Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power 9781138483477, 9781351054744

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Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power

This volume explores the panic that is a central affective register of our current international order. Fears of Somali pirates, “Gypsy” kidnappers, African warlords, Ebola, “Mexican meth,” pimps, coyotes, gangs, climate refugees, and more structure the dark side of a metropolitan unconscious. These are terrors over things that (might) cross borders, threatening the sanctity of territoriality and capital. Inspired by scholarship challenging panics around human and sex trafficking, the contributors to this volume develop the umbrella category of the global moral panic. Embracing the challenge of grasping a phenomenon not previously regarded as cohering, they consider panics provoked by travel, passage, and transgression; panics over bodies that move. Like panics over trafficking, the episodes narrated here ride and feed a field of common sense regarding crime, rights, and state power. Their logics of victims and villains nourish notions of the centrality of punishment, drawing from and feeding taxonomies of gender, race, and nation, solidifying the order craved by capital. They spotlight the coloniality of power, the ongoing salience of empire, the savior logics of rescue, and the profound sexism organizing hierarchies of bodies and places. Panic, this volume diagnoses, is a crucial, undertheorized facet of contemporary local-global relations. Micol Seigel is Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author of Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018) and Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke, 2009).

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

4 Fashion and Masculinities in Popular Culture Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas 5 Geomedia Studies Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds Edited by Karin Fast, André Jansson, Johan Lindell, Linda Ryan Bengtsson, and Mekonnen Tesfahuney 6 Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror The Melancholic Sublime Matthew Leggatt 7 New Feminisms in South Asian Social Media, Film, and Literature Disrupting the Discourse Edited by Sonora Jha and Alka Kurian 8 Women Do Genre in Film and Television Edited by Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz 9 Reclaiming Critical Remix Video The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works Owen Gallagher 10 Ecologies of Internet Video Beyond YouTube John Hondros 11 Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power Edited by Micol Seigel

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power Edited by Micol Seigel

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Micol Seigel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-48347-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-05474-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Editor’s Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction: Global Moral Panics and the Affective Contours of Power

vii ix xi

1

M icol S eigel

Part I

The Coloniality of Panic

25

1 Privateers and Public Ends: Piracy as Global Moral Panic

27

J atin D ua

2 Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness: Responses to Children’s Militarization in Uganda and the US

45

M ichelle M oyd , F rances M . C lar k e , and   R ebecca J o P lant

3 Ebola: Keywords

67

A dia B enton

4 A Panicky Atmosphere: On the Coloniality of Climate Change

87

A lex C hambers

5 The Panic over Human Smuggling: From the NineteenthCentury Coolie Trade to Today’s Migrants E lliott Young

108

vi Contents Part II

Too Mobile: Panic at the Borders

129

6 Rescuing the Blonde Angel: The Global Captivity Narrative and the Panic of 2013

131

S usan L epselter

7 The Everywhere Drug War: Narcoterror and the Global Flows of the Methamphetamine Imaginary

144

T rav is L innemann and Kyra M artine z

8 Black Bodies, Wrong Places: Rolezinho, Moral Panic, and Racialized Male Subjects in Brazil

158

O smundo P inho

9 Circulating Sin: Sailors and Benevolence in Early Nineteenth-Century New York

179

Dana L ogan

10 Transnational Securityscapes: Central American (Immigrant) Youth and the “Military Option”

199

E lana Zilberg

Part III

Resisting Rescue: Sex/Work

221

11 Stop the Woman, Save the State: Policing, Order, and the Black Woman’s Body

223

Rudo M udiwa

12 “Modern-Day Slavery”: The Analogy Problem in Human Trafficking Reform

244

J ulietta H ua

13 Saving Love: Compassion, Desire, Violence, and Deceit in Late Capitalism

264

C ourtney M itchel

14 “And Still We Rise”: Moral Panics, Dark Sousveillance, and Politics Otherwise in the New New Orleans

275

L aura M cT ighe

Index

299

List of Figures

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 6.1

Film Poster for Climate Refugees; climaterefugees.com 91 Still from Climate Refugees 99 Still from Climate Refugees 99 Still from Climate Refugees 100 Still from Climate Refugees 100 Still from Climate Refugees 100 The “Blonde Angel”; https://uk.reuters.com/article/ukgreece-girl/greece-riveted-by-mystery-of-blonde-angelidUKBRE99I06620131019 132 7.1 “Flow of transnational crime and violence,” digital image from Bob Price, “Texas Border Security - A Strategic Military Assessment,” texasgopvote.com 30 September 2011; www.texasgopvote.com/­ immigration/texas-border-security-strategic-militaryassessment-tx-ag-commissioner-­todd-003353 152 8.1 Police Action at Vitoria Shopping Mall. Video frame from YouTube, 2013; www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WoLa1Rw42b8 160

Editor’s Acknowledgments

THANKS to the Global Moral Panics Working Group, a group of Indiana University faculty and graduate students who accompanied this project in its myriad stages: Marlon M. Bailey, Claudia Breger, Lindsey Campbell-­ Badger, Alex Chambers, Lessie Jo Frazier, Sara Friedman, Ross Gay, LaNita Campbell, Scott Herring, LaMonda Horton-­Stallings, ­H ilary Kahn, Susan Lepselter, Dana Logan, Courtney Mitchel, Rudo Mudiwa, and Susan Seizer, especially my co-PI’s on early grants, ­LaMonda, Sara, Dana, and Alex; to my “brain trust” of Rudo, Courtney, and Alex, and to Alex yet again for his tireless willingness to brainstorm new titles; to the committed and tireless Stepanka Korytova; to all the authors in this volume; to the members of the undergraduate Global Moral Panics seminar, especially Christopher Brown, Mel F ­ rancis, Grace Shen, Stone Irr, and Phil Fisher; to Ronak Shah, who first made the observation that human trafficking was a moral panic when he was an undergraduate; to the participants in the GMP Symposium in fall 2014 who did not end up in this volume but enriched us all with their ideas and comments nonetheless: LaNita Campbell, Steven Osuna, Edith Kinney, Angelique Nixon, Imani Johnson, Jenna Loyd, and Kimberly Walters; to the generous colleagues who reviewed post-Symposium essays anonymously so that I cannot name them here; to Gisela Fosado at Duke University Press for her confidence in and support for the project from our earliest conversations; to Felisa Salvago-Keyes and Christina Kowalski at Routledge for lasting confidence; to those who consulted and participated from afar, including Paul Amar, Laura Briggs, Svati Shah, Lucinda Ramberg, Carole Vance, and Stanley Thangaraj; to Garrett Felber, Mary Gray, and Kung Li, who provided editorial feedback in the late stages; to Sarah Zanti for editorial reflections and logistical support of every conceivable kind; and to the following Indiana University funding bodies: the College Arts and Humanities Institute, including Jonathan Elmer, ­A lexander Teschmacher, Luis Roncayolo, and Patsy Ek; the College of Arts and Sciences, especially associate deans Jane ­McLeod and John Lucaites; the Center for the Study of Global Change and its wonderful director Hilary Kahn, who came in on the ground floor of the project and accompanied it the whole way; the Cultural Studies Program and Shane Vogel, director; and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

List of Contributors

Adia Benton (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University) is a cultural anthropologist with interests in global health, biomedicine, development and humanitarianism, and professional sports. Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015), explores the treatment of AIDS as an exceptional disease and the recognition and care that this takes away from other diseases and public health challenges in poor countries. A second book project, tentatively titled Cutting Cures, focuses on the global movement to improve access to quality surgical care in poor countries, using it as a case study for describing and understanding ideological formations in global public health. Other recent publications have focused on visual analyses of humanitarian images, race and humanitarian professionals, security and military paradigms during epidemics, and temporality in an era of antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS. Alex Chambers (PhD Candidate in American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington) is writing a dissertation called “Ecopessimism and the Arts of Survival in the Twenty-First Century,” which examines an archive of poetry, theater, film, and historical documents that reveals a growing sense of the precariousness of the planet’s livable environments. His essays and poems have been published in venues such as Gulf Coast and Puerto del Sol, and he has presented scholarly work at the American Studies Annual Meeting, Dimensions of Political Ecology, and other conferences. His writing has won awards from the Associated Writing Programs and the Academy of American Poets. Frances M. Clarke (Senior Lecturer, History Department, University of Sydney) focuses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction; interpretations of war; and, more recently, the history of childhood. Her first monograph, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North, jointly won the AHA’s biennial Hancock Prize for the best first book in any field of history. She subsequently began several collaborative projects with Rebecca Jo Plant, a specialist on twentieth-­ century US history, one on a little-known civil rights protest over the

xii  List of Contributors segregation of Black “gold star” mothers in interwar America, which was published in the Journal of American History in 2015, and a second on the relationship between childhood and militarism in America from the Revolution to the modern era. Dr. Clarke teaches courses on a range of topics in American history, from the colonial era through to the turn of the twentieth century, as well as courses dealing more broadly with the history of war, gender relations, and Victorianism. Jatin Dua (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on maritime piracy in the Indian Ocean and projects and processes of governance, law, and economy along the East African coast. His current book project, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean, explores maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean within frameworks of protection, risk, and regulation by ­moving between the worlds of coastal communities in northern ­Somalia, maritime insurance adjustors in London, and the global shipping industry. He is conducting research for a second project on the materiality and mobility of navigation, including technologies of risk calculation, credit extension, and the daily forms of circulation and governance that occur across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, a key maritime choke point connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. He teaches on the anthropology of law and regulation; oceanic studies; global capitalism; state and non-state violence; and the various historical and contemporary practices that have been labeled “piracy,” from maritime raiding to the moral economy of hacking. Julietta Hua  (Professor and Department Chair, Women and Gender Studies, San Francisco State University) has a PhD in Ethnic Studies and is the author of Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (2011), which looks at US anti-trafficking law and policy. In addition to publishing on human rights and trafficking, she has published on chimpanzee sanctuaries and the limits of rights frameworks. With Kasturi Ray, Hua has been researching political organizing around intimate labors. She teaches electives in WGS on immigration, human rights, law, and politics. Susan Lepselter (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington) explores the poetics of both popular media and everyday life in contemporary American culture, focusing particularly on captivity narratives, themes of gender and class, and discourses of memory and trauma in American social life. Her book The ­Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (Michigan) offers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. Winner of the Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Gregory Bateson Prize, the project

List of Contributors  xiii reads conspiracy theory as an index of late twentieth-century ­American ­ alaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward m social mobility. She teaches courses on American captivity narratives, gender, nature and culture, and the ethnography of everyday life. Travis Linnemann (Assistant Professor of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University) works on the linkages between the wars on drugs and terror; so-called narcoterror; psycho-geographies and landscapes of violence; and policing imaginary, such as that found in HBO’s True Detective series. Travis’s new book, Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power, is just out from NYU Press. He has also written on police and state violence, and drug control in the British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology; Crime, Media, Culture; Critical Criminology, and elsewhere. Dana Logan (Postdoctoral Research Associate, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University) earned her PhD in religious studies from Indiana University. Focused on the role of religious ritual in democracy, her current work reframes American “civility” as a specific set of rituals historically developed by elite Protestants and carefully crafted as religious but unsectarian gestures; her project aims to explain the religious heritage of these mores and the context in which they operate in contemporary US society. Kyra Martinez (graduate student, Criminal Justice Graduate Program, Eastern Kentucky University) is completing an MA in Justice Studies. Her research concerns cultural criminological, abolitionist, and transformative justice studies. Laura McTighe  (Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College) is an ethnographer and oral historian whose scholarship is grounded in more than twenty years of work in movements to end AIDS and prisons. Her research centers the often-hidden histories, practices, and geographies of struggle in the US, and asks how these worlds “otherwise” are emerging, taking root, and transforming our present. With her interlocutors, she has undertaken fieldwork to understand and intervene at the intersections of health, healing, and criminalization, through an engaged abolitionist ethics. Her current book project, “Born In Flames,” is a collaborative ethnography of race, religion, and the spatiality of opposition, which she has researched and written alongside the leaders of Women With A Vision in New Orleans. Her next major project, “Moral Medicine,” is a historical ethnography of the emerging women’s carceral sphere. Her writings have been published in  Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2018);  Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2017); Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Cages (University of Georgia Press, 2012); Islam and AIDS: Beyond Scorn, Pity and Justice (Oneworld Press, 2009); and a variety of community-based publications.

xiv  List of Contributors Courtney Mitchel (PhD Candidate, American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington) is currently writing a dissertation on aesthetic experience as a way for marginalized subjects to enact alternative forms of subjectivity entitled, “Feeling Human: Aesthetic Experience and the End of Enlightenment Humanism.” She is the recipient of several awards, including the IU College Graduate Fellowship, and has been a HASTAC Scholar. Michelle Moyd  (Associate Professor, History, Indiana University, Bloomington) is a historian of Eastern Africa, with special interests in the region’s history of soldiering and warfare. Her first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, explores the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East ­A frica, today’s Tanzania. The book examines how askari identities were shaped by their geographical and sociological origins, their ways of war, and their roles as agents of the colonial state. She is currently at work on a short book entitled Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which will examine the spectrum of African experiences in the war, especially as soldiers and workers. Her teaching draws on overlapping interests in African history; histories of conflict, militarization, and humanitarianism; the global history of World War I and its aftermaths; and labor history. Most recently, she developed the course “Histories of Humanitarianism,” which will be taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Rudo Mudiwa  (PhD Candidate, Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington) is currently completing a dissertation titled “Transgressive Mobilities: Zimbabwean Women Moving Against C ­ risis and Containment.” Her research was funded by the Social ­Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research ­Fellowship. She has published in This is Africa and Africa Is a Country. Osmundo Pinho  (Professor, Center for Arts, Humanities and Letters, Federal University of the Recôncavo of Bahia, Cachoeira campus) is a sociocultural anthropologist and Cultural Studies scholar interested in race, class, state policy, and violence in Brazil. He has published extensively on race and class dynamics in Bahia, São Paulo, Mozambique, and other parts of Brazil and Africa, with a focus on bodies, sexuality, and the regulation of public space. Rebecca Jo Plant  (Associate Professor of History, University of California, San Diego) is a historian with research interests in women’s gender and family history; the history of therapeutic culture and the psychological professions; and the social and psychological impact of war in nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA. She is the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America

List of Contributors  xv (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and articles on motherhood in historical, history of medicine, and history of science venues. She is currently working on two book projects, one with Frances M. Clarke and another also centrally concerned with war, masculinity, and social change about how military psychiatrists capitalized on wartime opportunities to legitimate their expertise and how their efforts affected both professional and popular notions of mental illness and masculine subjectivity. Micol Seigel (Professor of American Studies and History, Indiana University, Bloomington) teaches and studies policing, prisons, and race in the Americas. She is the author of Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke, 2009; finalist for the Lora Romero First Book Prize of the American Studies Association), and a new book, also from Duke, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Previous work has appeared in Social Text, Transition, Social Justice, the Journal of American History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and elsewhere. Micol’s research has been supported by the ACLS, Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell Society for the Humanities, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and Harvard’s Charles Warren Center. In 2018-2019 she will hold the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in International Relations at University of São Paulo. Elliott Young  (Professor of History and Director of Ethnic Studies, Lewis & Clark College) is a historian of Latin America. His most recent book, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas, the Coolie Era to WWII (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), is a transnational history exploring the construction of the idea of the “illegal alien” throughout the Americas. He published two other books on borderlands history, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (Duke University Press, 2004) and Continental Crossroads (Duke University Press, 2004), a volume of essays by new scholars in the field. His articles have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including Past & Present, the Western Historical Quarterly and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. In 2003, he cofounded the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. Dr. Elana Zilberg  (Associate Professor of Communication, University of California San Diego) is an urban anthropologist. Her first book, Space of Detention: The Production a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Duke 2011) interrogated issues of security, space, and mobility between the United States and Latin America from the Cold War to the War on Terror. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, “Bridging Divides at the Los

xvi  List of Contributors Angeles River: An Aesthetics of Integration—A Politics of Refusal.” This research extends her interest in questions of race, space and power into the domains of urban nature, infrastructure and environmental justice. Her previous work has appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, City and Society, Wide Angle, Anthropological Theory, Journal for Contemporary Ethnography, and in various edited volumes on globalization, neoliberalism, and Latin American and Latino studies.

Introduction Global Moral Panics and the Affective Contours of Power Micol Seigel

As the current US president regularly demonstrates, panic is a central affective register of politics today. Hype over opioid addiction, immigration, crime, and other strategically distracting threats structures POTUS’s approach to policy and cements support from his base. What domestic observers of these geopolitical pyrotechnics might miss is that these dynamics are shot through with global currents, redolent with the legacies of colonialism updated by neoliberal strategies of globalization. Fears of Somali pirates, “Gypsy” kidnappers, African warlords, Ebola, “Mexican meth,” pimps, coyotes, gangs, refugees, migrants, and so much more, structure the dark side of a still-metropolitan unconscious. These are terrors over things that (might) cross borders, and whose crossings threaten the sanctity of the structures anchored to territoriality and capital. These panics are defined not by place or scale but by travel, passage, transgression. These are panics over bodies that move. To think these panics all together, as a category, is insightfully diagnostic. Contemporary panics draw from and feed taxonomies of gender, race, and nation, and solidify the order craved by capital, and to examine them as the contributions to this volume do is to place the workings of these consequential social categories in high relief. The chapters that follow capture the flows of fear, pity, regret, egotism, cruelty, contempt, desire, solidarity, and other affective formations, which structure and shape the movement and placement of labor, capital, and violence. They make groundbreaking interventions into the particular conversations they address, and collectively they show us something vital about the world today. In this introductory chapter I try to explain what I think that is, why thinking about panic as the affective dimension of international order, in particular for elites and a metropolitan middle, directs an Xray onto the vectors of power that define all our lives. To begin this task, I draw out some of the themes running through the volume’s analyses of myriad panics, gesture to underlying structures, and try to convey what is at stake for the agents of panic. I begin with a discussion of terms, sharing the challenge of naming the dynamic showcased in this volume, of struggling to allow a shape to emerge among detached pieces not heretofore regarded as cohering. I review the widely,

2  Micol Seigel even exhaustively familiar concept of the “moral panic” and make a case for recharging it, in debt to recent, brilliant critics of anti-human trafficking campaigns. This requires an explicit discussion of method, thinking through the Cultural Studies approach that emerges in the project overall, although the individual authors range across a disciplinary and interdisciplinary spectrum. I then turn, substantively, to some of what there is to glean from this approach. Panics proffer a window, I suggest, or a mirror; in any case, some sort of looking device. They do this because they are narrative, grand stories made up of small ones. I highlight three of these micro-tales, consequential mosaics of affect and power: the urge to save, “the child,” and “order.” The individual chapters emerge along the way as I draw from them for empirical content and note their authors parenthetically. I finish by explaining the book’s sections, organized to amplify the implications drawn out in this introduction. The introduction telescopes the varied chapters into a single frame so that the whole comprised of their parts may be seen. What they reveal is the crucial, significant, undertheorized role of panic in organizing nested local and global flows of power.

Naming the Global Moral Panic What now feels like a solid appreciation began with confusion and frustration a half dozen years ago. A poster on my campus featured a young woman with smooth hair, scanty clothing, and a downcast gaze; it advertised a journalist’s talk about human trafficking. The flyer conveyed vulnerability and a disturbing sexuality. I took it with me to ponder, asking others what it made them think, and a particularly brilliant student put it perfectly: “it’s a moral panic!” Yes, we mused; a global one, anchored by first-world women yearning to save exotic third-world women from scary brown men. We rehearsed the well-worn grooves of argument learned from Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Stuart Hall and coauthors.1 Why were these points not obvious to those who crafted the poster? Over the following months, an idea blossomed, and we held a conference, bringing some 20 scholars from across the US and beyond to consider “global moral panics.” This volume launched from that shared inquiry, shedding and adding fragments as we worked to create a coherent whole. Global moral panics, as the notion turned in our hands, were lamentable “problems,” widely and popularly decried. They were (and are) seen as animated by individual evildoers leaving hapless victims in their wake. They feature menaces looming from the globe’s poor margins, including forsaken urban and rural outposts in the nominal First World, which travel to the gilded sites of postcolonial privilege. They tender global north citizens the role of noble savior via feel-good clicktivist

Introduction  3 measures promising zero structural change (as chapters here by Hua and Moyd, Clarke, and Plant unpack). They incite wild rhetoric blasting the traffickers, narcos, kingpins, guerrilla generals, and Somali “Cap’n Hooks” who need the strong arm of the state, encouraging reformers to embrace a neoliberal bouquet of walls and cages. These “solutions” exacerbate the underlying dispossession and reinforce the victim-blaming, self-congratulatory rhetoric of contemporary global capitalism. These world-shaping, world-revealing fears we called “global moral panics.” We were building, of course, on the notion of the “moral panic,” an old and favored heuristic with which to understand projects of social control organized through affect. Back in 1972, Stanley Cohen offered the concept as a way to understand how certain British youth subcultures were figured as dire threats to the common good. As a Cultural Studies scholar, Cohen was interested in the way the media functioned to channel alarm as well as the role of political rhetoric. He understood that galvanizing a panic served to divert attention from underlying issues, generally much more mundane, less salacious, and more difficult to tackle. Critics interested in these underlying issues, especially racial and class inequality, have found the notion of moral panic invaluable. Pointing to the use of moral panic to channel racial animus, the 1978 classic Policing the Crisis detailed the British panic over mugging, which demonized young Black men. Stuart Hall and his fellow writers pointed out that moral panics redirect political and economic instability toward fear of a scapegoated social group, building support for punishment while turning people away from analyses of structure. 2 Cultural Studies has paid ample attention to moral panics as a rallying force for reaction and retrenchment but not explicitly to what happens when panics stretch over national borders and around the curve of the globe. Perhaps we have therefore not realized how critical these global moral panics are, especially today. In the era of neoliberalism— the economic paradigm applied since the 1970s based on untrammeled free-market privilege—moral panics travel in the fast lane. ­Neoliberalism accelerates the movement of capital and global elites while hardening borders to labor migration. Its widening of the rich-poor gap and its profit-obsessed natural resource extraction have inflicted a brutal immiseration of those at the margins. The forced labor migrations of human trafficking are only one example of the “opportunities” neoliberalism bestows on the unlucky. Our conceptualization in this volume extends to a range of others, but human trafficking defines a key launching point. Campaigns decrying trafficking were a key spark to our process, and scholarship critiquing those campaigns has been enormously helpful along the way. An entire field of fierce and insightful critiques of anti-human trafficking campaigns was developing as we worked, challenging the moral panics around human trafficking into all kinds of labor. This collection rests gratefully on

