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GLOBAL HAUNTINGS
Respondant: Rei Terada, Comparative Literature link to faculty profile
Moderator: Erin Trapp

"The Sexual and Racial Fantasy of the Abu Ghraib Tortures: Notes for an Investigation"
Simón Trujillo, University of Washington

Various strands of the public and academic intellectual discourse surrounding U.S. torture policy, especially the now infamous Abu Ghraib torture scandal, have focused mostly on the ways in which the tortures represent the yet another formulation and performance of governmentalized imperial power in the context of the deterritorialized and despatialized war on “terror.” For example, Judith Butler’s reading of the governmental procedures that reconstitute prisoners of war at Guantánamo Bay into “enemy combatants” in her book, Precarious Life, concentrates on the surreptitious reemergence of sovereign power in the context of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. On a different level, Susan Sontag’s analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos in her essay, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” argues that the tortures are somewhat the effect of both the United States’ bungled occupation of Iraq and a general tendency of American culture’s saturation in endless representations of sex and violence.

Yet there lingers a number of questions that haven’t been directly addressed at this level of discourse. What populations are juridically deemed fit for torture and under what conditions? More specifically, what is the dense relationship between the acts captured in the Abu Ghraib photos and the governmental protocol designating their legitimacy?

In this paper I will outline the ways in which the tortures that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison, through the Bush Administration’s legal manipulation and the imperialist mindset of the Iraq war, can be read as performances of racial and sexual fantasy. Since the legal justification for torture and the disregard of the protections outlined in the Geneva Conventions primarily rest on the idea that the detainees are “non-state actors,” the performative stripping of the legal rights of the detainees also perpetuates the imperialist tendency of viewing annexed ethnic populations as “half or partially formed.” In this view, the Abu Ghraib tortures might be read as the enactment of fantasy that marks the re-emergence of racist thought expressly disavowed at the level of the neo-imperial liberating (civilizing) mission. But it appears that the forced rendering of “otherness” on the bodies of captive Iraqis marks a repetition with a difference of the history of the imperial imaginary. In this context, where the production of the detainees’ guilt or “deficiency” is no longer necessary to legitimate the exercise of U.S. governmental power, the questions surface: what work does this racial and sexual fantasy do and for whom? In other words, how do we understand the repertoire of sexual and racial fantasy at Abu Ghraib if it is no longer necessary for the justification and operation of State power?

It is this space that my paper will investigate—the workings of racial and sexual fantasy at Abu Ghraib in both its repetition and its difference from the all-too-familiar orientalist constructs—with the hope that Hortense Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” can shed some light on this difference. To trope on her argument of the “ungendering” of African slaves in middle passage, in the evacuation of the legal rights of the detainees, their bodies are then reincorporated with Western fantasies of the sexual and racial “otherness” of Islam. In this context, how do the tortures and their legal justification reflect broader, more insidious assumptions governing the rational(s) for the Iraq war as an appendage of the war on terror, and what heterogeneous and uneven effects do they produce?

"Unusual Encounters: Hauntings in Contemporary Colombian Culture"
Luis Ramos, University of California, Berkeley

My paper examines the notion of haunting as a mode of reading predicaments in contemporary Colombian culture.  While by “haunting” I am referring to the heightened sense of disjuncture that is said to accompany an encounter between two states conceived as distinct from each other (e.g., the material versus the virtual, the ocular versus the tactile, inert versus sentient life), my definition will depart from standard accounts in two important respects.  For one, I am more specifically concerned with encounters that enact this sense disjuncture on a larger social scale (e.g., between nation and state, elite and subaltern classes, the post-Industrial North and the peripheral South). Conversely, I will be less concerned with emotions described in major terms (i.e., as in the gothic genre’s predilection for dread and terror), but rather, with those more closely linked with minor encounters of fleeting pleasure or pain (e.g., amusement or irritation, diversion or discomfort, distraction or guilt). By offering an expanded definition of the notion of haunting, on the one hand, I seek to bring to bear the relevance of the spectral to the uneven socioeconomic circumstances that characterize contemporary Colombian life. By foregrounding minor (rather than major) emotions as my object of inquiry, on the other, I seek to situate my project on grounds more suitable for readings of the spectral in the everyday.

