Reading America From the Peripheries

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American Quarterly, Volume 67, Number 1, March 2015, pp. 219-229 (Review)

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| 219Reading America from the Peripheries

©2015 The American Studies Association

Reading America from the PeripheriesAlex Lubin

The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. By Vijay Pra-shad. New York: Verso, 2013. 300 pages. $26.95 (cloth). $18.95 (paper).

The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. By Paul Amar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 328 pp. $94.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper).

Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. By Laleh Khalili. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 368 pages. $90.00 (cloth). $27.95 (paper).

During the European revolutions of 1848, the Austrian minister to France, Klemens von Metternich, is reported to have said, “When France sneezes Eu-rope catches a cold.” Metternich’s assessment of the regional and global impact of the French Revolution has been recently reprised and applied to the United States: “When America sneezes the whole world catches a cold.”1 Yet the global impact of an American sneeze in this case does not refer to the revolutionary impulse of American-styled Jacobins but to the globally hegemonic influence of American economic and military power. Since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the United States’ geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, the United States has entered into an unprecedented phase of unipolar power in which it has the ability to control flows of capital, people, and technology. Yet American global supremacy is contested and transforming because of eco-nomic crises within the United States and emerging centers of economic and political gravity on the peripheries of the American Empire, such as from the constellation of global South states known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

Ever since Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s influential Cultures of United States Imperialism mapped a new course of studies of US Empire, American studies scholars have focused on the critical dialectic between domestic social and political relations and foreign policy.2 Kaplan and Pease’s groundbreaking book was published precisely at the historical moment that the nature of US

| 220 American Quarterly

power was undergoing a transformation from the Cold War to something else. The post–Cold War United States saw escalating deindustrialization, fierce at-tacks on the social safety net (leading to the end of “welfare as we know it” in 1996), and escalating incarceration under the war on drugs. Yet the events of September 11, 2001, marked a turning point in the post–Cold War era. The war on terror knit together the domestic logics of policing and prisons with the foreign policy of fighting terrorism. In the war on terror, the homeland, as Amy Kaplan and others argue, was expanded to include America’s global battlefields.3 As the war on terror increasingly linked a global constellation of battlefields and prisons, US-dominated neoliberalism sought to control flows of capital and direct them into Northern banks.

Despite the important critical lens that has focused attention on the global and domestic battlegrounds of the war on terror and neoliberal economics, American studies remains mostly a field rooted to knowledge produced about the United States by scholars drawing on archives within the United States. Yet it is critical for understanding the global economic and military battlefields of the United States to shift the focus to the global sites confronting the impacts of US economic and military power. If American studies practitioners agree that the United States is an empire, then perhaps we should proceed to map the United States not only from within but—importantly and critically—from the perspective of its imperial peripheries where we can view empire in all its global movements and presences. What do the imperial laboratories of Latin America teach us about the rise of austerity and prisons in the United States? Can the formation of South–South economic cooperation counterbalance the dominance of US-led globalization? What do imperial sites of policing and counterinsurgency tell us about the United States’ role as a node in a global transit of military tactics and practices?

The important and engaging books reviewed in this essay provide precisely the sort of reorientation required of a new transnational American studies that is not merely concerned with the projection of America abroad but also with the circulation of American-led economic and military initiatives from the peripheries back into the United States. While these books do not directly engage with each other, and employ different methods and geographic foci, they nevertheless help diagnose the “colds,” to return to Metternich’s quip, produced by US economic and military power. Moreover, they enact a trans-national scholarship focused on the global routes of economic and military knowledge, tactics, and strategies. Taken together, the books under review illustrate the consequences of US-led neoliberal governance, from the perspec-


tives of those who confront its direct effects and within the geographies where social movements in opposition to neoliberalism take place.

Vijay Prashad’s The Poorer Nations is an ambitious, complex, and lucid history of a political and economic project that emanated from the global South. The book is a sequel to Prashad’s highly acclaimed The Darker Na-tions: A History of the Third World in which he argued that the third world was not a place but a project aspiring for a greater level of “planetary democracy” organized around demands for peace, bread, and justice.4 This insight helped Prashad map the contours, dreams, and aspirations of the nonaligned move-ment, a movement that Prashad demonstrates articulated a vision of national sovereignty for nonaligned countries, as well as an international community of nonaligned nations that advocated for social justice not provided by Cold War hegemons. In The Poorer Nations, Prashad argues that the history of the nonaligned movement waned at the end of the Cold War partly because of how the global North, or what Prashad calls the “Atlantic project,” instituted a global economic program presided over by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has led to privatization and austerity around the world. Prashad’s “poorer nations” represent the remains of the third world’s nonaligned move-ment, facing increasing US-led neoliberalism and the inequality that came with these policies. Yet The Poorer Nations narrates not merely the demise of the third world project but also the demise of the hegemonic Atlantic project and the possible end of neoliberalism.

