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Terror and after...Homi K. Bhabha

Online publication date: 03 December 2010

To cite this Article Bhabha, Homi K.(2002) 'Terror and after...', Parallax, 8: 1, 3 — 4To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13534640110119579URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534640110119579

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parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 1, 3–4

Terror and after...1

Homi K. Bhabha

In these past, dark days it has been diYcult to draw a line between the outrage andanxiety provoked by terrorist attacks, and the urgent need for some more humaneand historical re� ection on the tragedy itself. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?The appalling images of death, destruction and daring that invaded our homes onSeptember 11th left us with no doubt that these unimaginable scenes belonged to amoral universe alien to ours, acts perpetrated by people foreign to the very � bre ofour being. But CNN had a sobering tale to tell. While the headline news staggeredfrom one towering inferno to another, the ticker tape at the bottom of the screeninterspersed its roll-call of the brave and the dead, with lists of Hollywood movies –� lms that had told a similar story many times before, and new, unreleased moviesthat were about to tell it again. What was only an action movie last week, turnedon Tuesday into acts of war. Same mise-en-scene , diVerent movie.

I do not want to blast Hollywood, nor to rail against the violence of the mass media.And I am certainly not suggesting, wistfully, that life follows art because that onlyrarely happens. I have chosen to start with the global genre of the terrorist action � lmin order to question the widely canvassed cultural assumptions that have come toframe the deadly events. Tuesday’s terrorism was a manifestation of a much deeper‘clash of civilisations’, we were frequently told. One night this week, BenjaminNetanyahu developed this thesis and ended up by placing Israel just oV the EastCoast of America. The next morning deputy secretary of defence Wolfowitz aYrmedwide international support for the US from nations that he described as belongingto the ‘civilised world’ and the ‘uncivilised world’.

Returning to CNN’s ticker tape of terrorist movies and special eVects, demonstratesthe futility of framing the event in such a divided and polarized civilizationalnarrative. Each of the unimaginable actions we were subjected to on our tv screenson Tuesday, have been repeatedly imagined and applauded in movie houses acrossthe country by law-abiding Americans, and successfully exported to other ordinary� lm-loving folks across the world. However, the decision to implement and administerterror, whether it is done in the name of god or the state, is a political decision, not acivilizational or cultural practice. Ironically, the ‘clash of civilisations’ is an aggressivediscourse often used by totalitarians and terrorists to justify their worst deeds, toinduce holy terror and create a debilitating psychosis of persecution amongstoppressed, powerless peoples. When we use the civilizational argument against them,

parallaxISSN 1353-464 5 print/ISSN 1460-700X online Ñ 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/13534640110119579

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we are, unwittingly perhaps, speaking in the divisive tongue of tyrants. WhenAmerican foreign and economic policy is conducted in terms of the civilizationaldivisions of ‘them’ and ‘us’, the nation assumes that hawkish, imperialist aspect thatprovokes a widespread sense of injustice, indignation and fear. The embattled andembalmed narrative of civilizational clash is often deployed to justify the recklessdestruction of civilians who are suspected by virtue of their culture (read secondnature), of being terrorists or protecting them.

Once we see terrorism as an organized political action, rather than the expressionof cultural or civilizational ‘diVerence’, we can both � ght it and look towards thefuture. A future that makes common cause between the American victims of terror,and those peoples around the world who are fated to live in countries governed byregimes or organizations that implement such unlawful and inhuman policies. Onlythose societies of the North and the South that ensure the widest democraticparticipation and protection for their citizens are in a position to make the deadlydiYcult decisions that ‘just’ wars demand. To confront the politics of terror, out ofa sense of democratic solidarity rather than retaliation, gives us some faint hope forthe future. Hope, that we might be able to establish a vision of a global society,informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared obligationsand responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.

Note

1 This text was originally published on September28, 2001 by The Chronicle for Higher Education.

Homi K. Bhabha is Professor in the department of English and AmericanLiterature and the WEB Dubois Institute of Afro-American Studies at Harvard.

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