My approach consists in reading the spectral in figures that tread an uncertain line between life and death, between the rule of law and its suspension, and between civil and foreign war.  In the film La Vendedora de Rosas and the novel, La Virgen de los Sicarios, for example, I examine why protagonists are haunted by ghostly apparitions that either foreshadow an imminent tragic end or stage an elusive return to an idealized past. What do the zones of lawlessness these figures traverse and the economies of death they circulate in, suggest about the relationship between local histories and global designs, to use Walter Mignolo’s terms? How does the affect of disjuncture that this relationship yields at times serve conservative and at times emancipatory ends?

My preoccupation with figures of indeterminacy, as I wish to call them, will bring to bear a number of concerns about the relation between spectrality and subalternity for Colombia, and by extension, Latin America. In short, my interest in the spectral lies in what Pheng Cheah recently called “the most apposite figure for freedom today1” that is, in the shadowy and contradictory forms emancipatory affect takes under neoliberal global conditions.  How, for example, does recent Colombian cultural production register not only the enfeebling effects of global capital upon subaltern sectors of the population, but moreover, the ways subaltern subjects are seduced by and acquiesce to the logic of the market? Similarly, how might a spectral reading of contemporary Colombian culture shed meaning upon the indeterminate character of Colombian modernity wherein distinctions between life and death, the exception and the rule, and civil and foreign war have been routinely blurred, often with the express purpose of ushering in a neoliberal economic order?  Finally, how might one think about the everyday character of violence in large sectors of Colombian life—the very creation of “deathworlds” as Achille Mmembe has so aptly put it—in relation to the specter of global capitalism that looms over it? 

"The Spectre of Comparisons in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost"
Su-Ching Wang, University of Washington

Coming from a Dutch-Ceylonese family, educated in Sri Lanka, England, and Canada, the booker prize award-winning author Michael Ondaatje develops from his multicultural experiences an interracial and international consciousness that flourishes in his latest novel Anil’s Ghost (2000).  Set against the historical background of political upheaval engulfed in Sri Lanka from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the novel represents in Ondaatje’s unique artistic way a brutal war against unknown enemies, an authoritarian government under suspicion of murdering its innocent civilians, and a suffering people. Into the war-torn country steps the protagonist Anil Tissera, a local-born but western-trained female forensic anthropologist dispatched by the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva to investigate the organized campaigns of murder on the island in a seven-week project that nobody is very hopeful about.   

This paper begins by outlining the general history of the island’s colonial past and its decolonizing present, tracing back to the specific social and historical context of the novel.  Once a highly heterogeneous composition stratified mainly by a rigid caste system, the Ceylonese people under the British rule were categorized into distinctive racial communities—the Sinhalese, the Tamils, and the Moors (Sri Lanka’s Muslims)—and differentiated from one another as “fixed entities” in possession of distinctive and somewhat incommensurable characteristics. Drawing on the colonial imprint of racial discrimination, this paper reads Sri Lanka’s current civil war as a brutal continuation of the social struggles among “fictive ethnicities” and the political conflicts between the west and the east.

Empowered by the knowledge and experience she has acquired over the years abroad, Anil breaks the predestined gender boundary between man and woman, passes into a “higher” and ‘whiter’ race, and shifts from a local woman to a western forensic specialist, from the gender oppressed to the racial oppressor.  The third world woman successfully incorporates both western civilization and modern science and subsequently turns into a representative of western values as a whole in the face of the local men.  Belonging at the same time to, in Etienne Balibar’s words, a western linguistic community and an eastern racial community, Anil has been forced to witness factually and figuratively the Ghost from her past with a split consciousness of her national belongings and from a double perception of her racial and linguistic “ethnicities.”

In light of Benedict Anderson’s insightful observation on the spectre of comparisons and with respect to Balibar’s studies on the correlation between nationalism and racism, this paper proposes that “Anil’s Ghost” is not a fixed entity or a particular dead person but a complex assemblage of haunting images and memorable figures that surface one after another from Anil’s childhood memory in Sri Lanka and adulthood experience in the west.  Caught between the east and the west, between the past and the present, between the internal racism and the external racism in the nation formation of post-independence Sri Lanka, Anil has constantly been invited to see “her” Sri Lanka and “her” western world “through an inverted telescope” and subsequently been haunted by the Ghost—the spectre of comparisons—the “strange experience” of simultaneously seeing things “close up and from afar.”