The Poorer Nations takes us through a vast archive of United Nations confer-ences and reports, and economic policies, and within the social movements of the poorer nations struggling to make meaning of the world presented to them both by their own leaders and by the global community. Prashad documents what Boutros Boutros-Ghali terms, in the book’s preface, the “global tango” in which neoliberalism confronts the project of the global South. The Poorer Na-tions begins by telling the story of the transition in the 1970s from an economic contest between the nonaligned movement’s vision of a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO), proposed in the UN General Assembly in April 1974, and Atlantic liberalism, which was represented by the Brandt commis-sion (named after former German chancellor Willy Brandt). The NIEO, a set of economic proposals made to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, was the third world’s economic plan to alleviate global wealth inequality and to produce a more equitable international economic order. The Brandt commission proposed a model of North–South cooperation that would shrink the widening wealth gap between the North and South and included


debt relief and economic cooperation. Yet, according to Prashad, the fate of the South’s NIEO and the Atlantic project’s version of liberalism had been sealed in 1971 when the United States successfully delinked the US dollar from the gold standard, allowing the United States to print more currency to dominate the Atlantic project.

The termination of the gold standard led to a precipitous rise in global commodity prices, including oil, food, and other staples. These transforma-tions had disastrous consequences for the poorer nations. Inflated commodity prices did not benefit the global South, where oil and other natural resources were plundered. During the late 1970s the United States took control of the international economic community through its formation of the G7—a group of seven finance ministers from the nations representing the largest global economies—and its eventual insistence that major international decisions in the United Nations take place in the exclusive club of the Security Council, and not in the democratic General Assembly. By the 1980s neoliberalism became the normative process of the international economic order by which the richer nations maintained and grew their wealth by directing the flows of global capital to Atlantic banks. According to Prashad, neoliberalism produced an uneven marketplace dominated by low-wage production in the South and low-cost consumption in the North. “Although the United States is only six percent of the world’s population, it consumes forty percent of its raw materials and energy output” (92).

The new international order understood the poverty of the third world to be the third world’s own fault, the result of what social scientists described as a “culture of poverty.” Prashad notes that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s influential analysis of the black family was similar to his analysis of global poverty, as he articulated it as the US ambassador to the United Nations. By this view, the global North offered the only way out of debt for the third world: exporting their raw materials and earning foreign exchange, and thereby transferring wealth from the third world to the first. Prashad describes neoliberal economic demands as a haunting foreign entity: “The newly aggressive IMF appeared as a beacon of hope in the sky, hovering around, taking measurements, then swooping down to scuttle all hope of deliverance, all hope of liberty. . . . it is no surprise that a third of Thai children surveyed by Bangkok’s Rajabhat Institute thought that the IMF was an unidentified flying object” (62).

The middle parts of The Poorer Nations document growing movements within the global South to challenge the dominance of US-led neoliberalism. In 1986 the South Commission was formed as a bulwark against Northern economic policies. The commission sought to reinvigorate the ethos of the


nonaligned movement and the NIEO, and it represented an attempt by the leading economies of the South to contest US economic hegemony. Rather than reproduce the neoliberal policies that had exacerbated inequality, the South Commission, which emerged in conjunction with various social movements that developed among women, workers, and peasants (termed “fourth world movements”), committed to providing for basic economic needs within the South. For a moment in the mid-1980s these fourth world social movements and the South Commission shared a desire to produce goods within the South for domestic consumption and to foster cooperation among Southern nations.

By the 1990s, however, the fourth world social movements and the South Commission grew apart, largely because elites within the South dominated decision making and the agenda. Prashad focuses on the economic ascendency of Japan and China during the 1990s as examples of “neoliberalism with Southern characteristics” (12). While Prashad views the formation of South–South cooperation as crucial to the poorer nations’ challenge to neoliberalism, he criticizes the poorer nations for their failure to reject neoliberalism and to embrace the fourth world social movements.

