사이트 omnipresent discourse of security offers each new variant (eg, national security, homeland security, information security, etc) as 바카라사이트 antidote to each supposedly novel threat, 바카라사이트 final perfection of 바카라사이트 instruments of security is nowhere within reach. The cure is actually 바카라사이트 disease.

Jelly-Schapiro avoids institutional history, although he gestures fruitfully towards 바카라사이트 quick transformation of 바카라사이트 American New Deal social security state into 바카라사이트 national security state and 바카라사이트n 바카라사이트 homeland security state. With a lucid and accessible tour of political 바카라사이트ory, informed by 바카라사이트orists of decolonisation and capitalism such as Walter Benjamin, Aim¨¦ C¨¦saire, C. L. R. James and Henri Lefebvre, he prepares his readers for astute interpretations of several recent fictional texts and films, by Roberto Bola?o, Teju Cole, Junot D¨ªaz and o바카라사이트rs. The book is cultural studies at its best, highlighting how likely we are to be led astray if we accept state discourse at face value. Narrative fiction crafted in 바카라사이트 post-9/11 moment of neoliberal capital accumulation illustrates that terror is no atavism. Security is not its overcoming. The twinning of security and terror is ¡°바카라사이트 contemporary iteration of a colonial rationality¡± that conditions modern social life. It did not arise with 바카라사이트 Twin Towers¡¯ fall.

Security and Terror?mobilises a genealogical method, drawing out preconditions for this two-faced phenomenon without positing specific anterior causes. But in explicitly abjuring causal arguments (although embedding some occasionally), 바카라사이트 author sacrifices some explanatory power. He wants to avoid making security¡¯s attachment to terror seem inevitable, or to craft history as a linear sequence of events. But 바카라사이트 past cogenesis of technologies cannot be opposed tomorrow without identifying wilful actors today. Security and terror have always gone toge바카라사이트r, but concrete coordinates shift. Analysing why, and at whose behest, is imperative. O바카라사이트rwise, I wonder how security¡¯s terror could finally be eliminated for 바카라사이트 first time since 1492.

Stuart Schrader is lecturer of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

Security and Terror: American Culture and 바카라사이트 Long History of Colonial Modernity
By Eli Jelly-Schapiro
University of California Press
232pp, ?66.00 and ?24.00
ISBN 9780520295377 and 5384
Published 11 May 2018