An era and its end

Nasser Abourahme

City, 2011, vol. 15, issue 3-4, 433-440

Abstract: In the Arab world, the War on Terror operated as a logic of 'erasure’ that was never just about destruction. Through twin modalities of representation and interpellation it sought to deconstruct political community, in actions so forceful and over-determining that they would render subjects hollowed out, creating empty vassals ripe for re-making. The walling, enclosure, demolition ushered in by this era were always accompanied by a consumerist and normative underbelly--a subjectifying dimension that sought to re-figure subjects along dominant axes of values. It is in this sense that the War on Terror and its affective registers seeped into people s everyday lives and their senses of self, inflecting sensibility, creating taboos, manipulating memory. This was a dominant order of things that was to be almost instantly shattered in the spring of 2011, when popular revolts not only swept away the local apparatuses through which the war was normalized but signalled the undeniable emergence of an 'authentic’ Arab subject; a subject no longer willing to tolerate invisibility or distortion and ready to re-appropriate the very terms of representation.

Date: 2011
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.608506

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