In the final chapter of The Poorer Nations, Prashad offers a “dream history of the South” in which he asks what the world would look like if imagined from the perspective of the fourth world. In this example, Prashad exemplifies the “possible history” in his title in order to imagine a utopian future. In 1992 the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization found that “over 780 million people, mainly in Africa, South Asia and Latin America, do not have enough food to meet their basic daily needs for energy and protein” (231). Responding to these devastating data, Prashad looks to global revolts across the South such as the Zapatista rebellions against neo-liberalism, the international environmental movement, and the international women’s movement. In these movements on the front lines of US-led economic policy, Prashad finds pieces of solutions that, if assembled properly, might elicit a more humane planetary order. “A broth of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, Marxism, communism, populism, and social Catholicism, alongside the memory of messianic great leaders (from Bolívar to Péron) and indigenous communitarianism,” Prashad asserts, “has created a slew of ideas, traditions, and resources for the political struggles across the region” (260).

The Poorer Nations distills a complex economic history into a lucid and engaging narrative. Although the book focuses on what US-led neoliberalism meant for the global South, this focus demonstrates a historical trajectory back to the global North, as European—and increasingly US—austerity programs were first practiced in the laboratories of the poorer nations. Moreover, The


Poorer Nations provides a historical materialist history of economic transforma-tion that helps us understand the shift to neoliberal governance in our times. Indeed, the ascendance of neoliberalism has not only meant a new global economic model but also the rise of a security industry required to police and protect the interests of capitalism amid the production of global inequalities. It is the global transit of economic and security policies that concerns Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago as well as Laleh Khalili’s Time in the Shadows.

Amar’s The Security Archipelago considers a similar era of US-led neoliberal ascendancy as Prashad’s The Poorer Nations, but not through economic history; instead, Amar studies neoliberalism as a set of discursive formations that guided urban redevelopment and spatial politics in two megacities at the peripheries of the neoliberal world order—Cairo, Egypt, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Security Archipelago is a prescient interdisciplinary analysis that anticipates the Arab rebellions in Cairo and locates them in a longer history of what Amar calls “human security states.” Human security is a concept that Amar employs with great success to identify ways that governmental and nongovernmental entities together govern space and drive development projects by appealing to securing bodies and protecting heritage. Amar’s analysis is highly sensitive to both the disciplining function of human security discourse and its possibilities as a framework to discuss human needs. In this way, Amar’s discussion of hu-man security parallels Prashad’s in identifying a tension between implement-ing “neoliberalism with Southern characteristics” (Prashad 12) and making a global South that prioritizes its own needs. The Security Archipelago helps us understand how both visions for the global South employ a discourse of human security.

Moreover, Amar’s text focuses less on an economic history of neoliberalism and more on the global security infrastructures required to police and secure the northward flow of southern capital. Hence The Security Archipelago is about mapping a global flow in security tactics and knowledge across the peripheries of the global North and in places like Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, two cities at the forefront of international development strategies. Amar argues that human security discourses are not only coercive mandates given to the global South by the North but are also developed locally within the global South and represent a contest between elites and nonelites over basic needs. Elaborating on the book’s title, Amar notes that “the practices, norms and institutional products of these struggles [in Cairo and Rio] have . . . traveled across an archipelago, a metaphorical island chain, of what the private security industry calls ‘hot-spots.’” Rio and Cairo, then, have been “pioneering test sites for neoliberalism” since the 1970s (15).


The Security Archipelago presents several case studies that exemplify the human security framework of neoliberal developmentalist narratives in Cairo and Rio. In the first example, Amar discusses global imperatives to police cit-ies during international conferences such as the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio and the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. In both cases Amar demonstrates that Rio and Cairo were laboratories of a particular form of securitization that relied on the mili-tarization of public security, the humanitarianization of military intervention, and the “moralistic hypervisibility” of sexuality and security (67). In both cases the city had to be secured, but the discourse of security was framed as “human security,” required to guarantee cultural heritage, global tourism, and proper bodily comportment.

In the second example Amar focuses on forms of neoliberal governance that emerged within Cairo and Rio in the 1980s and 1990s. Here we see how securing the cities was not merely about policing and containment but also about governance and privileging one vision of human needs. Through the 1980s and 1990s Amar argues that Cairo and Rio were laboratories, as well as originators, of a new “international architecture of human-security governance” increasingly imposed on the global South by the North (68). For example, during this time Rio adopted New York’s “quality of life program” and “broken window” policing, which transformed policing into a war on gangs, the poor, and the otherwise marginalized. Amar therefore is interested in a series of moral panics over queers in Cairo and Rio. In both cases the “human security” logic led to sweeps of presumably perverse districts that threatened these cities’ im-ages as global tourist destinations that catered to elites.