4  Micol Seigel these thinkers’ shoulders as it broadens to theorize an umbrella phenomenon under which anti-human trafficking panics belong. The critiques of anti-trafficking campaigns respond to a situation in which human trafficking is the subject of runaway hype. Politics and popular culture abound with fury for the evil of the pimps and coyotes; sympathy for the innocent victims, often pictured as nubile, young, and of course female; and fiery resolution to rescue. Hugely exaggerated numbers elevate the decibel level of outrage. Theaters teem with major motion pictures, news outlets overflow with exposés and denunciations, and legislatures rush to combat the practice. Perceptive scholarship critiques these campaigns. It objects to measures that aim only to punish individual traffickers, noting that it is not primarily “coyotes” and “illegal aliens” who make human trafficking happen but corporations as they seek to bypass labor laws and governments when they fail to curb workplace exploitation. This work points out that human trafficking is not an aberrant labor system but one consonant with and governed by the dictates of global capitalism. Overall, it is global inequality that shapes labor markets and migration, such scholars conclude, and global inequality that must be remedied in order to stop human trafficking. 3 The critique of campaigns against sex trafficking is particularly sophisticated. Scholars note that mainstream anti-human trafficking discourse all too easily slips its object over to the subset of sex trafficking, offering titillation and (melo)drama, harnessing the productive power of moral outrage and female victimization to projects of gender policing and category-border control. The sexual purity drives of the turn to the twentieth century echo in today’s panics as moralistic saviors work to secure normative heterosexuality by policing extrafamilial, nonreproductive sexuality and effacing women’s agency in choosing sex work as work. They present people who make rational choices to migrate and sell sex, and who are disempowered by the “rescue industry,” which offers mostly the chance to “return to sometimes oppressive family structures, work in factories, or serve as nannies and maids for the global bourgeoisie.”4 Anti-trafficking efforts may fail to make a dent in the problem they intend to solve, but they nonetheless have serious impact. Critics have pointed out a range of specific political work that they have accomplished, exacerbating the problems they purport to solve.5 They make things worse ideologically, as the panic-crisis framing distracts from the analysis of global inequality, and legislatively, as counterproductive border controls send more migrants to dangerous illegal crossings and exploitative working conditions once they arrive. Reformist campaigns deepen underlying inequities, worsen labor conditions, aggravate the health risks of sex work, intensify policing, and militarize public security, further criminalizing the poor. They privilege the masculinist,

Introduction  5 militarist, interventionist state apparatus and attendant frameworks of citizens and rights, fortifying the Enlightenment notions that undergird civilizationist, nationalist, racialized colonial and capitalist paradigms.6 This critique of anti-trafficking is a feminist critique of global capitalism, which the present volume very much shares. Reaching back to such luminaries as Gayle Rubin, Emma Goldman, and Frederick Engels, we join critics of anti-trafficking campaigns to consider the subtle and naturalized pressures that make it difficult to distinguish labor choice from compulsion, especially at the disadvantaged end of social hierarchies. As authors in this volume also point out, when state-sanctioned violence is used to squelch non-waged survival strategies, there are no genuine choices for laborers. An exhausting, treacherous, disruptive labor migration is never really a freely embraced option. Anti-human trafficking campaigns set the ability to toil as fundamentally equivalent to freedom, no matter its hazards or humiliations. “Freedom,” Gretchen Soderlund grimaces in her rebuke to the rescue industry, “has apparently been downgraded to the ability to engage in wage labor.”7 Human trafficking is a productive little nightmare, like so many (if not all) of these panics; it functions to contain challenges to the logics of capital. The contributors to this volume drink deeply from this critique as they seek to apply its acuity. Like the panic over trafficking, the panics narrated here ride and feed a field of common sense regarding crime, rights, and state power. Their cast of characters, one-dimensional victims and villains, boost shared notions of the centrality of punishment. Ideologically and materially, anti-trafficking and so many other contemporary moral panics fortify both state institutions, such as prisons and borders, and state logics, working together to enhance a “state effect” and to “reiterate the privileged place of the state.”8 These panics share a set of agreements about the legitimacy of state power that rely on, and again buttress, the citizenship/rights framework that reinforces irrevocably compromised state-centered notions of the universal and the human.

Keyword: Global? While “moral panic” clearly helps us think through the cases we share in this book, we realized that “global” as a term misrepresents our thinking in several ways. It suggests a larger scope than is actually the case: while the authors focus on locations around the world (Somalia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, West Africa, Eastern Europe, China, the US, ­Mexico, El Salvador, Central America, the Caribbean, Brazil) and some authors hail from outside the US, the project neither reflects nor describes the entire world. The term “global” flattens the multiple levels of scale at which the chapters work into the largest and most abstract, threatening to mask the critical undercurrents at play. “Global” can invoke the kind of “world history” that ends up meaning not the West but the rest,

6  Micol Seigel but these are not simply panics that take place outside a North Atlantic “home.” Finally, the term can read as celebratory, embracing frictionless flows of people and material objects as some globalization thinkers do, when these chapters actually treat movement that is painfully contested and contained. There are three ways to think about these panics that work better than “global.” The first is transnational. “Global” gestures to several fields that this volume pulls against, perhaps most resonantly the International Relations work that emphasizes states and borders, embracing the nation-­state as frame and unit of analysis. Authors here, contrastingly, problematize the nation-state, showing how panics overflow them and how panic is part of the ideological work that contributes to the reification of the idea of the nation and its borders. The flows of power in this collection are less global, then, than resolutely transnational in that they work through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), multinational trade organizations, corporations, and other liberal and neoliberal formations.9 They transcend and disregard the borders of nation even as they also strive to shore up those porous borders. Second, the panics we outline are traveling rather than global. They concern people and things that span socially anchoring distinctions, whether they enter prohibited nation-states, flaunt categories of gender or race, penetrate the epidermal cover of the body, or belie the protected time-space of childhood. They are not everywhere, as “global” can imply. That they might get somewhere they shouldn’t is precisely the problem. These are panics over fluidity, category error, and movement. Finally, the panics we observe are postcolonial in a theoretical rather than temporal vein. They are refractions of an unevenly postcolonial time that help us see the lasting impact of empire well into the twenty-­ first century. These panics are products of colonialism, indices of anti-­ colonial struggles, active parts of struggles to retain the coloniality of power.10 They often follow a kind of macro-gradient in which the source of panic ostensibly originates in the Third World or global south and travels (or threatens to travel) to an imperial center. In privileged enclaves, nervous people mount campaigns of rescue. The arc of fear mimics colonial withdrawal, though colonialism and its aftermath are disavowed by the proclamation of noble intention. The urge to save is an outward gesture from a metropolitan to a peripheral or former colonial location, confirming the coloniality of power in our nominally postcolonial world. So, the panics we outline here are as much “traveling,” “transnational,” and “postcolonial” as they are “global.” These terms map the saturated terrain of these capacious panics, aptly, if incompletely described by any one. Aspects of all four descriptors are present at times and absent at others, and readers will note the volume’s authors using the terms alternately and advisedly. The core concept of the moral panic,

Introduction  7 with its wonderful emphasis on affect and its revelation of the workings of social control, remains at the center, guiding us across levels of scale; through bumpy, uneven fields of power; and around locations far and near.

Method The overarching method applied in this volume is a Cultural Studies one interested in pulling hegemonic ideas, barely visible at the edges of perception, into the center of the frame. We follow Stan Cohen and Stuart Hall in the classic Cultural Studies goal of bringing curiosity to the production of ideology. All of the chapters challenge assumptions by analyzing rhetoric, discourse, and ideology. Yet we do more. The slippery dynamic that we are trying to grasp and share is not the purview of any traditional academic field. It is an object that has not been the target of scholarly analysis, and like so many innovative analytic objects, it therefore calls up a method of its own. Precisely because the phenomena we are following are so mobile (conceptually as well as geographically), this method must be messy, deft, and wildly interdisciplinary. These moving objects require a great diversity of conceptual strategies and terms, which the chapters brilliantly rally to the task. Bringing together the disparate phenomena we group here as traveling, transnational, postcolonial, and global panics permits critics to examine them not as international crises—isolated incidents requiring specific, limited reforms—but as indices of global dispossession and response. It highlights the range of state, market, and cultural forces that guide border formation and crossing. It allows us to apply conceptual tools from cultural analysis, such as discourse and representation, to critique the flat-footed pragmatism that dominates law and government, and offer alternate framings of migration, labor, trade, and more. The writers in this volume explore analogy and affect, alibi and ideology, performance and ritual, time and scale. They ask how conventional framings of crises support specific governance projects by upholding particular visions of social order and global “security” that serve the needs of transnational capital, and they set different forms of panic in relation to each other to detail the related symbolic strategies and social conditions that facilitate their production. These tactics permit the authors individually and the volume as a whole to move a host of absolutely essential parts of our world from the periphery of our vision into the center. What is it that comes into focus through such a lens?

A Distorting Mirror People fear what is different, or so the truism goes. Yet objects of panic often provoke ire because they are too like the viewer. As the globalized

8  Micol Seigel flows of states and capital gone terribly awry, they hold up a distorting mirror. Pirates redirect trade routes, migrants retrace the paths of pioneers (equally undocumented), and prohibited goods move efficiently through underground economies well outside of state control. These illicit phenomena often resemble their sanctioned equivalents but with a telling distortion. Pirates and narcos, for example, mimic the states whose rents they usurp but strip away the pretense that consent is the basis for trade, showing its real basis in coercion; they bulldoze the notion that trade enriches all because it is so clearly misery that has driven them to their métier. They hold up a looking glass in which state and market actors cannot help but see their ugly sides. A mirror for some is a window for others. Cultural Studies methods let us step through, like Alice, to the other side, where we learn from the panics that elites deploy to contain their rebel avatars. We can see the world the mutineers supposedly menace: the power that relies upon borders and the spatial formations such borders work to contain. The objects of panics sneak over political frontiers; ignore distinctions between illicit and sanctioned kinds of labor; tarnish the holy grail of private property; inhabit the inchoate realm of the sea; introduce disease agents across human immune defenses; and muddy the lines between citizen, alien, and criminal. They show us who, per prevailing power relations, must move; who is supposed to stay still; and who (and what) gets to transcend. Panics are good for thinking in that they trace key currents of power. Panics as windows also frame the constancy of dissent. People panic over threats to the flows of capital that structure inequality, hierarchy, and injustice. Panics therefore refract the racialized and gendered bodies that erupt into public space, the political process, the personal relation. The faceless masses who insist on having not only face but voice. The child who is fully compos mentis, the trafficked (sex) worker who consciously chooses their path, the marginal subject who insists that they will not just survive but thrive. Panics are the index of resistance in the shadow of its repression. The chapters on oil workers’ determination to tell their stories their way (Chambers) and sex workers’ successful struggle to oppose their criminalization (McTighe) showcase resistance most vividly, but it is also visible in chapters on the market women who claim public space in Harare (Mudiwa), favelados who play in Brazilian shopping centers (Pinho), Black sailors in the revolutionary Atlantic (Logan), and more faintly in many of the others. It helps that panics are narrative. A whole little story unfolds within. It’s a story with a moral—an Aesop’s fable. The moral is that there are bad people in the world. This is somebody’s fault, and that somebody should be punished. Panics are stories of evil individuals, never the structural bases of power. Meth is not a moderate Midwestern public health crisis (as Linneman and Martinez detail) but a cataclysmic

Introduction  9 terrorist incursion of terrifyingly Mexican drug dealers. They must be punished and the border reinforced—no health care needed, no public policy for rural poverty, no redistribution to the postindustrial precariat. Black cisgender and transgender women in New Orleans selling sex (as ­McTighe’s chapter submits) are not people trying to make ends meet in a world of meager options whittled further by the racism, sexism, and homophobia of accreted colonial occupations; they are corrupting degenerates who must be identified and isolated. Black women peddling vegetables at market stands in Harare (introduced by Rudo Mudiwa) are not legitimate entrepreneurs but a stain on the name of a nation hyperconscious of its formally postcolonial need to be accorded respect and recognition in the family of nations; vendors, and indeed any other women out in public, must be disciplined. Panics work hard to conceal structure and history. Their stories conceal (and analysis reveals) the deep eddies of racism, coloniality, and misogyny that structure power within and across nation-states. They function as mask, alibi, or distraction from global transactions saturated with state violence such as militarism or resource extraction. For example, the story of Gypsy kidnapping conceals (and Susan Lepselter’s marvelous analysis reveals) the racism still visited upon the Roma, ever punished for disregarding private property, individualism, and territoriality; the myth of race as a real category for human classification; the porousness of national borders; and the Roma’s failure to map onto seamless imagined communities. The story of African child soldiers’ forced recruitment conceals (and the chapter by Michelle Moyd, Frances Clarke, and Rebecca Plant reveals) long and ongoing histories of ­A frican resource exploitation and military invasion by European powers; presumptions of African savagery and ignorance wrapped up in the figure of the innocent dark child; the contrasting assumptions about the entitlement and potential of the white, metropolitan child; and the compulsion through poverty and coercive recruitment in the US of youth of color and poor youth into military and proto-military bodies. The story of human trafficking as a violation of human rights, one that citizens and states can fix, conceals (and Courtney Mitchel’s fresh insight reveals) the essential place of love in capitalism’s logics, not simply to alleviate greed and competition as other theorists have suggested but to power the acquisitive, commodified self that is the basic building block of contemporary consumer capitalism.

Discursive Knots: The Urge to Save Narratives of panic rely on a handful of discursive knots, a series of complex arguments compressed into deceptively simple, seemingly self-­ evident truths. Diamond-dense kernels such as “the child,” “the family,” “morality,” “health,” “human rights,” “security,” and more function

10  Micol Seigel to garrison prevailing inequalities, often as the building blocks of panics. The chapters in this volume show the ways in which these discursive compactions anchor racialized and gendered bodies to places and to work that shortens and worsens people’s lives, and how panics both draw from and feed these discursive tangles. The first of these knots revolves around the impulse to save. Indeed, one of the reasons it can be easy to miss the ubiquity of panic as a defining dynamic of our time is that the impulse so often comes couched as a campaign of rescue. A savior urge is frequently marbled through the flesh of panic: desire to save the Ebola sufferer, the youth seduced into drug use and addiction, the town menaced by drug violence, the starving African fisherman or child soldier, the nation’s reputation, the defenseless maiden trafficked into sex work, the guileless would-be wage earner tricked into sweatshop toil. The family, the law, the nation. These are allegories, narratives of risk and displacement that work to put people back in their “place.” They marshal affect to great consequence. As the family romances of global capital, they provide alibis for the dirty work of preserving inequality through violence. In the end, the noble attempt to save achieves not the kinder, gentler world the saviors believe they deliver but the opposite, as the chapters in this volume explain: punishment of the traffickers, detention of the laborers, invasion of the war-torn land. More cages, amped-up police, and hardened borders alongside deepened grooves of racism, colonial power relations, and gendered assumptions about family and power— altogether conditions for the targets of salvation worse than they were before. The explorations in these pages reveal a terrible paradox tangling the threads of planetary relationships into knots of inequality, oppression, and misery: mighty effort devoted to addressing global wrongs exacerbates the underlying causes. This paradox comes to light when we add affect, supposedly a stream well outside the realm of the economic (not to mention the intellectual), to our analysis of global relations. Reading the stories marshalled by fear, organized by other emotional investments, we see precisely how—and how much—affective narrative matters.

“The Child” Next among these knotty concepts is “the child”; it functions as a proxy for innocence, that deeply racialized and gendered artifact.11 The idea of the child powers panics around child soldiers, kidnapped children, underage workers, sex-trafficked girls, refugee children, drug dealers’ targets, and victims of climate change. The several chapters here (Hua, Mitchel, Young) and the volume of work elsewhere on human trafficking note how this panic relies on and strives to fix ideas of innocence (and therefore also immaturity and incapacity) to female bodies, especially

Introduction  11 white and whitened ones. The chapters also demonstrate the other side of this coin, the impossibility of innocence for young Black and brown men, such as Somali fishermen (Dua), or the favela dwellers whose shopping trips so scandalize Brazil’s upper classes (Pinho). Or, equally, the Salvadorans trapped in cycles of Cold War proxy conflict, exile to the US, racism, poverty and gang membership, military service, and deportation to a second exile in an El Salvador that they do not know (Zilberg). Relatedly, the notion of the family is a building block of many p ­ anics, which fear its vulnerability to such threats as “Gypsies” (­L epselter); drug addiction in white rural areas (Linneman and Martinez); “coolie” ­laborers (Young); heathens (Logan); Black women in public (­Mudiwa); and sex workers, especially when they are Black (McTighe). The n ­ uclear family is a highly racialized concept, as much so as childhood and ­innocence, crime, or terror. Similarly, morality structures stories of women in public space (Mudiwa, McTighe) and the need for religious conversion (Logan). The idea of health is another such brick, highlighted in the piercing chapter on Ebola (Benton). “Human rights” functions similarly, as several authors discern (Hua; Mitchel; Young; and Moyd, Clarke, and Plant). “Human rights” is a bridge discourse, linking ideas of the individual and the family to notions of citizenship, law, and order, and it is with the turn to “order” as organizing concept that we begin to ­detail the specific consequences of panics and the ideological and material structures they deploy.

“Order” What projects are furthered by the invocation of “order?” What order is it that gains from the production of panic? The answers involve carceral state violence in the service of capital in all its familiar forms: borders, cages, police, prison, and poverty visited first upon the poor and the Black—the unevenly developed underbellies of modernity and progress worldwide. Perhaps the best illustration of the use of order in this anthology comes from Brazil, whose national slogan is, after all, “Order and Progress.” Middle-class shoppers all around Brazil panicked when young, mostly Afro-descended men from the favelas went to the mall (Pinho). C ­ oining a term for this “invasion,” the rolezinho, commentators organized outrage about black bodies out of place, reinforcing the ideological link between blackness, poverty, and crime; sparking the implementation of a series of regulations designed to segregate space (such as admitting to the mall only those shoppers who arrived in cars); and exacerbating the harsh policing of Black youth in their neighborhoods and throughout their cities. Order is antithetical to equality. Perhaps not in theory but in practice and in our day. Order means hierarchy, organized by the taxonomies

12  Micol Seigel of race, gender, and their adjuncts: place, space, and work. To say that each person “knows their place” and stays in it, now decoded as the racist bromide it is, is often imagined as archaic, but that is wishful thinking. Order is constantly invoked alongside its sister term “law” and implicitly by its converse “crime.” Law and order as the solution to crime helps organize panics over piracy (Dua); gangs (Zilberg, Pinho); illegal migration (Young); sex work (McTighe, Mudiwa); human trafficking (Mitchel, Hua); kidnapping (Lepselter); and, of course, drug-dealing terrorists (Linneman and Martinez). This last hodgepodge emerges in the North American fear of methamphetamine trafficked from Mexico, which reinforces noxious ideas yoked to a raft of terrible effects. The ideas include racist tropes of Mexicans, other Latin Americans, and Latinos as sneaky criminals; the drug panic so crucial to US mass incarceration; and the mania over “security” and terror over “terrorism,” which now affixes to other panics as if magnetic. The concrete outcomes include immigration restrictionism in law, the tightening of border control, physical threats to brown people in the US, and widening assaults of the “everywhere war.” Even panics not about crime rest on a presumption of order. Invocations of the family are about order, not just moral and gendered but the stable order for capital that the laboring family produces. People in Western nations fear refugees generated by climate change (Chambers) whose arrival imperils metropolitan privilege. The order reinforced is a colonial one as the panic fortifies imaginaries of hapless third-world victims, potentially amassed into threatening hordes, never granted agency or voice. Although they note rich countries’ overuse of fossil fuels and hyperpollution, these panics’ underlying acceptance of the global divide that is the heart of this dilemma means that they cannot mitigate its harms. In another example, North Atlantic nations fear a deadly virus (Benton), reinforcing discursive frames that diminish African sovereignty and equality as subtle as the derogatory name for wild game in West Africa: “bushmeat.” Correspondingly, through health care organized differentially by race and nation, African bodies are produced as disposable while whiter Western counterparts are preserved. Order is spatial as much as conceptual and requires the organizing of bodies. Panics help with the distribution of stasis and movement. Through panics, some bodies are stilled, while others are sent into motion. Sick African bodies are kept in inferior hospitals, while sick white ones are sent for specialized care and quarantine. Migrant workers in the US are swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, idled in detention centers, and deported “home” where would-be migrants are warned to stay put, just like Chinese laborers a hundred years ago (Young). Climate refugees are contained in camps or abandoned to the seas (Chambers). The highways are open to heteronormative white citizens for profit or leisure, especially if their interactions with traveling

Introduction  13 migrants can contribute to state policing projects (Mitchel). “Gypsies” should stay still, and tourists should go everywhere (Lepselter). Black sailors should travel far and wide as long as they do so with the ­Bible in their hands but should be contained dockside when they are in New York (Logan). Poor African-American women should be neither seen nor heard, confined in kitchens, neighborhoods, brothels, or jail (McTighe); poor African women likewise (Mudiwa). Slum-dwellers should stay in the favela unless on the bus to work (Pinho). Salvadorans unwilling to fight and die in the War on Terror should either rot in US prisons or go “home” (Zilberg). Through the violent management of particular kinds of bodies, panics function as widespread social control, enabled by the conceits of liberal democracy. From displacement to immobilization, neoliberalism relies on various modes of forced spatiality as people are both set into motion and contained. Elites and other moral entrepreneurs of panics organize interrelated series of containments and displacements to discipline global flow. Motion and stasis are paired in the experiences of poor migrants who alternately move, delay, flee, hide, scramble, and then often hurry up and wait anyway in screamingly frustrating stints in line at checkpoints or bureaucratic posts; in detention or holding facilities; or as prisoners forcibly idled yet always facing the threat of relocation to other facilities, ever farther from loved ones or laboriously cultivated medical care requests or grievance procedures.12 Stasis and containment are produced by borders, state regulations, the ways in which people are idled and their bodies kept in place. Stasis is about the drawing of boundaries, lines in the sand, restrictive regulations, and about otherwise enforcing immobility. Rescue is more about movement, about spiriting people from inappropriate to appropriate areas. Yet rescue is often containment or containment presented as rescue. There is a dialectic here as containment and rescue are often dependent on each other. The campaign to rescue child soldiers in Uganda, for example, like abolitionism in the nineteenth century, serves the goals of empire, encouraging the West to “fix Africa by invading it” (Moyd, Clarke, and Plant). It strengthens the roles of US-based evangelicals in Uganda who have been so critical to the development of brutal antigay legislation, and it fuels complacency about the militarization of (some) American children and youth. The nineteenth-century campaign to rescue Chinese “coolies” sounded humanitarian but functioned to buttress US empire (Young). The quintessential rescue panic is the one focused on human (and sex) trafficking. People hoping to rescue the victims of this travesty ultimately make migration more risky and dangerous, and that is only the beginning. The effort to make labor exploitation visible (as Julietta Hua explores in depth) obscures the violence of the humanitarian industry, whose interventions are carceral (and, when launched in the name of

14  Micol Seigel protecting women, carceral-feminist), based on raids and arrests and punishment, and upheld by financial as well as state infrastructures. Hua, Mitchel, and Young all point out that anti-trafficking campaigns never approach the structural conditions that dispossess, whether because solutions to dispossession are framed in terms of better and smarter buying practices (Hua); because narratives are framed as melodramas of evil recruiters and innocent migrants that distract from empire and capitalism as causes for labor exploitation, reinforcing imperial state power and global inequality (Young); or because the problem is framed as an immoral aberration of global capitalism rather than an emblematic function of it (Mitchel). Consent for capitalism is produced through these panics by the very people who appear to dissent as they find some small part to oppose in a way that obscures and upholds the whole.

