Presidential Sponsored Session: The Year of the Boomerang: Pasts, Presence and Futures in the “War on Terror”

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

2022 marks twenty years since the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba began incarcerating and torturing Muslim men in what came to be known as the “War on Terror.” In her essay “Where is Guantánamo,” Amy Kaplan brilliantly traced the overlapping histories of European conquest and US empire building as genealogies for both the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, and the imperial violence that the US was to unleash in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in what is now known as the “Forever War.” This session wants to take seriously Kaplan’s arguments and grapple with how the “Global War on Terror” is not exceptional from but rather endemic to the long history of racial capitalist enclosure that has come to define the global order.

In reckoning with this terrain, we will probe the assemblage of violence that has emerged in its wake, including but not limited to the rise in explicit expressions of white supremacist violence and its state sanctioned corollaries, the racial panics around migration and refugees, the necropolitical calculus of policing and military infrastructures under the rubric of “anti-terrorism,” the enduring and expanding structures of settler-coloniality, the expansion of carceral regimes within and across border-zones, the use of lawfare as technologies of control, and the planetary war of counter-insurgency across the battlespace. Amidst the ruins, we will reflect on not only how power and domination have shape shifted over the last 20 years, but we also want to also call attention to – and celebrate - the insurgent world-building practices and movements that have also emerged and been sustained.

Sohail Daulatzai explores the afterlives of empire through text, short film/video, sound and the curatorial. He’s the author and co/editor of several books, including Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America; Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue; Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop; With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism and Empire; and Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic. He has directed film/videos for critically acclaimed artists Algiers, Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), and a cine-geography for Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. He curated the exhibit Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop and Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International and was co-organizer for the exhibition Iconic: Black Panther. He has published essays widely and written liner notes for the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album, the liner notes for the DVD release of Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, the centerpiece in the museum catalog Movement: Hip-Hop in L.A., 1980’s – Now, and an essay in iconic photographer Jamel Shabazz’s retrospective book Pieces of a Man. He is Professor in the Departments of Film and Media Studies, African American Studies, and Global Middle East Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Erica R. Edwards is Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University. She is the author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire and Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize. She is the co-editor of Keywords for African American Studies, published in 2018 by NYU Press. Her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as differences, Callaloo, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Black Camera.

Joanne Barker is Lenape (a citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians). She is professor of American Indian Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Her books include Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist (UC Press, 2021) and Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Sovereignty (Duke U Press, 2011). She serves on The Segorea Te Land Trust Board.

Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based organizer, writer, and currently Visiting Associate Professor of global political thought at Vassar College, having taught previously at Drexel University, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas. He has held visiting research positions at the College of William and Mary's Decolonizing Humanities Project, NYU's Hemispheric Institute, and the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Radical Américas and author five books: We Created Chávez (Duke, 2013), Building the Commune (Verso, 2016), Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017), A World Without Police (Verso, 2021), and most recently, Anticolonial Eruptions (University of California, 2022).

Nadine Naber is a scholar-activist and Professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is co-founder of the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program at the University of Michigan and founder of the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC. Dr. Naber is the author/co-author of five books: Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (2012); Race and Arab Americans (2008); Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2010); The Color of Violence (2006); and Towards the Sun. She is an expert author for the United Nations; a board member of the Arab American Action Network; editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies; co-founder of the organization Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity and founder of Liberate Your Research. She is currently Co-PI of the report, The Status of Racial Justice for Arab Americans in Chicago at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at UIC. She is co-author of the forthcoming book, Pedagogies of the Radical Mother (Haymarket Press).

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Sohail Daulatzai, University of California-Irvine

Panelists

• Erica R Edwards, Yale University

• Nadine Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Geo Maher, Vassar College

• Dylan Rodriguez, University of California-Riverside