In the most provocative section of The Security Archipelago, Amar discusses Mohamed Atta’s vision for urban redevelopment of Cairo’s Islamic quarter. Atta, of course, was one the architects and culprits in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Amar demonstrates that Atta was a promising architect who imagined Islamic Cairo as a space that would be religiously driven yet open to market relations as well. In this way, Atta imagined the city as a space of religious modernity, in which moral and gender propriety would be normative. Yet neoliberal imperatives demanded that urban redevelopment serve the interests of global tourism and corpora-tions. Hence the logic of rescuing urban heritage combined with transna-tional security imperatives, as local authorities employed US policing tactics and knowledge in thwarting local attempts to renovate Islamic Cairo from the standpoint of people like Atta. Amar’s point here is that human security imperatives did not enable a space for people like Atta to engage indigenous


visions of development; while most Egyptians responded to human security imperatives by turning to populist movements, Atta turned to a conservative and distorted vision of Islamic jihad.

Amar also focuses on attempts to renew Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas for cultural tourism and to eliminate sex trafficking from Copacabana’s beach. Here we see state policing and security forces collaborating with humanitar-ian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in ways that demonstrate the imbricated logics of humanity and security. As Amar argues, “For Brazil to assume leadership of the democratic Global South . . . the image of Brazilian law enforcement had to change from Death Squad to Rescue Mission, from authoritarian to humanitarian, from national security to human security” (184).

The final chapter of The Security Archipelago provides the most sustained analysis of the spaces of hope made available within the framework of human security. Here Amar focuses on what he terms the “feminist insurrections” within the Egyptian revolution. Amar demonstrates how the Egyptian women’s movement contested the global security logic rooted to a protection-of-women discourse. In particular, Egyptian women challenged the logic of international aid that tied donor funds to how recipient nations treat their women. Instead, the women’s movement in Egypt argued that such aid regimes were part of attempts to institute “international gender enforcement” (224) and that it was the practices of the international human security regime and of Egyptian police and military that most threatened Egyptian women. As Amar argues, Egyptian women postulated human security through a different lens that focused on rights to the city and to basic needs. Indeed, these are rights echoed by the fourth world social movements described in The Poorer Nations.

The Security Archipelago describes the transition in international governance from liberalism to neoliberalism, which for Amar amounts to the ascendance of securitization. While Amar’s focus is on two megacities at the peripheries of the neoliberal order, he gestures throughout his study to how and why ideas of securitization, especially from the United States, circulate across the globe. It is precisely the global movement of colonial policing and security across the colonial world that interests Khalili in Time in the Shadows. Khalili focuses on how liberal states engage counterinsurgency tactics across colonial and metropolitan battlespaces; her ambit is less the economic formation of neoliberalism than a long history of counterinsurgency tactics that helps us understand the contemporary US war on terrorism.

Time in the Shadows provides a deep chronological history of the global borrowing and movement of military strategies and tactics between colonial outposts and imperial metropoles. Khalili is interested in how liberal states


and empires have managed colonized and enemy populations in the past and present. She argues that liberal states justify confinement and counterinsur-gency measures through discourses of law, population management, and good governance. Moreover, Khalili demonstrates through detailed archival research a global circuitry of imperial policing and confinement strategies that helps us to map a world produced not only through neoliberal globalization but also by global North military violence.

Where Khalili’s work intersects with Prashad’s The Poorer Nations and Amar’s The Security Archipelago is in its sharp focus on neoliberalism’s inter-est in good governance, population control, and social work as rationales of counterinsurgency tactics. Just as Prashad identifies Moynihan’s belief that the global South’s poverty was a result of a culture of poverty within the South and Amar identifies NGO interests in protecting Egyptian women from Arab society during the Arab revolutions, Khalili frames liberal counterinsurgency tactics as motivated by discourses of rescue, human uplift, and protection. Yet Khalili is less interested in the era of neoliberal economic ascendance than in situating the US-led war on terror in a long genealogy of colonial policing and control, engaged in by the United States on the North American frontier, the French in Algeria, and the British in India.

In the first section of Time in the Shadows Khalili focuses on the movement of policing and confinement tactics across colonial outposts and imperial metropoles. In one example, Khalili shows that the United States modeled its expeditionary campaigns in the Philippines, Caribbean, and Latin America on the mid-nineteenth-century wars targeting Indigenous peoples of North America waged on the North American frontier. “Many US military gover-nors of the Philippines” she observes, “had fought and administered Native Americans, and they compared various Filipino peoples—both favorably and unfavorably to their former charges” (18). Hence liberal states justify and frame their counterinsurgency measures as beneficial to colonial populations and as forms of military control that are clearly distinguished from the more violent forms of colonial violence practiced by nonliberal states.