Organization of the Volume The panics examined here help us see the ongoing importance of empire to global conditions today, whether we see the world as neocolonial, thoroughly postcolonial, or so deeply riven by the coloniality of power as to empty the “post” of all meaning. The book’s first section, “The ­Coloniality of Panic,” presents chapters that most clearly set this dynamic open to review. These are explorations of Somali piracy (Dua), Ugandan and US child soldiers (Moyd, Clarke, and Plant), ­Ebola ­(Benton), ­trafficked labor from China in the nineteenth century and Central America in the twenty-first century (Young); and climate change refugees (Chambers). Nothing renders these panics visually better than the surging red arrows illustrating Chambers’s analysis of climate refugees (Figures 4.2–4.6, eerily echoed in Figure 7.1 tracking Mexican narcoterror). Recalling Cold War nuclear missile paths, the arrows trace migrants’ supposed routes from colonial spaces to the North American metropole, conveying menacing velocity and mass. Such flows of resources, ideas, people, and disease run along the grooves set by ­European imperialism and colonialism, and it is no accident that this section gathers three of the volume’s four chapters about Africa, the continent occupied and ill-used to the planet’s most devastating effect. In these panics, we see the not-so-funhouse mirror held up to first-world citizens who work vigorously to deny the histories of exploitation that they are rehearsing. The second section focuses on the treasures that panics are deployed to protect. Panics concern things that travel, as we have noted, that cross many kinds of borders, threatening their sanctity both concretely and in the abstract. National territorial borders are only one of the many boundaries flaunted by people resisting their confinement. “Too ­Mobile: Panic at the Borders” offers a bouquet of these line-crossing terrors: Roma people whose blond children mock the boundaries of race just

Introduction  15 as their itinerant strategies threaten the settled, taxable, surveillable national body (Lepselter); Mexican migrants whose easy transmission over the US’s southern border has long animated corn-fed nightmares, now crossed with the generic images of the War on Terror and meth, a drug whose famous use in white rural communities confounds the borders of ghetto neighborhoods, of rural versus urban space, and of race that are supposed to contain the deadly trade (Linneman and Martinez); youth from Brazil’s vast slums whose leisure activities spotlight the intangible but formidable borders between their precarious shantytowns and the shopping mall’s cathedral of wealth, consumerism, and private property, moreover showing the salience of race in a country that still denies its operation (Pinho); Black sailors who muddy the categorical waters of white Christian West versus dark heathen rest and whose affiliations amidst eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions in Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and elsewhere make them potential carriers of Black radicalism into a sanctum of white supremacy (Logan); and Salvadoran youth who confound national loyalties with their shifting allegiances to gangs and armies, and whose military service renders them not-quite-recuperable subjects of American empire (Zilberg). The crossing of territorial borders without state sanction seems to entail the flaunting of other, more abstract but still critical social categories, such as race, space, and nation, as this section’s gorgeously complex landscapes reveal. If the first section highlights empire, and the second centers race and nation, the last demands that we recognize gender and sexuality as ubiquitous and powerful. Panics that posit the Western subject as savior necessarily draw gender into their construction of objects of rescue, as we observed earlier, sometimes merely through the conception of innocence, often explicitly in the yearning to save women and girls. The bodies that Western empire marks for rescue are predominantly cisgender, heterosexual female bodies, preferably white, though not necessarily in our enlightened age. Nowhere is this more visible than in relation to the figure of the sex worker, an object of rescue and panic, policing and saving, expulsion and incorporation, as explored throughout the brilliant work on anti-human trafficking campaigns acknowledged earlier and in this section’s stories of Black women selling sex or vegetables in ­Zimbabwe’s capital (Mudiwa), the abstract trope of the sex worker as imagined by North American saviors (Hua and Mitchel), or the ­A frican-American cisgender and transgender women who organize and fight their criminalization in New Orleans (McTighe). Closing out the volume, McTighe’s fierce and beautiful account of an indomitable group of activists leaves us charged with their determination to rework a world impoverished in its soul by the violence of capital and cages, and the miserly pressures of their panics. Panic, this volume verifies, is a central affective register of our current international order, whether post- or neocolonial, globalized or

16  Micol Seigel underdeveloped, touching down in innumerable local contexts flushed by global currents. It draws from and feeds categories of gender, race, and nation, and solidifies the order craved by capital. It is our hope that not only scholars but also activists and critics straining to counter the building of ever more walls and cages, who with us reach for a more just world, may find this diagnosis useful.

Notes 1 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. 2 Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; ­Garland, “On the Concept of Moral Panic,” 16; see also Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism; Soderlund, “Covering Urban Vice,” 439; Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State. 3 Anderson and O’Connell Davidson, Needs and Desires; Andreas and ­Snyder, The Wall around the West; Andrijasevic, “Beautiful Dead Bodies”; ­A ndrijasevic, “The Difference Borders Make”; Berman, “(Un)popular Strangers and Crisis (Un)bounded”; Bernstein, “Militarized ­Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism”; Brennan, Life Interrupted; Brennan and ­Mahdavi, Trafficking Myths and Realities; Chacón, “Misery and Myopia”; ­Kempadoo, “From Moral Panic to Global Justice”; Koslowski, “Economic Globalization”; Moore, “Special Report”; Quayson and Arhin, Labour ­Migration; Shah, “Sex Work in the Global Economy”; Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers”; Wong, “The Rumor of Trafficking”; Vance, “Innocence and ­Experience”; Vance, “States of Contradiction.” A number of collective projects also make these points with frequency, including Kempadoo, Sanghera, and Pattanaik, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered; Snajdr and Marcus, “Anti-anti-trafficking?”; Hoang and Salazar Parreñas, Human Trafficking Reconsidered; “Interdisciplinary Project on Human Trafficking”; “Critical Modern Slavery Studies”; and LeBaron and Howard, Forced ­L abour in the Global Economy. See also Critcher et al., Moral Panics in the Contemporary World. To give a sense of the shared timing of this work and ours, a Facebook page, “Critical Modern Slavery Studies,” was created as we were in the midst of conference planning. 4 Agustin, Sex at the Margins; Andrijasevic, “Beautiful Dead Bodies”; Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism”; Bernstein, “The Sexual Politics of the ‘New Abolitionism’”; Blanchette and da Silva, “Mulheres Vulneraveis e Meninas Más”; Blanchette and da Silva, “On bullshit and the trafficking of women”; Brennan, Life Interrupted; Brennan and Mahdavi, Trafficking Myths and Realities; Busza, “Sex Work and Migration”; Chacón, “Misery and Myopia”; Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite; Cheng, “Interrogating the Absence of HIV/AIDS Interventions for Migrant Sex Workers in South Korea”; Cheng, On the Move for Love; Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women”; Doezema, Sex Slaves and ­Discourse Masters; Enloe, “Womenandchildren”; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Haynes, “The Celebritization of Human Trafficking”; Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights; Kempadoo, Sanghera and Pattanaik, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered; Ludwig, “From Somaly Mam to ‘Eden’”; Luibhéid, Entry Denied; Moore, “Special Report”; Pascoe, ­Relations of Rescue; Peters, Responding to Human Trafficking;

Introduction  17 Saunders, “Prohibiting Sex Work Projects, Restricting Women’s Rights”; Schaeffer-Grabiel, “Transnational Media Wars over Sex Trafficking”; Shah, “Sex Work in the Global Economy”; Shah, Street Corner Secrets; Soderlund, “Covering Urban Vice”; Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers”; Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism; Vance, “Innocence and Experience”; Vance, “Thinking Trafficking, Thinking Sex”; Weitzer, “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking”; “nannies and maids” quote from Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers,” 83. 5 To give just a few examples, the anti-trafficking campaigns of the International Organization for Migration reinforced a perception of Eastern European criminality just as countries from the region sought to join the European Union; the Bush administration leaned on accusations of trafficking to justify its foreign policy in relation to Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea; evangelical and right-wing forces in Rio de Janeiro appropriated anti-­trafficking campaigns to renew militarized policing of the poor and derail the liberal reforms of the Lula administration; Andrijasevic, “Beautiful Dead Bodies”; Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers,” 80; Amar, “Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro.” 6 The most thorough critique of Enlightenment paradigms is Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race; the classic critique of state frameworks is Scott, Seeing Like a State; for these critiques in relation to human trafficking, see Amar, “Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro”; Amar, The Security Archipelago; Anderson and O’Connell Davidson, Needs and Desires; Andrijasevic, “Beautiful Dead Bodies”; Andrijasevic, “The Difference Borders Make”; Berman, “(Un)popular Strangers and Crisis (Un)bounded”; Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism”; Bracke, “From ‘Saving Women’ to ‘Saving Gays,’” 247; Brennan and Mahdavi, Trafficking Myths and Realities; Busza, Castle, and Diarra, “Trafficking and Health”; Campbell, Don’t Shout Too Loud; Chacón, “Misery and Myopia”; Cheng, “Interrogating the Absence of HIV/AIDS Interventions for Migrant Sex Workers in South Korea”; Cheng, On the Move for Love; Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue; Easterly, The White Man’s Burden; Enloe, “Women and children”; Fukushima and Hua, “Calling the Consumer Activist, Consuming the Trafficking Subject”; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights; Koslowski, ­“Economic Globalization, Human Smuggling, and Global Governance”; Ludwig, “From Somaly Mam to ‘Eden’”; Mathers, “Mr. Kristof, I Presume?”; Moore, “Special Report”; Povinelli, Empire of Love, 77–78; Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights; Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers”; Vance, “States of Contradiction”; Wong, “The Rumor of ­Trafficking.” For a critique of liberal, humanitarian state projects, see Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Atanasoski, Difference Incorporated. 7 Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers,” 83. 8 Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect”; Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights; quote from Berman, “(Un)popular Strangers and Crisis (Un)bounded,” 37; see also Andrijasevic, “Beautiful Dead Bodies,” 25. 9 I have written about the difference between transnational and international in Seigel, “Beyond Compare”; for a wonderful exploration of “global” as a “concept-metaphor,” see Moore, “Global anxieties.” 10 The “coloniality of power” refers to the persistence of the power relations of colonialism after its formal demise. For while many imperial powers have ended formally colonial relationships, colonial dynamics undeniably persist; Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.”

18  Micol Seigel 11 On “racial innocence,” that is, the ways in which the child can be used to “make political projects appear innocuous, natural, and therefore justified,” see Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 33; see also Chinn and Duane, “Introduction”; Meiners, For the Children? Meiners, “Never Innocent”; Stockton, The Queer Child. 12 Auyero, Patients of the State; Graeber, “Beyond Power/Knowledge.”

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Introduction  19 Bernstein, Elizabeth, and Laurie Schaffner, eds. Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2005. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Blanchette, Thaddeus Gregory, and Ana Paula da Silva. “On Bullshit and the Trafficking of Women: Moral Entrepreneurs and the Invention of Trafficking of Persons in Brazil.” Dialectical Anthropology 36 (2012): 107–25. Bracke, Sarah. “From ‘Saving Women’ to ‘Saving Gays’: Rescue Narratives and their Dis/continuities,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (2012): 237–52. Brennan, Denise. Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Brennan, Denise, and Pardis Mahdavi. Trafficking Myths and Realities: Urban Legends, Moral Panics and Their Collateral Damage. Forthcoming. Busza, Joanna. “Sex Work and Migration: The Dangers of ­Oversimplification— A Case Study of Vietnamese Women in Cambodia.” Health and Human Rights 7, no. 2 (2004): 231–49. Busza, Joanna, Sarah Castle, and Aisse Diarra. “Trafficking and Health.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 328 (June 5, 2004): 1369–71. Campbell, Courtney D. Don’t Shout Too Loud. Portland: Changing Directions Films, 2012. Carby, Hazel V. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 738–55. Chacón, Jennifer M. “Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking.” Fordham Law Review 74 (2005–2006): 2977–3040. Chateauvert, Melinda. Sex Workers Unite: From Stonewall to Slutwalk. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014. Cheng, Sealing. “Interrogating the Absence of HIV/AIDS Interventions for Migrant Sex Workers in South Korea.” Health and Human Rights 7, no. 2 (2004): 193–204. ———. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Chinn, Sarah and Anna Mae Duane. “Introduction” to Child, special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2015): 14–25. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Critcher, Chas, Jason Hughes, Julian Petley and Amanda Rohloff, eds. Moral Panics in the Contemporary World. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Critical Modern Slavery Studies. www.facebook.com/groups/CriticalMSS/ permalink/925035830928296/. Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Dodge, L. Mara. “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime and Prisons, 1835–2000. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Doezema, Jo. “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women.” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (December 1999): 23–50.

20  Micol Seigel ———. “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Sex Workers at the UN Trafficking Protocol Negotiation.” Social Legal Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 61–89. ———. Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking. New York: Zed Books, 2010. Duggan, Lisa, and Nan D. Hunter. Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006. Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin, 2006. Enloe, Cynthia. “‘Womenandchildren’: Propaganda Tools of Patriarchy.” In G. Bates, ed., Mobilizing Democracy: Changing the U.S. Role in the Middle East. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1991. Fassin, Didier. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Fukushima, Annie, and Julietta Hua. “Calling the Consumer Activist, Consuming the Trafficking Subject: Call + Response and the Terms of Legibility.” In Documenting Gender Violence, edited by Lisa Cuklanz and Heather McIntosh, 45–66. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Garland, David. “On the Concept of Moral Panic.” Crime Media Culture 4, no. 1 (2008): 9–30. Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Graeber, David. “Beyond Power/Knowledge: An exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity.” Talk at the London School of Economics, 25 May 2006. Available http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/ download?doi=10.1.1.533.6142&rep=rep1&type=pdf Grano, Daniel A., and Kenneth S. Zagacki. “Cleansing the Superdome: The Paradox of Purity and Post-Katrina Guilt.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 201–23. Hall, Stuart, with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State and Law and Order. London: The MacMillan Press, 1978. Haynes, Dina Francesca. “The Celebritization of Human Trafficking.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 653 no. 1 (May 2014): 25–45. Herdt, Gilbert, ed. Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight over Sexual Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Hoang, Kimberly Kay, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, eds. Human Trafficking Reconsidered: Rethinking the Problem, Envisioning New Solutions. New York and London: International Debate Education Association, 2014. Interdisciplinary Project on Human Trafficking. http://traffickingroundtable.org. Kempadoo, Kamala. “From Moral Panic to Global Justice: Changing Perspectives on Trafficking.” In Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik,

Introduction  21 eds., Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005. Kempadoo, Kamala, with Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik, eds. Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012. Koslowski, Rey. “Economic Globalization, Human Smuggling, and Global Governance.” Journal of Economic Issues 26, no. 3 (1992): 673–705. Lancaster, Roger N. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. LeBaron, Genevieve, and Neil Howard, eds. Forced Labour in the Global Economy: Beyond Trafficking and Slavery short course, vol. 2. London and ­Johannesburg: King’s College London; University of the Witwatersrand, 2015. http://cameronthibos.com/bts/BTS-2-Global-Economy.pdf Ludwig, M. “From Somaly Mam to ‘Eden’: How Sex Trafficking Sensationalism Hurts Sex Workers.” TruthOut July 9, 2014; www.truth-out.org/news/ item/24827-from-somaly-mam-to-eden-how-sex-trafficking-sensationalismhurts-sex-workers (Accessed 1/5/16). Luibhéid, Eithne. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mathers, Kathryn. “Mr. Kristof, I Presume? Saving Africa in the Footsteps of Nicholas Kristof.” Transition 107 (2012): 15–31. McLagan, Meg. “Circuits of Suffering.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28 (2005): 223–39. Meiners, Erica R. For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ——— “Never Innocent: Feminist Trouble with Sex Offender Registries and Protection in a Prison Nation.” Meridians 9, no. 2 (2009): 31–62. Mitchell, Timothy. “Society, Economy, and the State Effect.” In State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by George Steinmetz, 76–97. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (autumn 1988): 61–88. Moore, Anne Elizabeth. “Special Report: Money and Lies in Anti-Human Trafficking NGOs.” TruthOut 27 January, 2015. www.truth-out.org/news/ item/28763-special-report-money-and-lies-in-anti-human-trafficking-ngos Moore, Henrietta L. “Global Anxieties: Concept-Metaphors and Pre-­Theoretical Commitments in Anthropology.” Theoretical Anthropology 4, no. 1 (2004): 71–88. Northrup, David. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Open Democracy: Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. www.opendemocracy.net/ beyondslavery Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press. Peckham, Robert, ed. Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Peters, Alicia. Responding to Human Trafficking Sex, Gender, and Culture in the Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

22  Micol Seigel Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Quayson, Ato, and Antonela Arhin. Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations: The Commodification of Illicit Flows. New York: Routledge, 2012. Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. Razack, Sherene H. Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Saunders, Penelope. “Prohibiting Sex Work Projects, Restricting Women’s Rights: The International Impact of the 2003 U.S. Global AIDS Act.” Health and Human Rights 7, no. 2 (2004): 179–92. Schaeffer-Grabiel, Felicity. “Transnational Media Wars over Sex Trafficking: Abolishing the ‘New Slave Trade’ or the New Nativism?” In Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures, edited by Radha Hegde, 103–23. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Seigel, Micol. “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn.” Radical History Review 91 (winter 2005): 62–90. Shah, Svati. “Open Secrets: Women Soliciting Construction and Sex Work in Bombay.” In Poverty, Gender and Migration, edited by Sadhna Arya and Anupama Roy, 1–11. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006. ———. “Sex Work in the Global Economy.” New Labor Forum 12, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 74–81. ———. Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Snajdr, Edward. “Beneath the Master Narrative: Human Trafficking, Myths of Sexual Slavery and Ethnographic Realities.” Dialectical Anthropology 37, no. 2 (2013): 229–56. Snajdr, Edward, and Anthony Marcus. “Anti-anti-trafficking? Toward Critical Ethnographies of Human Trafficking.” Dialectical Anthropology 37, no. 2 (June 2013): 191–94. Soderlund, Gretchen. “Covering Urban Vice: The New York Times, ‘White Slavery,’ and the Construction of Journalistic Knowledge.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 4 (2002): 438–60. ———. “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 64–87. ———. Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–314. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1988. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Vance, Carole. “Innocence and Experience: Melodramatic Narratives of Sex Trafficking and Their Consequences for Law and Policy.” History of the Present 2, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 200–18.

Introduction  23 ———. “Thinking Trafficking, Thinking Sex.” GLQ 17, no. 1 (2010): 135–43. ———. “States of Contradiction: Twelve Ways to Do Nothing about Trafficking While Pretending To.” Social Research 78, no. 3 (2011): 933–48. Weitzer, Ronald. “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade.” Politics & Society 35, no. 3 ­(September 2007): 447–75. Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, eds. Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. 1st ed. Los Angles: University of California Press. Wong, Diana. “The Rumor of Trafficking: Border Controls, Illegal Migration, and the Sovereignty of the Nation-State.” In Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, edited by Willem van Schendel, 69–100. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Zilberg, Elana. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Part I

The Coloniality of Panic

1 Privateers and Public Ends Piracy as Global Moral Panic Jatin Dua

The Muntakhab al-Lubab, a seventeenth-century chronicle of Mughal India written by the historian Maulavi Kabir Al-Din Ahmad (Khāfī Khān), describes a particularly gruesome incident of raiding at sea. In 1695, the Ganj-i-Sawai, one of the largest Mughal trading vessels belonging to the emperor Aurangzeb, was returning to Surat, a major port in Western India, with around 600 pilgrims from Mecca and revenue from the sale of Indian goods at Mocha and Jeddah. Given its valuable cargo, the ship was heavily armed with 80 cannons and 400 muskets, and escorted by another ship, the Fateh Muhammad. As the ships sailed across the Bab-el-Mandeb, a ragtag group of pirate vessels led by the notorious “King of Pirates,” the Englishman Henry Avery, started chase. After sacking the Fateh Muhammad, Avery’s crew pursued the Ganj-iSawai, waged a ferocious battle, and then boarded and ransacked the ship. The Muntakhab details the dreadful treatment meted out by Avery and his crew: For a week the pirates (duzd darya) tortured the faithful. Beatings and murder were commonplace and even the honor of women was not spared. So much so that many women jumped overboard in order to escape the fate that awaited them at the hands of these barbarians. After having remained engaged for a week, in searching for plunder, stripping the men of their clothes and dishonoring the old and young women, they left the ship and its passengers to their fate.1 This act of piracy jeopardized the tenuous trading relationships of the British East India Company (BEIC) in Mughal India. Established almost a century prior to the Ganj-i-Sawai incident as a joint-stock company granted exclusive rights by Queen Elizabeth for trade in the Indian Ocean, the BEIC was a relative newcomer—and a weak one at that— within the transregional world economy of the Indian Ocean. Dependent on local merchants for capital and an imperial farmân (decree) from the Mughal authorities to trade in India, the fragile relationship between the BEIC and the Mughals was further strained by Avery’s hijinks at sea.

28  Jatin Dua As the historian Patricia Risso notes, when news of the attack on the Ganj-i-Sawai spread at the ship’s home port, angry locals tried to lynch any available English merchants, on the assumption that Avery’s attack was somehow sponsored, condoned, or facilitated by the East India Company. The Mughal governor intervened to prevent lynching, but he also ordered his troops to occupy the East India Company’s establishments in Surat and nearby Suwali, to incarcerate their sixty- three employees, and to stop their trade. 2 In audiences with Mughal officials, the English governor of Bombay, Sir John Gayer, tried to distinguish Company employees from Avery, arguing, “we are merchants, not pirates.”3 The officials were unimpressed. After nearly a year of negotiations, the employees were finally released and trade reestablished, once the BEIC agreed to hire out two English ships to the Mughals as protective convoy for the pilgrim vessels of Surat. In England, Avery’s daring raid captured the public’s imagination. A veritable cottage industry of fictional and fictionalized biographical accounts emerged in the decades after the Ganj-i-Sawai incident, including The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery, published in 1709.4 These accounts transformed Avery into a household name synonymous throughout Britain with the spirit of adventure and the glamor of life at sea. At the same time as Avery was being immortalized into a figure of mystery and intrigue (whose legacy lives on in contemporary Hollywood renditions of Caribbean piracy), the BEIC convinced the Privy Council of William III to launch a worldwide manhunt against him, the first such global operation in recorded history. Avery himself eluded capture and was rumored to have sailed to Madagascar and a life of retirement with the captured granddaughter of the Mughal emperor. Six of his crew members were arrested and brought to England in 1696 where they were found guilty of piracy and swiftly executed. 5 Soon after Avery’s act of raiding at sea, another British sailor, William Kidd, gained notoriety when he captured the Mughal vessel, the Quedagh Merchant, in 1698. Once again, the English governor of Bombay found himself in front of Mughal authorities seeking to distance the Company from these itinerant marauders while also pressuring the Crown to act decisively against piracy. Representatives of the Company not only called upon the English state for protection and assistance against pirates in the Indian Ocean but also had to construct piracy as a global problem threatening an emerging British imperial hegemony. In her introduction to this volume, Micol Seigel notes that the panics we are interested in here (in this volume) are not simply instances in which Stanley Cohen’s heuristic device of moral panic occurs outside a North Atlantic “home.” As Seigel highlights,

Privateers and Public Ends  29 [t]hese are terrors over things that (might) cross borders, and whose crossings threaten the sanctity of the structures anchored to territoriality and capital. These panics are defined not by place or scale but by travel, passage, transgression. These are panics over bodies that move.6 Maritime piracy in the Indian Ocean, in both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries as well as in its contemporary guise, fits this mobile category, blurring boundaries between land and sea, legal and illegal, taxation and taking. Juxtaposing British responses to the taking of ships such as the Ganj-i-Sawa’i and the Quedagh Merchant with the contemporary moral panic over Somali pirates in these same restive waters highlights how piracy as a global moral panic serves simultaneously to background histories of complicity and exploitation while productively intervening to transform maritime space and imperial authority. The analytic focus forged through attention to affect and to panic in particular, as suggested in this volume, thus productively allows us to see the trans­ regional stakes and scales of this process in ways that resonate beyond the monsoonal waters of the Western Indian Ocean.

Piracy and the Making of a “British Lake” In distinguishing between the piratical acts of men like Avery and Kidd, and the “honorable business” of the BEIC, the English governor elided the fact that the “King of Pirates” had not always been a pirate. Scholars have emphasized the fluidity in defining the term piracy. In his masterful survey of the law of piracy, legal scholar Alfred Rubin notes that a “cursory examination of learned literature, treaty articles and national statutes shows at least six different meanings of piracy.”7 These meanings range from A vernacular usage with no legal implications; 2) An international law meaning related to unrecognized states or recognized states whose governments are not considered empowered at international law to authorize the public activity that is questioned, like the Barbary States (1600–1830), The Malay Sultanates (1800–1880) and the Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms (1820–1830); 3) An international law meaning related to the private acts of foreigners against other foreigners in circumstances making criminal jurisdiction by a third state acceptable to the international community; 4) various special international law meanings derived from particular treaty negotiations; and 5) various national domestic law meanings defined by statutes and practices of individual states; 6) An international law meaning related to unrecognized belligerency hostis humani generis (enemies of all mankind).8

30  Jatin Dua The plurality of these usages, from a form of “taxation” and economic exchange to hostis humani generis (enemies of all mankind), highlights the long history of maritime predation and a slippage and mobility in defining this practice. In addition, the mobility of this concept of piracy has also been central in demarcating the boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, acceptable and unacceptable. As Daniel Heller-Roazen has argued, between the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the legal categories of “piracy” and “privateering” emerged in close relationship to each other. Documents such as the letter of marque and reprisal were the only distinction between an act of piracy and a legitimate form of plunder or reprisal at sea. For Heller-Roazen, this blurry boundary between piracy and privateering was crucial in “waging public wars by private means”9 and allowed states throughout Europe to demarcate the borders between acceptable and unacceptable violence as well as private and political ends—reserving for sovereigns the capacity to legitimize their violence while criminalizing the violence of rivals and those who resisted their attempts at monopoly. In the Atlantic world, the “golden age of piracy” in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as scholars such as Robert Ritchie (1986) and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2013) have highlighted, was also an era of imperial competition. In a world dominated by Spain and Portugal, and divided between them through papal decree, newcomers such as the Dutch, English, and French were at a distinct disadvantage. As Ritchie notes, “Dutch, English, and French policy makers sought empire, but did not have the resources to achieve this goal. It was left to entrepreneurs to carry out state policy by private means.”10 Privateering, initially financed by monarchs and later financed by private enterprises and legally supported by both natural law and legal positivist claims to legitimacy, provided the ability to effectively challenge Spanish and Portuguese monopoly. Through the issuance of letters of marque, monarchs “legalized” piracy and ensured a percentage of the profits to finance state expansion and consolidation. Yet legalized privateering was always a precarious venture. The cyclical nature of war and peace in the Atlantic, and later in the Indian Ocean world as empires jostled and competed for influence and profit, led to a steady ebb and flow between pirate and privateer. In times of war, the demand for privateers surged, and during times of peace, privateers were decommissioned but continued to engage in raiding without sponsorship, thus becoming pirates. While some privateers—notably Francis Drake and Henry Morgan—transformed themselves into governors and permanently moved from sea to land, the majority, like Avery and Kidd, remained offshore, caught in this oscillating world between pirate and privateer. The sea change of the long eighteenth-century Caribbean world (1689–1856), including the end of the Anglo Spanish Wars; the declining fortunes of the Spanish; and the emergence of British, Dutch, and French

Privateers and Public Ends  31 colonies in the Caribbean, transformed the relationship between pirates and empire. The Atlantic was no longer a welcome home for these sailors. Even though these itinerant sojourners had been instrumental in breaking the hegemony of the Spanish, the newly established colonies turned hostile toward them, labeling them pirates. A desire to flee this rapidly shifting Atlantic world or a thirst for adventure led men (and this was a mostly masculine world, with important exceptions) like Avery and William Kidd to the relative hospitality of the Indian Ocean, specifically the island of Madagascar and some of the Comoro Islands. Pirates found camaraderie; supplies; and, importantly, ready and willing crew members in order to stage attacks on dhows and other vessels traversing the great trade highways of the Indian Ocean from these island hideaways. Away from the tightening embrace of British imperial control in the Atlantic, which was exemplified by the Navigation Acts, the pirates of Madagascar enjoyed a profitable, if not peaceful, existence in what became known as the “pirate’s last frontier.”11 The attack on the Ganj-i-Sawai, followed by William Kidd’s marauding in the Red Sea and the attack and capture in 1698 of the ­Quedgah Merchant, another ship owned by the Mughals, transformed and ultimately destroyed this brief utopic world of “hydrarchy.”12 As noted earlier, the Ganj-i-Sawai incident and others threatened the tenuous relationship between the BEIC and the Mughals. In the immediate aftermath, company officials were arrested; trade was stopped in Western Indian ports; and, equally troublingly, company monopoly over trade—a monopoly granted by royal decree—was threatened by the presence of these British subjects who operated without company license. The movement of pirates from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean was productive in manufacturing a global moral panic that, in addition to effacing the prior intimacy of piracy and privateering, transformed the relationship between public and private violence at sea. The establishment of the British ­Empire was premised on a myth of a pacific maritime empire extending and transforming oceanic space into a “British Lake.” David Armitage has highlighted that this “empire of the seas was critical to defining the British Empire as both free and benign.”13 Constructing a vision of a peaceful empire of the seas required the British to partially forget the violent maritime histories through which British global expansion was achieved. A sharp distinction between piracy and legitimate commerce was essential in creating and sustaining this myth. The figure of the pirate was disentangled from its double, the heroic British privateer, and transformed into the hostis humani generis. Criminalization and the spectacle of legal trials and public executions were thus central to creating the category of the pirate in the maritime world of the eighteenth century. In London, New York, Port Royal, Cape Town, and Salvador an international campaign of terror was unleashed with spectacular

32  Jatin Dua executions of those who had committed sea banditry. At these ports the gibbeted corpse of one who had sailed under the black flag, flesh rotting, crows picking at the bones would greet the arriving mariner.14 Rumors circulated of the patronage enjoyed by pirates such as Avery and William Kidd within American colonies. Ports like Johanna and Saint Marie were described as markets for unscrupulous (American and French) merchants attempting to circumvent provisions of the Navigation Acts and British maritime hegemony. The BEIC capitalized on this anxiety and tied its difficulties with British pirates in the Indian Ocean to wider geopolitical currents and advocated for expanding the powers of Admiralty Courts and establishing bodies such as the Board of Trade. These legal and administrative bodies were responsible for creating and policing distinctions between piracy and commerce. In addition to their geopolitical effects (calling on the British state and criminalizing certain forms of maritime takings as piracy), the Ganji-Sawai attack and Kidd’s capture of the Quedgah Merchant were instrumental in transforming the maritime world of the Indian Ocean. William Kidd’s trial and execution marked the end of a global cycle of piracy that had reverberated across the Indian Ocean. But the question of piracy remained central for the BEIC and its claim to sovereign protection and jurisdiction over British and Mughal shipping. After the 1720s, the Company turned its gaze toward the Marathas in Western India and the Al-Qawasim in the Arabian Peninsula, and began wars on these newfound pirates, “pirate” now simply a term for a potential maritime rival. The afterlife of the global moral panic over piracy thus was central in expanding the Company’s sovereign vision over the Indian Ocean. In the name of fighting pirates, an empire emerged. As Philip Stern has shown, however, and ironically, “the East India Company’s lobbying efforts to protect its jurisdiction from American pirates opened the East Indies to the biggest interloper of all: the British state, which used its pirate-hunting squadrons to extend authority over the company”15 and transform the Indian Ocean into a British lake.

Defining Piracy: The Case of Somalia By the late nineteenth century, piracy in the Indian Ocean had been consigned to the status of relic. The execution of William Kidd and the pacification of Marathas, the Al-Qawasim, and other restive inhabitants of the oceanic littoral had successfully established the hegemony of the British Navy. Along with the transition from sail to steam, vast portions of open ocean were increasingly regulated, and by 1924, legal scholar Edwin Dickinson asked in the pages of the Harvard Law Review, “Is the Crime of Piracy Obsolete?” With the end of formal empire, as territorial

Privateers and Public Ends  33 states became the norm in a post-1948 world, it seemed as if the behemoth had tamed the leviathan. In the 1990s, however, piracy returned, from the Straits of Malacca to Somalia. Shifting regulatory regimes, a proliferation of small weapons, the growing demand for fish and the de-peopling of global shipping made the busy shipping lanes of Southeast Asia and Africa once again sites of predation, profit, and plunder. For the most part, these acts of predation remained—like life at sea more generally—obscured from popular view or concern. Then a series of spectacular hijackings from 2007 onward off the coast of Somalia made visible this sea of piracy and generated an unprecedented naval, legal, and media response. A 2013 Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, Captain Phillips, cinematically rendered this upsurge in maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean. Based loosely on the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, probably the most high-profile case of contemporary maritime piracy in these waters, the film features a routine voyage from Oman to Kenya. On a placid day at sea, two skiffs suddenly appear alongside the ship. Evading one of the boats, the large lumbering Maersk is unable to escape the climbing ladder of the second. Within minutes a pirate foursome has boarded the ship and taken the captain and his crew hostage. “Don’t be afraid, I’m the captain now,” declares the young leader of this ragtag gang. True to its name, Captain Philips remains focused on its eponymous hero, and the Somali hijackers remain just that: hijackers with only vague references to a pre-pirate past of fishermen who turned pirate presumably due to desperation. As Stephanie Jones has noted in her reading of the legal geography of Captain Philips, only four minutes of the film are set in Somalia: “[a] jagged scene on a beach portrays young men who are desperate to commit piracy simply because they need money to live…[N]othing in this scene allows us to understand these men under a rubric other than ‘private ends,’ everything allows us to see them at the blunt end of the global economy.”16 For Jones, this scene and the larger narrative arc of the movie are designed to construct the actions of Cabdiweli Cabdiqaadir Muuse and his compatriots as a simple case of maritime piracy consistent with Article 101 of the UN Convention of the Law of Sea: Piracy consists of any of the following acts: a any illegal act of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed: i on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft, and ii against a ship, aircraft, persons, or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

34  Jatin Dua b any act of voluntary participation in the operation of a ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft; c any act of inciting or of intentionally facilitating an act described in subparagraph (a) or (b).17 The notion of private ends and its occurrence in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state is central to the international legal definition of maritime piracy and one that distinguishes it from other forms of state and non-state violence. In Captain Philips, the opening four minutes and the repeated references to “international waters” by crew members and naval officials create an “airtight legal geography” that, for Jones, evacuates the possibility of the hijacking as anything other than an act of piracy: This is without question an act of piracy: these men are without question pirates. That is, they are not legitimate combatants or enemies proper. They are not, in the final account, any kind of political category: they have become unqualified and absolute ‘peril,’ like the weather, even to themselves. And as such they allow – they require, they invite – an utter response.18 The erasure of the political and the transformation of men like Muuse into pirates existing outside territory (and history) are, as Jones deftly notes, processes of rendering the pirate a peril (“like the weather”), which then requires and justifies a lethal response. With great elucidation, contributors to this volume have noted how moral panics obscure histories and the manifold causes and structures that undergird forms of inequality. In the case of Somali piracy, a similar form of obfuscation is at play. Transforming Muuse into a peril at sea and the general way in which pirates are rendered mute and illegible throughout the movie is a mode of transforming piracy into something strictly apolitical, a form of criminality that requires a legal and policing response. If movies like Captain Philips foreclose the possibility of political motives for raiding at sea, the framework of failed states and criminality through which a moral panic around Somali piracy was built similarly obscures other histories and also constructs the possibility of intervention—in the case of Somali piracy, a global securitization of the Indian Ocean.

The Productivity of Failed States Somalia’s 20-year condition of state collapse is routinely cited as a contributing cause of piracy. As Jeffrey Gettleman observes, “the perfect conditions for piracy prevail: anarchy, a cold war legacy that left Somalia armed to the teeth, and a 1,900-mile coastline abutting the Gulf of Aden, which 20,000 ships traverse each year. The pirates of Somalia have

Privateers and Public Ends  35 an entire country the size of Texas to use as a sanctuary.”19 The logic is clear: the proximity to a major shipping lane provides opportunity, the ungoverned space removes deterrents, therefore piracy will flourish. This narrative of failed states and criminality has been critiqued for failing to account for the fact that if ungoverned space were a critical factor, piracy in Somalia would be concentrated in south-central coastal areas, which have been the most lawless, violent, and crime-ridden areas since 1991. But pirates have not been very active on the southern coast. Instead, they have clustered on the northeast coast in Puntland and in several fishing villages in Central Somalia, where a weak but functional local administration holds power. Additionally, recent literature has sought to critique and contextualize the narrative of failed states and the ways it obscures forms of governance and order without government, and to provide historically nuanced understandings of the rise of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean. 20 In these accounts, contemporary maritime piracy is part of a longer trajectory of rent-seeking and the development of economies of protection on land and sea. Along the Somali coast, piracy emerged in the 1990s when large-scale foreign trawling first made its appearance in the Western Indian Ocean. A coastal upwelling brings nutrient-rich waters to surface, creating one of the most fertile areas off the coast of Somalia. The long-distance trawlers, primarily from Southeast Asia and Europe, were drawn to this bountiful coast in search of tuna, snapper, and other coveted piscine delights. In response, initially, fishing communities along the coast sought to resist these interlopers through confrontation and attempts at “taxation.” These often violent encounters gradually scaled up. From targeting fishing trawlers and small dhows, pirates operating in these waters soon shifted to cargo ships, and from the “low and slow” cargo boats chartered to bring food aid by the World Food Program to, finally, oil tankers. In these accounts, therefore, piracy, far from a peril without agency or history, is an attempt, albeit couched in the threat of violence, to insert oneself within a world of trade, a variation on what Eric Wolf would call the “tributary mode of production.” It is also a form of protest, a mode of asserting jurisdiction onto oceanic space in ways that are rendered invisible in Captain Philips and the story of failed states. But the narrative of state failure is also profoundly productive. In 2008, following the hijacking of the US-bound, Saudi Arabian, 1,090-foot, very large crude carrier (VLCC) MV Sirius Star, 450 miles southeast of the Kenyan coast, the UN Security Council adopted a series of resolutions to construct the legal edifice for the twenty-first century’s global war on piracy. Specifically, UN Resolution 1816, while “respecting the sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, and unity of Somalia,” gave unprecedented authority to international naval vessels to pursue pirates in international waters, Somali territorial waters, and even on land, thereby suspending Somali national sovereignty even as it claimed to respect it. Established under the Chapter VII powers of the Security Council, which

36  Jatin Dua deals with the UN’s authority to address threats to international peace and security, the 2008 resolutions on counter-piracy (UN Security Council Resolutions 1816, 1838, 1846, and 1851) effectively dissolved distinctions between land and sea, territorial waters and high seas—distinctions that have been central to the construction of piracy as a legal category separate from armed robbery and smuggling. In addition to re-spatializing piracy as an act that can occur in territorial waters and even on land, these resolutions placed the newly emerging coalition of national navies at the center of counter-piracy operations and gave them authority to take “all necessary means or measures at sea and on land to suppress piracy and armed robbery at sea.” Within a year, by 2009, an international coalition had assembled off the coast of Somalia, marking the latest chapter in the long war on piracy that began after the attack on the Ganj-i-Sawai. International naval vessels were back, once again involved in chasing pirates. Counter-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean were organized primarily under the auspices of three naval coalitions, with over 30 states participating in the policing of the Western Indian Ocean. This global architecture, like the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century war on piracy, transformed and re-scaled maritime encounters at sea into a global moral panic. As scholars such as Julietta Hua, Marieke De Geode, Svati Shah, Paul Amar, and others have shown, the threat of terrorism and human trafficking allows for the construction of a particular kind of security regime. 21 Premised on a narrative of protection and governing through risk, this regime constructs a global field of intervention and privileges legal responses. By emphasizing state failure and crisis, the security architecture authored in the wake of piracy traced a plot similar to narratives around terrorism and human trafficking. In 2009, when the European Union Naval Force for Somalia (EU-­ NAVFOR) was established, its original mandate specified the goals of the international counter-piracy force as “the protection of vessels of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the protection of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) shipping.”22 While the protection of vessels belonging to the WFP and AMISOM remains a central reason for the continued presence of EU vessels in the Western Indian Ocean (indeed on their web page, EU-NAVFOR keeps a running tally of the number of WFP and AMISOM vessels protected), the mandate of this international counter-piracy force has expanded in recent years to include the “deterrence, prevention and repression of acts of piracy and armed robbery off the Somali coast and the protection of vulnerable shipping off the ­Somali coast.”23 The US-led Combined Task Force-151 (CTF-151) similarly frames its mandate in Somalia within the ambit of protection: In accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolutions, and in cooperation with nonmember forces, CTF-151’s mission is to disrupt piracy and armed robbery at sea and to engage with regional

Privateers and Public Ends  37 and other partners to build capacity and improve relevant capabilities in order to protect global maritime commerce and secure freedom of navigation. 24 Here we see the re-scaling of counter-piracy. From the protection of vessels of the WFP and AMISOM shipping, counter-piracy is now in the business of “protecting global maritime commerce and the freedom of navigation.” The re-scaling of protection also transforms the means and ends of military intervention. As with terrorism and human trafficking, protection becomes an end in itself—a form of potentially perpetual intervention. In contrast to elimination, the logic of protection is one of management and open-ended engagement. As a French captain associated with the EU-NAVFOR noted, “we’re not actually here to eliminate piracy.” The captain continued, “if we wanted to eliminate piracy we’d have to occupy Somalia. No one has the appetite for that, not Britain and certainly not the United States. We manage piracy, nothing more, nothing less…there is no end goal to this operation, just potentially the end of the mandate.”25 Spanning multiple continents and employing over 2,000 military personnel, this form of management resonates with Michel Foucault’s reflections on security. For Foucault, security amounts to the management of a series of mobile elements and is concerned with the regulation of and distinction between “good” and “bad” circulation. Through the example of the eighteenth-century town at a moment of shift from mercantilism to free trade, Foucault notes that as towns opened their walls to trade routes to prompt economic growth, they made themselves vulnerable to a whole host of undesirable objects. As he describes, an important problem for towns in the eighteenth century was allowing for surveillance since the suppression of the city walls made necessary by economic development meant that one could no longer close towns in the evening or closely supervise daily comings and goings, so that the insecurity of the towns was increased by the influx of the floating population of beggars, vagrants who might come from the country…. It was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing good circulation by diminishing the bad. 26 This sense of distinction and distinguishing between good and bad circulation is at the heart of the contemporary naval response to piracy. Policing pirates entails not just a military response but also creating and designating the “milieu” within which circulation occurs. The milieu for Foucault is not just the context but “what is needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another.” The milieu then is the “medium of an action and the element in which it circulates.” Policing for pirates

38  Jatin Dua thus is not simply about finding pirates “out there” but rather constructing a physical and social seascape within which good circulation (shipping) is separated from bad circulation (piracy). Through surveillance and security practices, the Western Indian Ocean has come to be defined as a sea of piracy. Attempted as well as successful incidents of piracy are updated on the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO’s) live piracy map, and a practice of “fly-bys” (aerial surveillance through manned and unmanned craft) has created a detailed and often classified mapping of this oceanic space. This sea of piracy is built precisely on obscuring the histories and political contestations within which piracy emerged and, like the “British Lake” of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, exists as an infrastructure for the securitization of the Western Indian Ocean—a form of perpetual occupation.