Most revealingly, Khalili shows that in the second half of the twentieth century, liberal states understood counterinsurgencies through a discourse of social work; this argument echoes Amar’s theorizing of “human security.” Framed in terms of good governance and human protection, liberal states present counterinsurgencies in the late twentieth century as promoting liberal values. Hence, as Khalili argues, the US military in Iraq promoted its counter-insurgency tactics as an “ostensibly humanitarian agenda that relies far more on pliant proxies . . . than on gung-ho occupying forces, [and] depends on


scientific ethnographic knowledge of the peoples who are to be made legible to the state” (57).

The second half of Time in the Shadows engages the war on terror most directly, as it focuses on the US detention facility at Guantánamo, proxy pris-ons, and detention “black” sites. Khalili argues against Schmidt’s and Agam-ben’s theses on the state of exception, in which they argue that the sovereign suspends law during moments of national emergency. Instead, Khalili argues that Guantánamo illustrates the imbrication of law and lawfulness in a system of exceptionalism. “Liberal empires and conquering power,” she argues, “cre-ate ostensibly lawless places through a conscious and deliberate legal process of temporally and functionally setting aside one body of law and adopting another, or in rarer and more extreme instances, replacing legal procedures with administrative procedures” (67). The island prison of Guantánamo, for Khalili, is produced via legality, rather than the exception to legality.

Khalili also analyzes the proxy detention and rendition sites that enable liberal states like the United States and Israel to engage in extrajudicial and violent carceral methods while denying culpability. Hence during Israel’s oc-cupation of Lebanon, Israeli forces relied on the Southern Lebanese Army’s violent confinement and torture practices at the Khiam prison. Meanwhile, the United States employs various black sites and rendition prisons like Abu Ghraib to wage counterinsurgency warfare in places like Iraq, as well as to socially engineer new colonized subjects. Indeed, such rendition sites not only confine but also surveil and discipline bodies.

Time in the Shadows helps us understand how liberal counterinsurgency tactics used in the US war on terror ricochet back to the United States in the form of militarized securitization in US cities. Drawing on the analysis presented in Time in the Shadows, we can better understand how and why private military firms like Blackwater, used in counterinsurgency operations throughout the Middle East, were used to secure New Orleans in the after-math of Hurricane Katrina. The US security state during the war on terror has increasingly framed domestic urban uprisings as terrorist activities requiring counterinsurgency tactics.5

These three important books are in dialogue in important ways. Two key threads run through them: the ascendance of the twin global forces of US-led neoliberalism and US-developed counterinsurgency and securitization. Each author asserts that the United States is a critical supplier of neoliberal economic policy and securitization tactics, yet, importantly, the books are not focused primarily on the United States. While Time in the Shadows is the most concerned with US counterinsurgency tactics, it masterfully engages a global


and comparative archive in order to position the United States in the context of a longer history of liberal states engaged in counterinsurgencies. Prashad maps the economic history of neoliberalism and the challenges to it mounted by the global South, while Amar and Khalili map various examples of global securitization and counterinsurgency. We might further the work begun here by placing the map of US-led neoliberalism over the map of US-dominated securitization and counterinsurgency in order to overlay economic policy and international warfare. The history of neoliberalism tracks well with the history of the US-led war on terror, and we would do well to consider how US mili-tary policy and imperial histories of counterinsurgency track with economic interests in regulating the flow of international capital from South to North.

Reading America from the peripheries of US-led neoliberalism and securiti-zation also suggests new ways to analyze forms of securitization and economic austerity within the US metropole. The global economic and security processes that wrecked Islamic Cairo, or the economic policies that raised commodity prices and transferred wealth from the poor to the rich, or the counterinsur-gency tactics used by the United States in Iraq can help us understand the precipitous rise in incarceration in the United States, the austerity measures enforced on cities like Detroit, or the moral panics that continue to characterize social movements among the poor. While it may be true that “when America sneezes the whole world gets a cold,” it is increasingly true that America sneezes because it has a cold.

Notes1. The phrase is a cliché most commonly used in media to describe the impact of the US economy on

the global economy. See National Public Radio, “When American Sneezes, Cliché’s Spread,” January 24, 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18368571.

2. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

3. Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 82–93.

4. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).5. This is a dynamic that I elaborate in Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab

Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Reading America From the Peripheries

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