Life and Labor at Sea If the moral panic over Somali piracy obscured the context of contemporary piracy in the Western Indian Ocean and created an infrastructure for the securitization of this maritime space, it also briefly brought into view a world of mobility and commerce that is both central to the contemporary world and invisible in everyday life. More so than ever, shipping remains critical to world trade. As the secretary general of the IMO has noted, “without shipping half the world’s population would freeze and the other half would starve.”27 Approximately 90 percent of global imports and exports currently travel by sea on around 93,000 merchant vessels, operated by 1.25 million seafarers, carrying almost six billion tons of cargo. Yet this world of commerce and mobility is mostly hidden from view. In her account of the shipping industry, Rose George remarks upon encountering the lumbering leviathan that will be her home for five weeks as she travels from Felixtowne, England, to Singapore: The public is not allowed on a ship like this, nor even on the dock. There are no ordinary citizens to witness the workings of an industry that is one of the most fundamental to their daily existence. These ships and boxes belong to a business that feeds, clothes, warms, and supplies us. They have fueled if not created globalization. 28 An active forgetting of the sea and the millions who transit and toil in this space characterizes this contemporary moment amidst proclamations of the triumph of the digital and the virtual. The photographer and theorist Allan Sekula’s work seeks to correct and critique this form of “sea-blindness.” For Sekula, the contemporary maritime imaginary only focuses on the sea as “the site of intermittent horrors and extraordinary

Privateers and Public Ends  39 but brief expenditures of energy, quite distinct from the dramas of everyday life.”29 The exhibition and book Fish Story as well as the documentary A Forgotten Space work against this imaginary, poignantly rendering life at sea through attention to the labor of those who turn the wheels of the contemporary global economy. Sekula emphasizes both the invisibility of this maritime world and the very visible ways in which work at sea marks those onboard the large container ships that transport goods across the world. Often as big as five-story (or more) buildings and with a carrying capacity up to 19,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), container ships are floating factories populated by a motley crew of nationalities from Fiji to Indonesia. These seafarers often live on board for six to ten months at a time, and a majority spends the better part of their adult lives at sea, away from family and the solidity of landed life. The multinational composition of the shipping industry is, as a number of observers have noted, a highly hierarchical one. Until recently, captains and officers were recruited primarily from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (North America, Western Europe, etc.), while the majority of ratings (noncertified) seafarers and ordinary seamen (OS) were recruited from developing countries, creating a two-tiered ship divided often by racial and national differences. This bi-level world is a somewhat recent development. While oceanic spaces have often been understood as existing beyond jurisdiction, ships, as the historian Lauren Benton reminds us, are floating forms of territoriality. Ships “play a dual role as sources of order in the ocean; they are islands of law with their own regulations and judicial personnel, and representatives of ‘municipal’ legal authorities—vectors of law thrust into ocean space.”30 Until the early part of the twentieth century, national shipping companies generally operated their vessels under their national flags subject to national regulation. These ships were also crewed by seafarers of the flagstate in which the ship was registered. Beginning in the post-war period, Helen Sampson and Michael Bloor highlight: major maritime nations, essentially those with developed economies, took steps to improve safety in the industry, particularly via the introduction of more stringent controls over labour markets and ship operations. Thus employers increasingly had to abide by national collective bargaining agreements and minimum standards in relation to working conditions and more technical safety standards. This tended to increase operating costs.31 In response, a number of ship operators engaged in a process of “flagging out,” that is, registering ships in third-party jurisdictions. This business

40  Jatin Dua practice, also known as using flags of convenience, dates back to the Roman era when merchant ships used false flags to avoid enemy warships. In addition to using flags of convenience, beginning in the 1970s, national governments started liberalizing their shipping acts to make it easier for crew ships with maritime laborers from other countries. ­Countries such as the Philippines and India saw a dramatic upsurge in numbers of people working at sea as a result. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), “in 1987 alone, the employment of Filipino seafarers on European-owned ships increased from 2,900 to 17,057 people.”32 This liberalization and globalization was a way to circumvent regulation, increase profitability by reducing oversight, and render invisible the world of maritime labor—a reminder that capitalism runs on people (specifically, cheap labor) in addition to fossil fuels. The moral panic over Somali piracy, perhaps inadvertently and however briefly, brought to popular consciousness this world at sea. As in the case of overfishing and maritime exploitation in the Western Indian Ocean, the exploitation and the racialized logics underpinning this economy were quickly backgrounded as the international community redirected the existence of piracy to questions of abstract security and protection of global trade. As Melissa Francis has noted, for every Captain Philips is the unknown seafarer whose capture at sea fails to provoke national outrage, much less Hollywood blockbusters.33 The protection afforded through a language of moral panics not only flattens the complexities of life at sea but, like the global economy that undergirds it, is a protection that is distributed unevenly throughout this mobile, maritime world. On March 29, 2010, a Panamanian flagged roll-on/roll-off cargo ship, the MV Iceberg 1, left the port of Aden en route to Jebel Ali with a 25-person crew including seafarers from India, Yemen, Ghana, Sudan, and the Philippines. Just ten miles from the port of Aden, they were boarded by a group of pirates and taken toward Somalia and uncertainty. In contrast to the rescue of the Maersk Alabama, the crew of Iceberg 1 did not warrant a full-fledged naval response. In 2010, with incidents of piracy skyrocketing, the capture of a small cargo ship with a non-Western crew generated little press interest or attention. The Iceberg 1 also had the misfortune of facing similar neglect from the shipping company that owned the vessel. No ransom payments were forthcoming for the ship’s release, and the crew members were subject to the traumatic ordeal of being held captive for over three years, the longest hijacking in modern maritime history. A former hostage on board the ship recalled dire conditions and a sense of hopelessness when they realized they had been abandoned at sea: For the first few months we all had some hope. They [the pirates] made us call our families to put pressure on the shipping company.

Privateers and Public Ends  41 We all thought there is no way the company would just leave the ship and cargo to rot out here. Initially the pirates were cruel, but not very violent. When they realized also they were not going to get ransoms it was a horrible moment. We were all in a small room with very little food and water and no electricity. The smell was horrible. Many of us just wished to die and end this torture. I sometimes think that the two people who died had a better fate than us. 34 Traveling without kidnap and ransom insurance, a practice common amongst smaller firms who wished to avoid the prohibitive insurance costs, the ship was essentially left in a legal and regulatory lurch. As a maritime expert told me in an interview, “if there is no insurance and the owners do not negotiate then only the flag state can put legal pressure on the company.”35 In the case of the Iceberg 1, the ship flew under a flag of convenience and was registered in Panama. As the expert explained, “the chances of Panama intervening even if it wanted to do so are next to none. That leaves us with the Indian Navy. But authorizing such operations is much more difficult when foreign nationals from so many other countries are involved.”36 The moral panic over Somali piracy reduced life at sea to a battle between “bad” pirates and “good” navies and seafarers in order to construct the infrastructure of perpetual security. As the fate of the Iceberg 1 highlights, this world is perhaps not as Manichean as it initially appears. While not denying the violence of piracy and the trauma inflicted on those who fall captive, the everyday forms of violence that characterize the world of global capitalism as it plays out in the shipping lanes, ports, and insurance offices of global shipping disappear from view when piracy transforms into a peril, a global moral panic. The panic around piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was critical to forgetting the intimacy of trade and violence in the making of empire. In a similar vein, contemporary narratives of Somali piracy render invisible the racialized forms of exploitation and injury that characterize life and labor at sea and the histories of exploitation and extraction along the East African coast. Thinking through this long history of piracy, and especially the hijacking of the Iceberg 1, is a stark reminder that while legal categories and states create and police binaries between the worlds of pirates and legitimate sojourners, between private and public ends, life at sea requires us to step outside this binary and ask as the pirate did when confronted by the Emperor Alexander: Alexander the Great: What is your idea, infesting the sea? Pirate: The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: but because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.37

42  Jatin Dua

Acknowledgements Funding for this research was provided by the Wenner Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council and the Mellon/ACLS Foundation.

Notes 1 Khān, Muntakhab al-Lubab, 420–22. 2 Risso, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy,” 308. 3 Ibid. 4 Most subsequent accounts that immortalized Avery in the popular imagination borrowed heavily from this work, written under the pseudonym Adrian van Broeck, who claimed to be a Dutchman captured by Avery’s crew. Tales of Avery’s heroics also emerge in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates written by the  ­mysterious Captain Charles Johnson, sometimes thought to be a  pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, in addition to a number of popular ballads. These works have been central in crafting the Caribbean pirate in popular imaginary and Avery as the quintessential figure in this mythmaking. 5 Rex v. Dawson. Howell’s State Trials 451, 453 (1696). This case is often cited for putting forth, in the instructions to the jury, one of the clearest definition of piracy prior to its codification in the UN convention on the law of the seas: Now piracy is only a sea-term for robbery, piracy being a robbery committed within the jurisdiction of the Admiralty. If any man be assaulted within that jurisdiction, and his ship or goods violently taken away without legal authority, this is robbery and piracy. If the mariners of any ship shall violently dispossess the master, and afterwards carry away the ship itself, or any of the goods, or tackle, apparel or furniture, with a felonious intention, in any place where the lord Admiral hath, or pretends to have jurisdiction, this is also robbery and piracy. 6 Seigel, “Global Moral Panics and the Affective Contours of Power, p. 1. 7 Rubin, The Law of Piracy, 1. 8 Ibid. 9 Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All. 10 Ritchie, Captain Kidd, 15. 11 Ibid, 50. 12 For a detailed and evocative description of this world, see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 143–210 and passim. 13 Armitage, The Ideological Origins, 104. 14 Rediker, Villians of All Nations, 243–44. 15 Stern, The Company State, 112. 16 Jones, “The Absent Pirate,” 530. 17 Article 101, UNCLOS, 1983. 18 Jones, “The Absent Pirate,” 532. 19 Quoted in Dua and Menkhaus, “The Context of Contemporary Piracy,” 756. 20 Anderson, “Somali Piracy”; Dua, “A Sea of Trade”; Hansen, “Piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden”; Samatar, Lindberg and Mahayni, “The Dialects of Piracy in Somalia”; Shortland and Varese, “The Business of Pirate Protection.”

Privateers and Public Ends  43 21 Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights; De Goede, Speculative Security; Shah, Street Corner Secrets; Amar, The Security Archipelago. 22 EU-NAVFOR mandate on file with author. 23 Ibid. 24 CTF-151 mandate on file with author. 25 “Col. Pierre” (pseudonym used to protect confidentiality), in discussion with the author, July 2013. 26 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 18. 27 Quoted in “Go to Sea! A Campaign to Attract Entrants to the Shipping Industry” (IMO Circular Letter No. 2922, 21 November 2008). 28 George, Ninety Percent of Everything, 2. 29 Sekula and Buchloh, Fish Story, 32. 30 Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 120. 31 Sampson and Bloor, “When Jack Gets Out of the Box,” 553–54. 32 Quoted in Mannov, Economies of Security, 10. 33 Francis, “Modern Day Piracy,” n.p. 34 “Raj” (pseudonym used to protect confidentiality), in discussion with the author, December 2013. Wagdi Akram, a Yemeni crew member, allegedly committed suicide during captivity. Additionally, the chief engineer, a Ghanaian national, was also killed in captivity. 35 “Captain Kelly” (pseudonym used to protect confidentiality), in discussion with the author, July 2015. 36 Ibid. 37 Quoted in Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars, 37.

Bibliography Primary Sources Khafi Khan, Muhammad Hashim. Muntakhab-ul-Lubab. Edited by Mawlavi Kabir al-Din Ahmad. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1869. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982. www.un.org/Depts/ los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/closindx.htm Secondary Sources Amar, Paul. The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics and the End of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Anderson, David. “Somali Piracy: Historical Context and Political Contingency.” European Security Forum Working Paper 33 (2009): 1–14. Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Benton, L. A. Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. De Goede, M. Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Dua, Jatin. “A Sea of Trade and a Sea of Fish: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 353–70. Dua, Jatin, and Ken Menkhaus. “The Context of Contemporary Piracy The Case of Somalia.” Journal of International Criminal Justice 10, no. 4 (2012): 749–66.

44  Jatin Dua Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population. New York: Picador, 2004. George, Rose. Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. Hansen, Stig. “Piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden: Myths, Misconceptions and Remedies.” NIBR Report 2009 29, Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo. www.nibr.no/filer/2009-29-ny.pdf Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations. New York: Zone Books, 2009. Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Johns, Adrian. Piracy – The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Jones, Stephanie. “The Absent Pirate: Exceeding Justice in the Indian Ocean.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 522–35. Linebaugh, Peter, and Rediker Marcus. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 2000. Mannov, Adrienne. “Economies of Security: An Ethnography of Merchant seafarers, Global Itineraries and Maritime Piracy” PhD diss., University of Copenhagen, 2016. Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005. Ritchie, Robert. Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Risso, Patricia. “Cross-Cultural Perception of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during the Long Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 293–319. Samatar, Abdi, Lindberg Mark, and Mahayni Basil. “The Dialectics of Piracy: The Rich versus the Poor.” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 8 (2010): 1377–94. Sampson, Helen and Michael Bloor. “When Jack Gets Out of the Box: The Problems of Regulating a Global Industry.” Sociology 41, no. 3 (2007): 551–69. Sekula, Allan, and Benjamin Buchloh. Fish Story. Dusseldorf: Witte de With, center for Contemporary Art, 1995. Shah, Svati. Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

2 Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness Responses to Children’s Militarization in Uganda and the US Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant Concern over the widely denounced practice of employing children as combatants has surged in recent decades as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Western news outlets have increasingly drawn attention to this issue. Between 2000 and 2014, the New York Times ran nearly 400 articles, editorials, or letters that used the terms “child soldier” or “child soldiers”—a ninefold increase from the preceding 15-year period.1 This growing attention to the problem of child soldiers is, in part, a response to an actual rise in the use of children by rebel groups and state militaries in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. But it also reflects the increasing power of human rights ideology, which only in the 1970s began to identify “the child soldier” as a subject for humanitarian intervention. 2 Contemporary American discussions of child soldiers invariably frame this issue solely as a human rights crisis in developing nations. Most recently, the media has focused on African child soldiers weighed down with ammunition too heavy for their slim frames. Such poignant and disturbing imagery lends power to sensationalized narratives of brutal warlords who violate the most basic norms of civilization by exploiting vulnerable children and acclimating them to violence. The suffering of child soldiers is undeniably real, and their experiences often appalling; yet these narratives are deeply problematic in at least two key respects. First, they have helped to fuel a global moral panic that has amplified the notion of African deviance in public imaginaries. Sensationalized media coverage of African conflicts and their terrible effects on children participate in and reinforce long-standing perceptions of a savage and benighted continent in need of intervention by white saviors. Over the decades, these white saviors have taken various forms, including missionaries, explorers, colonizers, international humanitarian organizers, militaries, journalists, and youthful volunteers. All have claimed to have deeply felt desires to help Africa, yet they typically approach their

46  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant self-appointed role with profound naiveté and willful ignorance of local complexities and foreign imbrications therein. Second, if the sensationalized discourse surrounding African child soldiers tends to recapitulate assumptions and images rooted in the colonial past, it also presents a distorted view of contemporary social realities. Western media and human rights groups typically present the child soldier as a prepubescent boy who has been abducted into a rebel group and forced to serve as a combatant. Yet, while such scenarios occur all too frequently, the vast majority of the individuals who fall under the United Nation’s (UN) definition of “child soldier” do not fit this image. As legal scholar Mark Drumbl points out, a large majority are aged ­15–17, and, by some estimates, nearly 40 percent are girls. Moreover, most children attached to foreign militaries and rebel groups do not serve as combatants but rather as porters, cooks, guards, or “wives,” whose roles might include domestic labor as well as sex. Finally, in the majority of conflicts, abduction has been the exception rather than the rule. According to Drumbl, as many as two-thirds of all child soldiers “exercise some (at times considerable) initiative in coming forward to enroll.”3 Yet the complex realities that compel those under the age of 18 to join militaries or militia groups have not been the subject of extensive analysis and discussion in the mainstream press. Instead, Western media attention and NGO efforts to raise public awareness have typically been riveted on far more spectacular instances of child abduction and child soldiering. The clearest example of this dynamic is the Kony 2012 campaign. Launched by the group Invisible Children (IC), this campaign sought to expose the brutality of Joseph Kony, the elusive leader of the Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and called for nothing less than a military intervention to capture him. Among the many crimes committed by Kony in the LRA’s long-running war against the Ugandan state and its military (the Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Force or UPDF), IC pinpointed the LRA’s use of child soldiers. A 30-minute film produced by the organization and released on YouTube drew an astonishing amount of attention and financial support from the US and other wealthy nations. Yet the campaign ultimately failed in its stated goal of capturing Kony, and IC has since announced it is undergoing a “transition” that amounts to the shuttering of its operations.4 A close analysis of this episode reveals the shortcomings and myopia of an approach to the issue of child soldiering that, however well meaning, stokes moral outrage and fuels “white savior fantasies” through decontextualized and sensational media images. These fantasies then lay the foundation for a variety of interventions to occur in situations that are made to appear as intractable crises that demand such interventions in the name of humanitarian good will. 5 In the chapter’s second half, we explore how such a fixation on images of Africans’ brutality or vulnerability has gone hand in hand with

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  47 comparative complacency in regard to the growing militarization of American children and youth. The expansion of the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) and other militaristic youth programs in recent years, along with the Army’s attempts to draw young people’s interest with exciting video games that simulate war, has attracted relatively little criticism—especially if one looks back to the first decades of the twentieth century, when masses of Americans vigorously opposed attempts to introduce military training into public schools on the grounds that it threatened republican values.6 The point here is not to suggest that the experiences of American high school students enlisted in JROTC are in any way commensurate with those of child soldiers in conflict-ridden regions around the globe. Instead, it is to call attention to the ways in which the media’s construction of the “child soldier” as wholly “other” has obscured the genuinely militarist aspects of programs aimed at American youth—programs that are widely and often uncritically celebrated for instilling discipline, building character, and promoting patriotism. In sum, this chapter argues that moral panics associated with child abduction and forced conscription in African armed conflicts are inseparably linked to Western refusals to grapple with the long histories of imperialism and capitalism that have significantly influenced African politics, economics, and societies in the postcolonial era. At the same time, it probes the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US’s attempts to internationalize a historically and culturally specific conception of childhood and childhood innocence that it has always applied very selectively to its own nation’s children.7

Kony 2012: The Moral Panic of Child Soldiering By the time IC launched Kony 2012, the organization had spent the better part of a decade visiting high schools, churches, and university campuses, delivering their message about a crazed and ultraviolent warlord who preyed on vulnerable children. During these visits, representatives of the organization often aired their film Invisible Children: The Rough Cut. Such events also featured former child soldiers, who offered emotionally wrenching testimonials about their past experiences in the LRA and praised IC’s efforts. Designed to increase awareness about the plight of the Acholi of northern Uganda, and especially that of Acholi children, these events raised considerable funds for the cause. Still, IC’s founders believed that more should be done and that if only people around the world knew more about the situation in Uganda, they would feel compelled to get involved. Launched on March 5, 2012, Kony 2012 quickly went viral—indeed, it became “the most viral video in history” up to that point.8 Its message was simple: young people around the world should “make Kony

48  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant famous” to facilitate his capture and arrest by the end of 2012. The ultimate goal was to ensure that Kony was tried by the Hague’s International Criminal Court, which had indicted him as a war criminal. To achieve this goal, IC planned a global event called “Cover the Night,” in which people in the US and around the world were to hang vivid posters and flyers with the Kony 2012 logo and distribute images of Joseph Kony (sold by IC on their website) as widely as possible to help raise awareness about his crimes.9 IC also appealed to a number of politicians and celebrity “culture makers” (including Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney) to use their influence and social media presence to spread the word about Kony 2012 and use their wealth to help effect change in northern Uganda.10 It seems unlikely that the youthful clicktivists who helped Kony 2012 go viral and earned IC some $20 million that year had much knowledge about Uganda, let alone Joseph Kony. But Kony 2012 clearly struck a nerve. Why?11 After all, examples of child soldiering in post-Cold War Africa abound, as do examples of African leaders accused of atrocities and war crimes, but none had ever generated the attention that IC did with Kony 2012.12 Much of the film’s appeal can be attributed to its emotional pull, fast pacing, and slick production, all of which allowed it to reach young Americans; Kony 2012 owes as much to reality TV as to documentary filmmaking of the sober Frontline variety. The film highlights the dramatic 2003 encounter that led directly to the establishment of IC. When traveling as college students in northern Uganda, the organization’s future founders came across a group of children known as “night commuters” or “night walkers”—those who, fearing abduction by rebels, would leave their villages before nightfall and trek to the nearest town to sleep in almost unimaginably crowded shelters for internally displaced people. After surveying the dismal scene, IC cofounder Jason Russell, who directed and features prominently in the film, sputters, “I cannot believe that…. this has been going on for years? If that happened one night in America it would be on the cover of Newsweek.” Indeed, it is Russell’s apparently unscripted response that points to one of the most wrongheaded assumptions underlying the Kony campaign: the conviction that attention from major American media outlets in and of itself could go a long way toward redressing the human suffering that arose from social and political conflict in far-flung places around the globe.13 The attention to Ugandan child soldiers in particular may also reflect the fact that the country has long been a focus of US-based evangelical activities. During the years preceding the Kony 2012 campaign, USbased evangelists made significant inroads into Ugandan socioreligious life, much to the detriment of LGBTQ Ugandans, who have become the targets of a campaign that seeks their full criminalization under Uganda law.14 (The antigay campaign in Uganda has likewise been rhetorically framed in terms of the need to protect children, in this case, from

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  49 Western influence and predators.) US Christian organizations have also played a part in reversing Uganda’s enviable progress in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS: rather than helping Ugandan authorities promote safer sex, they pushed for abstinence as prevention, with predictable results. While IC has never promoted this agenda, in 2012, bloggers and journalists investigating IC’s finances and tax records showed that the organization had in fact accepted donations from several evangelical organizations whose antigay positions are quite clear.15 IC was thus, at a minimum, part of a wider web of US-based evangelical ties to Uganda that have supported illiberal political actions, particularly around issues of sexuality. But if the US’s engagement with Uganda is distinctive in many respects, the Kony 2012 campaign replicated a much older and more pervasive language of civilization and barbarism—a discourse used by late nineteenth-century European colonial powers to cast themselves as superior to Africans in every way that mattered. Although Kony 2012ers would no doubt resist being described as such, they were participants in a campaign that, despite its humanitarian credentials, trafficked in paternalism, neocolonialism, and militarism in ways that directly recalled colonial practices. European antislavery interventions in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer a useful historical comparison to illustrate this point. While abolitionism provided the ideological and often the financial backing for such interventions, it also served the larger goals of empire. Colonial interventions in the name of abolishing African slaving practices reduced the numbers of people being enslaved through preexisting local and regional slaving networks, but they simultaneously unleashed new forms of unfree labor that benefited the colonizers, their African agents and allies, and the new colonial states. Colonial rhetoric celebrating the merits of free labor masked a range of exploitative labor practices that clearly served colonial imperatives, benefiting the colonizers and their local African allies who helped them recruit labor.16 As Curtis Keim explains, the white race, which had only recently stamped out its own slavetrading and slaveholding practices, called Arabs and Africans inferior because they traded and held slaves. [...] Europeans demanded that racially inferior Arabs and even more racially inferior Africans allow themselves to be saved from their depravity by racially superior Europeans.17 Abolitionism was also tightly bound up with Christian mission activities, which rested on the assumption that European tutelage would help Africans become civilized, if only converts accepted Christianity’s message of love. By the mid-nineteenth century, for most Europeans,

50  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant “[c]hildhood [had become] the universal metaphor for the African state of mental and cultural development.”18 Christian missionaries played active roles in helping enslaved Africans secure emancipation by providing sanctuary to escapees, employment at mission stations, and so on. But missionary support depended on ex-slaves converting to Christianity, conforming to European civilizationist ideals, and disavowing previous socioreligious beliefs and practices. In addition, missionaries contributed to the process of educating Africans to work for the colonizers (in government, industry, and agriculture), imparting Christian ideas about appropriate work ethics, schedules, gender roles, and attire. Many missions reported conversion numbers back to organizational headquarters based in Europe, where positive reports helped generate revenue to maintain and expand missionary activities around the world. This earlier missionary activism on the question of slavery and abolition foreshadowed the humanitarian impulses that IC corralled to such great effect in Kony 2012. A humanitarian campaign’s success often hinges on the organization’s ability to demonstrate children’s suffering to an imagined audience whose members are poised, credit cards in hand, to save said children from further suffering. Humanitarian organizations’ advertising campaigns tend to a follow a “formula” in which a “terrible problem” (e.g. Joseph Kony’s crimes against northern Uganda’s children) has a “simple solution” (e.g. send money to Kony 2012).19 Expertly drawing on moral panic around the issue of what constitutes an appropriate childhood, they call on average/affluent citizens of the global north to help the impoverished, abused, downtrodden citizens of the global south by doing something, even if that something is only texting or clicking a radio button to like, send, confirm, favorite, and so on. Those who participated in Kony 2012 immediately felt, at least for that moment, a part of something big.20 And by promising a global movement that would culminate in the “Cover the Night” action, the campaign allowed participants to feel momentum toward the shared goal of capturing Joseph Kony so that he could face trial for his crimes against his child victims. Many Ugandans were perplexed or even angered by the IC’s stated goal of making Kony famous; why, they wondered, should the image of man who had wreaked havoc in their communities be plastered on T-shirts and posters? Yet the organization not only sought to abet Kony’s capture by making his image ubiquitous, but, in the name of saving Acholi children from the LRA’s depredations, they lobbied the US government to send a military force to assist the Ugandan Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF) in hunting down Kony. This marriage of humanitarian impulses with calls to military action secured IC’s place in a long line of well-intentioned, but nonetheless racist, efforts by “white saviors” to fix Africa by invading it. 21 There are a few glaring problems with this approach to humanitarianism. It assumes that particular forms of outside

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  51 help are wanted (in this case, a military intervention to capture Kony, or raising Kony to celebrity status), and that the white saviors know how best to help. It ignores African actors and activists whose locally informed ideas, approaches, and efforts deserve, at a bare minimum, to be heard by outsiders before they plunge into “fixing” the crisis at hand. 22 It assumes that outside intervention will be neutral, even invisible, and refuses to acknowledge the structural and everyday inequalities that almost guarantee any intervention will be at best a temporary fix, at worst an exacerbation of already difficult conditions. It inserts additional military presence into situations that often are already overwhelmed with militaries and fails to propose negotiation as an approach worth considering. 23 In the case of Kony 2012, calls for US military intervention on humanitarian grounds ignored the fact that US military assistance has at times served precisely the opposite ends, as when funneled to governments like that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has routinely used child soldiers. Moreover, it used inaccurate information in its campaign: Kony and the LRA had not been operating in northern Uganda for some five years when the Kony 2012 video came out. In short, this approach oversimplifies a complicated recent history in favor of a slick presentation. And it adopts an ahistorical approach to understanding a much longer history of violence in northern Uganda—one in which the US is implicated through its military and political alliance with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. The campaign’s call to do something about Uganda’s so-called “invisible children” moved millions to act, mainly by spreading awareness and donating money. But in so acting, participants entered an ahistorical realm in which international economic and structural inequalities, militarism, greed, and political alliances—and the historical circumstances that created such circumstances in the first place—went wholly unacknowledged. 24 In the Kony 2012 media spectacle, Joseph Kony took on celebrity status as the embodiment of evil, while IC and Kony 2012ers assumed the role of white saviors whose generosity and resolve would help capture him, bringing good to Uganda/Africa. For their part, the LRA’s child soldiers became symbols of a childlike Africa in need of immediate assistance. The campaign thus mobilized the well-worn tropes established in preceding centuries of European-African contact. Nowhere is this clearer than in the film Kony 2012’s evocation of childhood. The stories of victimized African children—and especially one particular victim, 12-year-old Jacob Acaye—are at the heart of the film. An early scene depicts Russell’s personal pledge to Acaye as the reason why Russell and his friends founded IC in the first place. But this scene is revealing in unintended ways. For one thing, its emphasis on victimhood all but precludes an appreciation of the agency that Jacob, like many child soldiers, managed to exercise, even in the direst of circumstances. This scene focuses on Acaye’s ongoing terror of the LRA

52  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant rebels, glossing over the fact that he had already managed to escape from his abductors after they brutally murdered his brother. His act of self-­ preservation obviously called for extraordinary determination, bravery, and resourcefulness, yet the film portrays young Jacob wholly as a victim, weeping inconsolably, and expressing hopelessness in the face of Russell’s earnest and insistent promise that “it’s going to be okay.” As in many other humanitarian ventures that focus on the isolated, vulnerable child, the film’s portrayal of Acaye also privileges his relationship to a Westerner, and initially a stranger, over his preexisting relationships. We learn almost nothing about the adults in Jacob’s life. Moreover, in the critical scene in which Russell promises to correct the situation, Jacob is in fact sitting next to another night walker—an unidentified friend or relative who is mostly cut out of the picture but whose voice we hear. When Jacob says it would be better if they just died now, this unidentified child challenges his despondency and insists that they must move forward. But Russell and the film’s editors apparently viewed this child as an unwelcome third wheel; such evidence of resiliency and self-help among Ugandan children clearly complicates or undermines the message the film seeks to convey. This assumption is confirmed in a subsequent scene, filmed several years later, when Jacob arrives as a teenager in San Diego where IC was headquartered, to help promote the organization’s work. Jacob is shown visiting a dolphin exhibit with Russell. When one of the dolphins leaps up, close to the glass enclosure where Jacob is standing, he instinctively recoils, leading Russell to assure him once again that “it’s okay”; he is safe now, and nothing will hurt him. Why, one wonders, did the filmmakers include this scene if not to underscore the notion that Russell had heroically made good on his earlier promise? Yet another troubling aspect of the film’s portrayal of childhood concerns the way in which Jacob’s deprived youth is implicitly contrasted to that of Russell’s young son, Gavin, who also features prominently in the film. The opening scene shows Gavin’s birth, followed by a montage of videos shot during the first years of his life. He appears dancing, pretending to be a ninja, and making an “angel” in the sand on a bright, sunny day. The clear message—that this is what childhood is supposed to look like—is driven home when the narrative shifts abruptly to reveal the literal and figurative dark circumstances of the Ugandan night walkers. In another scene, Russell “interviews” Gavin, who now appears to be about three, and tells him about the work he is doing. The camera lingers on Gavin’s disturbed expression as he takes in information about Kony, the “bad guy,” thereby reinforcing the notion of children’s innocence and innate goodness. At the film’s end, Russell explains, “I want to say that the world we’ve left behind is one that Gavin can be proud of, a place that doesn’t allow Joseph Konys and child soldiers, a place where children, no matter where they live, have a childhood free from fear.”

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  53 It then shows Gavin voicing his desire to be just like his father when he grows up, vowing, “I’m gonna come with you to Africa.” When Ugandans were shown the film, they were understandably quite confused by this focus on a small white child in a film that purported to document their trials. But if the film is viewed as work primarily designed to galvanize middle-class American audiences, Gavin’s role as a symbolically charged symbol is clear: he stands for the purity and innocence of protected childhood, while Acaye and the other night commuters represent childhood imperiled and potentially despoiled. It is up to the young viewers in the US and elsewhere in the world—largely teenagers and college students—to resolve the situation, using the strength of youth idealism and determination to break through the world’s callous indifference to the children’s suffering. Scholars, activists, and other informed commenters pushed back hard in the wake of Kony 2012’s release to a global internet audience. In a stream of smart, readable, and engaging blog pieces, essays, and statements of concern, critics of IC and Kony 2012 carefully laid out their concerns about the campaign’s message and the harm it might cause, particularly regarding further militarization of the region. The comments sections that follow some of these online articles are instructive: many commenters refused to accept the criticisms of IC as legitimate, insisting instead that it was better to do something than nothing, and that such critics were simply arrogant intellectuals wasting valuable time that could be better devoted to capturing Kony. Another aspect of the criticisms leveled against IC concerned what appeared to be questionable uses of the millions of dollars they collected from online donations as well as money raised by IC before Kony 2012 began. Here again, commenters expressed anger that critics were focusing unnecessarily on IC’s business practices when the organization was clearly doing such unimpeachable charitable work for Uganda/Africa. The tone of these comments suggested that many contributors did not want to concern themselves with the burden of thinking about how their donations were being spent. Rather, with their money long gone and on its electronic way to helping Africa and making Kony famous, they preferred to think that they had done something, even if that something was not the right thing. As Teju Cole put it in early March 2012, “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”25 The commenters’ responses to IC’s critics indicate that “the real star of Kony 2012 isn’t Joseph Kony, it’s us.”26 And most of “us” don’t want to know much about the complexities and complicities that created Joseph Kony, the LRA, and any number of other African conflict zones and crises. After all, that might require research, and it might make us feel bad. But at an even more basic level, it would require caring enough about Africa and Africans to believe that their humanity exists and is

54  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant commensurate and coterminous with our own; that their current conditions have a history worth studying; and that “we” are entangled in that history in ways that should move us to question our governments, our economies, and our blind spots. For instance, President Museveni came to power in Uganda in 1986 as a “freedom fighter,” having defeated then-President Milton Obote’s government forces in an insurgency. Obote had expressed socialist leanings, which made his government unappealing to Reagan-era US politicians and military planners. Since then, Uganda has been a favored US ally. Uganda has served as a foothold for US action in East Africa against al-Quaeda and al-Shabaab. The Kony 2012 idea relied on the assumption that the US could intervene there with little interference. The assumption was plausible because the military groundwork to enable such an intervention already existed. 27 The white savior fantasies that drove Kony 2012 were thus entangled with East Africa’s recent military history as well as the history of US global military assistance programs.

A Double Standard: Selective Efforts to Save Children from War Interest in Kony and the LRA has dissipated since 2012, but media coverage of the recruitment of child soldiers continues to focus on the phenomenon of evildoers who compel vulnerable children to enlist for war. Most recently, news networks across the US have reported on the recruitment of child soldiers by ISIS militants. “While their peers in the U.S. build campfires,” reported NBC News on November 7, 2014, ISIS has been teaching children “how to use AK-47s” and “brainwashing” them with a mix of “imagery and propaganda” in order to provide “a ready-and-willing next generation of jihadis.” Like most such reports, this one went on to point out that the United Nations has condemned the training and recruitment of children under 18 as a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. 28 What media outlets failed to note is that human rights groups have roundly criticized the US for its own policies toward the military indoctrination and recruitment of children. In recent years, the US military has amplified its presence in public schools, targeting children and youth as potential enlistees. Moreover, the US Congress has declined to ratify the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), making the US the last holdout against this international human rights treaty that seeks to protect children and youth. 29 American policymakers and media analysts point to appalling instances of childhood vulnerability elsewhere, but they remain mute when it comes to the numerous US laws and policies that conflict with the CRC’s provisions. Among these are legal decisions to treat juvenile offenders as adults and to impose life sentences on prisoners under the age of 18, the exemption of certain

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  55 categories of American children from child labor laws, the enlistment of 17-year-olds with parental consent, and other policies and actions that directly contravene human rights laws in relation to child soldiers. Such policies and actions include US-sanctioned torture and imprisonment of alleged child soldiers in Iraq, Guantánamo, and Afghanistan as well as support for multiple regimes across the globe that recruit and employ children as combatants.30 Moral panics about the use of child soldiers in non-Western nations, in other words, serve to obscure a domestic history in which the category of a “child” worthy of protection is applied either selectively or not at all. Intense interest in and activism around the problem of foreign child soldiers contrasts sharply with the predominantly local, relatively smallscale movements to challenge what has been called the “militarization of schooling” in America—that is, the adoption of “practices and policies in schools that orient youth towards military enlistment and service.”31 This trend toward targeting younger Americans as potential enlistees can be traced back to the transformation of the US military into an all-volunteer force in 1973. Having overturned conscription, the armed services were compelled to attract new recruits through advertising campaigns and the provision of incentives such as subsidized education and signing bonuses. Although these methods worked well at first, declining military enlistments by the 1990s led the Pentagon to seek new ways of filling the ranks, including launching far more aggressive recruitment campaigns directed at the young. As a result, the presence of the military in public schools—especially those servicing low-income and nonwhite students—grew exponentially in the first decade of this century, surpassing anything seen in the past.32 The growth of organizations that directly channel children into the military provides the most glaring example of the militarization of American schooling. Most notably, the JROTC, a federal program partly funded by the Department of Defense (DoD) which began in 1916, more than doubled in size in the early 1990s, an expansion that continued over the following decade. 33 Each branch of the service has its own JROTC, the Army’s being the largest. According to its website, as of February 2016, there were “approximately 314,000 Cadets enrolled in 1,731 high schools, led by 4,000 retired Army Instructors.”34 This program, which is mandatory on some campuses, enrolls boys and girls as young as 14. Outfitted in khaki or full dress uniforms, cadets receive military ranks and instruction in military discipline, military science, and military history. Although officials deny that JROTC is used as a recruiting tool, Army regulations state that the program “should create favorable attitudes and impressions toward the Services and toward careers in the Armed Forces.”35 And statistics for the decades after 1990 suggest the extent to which this goal is realized: depending on the service branch, between 30 to 55 percent of JROTC graduates eventually

56  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant join the military—a rate far exceeding anything seen among the broader population.36 Whereas the JROTC enrolls those who have reached high school age, it also administers various programs aimed at even younger children. The Junior Cadet Corps (JCC), for instance, provides elective courses for those in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, supposedly to prepare them for high school. JCC videos show uniformed participants engaged in “armed” drill inspections and participating in a range of activities that include simulating warfare with imitation weapons. 37 Similarly, the National Middle School Cadet Corps (NMSCC) provides a “sequence of middle school courses and supplemental after-school programs” for children aged 11 to 14. Billing itself as a way to “curb gang activity, reduce drop outs,” and promote valuable life skills like “personal discipline” and “team work,” NMSCC cadets learn to drill and chant in formation; they receive training by members of the armed services; and they go on field trips to military installations. 38 Taking in children at an even younger age, the Young Marines is open to “all youth aged 8 through completion of high school.” According to this organization’s website, there are now approximately 300 units involving 10,000 youths in 40 states, most of which are led by retired military personnel. Like their counterparts in other JROTC-sponsored organizations, young participants wear uniforms and complete training in military structure and nomenclature, and engage in various physical activities and volunteer work among veterans groups.39 The American media’s current fixation on the way foreign governments recruit the young seems deeply ironic, given this situation in which hundreds of thousands of American children—some as young as 8—now receive military-style training. Yet the proliferation of such organizations is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the increasing presence of the military in American children’s lives. Over the past several decades, the Pentagon has also relentlessly sought to reach children outside the classroom. The Army urges recruiters to view their School Recruit Program as “a long-term investment,” explaining that they should endeavor to form relationships with students “at every level of education,” including those as young as 12 or 13: “You will find that establishing trust and credibility with students—even seventh- and eighth-graders—can positively impact high school and postsecondary school recruiting efforts. Students who already know you as a respected and trusted member of the community will also see you as someone they can emulate and fearlessly approach to discuss their career options.”40 To foster trust and build relationships, military recruiters are instructed to get involved in any and all school activities—from participating in Black History Month or eating in the school cafeteria to developing close relationships with popular students in order to encourage their peers to enlist.41 Military-themed entertainment is now a feature of

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  57 pep rallies and sporting events, especially in low-income schools. And recruiters use financial incentives, such as assurances of college aid, signing bonuses, or free iPods to meet their monthly recruiting targets.42 According to dozens of journalistic exposés, recruiters have also frequently resorted to bullying, deception, or intimidation either to attract enlistees or to coerce those who have signed up and then changed their minds—practices so widespread that Congress called for an investigation in 2006.43 Sophisticated media messaging via commercials and video games serves to reinforce students’ personal encounters with recruiting officers. Pentagon-funded TV commercials tout the benefits of military service, invariably emphasizing the opportunities for education, travel, or excitement while downplaying the risk of injury, death, or psychological trauma.44 Similarly, the US military has moved into the gaming industry in a major way, developing and producing online video games such as America’s Army, which allow players to participate in virtual warfare. Launched in 2002, this free game has had more than 13 million registered users since its release, with each new iteration employing what anthropologist Robertson Allen describes as “increasingly sensational, cinematic, and technophilic” combat gaming scenarios.45 America’s Army, he explains, proudly advertises its intent to compete “in the electronic entertainment space for youth mind share” in order to get the young thinking of military enlistment as early as possible. Allowing users to imagine themselves in the Army, the game creates “virtual soldiers” in both senses of the word—familiarizing users with military life while simultaneously attracting future recruits, and then helping to train those same recruits in “weapons familiarization and cultural awareness role-playing exercises.”46 This and similar games provide an experience of acculturation that Nick Turse categorizes as “less a matter of simple military indoctrination and more like a near immersion in a virtual world of war, where armed conflict is not the last but the first—and indeed the only—resort.”47 Not every American child will be subject to such overt pressure, of course. As the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations point out, the DoD specifically directs its recruitment efforts toward students of color and high schools with lower college attendance rates.48 Some blame this situation on the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, which required that high schools receiving federal funds allow military recruiters the same level of access to students as job or college recruiters. The effect was not only to force public schools to accept the presence of the military on campus but also to provide the personal information of millions of students for inclusion in the DoD’s extensive recruitment database. Although the law theoretically allows parents to “opt out” by requesting that high schools not release students’ personal information, many parents remain unaware of this option.49 Moreover, military

58  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant recruiters manage to circumvent laws regarding parental consent and the release of students’ personal information through the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)—a three-hour test given to all new recruits—that is also administered every year to over 600,000 public high school students, the vast majority under age 18. Because the Army itself administers the tests, it claims that the results of the ASVAB are not “educational records” and are therefore not subject to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act; whereas the school itself can choose not to automatically convey the results to the DoD, most do not select this option.50 In early 2013, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called upon the Obama administration to “[e]nsure that schools, parents and pupils are made aware of the voluntary nature of the ASVAB before consenting to the participation into it” and to “amend No Child Left Behind to ensure that recruitment practices do not target persons under the age of 18.”51 For the past two decades, social commentators on the left have been sounding the alarm over the militarization of American childhood. They have noted that organizations such as the JROTC socialize children into support for war, teach them to see the world in terms of battle and survival, and train them in habits of obedience, regimentation, and compliance to hierarchy—qualities more suited to authoritarian regimes than to a liberal democracy. 52 They have pointed out that instructors in such programs often have minimal or no training as teachers, and their textbooks offer a simplistic, triumphalist view of American history with a distinctly pro-military bias. 53 And they have decried the fact that programs like the JROTC receive public funding, while no equivalent support or teaching time is dedicated to serious discussion of the ethics of war, the role of the military within a democracy, or critical perspectives on America’s role in global affairs. 54 Likewise, various groups—from Iraq Veterans for Peace to civil rights organizations—have organized to provide students with alternative perspectives on war. The most vocal and well-organized movement to curtail the presence of the military in schools, however, has focused around counter-­ recruitment efforts that seek to limit the military’s access to schools and support parents’ right to withhold their children’s personal details from recruiters. These efforts exist in all American states, and they have achieved some success in working against militarism, mostly through student and parent activism, the provision of speakers to public schools, and advocacy around the issue of students’ right to privacy. 55 Yet there are also some interesting and unsettling parallels between the moral panics over child soldiers in Uganda and elsewhere, and these domestic counter-recruitment efforts. In both cases, public anger and activism are focused on a legitimate problem: the use of children as combatants or

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  59 the targeting of children for military recruitment. Both movements seek to ensure that the young are protected from direct involvement in war, and both focus attention on a narrow target: Joseph Kony on the one hand, and military recruiters on the other. In each case, the root cause of the problem is complex and multilayered, yet the proposed solution is relatively straightforward. Just as the problem of child soldiers must be traced not to one brutal warlord or alien cultural practices but to a complex history and geopolitics in which Western nations are complicit, so too does the issue of the militarization of American childhood need to be seen as extending beyond a local or individual level. Seeking to prevent one’s own child from being recruited while ignoring the military expansionism that led to such recruitment efforts simply pushes the burden of going to war on to someone else’s child. Similarly, decreasing the overall number of American recruits may end up increasing the exploitation of poor foreign workers, given the extent to which the US now subcontracts military-­related tasks to companies around the world. 56 If moral panics over child soldiers misleadingly focus on external problems and divert attention from American children, then the correction lies not in turning attention inward but rather in recognizing the extent to which the conditions of children at home and abroad are intrinsically connected. American children cannot be protected from the effects of war by removing military recruiters from classrooms and schoolyards any more than children in Uganda or elsewhere can be given innocent childhoods via well-meaning movements that reduce complex geopolitical problems to individual evildoing. War will affect children’s lives in both places, whether they join the military or not. In America, the massive expansion of the nation’s military capabilities over the past three decades has been purchased by channeling funds and human potential away from solving civil problems and toward military ends, leading to skyrocketing rates of poverty and homelessness among American children and bequeathing to the next generation crippling debt, crumbling infrastructure, moribund civil liberties, and environmental catastrophe. Similarly, it makes little sense for American activists to campaign against one foreign tyrant’s abuse of the young when America’s war on terror has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq and Afghanistan and confronted millions of children throughout this region with internal displacement, social devastation, irreparable environmental destruction, and continuing violence on a mass scale. When it comes to the effects of war on children, moral outrage is a perfectly reasonable response. But moral panics that ignore the structures through which war is produced and sustained in favor of targeting malefactors can only ever succeed in saving one child to the detriment of many more.

60  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant

Notes 1 Between 1985 and 1999, only 42 such items appeared in the New York Times. In the Washington Post, the numbers for these same two periods rise from 60 to 408—a nearly sevenfold increase. 2 In 1977, amendments to the Geneva Convention dealt with the issue of “child soldiers” for the first time, mandating that signatories prohibit their militaries from recruiting children under 14 years of age and take all “feasible measures” to ensure that those under age 15 play no direct part in hostilities. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) reinforced this prohibition, while also leading to an international movement to implement a “straight 18 position” that would compel signatories to accept 18 as a minimum enlistment age. 3 Drumbl, “Child Soldiers and Clicktivism,” 482. 4 Sanders, “Organization Behind ‘Kony 2012’ Set to Close Its Doors in 2012.” 5 In a widely circulated set of tweets regarding Kony 2012, the Nigerian writer Teju Cole criticized IC for epitomizing what he called the “White Savior Industrial Complex.” He later expanded on his critique in The Atlantic, arguing that IC and similar US-based groups fail to address or inform themselves about the larger and systemic problems that Uganda and other African nations face, while displaying a lack of humility and failure to consult with those they hope to “save.” Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” 6 Zeiger, “The Schoolhouse and the Armory.” 7 As Susan Shepler has noted, attempts to impose Western notions of childhood upon poor and conflict-ridden nations must “be understood as part of the history of colonialism and of colonialism’s offspring, development. Indeed, the spread of the Western ideal could be seen as the colonization of childhood, one of the central ideas of what is now known as childhood studies.” Shepler, Childhood Deployed, 6. 8 Wasserman, “‘Kony 2012’ Tops 100 Million Views”; Edmondson, “Uganda is too Sexy.” 9 The grand plans for “Cover the Night” never materialized as relatively few people showed up to participate. The failure has been read as indicative of the limitations of online activism as well as the growing skepticism surrounding the movement, particularly following the very public mental breakdown of its most visible figure, IC cofounder Jason Russell. Garber, “How Kony’s Big 2012 Event Fizzled Out.” 10 Patricia Daley has noted that Western celebrities who support humanitarian campaigns often serve to “render Africa invisible to probing by dehistoricising and depoliticizing the causes they support. In this way they shift the public’s attention (especially that of the young) away from exploring the roots of the crises to tackling the manifestations. Africa’s problems are presented essentially as moral—as the consequences of human failure that can be technically fixed—by the Western leaders.” Daley, “Rescuing African Bodies.” See also Haynes, “The Celebritization of Human Trafficking.” 11 In pondering this question, Jack Bratich has written, “Some critics have pointed out, quite rightly, that KONY 2012 [. . .] appears as a one-man crusade, a self-congratulatory expression of [IC founder] Jason Russell’s personal journey. But Russell’s missionary position doesn’t explain the video’s massive appeal. There is no ‘I’ in meme, but there are (at least) two ‘me’s. It’s the connection and circulation that matters. We can ruthlessly refute the film, but we also need to understand the very real draw it has/had with young people.” Bratich, “My Little Kony.”

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  61 12 Civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone produced considerable numbers of child soldiers. Charles Taylor, who was President of Liberia during that country’s civil war, was tried and found guilty of war crimes at the International Criminal Court in 2012. 13 Finnegan, “The White Girl’s Burden,” 33. 14 In 2014, Uganda enacted a draconian Anti-Homosexuality Act that was ultimately ruled invalid by the Constitutional Court of Uganda. On the role of US evangelicals in fomenting antigay sentiment, see Roger Ross William’s 2013 documentary “God Loves Uganda”; Walker, “How Uganda was seduced by anti-gay conservative evangelicals.” 15 See, for example, Wilson, “Invisible Children Funded by Antigay, Creationist Christian Right.” 16 For a succinct overview of these historical issues, see Cooper, “From Free Labor to Family Allowances.” For an incisive commentary on the links between the older discursive modes and recent representations of Africa, see Mathers, “Mr. Kristof, I Presume?” 17 Keim, Mistaking Africa, 46. 18 Keim, Mistaking Africa, 45. 19 Clifton, “Representations of Africa in NGOs’ Marketing Campaigns.” 20 “[Kony 2012] is essentially a global distributed manhunt, a nascent dystopic experiment reminiscent of Running Man and Logan’s Run, but now updated for a Hunger Games generation in which spectatorship turns into participation and intervention.” Bratich, “My Little Kony.” Of course, before the age of social media, telethons and television advertising also convinced people to donate by phoning in pledges. 21 Cole, “The White Savior Complex”; Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights, 3–14. 22 Haken and Taft, “Backlash against Kony 2012”; and Su and Besliu, “The Real Effects of Kony 2012.” 23 Association of Concerned Africa Scholars, “ACAS Statement to the U.S. Government about the Lord’s Resistance Army and Central Africa”; Brown, Metzler, Root, and Vinck, “React and Respond.” 24 Daley, “Rescuing African Bodies”; Currion, “The Humanitarian Future.” 25 Cole, “The White Savior Complex.” 26 Mengestu, “Not a Click Away.” 27 It is worth noting that the Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF) has committed its share of crimes (including the use of child soldiers and forcing Acholi into displacement camps) in northern Uganda in prosecuting the war against the LRA. 28 Vinograd, Balkiz, and Omar, “ISIS Trains Child Soldiers.” 29 The most recent signatories include South Sudan, Palestine, and Somalia. “Conventions on the Rights of the Child.” See also Lawrence S. Winter, “Will the U.S. Government Stand Alone in Rejecting Children’s Rights?” The CRC mandates that signatories accept 18 as a minimum enlistment age in addition to numerous other provisions around the military treatment of children (defined as those under the age of 18, unless a state’s domestic legislation decrees an earlier age of majority) and sets forth children’s political, economic, social, civil, and health rights. Although the US has not ratified this treaty, it has signed one of the CRC’s optional protocols, which specifies a minimum voluntary recruitment age of 16 and provides additional safeguards on the recruitment of those between 16–18 years of age. 30 Brown, “U.S. Approves Military Aid for Countries with Child Soldiers”; Rosen, Child Soldiers, 85–110.

62  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant 31 Furumoto, “No Poor Child Left Unrecruited,” 200. 32 Anderson, “‘The Military ‘Pipeline’ from Our Public Schools to Returning Veterans.” 33 Andes, “Army Expands Junior ROTC Programs”; Berlowitz and Long, “The Proliferation of JROTC.” 34 “An Overview of JROTC,” JROTC website. Archived at https://web.archive. org/web/20160301192152/http://www.usarmyjrotc.com/overview-of-jrotc 35 ACLU, Soldiers of Misfortune, 13. 36 McDuffee, “No JROTC Left Behind.” 37 Junior Cadet Corps website, 2016. 38 National Middle School Cadet Corps website, 2016. 39 Young Marines website, “Who We Are.” 40 US Army Recruiting Command, Recruiter Handbook. 41 US Army Recruiting Command, School Recruiting Handbook, quoted in ACLU, Soldiers of Misfortune, 10. 42 ACLU, Soldiers of Misfortune, 28–31; Hubert, “I want you!”; Turse, The Complex, chap. 12. 43 Child Soldiers International, Child Soldiers Global Report 2001; ACLU, Soldiers of Misfortune, 18–19. 4 4 Anderson, “The Military ‘Pipeline’ from our Public Schools to Returning Veterans.” 45 Allen, “Virtual Soldiers,” 153. 46 Ibid., 154. 47 Turse, The Complex, 140. 48 ACLU, Soldiers of Misfortune, 28; New York Civil Liberties Union, We Want You(th)! 49 Dittmeier, “No Child Left Behind and Military Recruitment in High Schools.” 50 Elder, “Linchpin of Pentagon’s School-based Recruitment.” 51 Committee on the Rights of the Child, “Concluding observations on the second report of the United States of America,” 4. 52 Aguirre, Jr. and Johnson, “Militarizing Youth in Public Education.” See also Baker, “We’re in the Army Now.” 53 Lutz and Bartlett, Making Soldiers in the Public Schools. 54 Anderson, “The Military ‘Pipeline’ from our Public Schools to Returning Veterans.” 55 Numerous local, state, and national organizations are involved in counter-­ recruitment efforts, most notably the American Friends Service Committee and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth, an umbrella organization that began in 2003 to connect these organizations, has also been particularly active in seeking to de-militarize schools and repeal laws that provide military recruiters with access to students’ information. 56 Tannock, “Is ‘Opting Out’ really an Answer?”; Stillman, “The Invisible Army”; Li, “Offshoring the Army.”

Bibliography “About the Young Marines.” Young Marines website. www.youngmarines. com/aboutus. Aguirre, Jr., Adalberto and Brooke Johnson. “Militarizing Youth in Public Education.” Social Justice 32, no. 3 (2005): 148–62.

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  63 Allen, Robertson. “Virtual Soldiers, Cognitive Laborers.” In Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing, edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, 152–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. American Civil Liberties Union. Soldiers of Misfortune: Abusive U.S. Military Recruitment and Failure to Protect Child Soldiers. 2008 www.aclu.org/­ soldiers-misfortune-abusive-us-military-recruitment-and-failure-protect-childsoldiers. Anderson, Gary L. “The Military ‘Pipeline’ from Our Public Schools to Returning Veterans.” Power Play 3, no. 2 (2011): 1–32. Andes, Jennifer. “Army Expands Junior ROTC Programs.” Associated Press, July 30, 1999. www.apnewsarchive.com/1999/Army-Expands-Junior-ROTCPrograms/id-d05983f70147f4ebe80ef2460bad2d68. Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS). “ACAS Statement to the U.S. Government about the Lord’s Resistance Army and Central Africa.” March 14, 2012. http://concernedafricascholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ ACAS-Central-Africa.pdf. Baker, Kevin. “We’re in the Army Now: The G.O.P.’s Plan to Militarize our Culture.” Harper’s Magazine, October 2003: 35–46. Berlowitz, Marvin J. and Nathan A. Long. “The Proliferation of JROTC: Educational Reform and Militarization.” In Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, edited by Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard, 181–91. New York: Routledge, 2003. Bratich, Jack. “My Little Kony: The Rise of the Flashpublics.” Counterpunch, March 13, 2012. www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/13/my-little-kony/. Brown, Barbara B., John Metzler, Christine Root, and Patrick Vinck. “React and Respond: The Phenomenon of Kony 2012.” April 13, 2012. http:// concernedafricascholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Kony-React-­ Respond.pdf. Brown, Hayes. “U.S. Approves Military Aid for Countries with Child Soldiers.” October 1, 2003. https://thinkprogress.org/u-s-approves-military-aid-forcountries-with-child-soldiers-f904eda82e7e/. Child Soldiers International. (2001) “Child Soldiers Global Report 2001 – United States of America, 2001.” www.refworld.org/docid/498805c126.html. Clifton, Hannah. “Representations of Africa in NGOs’ Marketing Campaigns.” Discovering the Damage. Dreams and Development blog, November 12, 2012. http://developmenthannahclifton.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/marketingdevelopment/. Cole, Teju. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic, March 21, 2012. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-saviorindustrial-complex/254843/. Committee on the Rights of the Child, “Concluding observations on the second report of the United States of America, adopted by the Committee at its sixty-­ second session (14 January–5 February 2013),” United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, January 28, 2013. Cooper, Frederick. “From Free Labor to Family Allowances: Labor and African Society in Colonial Discourse.” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 745–65.

64  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant Currion, Paul. “The Humanitarian Future.” Aeon Magazine, September 10, 2014. http://aeon.co/magazine/society/can-humanitarian-agencies-reinventthemselves-in-a-network-age/. Daley, Patricia. “Rescuing African Bodies: Celebrities, Consumerism and Neoliberal Humanitarianism.” Review of African Political Economy 40, no. 137 (2013): 375–93. Dittmeier, Kate Holm. “No Child Left Behind and Military Recruitment in High Schools: When Privacy Rights Trump a Legitimate Government Interest.” Journal of Law and Education 36, no. 4 (2007): 581–88. Drumbl, Mark A. “Child Soldiers and Clicktivism: Justice, Myths, and Prevention.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 4, no. 3 (2012): 481–85. ———. Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Elder, Pat. “Linchpin of Pentagon’s School-based Recruitment: Student Testing Program (ASVAB) Rife with Errors and Contradictions.” Global Research, January  5,  2014.  www.globalresearch.ca/linchpin-of-pentagons-­s choolbased-recruiting-program-student-testing-program-rife-with-errors-and-­ contradictions/5363839. Edmondson, Laura. “Uganda Is Too Sexy: Reflections on Kony 2012.” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 3 (2012): 10–17. Finnegan, Amy C. “The White Girl’s Burden.” Contexts 12, no. 1 (2012): 30–35. Furumoto, Rosa. “No Poor Child Left Unrecruited.” Equity & Excellence in Education 38, no. 3 (2005): 200–210. Garber, Megan. “How Kony’s Big 2012 Event Fizzled Out.” The Atlantic, April 24, 2012. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/ how-kony-2012s-big-event-fizzled-out/256261/. Haken, Nate and Patricia Taft. “Backlash against Kony 2012: Where Are the Voices of Ugandans?” March 19, 2012. www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/ Opinion/2012/0319/Backlash-against-Kony-2012-Where-are-the-voices-ofUgandans. Haynes, Dina Francesca. “The Celebritization of Human Trafficking.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 653, no. 1 (2014): 25–30. Houbert, K. “I want you! The 3 Rs, reading, ‘riting, and recruiting.” In Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization, edited by B. Sutton, S. Morgan, and J. Novkov, 213–22. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Keim, Curtis. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2014. Li, Darryl. “Offshoring the Army: Migrant Workers and the U.S. Military.” UCLA Law Review 124 (2015): 62–174. Lutz, Catherine and Lesley Bartlett, Making Soldiers in the Public Schools: An Analysis of JROTC Curriculum, 1995. http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/focus/ co/cows/afsc/youthmill/jrotc/msitps.pdf. Mathers, Kathryn. “Mr. Kristof, I Presume? Saving Africa in the Footsteps of Nicholas Kristof.” Transition 107, no. 1 (2012): 15–31.

Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness  65 McDuffee, Allen. “No JROTC Left Behind: Are Military Schools Recruitment Pools.” In These Times, August 20, 2008. http://inthesetimes.com/ article/3855/no_jrotc_left_behind. Mengestu, Dinaw. “Not a Click Away: Joseph Kony in the Real World.” Warscapes March 12, 2012. www.warscapes.com/reportage/not-click-awayjoseph-kony-real-world. National Middle School Cadet Corps website, www.nationalmiddleschoolcadetcorps.com/MISSION.html. New York Civil Liberties Union. We Want You(th)! Confronting Unregulated Military Recruitment in New York City Public Schools, 2007. www.nyclu. org/en/publications/report-we-want-youth-confronting-unregulated-military-­ recruitment-new-york-city-public. “An Overview of JROTC.” JROTC website. Archived at www.globalresearch. ca/linchpin-of-pentagons-school-based-recruiting-program-student-testing-­ program-rife-with-errors-and-contradictions/5363839. Razack, Sherene H. Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Rosen, David M. Child Soldiers: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2012. Sanders, Sam. “Organization Behind ‘Kony 2012’ Set to Close Its Doors in 2012.” NPR, December 14, 2014. www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/ 15/370824018/organization-behind-kony-2012-set-to-close-its-doorsin-2015. Shepler, Susan. Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Stillman, Sarah. “The Invisible Army.” The New Yorker (June 6, 2011): 56–65. Su, Yvonne and Raluca Besliu. “The Real Effects of Kony 2012.” International Affairs Review, April 23, 2012. Tannock, Stuart. “Is Opting Out’ really an Answer? Schools, Militarism, and the Counter-Recruitment Movement in Post-September 11 United States at War.” Social Justice 33, no. 3 (2005): 163–78. Turse, Nick. The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. U.S. Army Recruiting Command. Recruiter Handbook (USAREC Manual 3-01). November 22, 2011. Vinograd, Cassandra, Ghazi Balkiz and Ammar Cheikh Omar. “ISIS Trains Child Soldiers at Camps for ‘Cubs of the Islamic State’.” NBC News, November 7, 2014. www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/isis-trains-child-soldierscamps-cubs-islamic-state-n241821. Walker, Tim. “How Uganda Was Seduced by Anti-Gay Conservative Evangelicals.” The Independent, March 14, 2014. www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/africa/how-uganda-was-seduced-by-antigay-conservative-­ evangelicals-9193593.html. Wasserman, Todd. “‘Kony 2012’ Tops 100 Million Views, Becomes the Most Viral Video in History.” Mashable, March 12, 2012. http://mashable. com/2012/03/12/kony-most-viral/.

66  Michelle Moyd, Frances M. Clarke, and Rebecca Jo Plant Wilson, Bruce. “Invisible Children Funded by Antigay, Creationist Christian Right.” AlterNet, March 11, 2012. www.alternet.org/speakeasy/2012/03/11/ invisible-children-funded-by-antigay-creationist-christian-right. Winter, Lawrence S. “Will the U.S. Government Stand Alone in Rejecting Children’s Rights?” History News Network, February 11, 2015. http://historynews network.org/article/158368. Zeiger, Susan. “The Schoolhouse and the Armory: U.S. Teachers and the Campaign against Militarism in Public Schools.” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 2 (2003): 150–79.

3 Ebola Keywords Adia Benton

Between December 2013 and March 2016, nearly 30,000 people in West Africa were infected with Ebola virus. More than 11,000 of those people died. But Ebola was not simply a deadly disease that infected and killed an unprecedented number of individuals in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone over a two-year period. Ebola was also a political, cultural, and social phenomenon that brought to relief commonly held understandings of Africa and its place in the world— economically, socially, politically, and biologically. The West African Ebola epidemic raised questions about how the “globe” of global health is configured in ways that reflect and produce cartographies of uneven distributions of infectious diseases, cures, wealth, and power. These cartographies of inequality also shape the institutional logics of official responses to outbreak: who and what is presumed to pose a risk to health and well-being, and who and what are presumed to hold the solution to the epidemic itself. Indeed, on June 21, 2014, when Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders reported that the West African Ebola outbreak had begun to spiral out of control, the official statement did not register as a humanitarian emergency or a public health crisis of international import. Only after two American missionary clinicians fell ill in late July and were evacuated to the US for treatment in the first week of August did the World Health Organization (WHO) pronounce the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).1 Under these conditions, the US and the United Kingdom had little choice but to mobilize to send help to the affected region—with US President Obama in particular suggesting that “stopping the disease at its source” would prevent any locally acquired infections in the US. 2 By the time I visited Sweden’s Nordic Africa Institute in late August 2014 to participate in a panel about Ebola, my colleagues there were eager to show how an already hostile political climate on immigration became more intense as fear spread about possible Ebola infections in Europe. Text from newspapers handily “Google translated” for me on a friend’s smartphone showed the character, if not the extent, of

68  Adia Benton the panic. 3 European and North American colleagues working at nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the affected countries, many of whom were already on regularly scheduled summer holiday, were told to consider postponing their return to their field posts. The ­G erman government requested that any citizens working in the affected region, with the exception of health workers and diplomatic officials, return home.4 Volunteer organizations, such as the US Peace Corps, had already begun evacuating their personnel. 5 Liberian President E ­ llen Johnson Sirleaf demanded that any senior officials who had left the country return or risk losing their jobs. 6 The October 8, 2014, death of Ebola-positive Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan in a Dallas, Texas, hospital, and the subsequent Ebola infections of two nurses who cared for him, stoked an already intense political debate about the dangers Ebola posed to ­A merican citizenry and the body politic. Put more succinctly, this regional outbreak that had expanded to at least four countries in West Africa in late summer 2014 was not an emergency of “international concern” until it more directly threatened to reach the US and Europe. This viral border-crossing, which was precipitated by a desire to provide quality health care to two Americans, mobilized a global moral panic that outpaced the actual spread of the disease. Debates about which specific disease events (occurring in which specific geographical locations) can be defined as global threats are intimately linked to the ambiguous nature of global health, a growing disciplinary and professional field. Global health, like its predecessors tropical medicine and international health, is largely configured to address the public health concerns of the “Third World” in a way that cultivates a marketplace for “First World” professionals to engage in the work of calculating and mitigating disease risks, and developing bare minimum requirements for rescuing lives from the brink of death. The humanitarian impulse driving the quest for that “obscure object of global health,” as physician-anthropologist Didier Fassin calls it, is framed in terms that equate the global with the universal.7 It signals both the spatial expansion of health programs, funding, personnel, and ideas in certain directions, and the moral normalization of ideas about what governing health entails. The semantic collapse of the global and universal also provides ideological cover for health interventions that require inequitable distributions of disease, wealth, and power, and aim to mitigate the detrimental effects of these distributions. The “global” of global health as universal, then, indexes an aspiration for humane approaches to the world’s social problems, as addressed through public health measures, as it also provides a template for work that relies on and actively reproduces an inhumane bifurcation in quality of care for rich and poor, north and south.

Ebola  69 As a medical anthropologist with professional and personal ties to the region who also studies the political and cultural dynamics of outbreaks and “global health” interventions, I was a keen observer of the outbreak from afar. During my ad hoc research on the Ebola outbreak, I witnessed the rapid cultivation and circulation of experts (in the form of virologists, epidemiologists, program managers, health communications strategists, logisticians, and anthropologists), technologies (laboratory kits, medications, putative vaccines), and capital (bilateral aid, parallel markets for aid workers, resource extraction operations). My ethnographic data set, upon which I base the list of keywords and meanings that this chapter comprises, accumulated alongside this production and proliferation of expertise. The data set includes insights from the Ebola and global health panels in which I participated as the outbreak unfolded and throughout its duration; social media networks that coalesced and dissolved over the course of the outbreak; and the free-flowing commentary that such ephemeral networks inspire across the world—­particularly among the networks of aid workers, epidemiologists and clinicians, and of self-identified Africans and members of its diaspora.8 Through these channels, networks, and relationships, I collected stories about Ebola that invoke and reinvigorate the familiar immunological, nationalistic, and evolutionary tropes that pit us against them, foreign against native, pure against dangerous, traditional against modern, and fact against belief. Such stories have opened up the space to raise powerful critiques of the political economy of global health, development, and humanitarian aid. They have allowed for the contestation of ahistorical and depoliticized theories of disease transmission in this region, which, over the course of centuries, has been ground zero for the extraction of a range of natural resources and forced labor.9 In this chapter, I write specifically about the keywords coalescing around Ebola virus disease during the West African Ebola outbreak of 2013–2015. Drawing inspiration from AIDS activist Jan Zita Grover, who, in turn, drew her inspiration from Marxist scholar and literary theorist Raymond Williams, I develop not a “neutral review of meanings” but a set of critical and anthropologically informed interpretations of the language building up around Ebola in media, scholarly, and humanitarian responses to the West African Ebola outbreak.10 Specifically, I have identified keywords that provide an anchor for understanding the social groups and institutions that use them, how they use them, and the interventions these keywords produce or engender. I began developing this list in summer 2014, before the WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” to make sense of tropes, genres, and practices reflected in many of the

70  Adia Benton commonly used words or turns of phrase used to describe or interpret events related to the epidemic. This list is also my attempt to get a handle on and grapple with assumptions that have shaped responses to the epidemic in West ­A frica and the US in the two years of the outbreak. Specifically, I am concerned with the following questions: how do these words—their repeated use and implicit debates about their meaning—reflect shared assumptions within lay, scientific, and public health communities? What possibilities do they open up? Which ones do they foreclose? In identifying these keywords and their definitions, I emphasize how words and their meanings both shape and reflect our shared cultural constructions of health, disease, geography, and power. I ask how is meaning, particularly that constructed through the technologies and ideologies of global health, forged through and along steeply graded inequalities in a world system?

Bushmeat In a fact sheet on their website, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define bushmeat as the meat that comes from wild animals captured in developing regions of the world such as Africa. Bushmeat comes from a variety of wild animals, including bats, nonhuman primates (e.g., monkeys), cane rats (grasscutters), and duiker (antelope). It is often smoked, dried, or salted and considered a treat to some, a main food source to others.11 In the early stages of the epidemic, scientists speculated that bushmeat consumption in Guinea sparked the West African Ebola outbreak. Later, the origin story for this outbreak was revised to include a new central figure: a toddler named Emile who played near a bat-infested tree in ­Meliandou.12 In previous Ebola epidemics in East and Central Africa, outbreaks may have begun with zoonotic infections, or animalto-­human transmission, but the majority of infections were believed to have been contracted through intimate practices: providing care for the sick, preparing bodies of those who succumbed to Ebola virus for burials, and sexual intercourse with someone who had once fallen ill with Ebola. Person-to-person transmission of the virus, through acts of care and intimate touch, in other words, is the primary mode by which the disease begins to spread in a community.13 In the official CDC definition, “bushmeat” is as much a signifier of place—“developing regions of the world such as Africa”—as it is of food, something providing nourishment for people’s bodies, something

Ebola  71 consumed, ingested, and digested. To live in a “developing region such as Africa” means that a separate word (“bushmeat”) is used to describe the wild animals captured for food, while those presumably living outside of “developing regions” have “wild game.” As historical anthropologist of Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire Mike McGovern so cleverly puts it, “bushmeat is to game as hut is to house.”14 This analogy, he argues, embodies and unmasks the interpretive work serving a politics of disgust, a sentiment with powerful political valences. A politics of disgust, then, not only shapes the power dynamics in relationships among humans but also willingness to respond to others’ suffering, to empathize with their plight.15 Indeed, the US edition of the August 29, 2014, Newsweek magazine featured a photograph of a chimpanzee on its cover with the bold claim that bushmeat smugglers were providing a “backdoor [entry] for Ebola,” thereby sparking an epidemic in the US.16 While the reporters found no experts willing to confirm that West African game meat found in informal or formal American markets posed any plausible risk, these claims on the magazine’s cover did reflect and shape discriminatory attitudes toward West African immigrants and travelers.17 In reports like these, West Africans are “othered” as carriers of a deadly virus who “smuggle” potentially deadly contraband through the “back door,” an erogenous zone erected at US ports of entry.

Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever Ebola hemorrhagic fever was a name given to the condition caused by the Ebola virus, which was first identified by a team of European and American public health scientists in 1976 in Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo). After its identification and isolation, the virus and the disease it causes were given a name that cemented them as quintessentially African—named not after the village in which it was “discovered” but after a nearby river, in efforts to prevent the stigmatization of that village.18 The class of fever, hemorrhagic, implied that infection with the virus would inevitably cause bleeding along with an abnormally high body temperature.19

Ebola Virus Disease To avoid confusion about the symptoms and signs of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, which does not always cause visible hemorrhaging, the WHO began referring to the disease as “Ebola virus disease” or EVD. While the classificatory shift for Ebola occurred years before, the organization publicly referred to outbreaks of Ebola virus infections as causing Ebola hemorrhagic fever as late as 2012. The outbreak of EVD in West Africa,

72  Adia Benton which was first reported to the WHO in March 2014, appears to be the first time that WHO publicly referred to the disease as EVD. 20 This shift in classification reflects growing knowledge about the disease, its clinical course, and the signs for diagnosing an Ebola case. It also reveals the limits of knowledge about Ebola produced in the years following the disease’s discovery and preceding the 2013–2015 West ­A frican outbreak. The WHO writes and updates the International ­Classification of Diseases (ICD) manual, the book on how to diagnose and classify diseases and deaths. The ICD is a 120-year-old system currently in its 10th edition (ICD-10). It was initially introduced so that governments could standardize, codify, and track how citizens die, thereby bringing the management of a population’s health together with routine state functions and administrative practices. Of the ICD, science studies scholar Geoffrey Bowker writes, The smooth face of the flat list hides a complex story. The very name is, its developers point out, a misnomer. The ICD is a nomenclature, not a classification. There is no single organizing principle; rather etiological (disease origin), topographical (disease site), operational (test for disease) and ethical/political factors each play complex, frequently conflicting, roles in establishing the list. A single disease can be coded in more than one way. 21 It is notable too that the manual, once a way for the state to categorize, count, and manage citizen deaths, is now the primary classification tool that American hospitals and physicians use to bill insurance companies. State administration of life and death, health and disease is thus intimately intertwined with the actuarial logics of insurance and the economization of health care. In the West, the ICD also offers an officially sanctioned way to fall ill and die. The increasing use of EVD in official publications produced by the WHO and CDC, in addition to aligning policy with practice, also reflects the belated awareness and more generalized recognition among clinicians in West Africa that the features commonly associated with the diverse group of viral hemorrhagic fevers are not bleeding but fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. The case definition reflects the pliable clinical presentations observed in this current outbreak and the previous ones. It also implicitly demonstrates the shortcomings of how Ebola was first and foremost understood in the West as a security threat and bioterror agent rather than a public health risk to people living in endemic areas. 22

Ebola Case The CDC website outlines a case definition that includes two categories of people: confirmed cases—people whose infection can be verified or

Ebola  73 confirmed by a laboratory test—and the “person under investigation.” Clinical care for Ebola in the service of public health is, thus, detective work. The person under investigation has both consistent signs or symptoms and risk factors as follows: Elevated body temperature or subjective fever or symptoms, including severe headache, fatigue, muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, or unexplained hemorrhage; AND An epidemiologic risk factor within the 21 days before the onset of symptoms. An epidemiologic risk factor, in this case, is travel to a region where there is an active outbreak of EVD and contact with someone who might have been infected. The case definition operates on three categorical registers: first, it sorts people into categories of risk on the basis of symptoms that are not specific or unique to Ebola; second, it temporalizes relations between individuals and places characterized by their Ebola epidemic status; third, it relies on an individual’s memory about whether and when he or she might have come in contact with an infected person displaying nonspecific symptoms of fever, headache, and fatigue—common symptoms for malaria, typhoid, dengue, and other diseases endemic to the region. As the duration of the Ebola outbreak lengthened, we began to learn more about Ebola, and how it persists in a patient’s body long after she is said to have cleared an infection. We also learned that, despite previous statements to the contrary, there might be asymptomatic carriers (people with low-level infections that do not produce catastrophic disease). Even though subclinical infections appear to be common features of the many viral illnesses like Ebola, they were not immediately recognized as applying to EVD. This reflected the limitations of previous research that, in the 1990s and 2000s, focused more on the speculative work of military-inspired biopreparedness simulations and scenarios, and less on the retrospective work of creating and scaling up diagnostics. There was little prospective work of following clinical cases over time to understand Ebola immunity in humans. 23 The “Ebola case,” as described on the CDC website, is an epidemiological case, an individual occurrence in which a prospective Ebola patient is identified, contained, and treated, based upon geographical, social, clinical, and viral parameters, and then aggregated with other “cases” for the purposes of governing population health in relation to Ebola. In some ways, the epidemiological case resembles other types of cases—medical, legal, and psychoanalytic. As Yates-Doerr and Labuski write, the “expository medical case [is] attentive to the unusual and particular [and operates] as a tool for both diagnosis and instruction. The

74  Adia Benton psychoanalytic case is built from fragments of remembered details with therapeutic objectives. The legal case establishes a precedent, while the criminal case comes to the detective as a mystery to be solved.”24 Solving the mystery of the suspected Ebola case begins with questioning an individual for the purposes of placing the virus in epidemiologic context; briefly, this translates to locating it in a specific person, place, and time. Ideally (if we are to take the CDC case definition as an ideal), posing all the relevant questions about the E ­ bola risks an individual has encountered in a three-week period helps to reconstruct individual memory of the time, place, and extent of an exposure. A “suspected” case—the person under i­ nvestigation—then becomes subject to a battery of tests that confirm or reject the possibility of an Ebola infection. The Ebola case is also visualized in ways that extend definitions of epidemiological, medical, psychoanalytic, and legal cases. Despite the increasingly common use of EVD in media and official reports, the hemorrhagic fever remains a powerful and grotesque fantasy for people who have seen the 1990s epidemic thriller, Outbreak, or who have read the “non-fiction thriller” The Hot Zone by Robert Preston, but may not have seen an actual clinical case. The outbreak narrative as a genre—a literary case—hinges on how its authors make the invisible visible. Pathogens like Ebola are visualized through electron micrograph images, enhanced by clever color palettes and stunning magnifications. The virus’s movements and intensities are depicted in maps of the Mano River region, with animated GIFS showing dramatic movements of the disease across borders and over time. Clinical tools at the disposal of health workers and burial teams frequently serve to represent the heroic efforts of intervention teams. 25 Indeed, in the early days of the epidemic, the most common images associated with Ebola in a Google search were (1) the Ebola virus, (2) outbreak maps, and (3) personal protective equipment (PPE). Ebola Virus Colorized electron micrographic (TEM) images are among the most common depictions of the Ebola virus. Their frequency in a Google image search perhaps registers great interest in the science and “facts” of clinical presentation of EVD. Clicking Google images of Ebola often links to reports and short essays about the virus. Some images are not credited, obscuring from view the work of laboratory scientists and graphic artists who generate these images, and the various financial and professional arrangements that necessitate such images and their circulation.

Ebola  75 Outbreak Maps Outbreak maps of the affected region depict the prevalence of disease, making visible the labor of epidemiologists and other public health workers who have traced contacts, enumerated Ebola cases and deaths and fixed their geographical location at a particular time. In addition to being a product of epidemiological knowledge—“we know how many people have the disease, where the disease is and how much disease is in a place”—maps depicting viral movements and disease patterns may also reflect anxieties related to difference and the boundaries that it transgresses (Wald 2009). See also: projection. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) According to The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency of the United States Department of Labor, “Personal protective equipment, commonly referred to as ‘PPE,’ is equipment worn to minimize exposure to serious workplace injuries and illnesses. These injuries and illnesses may result from contact with chemical, radiological, physical, electrical, mechanical, or other workplace hazards. Personal protective equipment may include items such as gloves, safety glasses and shoes, earplugs or muffs, hard hats, respirators, or coveralls, vests and full body suits.”26 The frequency of images of individuals wearing personal protective gear registers a morbid fascination with the heroes, rather than the victims, of the outbreak. Indeed, tools f­ ocusing on the personal protection of health workers, particularly those coming from abroad, were highlighted as one of the more important safety measures to be taken within health facilities. In the early days of the ­epidemic, insufficient protective equipment was available for ­local health workers, rendering them particularly susceptible to infection in hospitals and the communities where they lived and often provided care. Glove shortages (ironic in a region that also produces rubber for international markets), lack of facilities to sterilize equipment, and insufficient reusable supplies further hampered health workers’ abilities to stop the outbreak. There were some complaints, moreover, that when the PPE was available, the protection and security it conferred to its wearer also served as barrier to communication, empathy, and care between health workers and the patients they cared for as well as those patients’ families. Although such protections are necessary for ensuring that the best quality of care can be provided for sick people in the long term, PPE was also the material manifestation of humanitarian intervention that is first and foremost preoccupied with self-preservation and security. See also: security.

76  Adia Benton

Opportunity 1 a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. A chance. 2 A chance for employment or career advancement. In addition to causing profound distress, illness, and death, Ebola also been characterized in terms of the opportunities—the chances, the potential, the futures—it produces. Opportunity to Get Ahead of Virus During a press conference held in Washington, D.C., on September 3, 2014, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan famously remarked that Ebola was “racing ahead” of efforts to contain it. Relatedly, commentators from around the world criticized world leaders for not “getting ahead” of the virus, and placed pressure on Western countries to deploy medical and military assets. 27 As the crisis escalated, international humanitarian organizations, overwhelmed by the sheer number of sick people, also called for the development of rapid diagnostic tests as well as more rapid research on vaccines and effective treatments. Vaccine development had actually begun years before the outbreak, but concerns about whether these commodities would generate profit—they were, after all, developed for some of the poorest places in the world—hampered efforts to test vaccines and drugs for their safety and efficacy. 28 At the same time, debates ensued about whether Ebola patients should have the opportunity to try experimental drugs. Such debates did not extend to the international health workers who were evacuated to intensive care units in Europe and North America. The decisions about who should access these experimental treatments are not isolated or neutral forms of triage. (Sierra Leone’s premier virologist also died amidst negotiations for his medical evacuation and possible treatment with an experimental drug, ZMapp.)29 Rather, these assessments about the value of life lie at the core of humanitarian emergency response; they are part of its operating logic; they are also highly racialized. 30 Missed Opportunity to Test and Develop Efficacious Drugs and Vaccines Once the number of new cases began to decline in the region in early 2015, the population available to participate in vaccine and drug trials was significantly reduced, leading some to lament the missed opportunity to test the vaccine on at-risk populations. 31

Ebola  77 Opportunity for Redemption On September 19, 2014, Somini Sengupta of the New York Times suggested that Ebola represented an opportunity for political redemption for UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who was also presiding during unresolved turmoil in South Sudan, Syria, and the Central African Republic.32 In the week preceding the article, the UN Security Council passed a resolution declaring the Ebola outbreak a threat to peace and security in the region, in which the UN would officially take the lead in coordinating the response to the outbreak. Although the move to strengthen coordination among humanitarian actors was welcomed by many, framing the outbreak as a security issue poses additional problems, including the militarization of public health. See also: security. Opportunity to Mend Political Relationships Other commentators have highlighted the potential for the outbreak to mend relationships between Cuba and the US. When Cuba deployed a few hundred doctors and nurses to the region, reports highlighted the potential for the US and Cuba to work “side by side” as “unlikely partners” in an effort at health diplomacy. 33 Blair Glencorse and Ashoka Mukpo, the latter an American Ebola survivor, argue that in the wake of the Ebola epidemic, there is an opportunity to rebuild trust between the Liberian government and its citizens. 34 In the initial months of the outbreak, Liberians accused officials of inventing the outbreak to garner international aid money, suggesting a relatively high level of mistrust of the government. Similar complaints in Guinea and Sierra Leone framed the outbreak as a means for advancing certain political aims and desires. For residents of Guinea’s Forest Region, where a history of mistrust built up over decades of government abuse and neglect, a punitive and coercive Ebola response, backed by security forces and security-minded Red Cross workers, was routinely challenged—often with violence. 35 In Sierra Leone, the transfer of responsibility from the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to the Ministry of Defense raised questions about whether Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma was grooming the military officer to be president. 36

Projection 1 An estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on a study of present ones. 2 The unconscious transfer of one’s own desires or emotions to another person. 3 The representation on a plane surface of any part of the surface of the earth or a celestial sphere.

78  Adia Benton Epidemic modeling is used to try to predict the trajectory and potential range of disease incidence. The products of these models are called projections. CDC projections in September 2014 estimated that 1.4 ­million people could become infected by January 2015 if no actions were taken. 37 Debates over the assumptions of the model ensued on Twitter and within communities of modelers: in even the worst-case scenario, what was the likelihood of no action being taken? What did their “correction factor” of 2.5 really mean? Related to these questions, the major ongoing debate has been focused on the purposes projections serve. They foreground the ethics and politics of modeling: is there a threshold at which political actors feel compelled to do something? The fact that these figures necessarily must be based on previous data, which are scarce, given the relatively small numbers of cases in previous outbreaks, posed additional problems for these projections (hence, the questionable 2.5 factor). Models and their projections are also profoundly shaped by modelers’ assumptions, their politics, and their intentions and motivations. How well they are to predict the future course of an epidemic depends on a selectively read and deeply circumscribed past, and a fraught present where they must intuit which factors matter and how, where they must make decisions about the limitations and potential uses of scant information and the transformation of this information into “data.” Projections are as much a description and product of uncertainty as they are used to shore up uncertainty and mitigate risk by managers in the field. In early January 2016, during President Obama’s final State of the Union address, we learned that these projections’ political character was once again relevant. He highlighted those projections that never came to pass, citing them as a success and evidence of a successful approach to the world’s problems: Fortunately, there is a smarter approach, a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every element of our national power. It says America will always act, alone if necessary, to protect our people and our allies; but on issues of global concern, we will mobilize the world to work with us, and make sure other countries pull their own weight… That’s how we stopped the spread of Ebola in West Africa. (Applause.) Our military, our doctors, our development workers -- they were heroic; they set up the platform that then allowed other countries to join in behind us and stamp out that epidemic. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a couple million lives were saved. 38 Numerical projections, therefore, refract other non-numerical forms of projection. Obama’s reference projected the better image of the US on the world, one in which diplomacy and security concerns are leveraged in pursuit of global health. Obama is essentially rewriting a recent history of uncoordinated global response, questionable militarization of

Ebola  79 epidemics, lingering distrust and exploitation in local and international politics, to align with an unrealized statistical projection.

Survivor Person who survives, especially a person remaining alive after an event in which others have died. 1.1 The remainder of a group of people or things; 1.2 A person who copes well with difficulties in their life; 1.3 A joint tenant who has the right to the whole estate on the other’s death. As Ebola treatment units expanded and health workers from all over the world came to assist in caring for Ebola patients, Ebola interventions focused on clinical treatment as much as prevention isolation, containment, and “dignified death.” With this expansion of resources in the affected countries, the number of survivors increased, bringing down previous case fatality estimates from 90 percent to 30–40 percent. A person is said to have “survived” Ebola once she has cleared the virus and recovers from the worst of the symptoms. But it wasn’t until clinicians and epidemiologists saw a large number of survivors that they learned that surviving an acute Ebola infection was not necessarily the end of illness. Months after being declared ­“virus-free,” individuals who had been infected with Ebola continued to transmit the disease through sexual intercourse. Others suffered from post-Ebola syndrome, a collection of symptoms related to Ebola infections: ophthalmological problems, musculoskeletal pain, hearing issues, and other neurological disorders. There are other implications of having survived an Ebola infection. Survivors were said to have developed immunity to the disease, at least in the short term. This caused some speculation (in many senses of the word) about the value and use of survivors. Most of this discussion was centered on how to enlist and exploit their labor as caregivers and their biological material—serum developed from their blood, for example— whether their blood was a gift, purchased, or obtained in other ways. It is no accident that this discussion began with academic institutions and was used in their press materials. Ebola had created an opportunity to expand research portfolios, publications, and institutional prestige. In a press release from the University of Texas, for example, a research scientist at the university describes his work in terms of using survivors or other immune individuals as laborers: “If we can reliably identify who they are, they could become people who help with disease-­control tasks, and that would prevent exposing others who aren’t immune.”39 An Emory University press release is less subtle in drawing links between

80  Adia Benton extraction and scientific research in Ebola-affected communities. The author describes how university scientists have received funding to “min[e] immune systems of Ebola survivors for therapeutic gold.”40 Such statements raise issues about markets, the commodification of survival and survivorship, and the production, extraction, refinement, and distribution of survivor blood and labor. Who benefits from understanding survivors as repositories to be visited; excavated; and processed to derive professional, cultural, and economic capital? What can be done to ensure that the benefits of these efforts can be recalibrated to care for the people who will surely be affected in future outbreaks? That survivors may be experiencing symptoms that outlast their contagiousness and immunity, conditions that exceed the “use-value” of their blood or intimate labor, has only recently been discussed, and in a very limited manner. It is here, again, that the long history of the region’s fevers, feuds, and trade41 come together in the actual blood of survivors and the markets in which they are imbricated.

Security In the aftermath of the West African Ebola outbreak, when the UN Security Council passed a resolution declaring it a threat to international peace and security, a global health security paradigm originally articulated in the 1990s regained prominence. A question that critical observers have asked about health security frameworks is: whose security and from what? As Paul Farmer noted in his work on tuberculosis in Russia more than a decade ago, “casting tuberculosis as a key national security issue… is an approach which puts physicians and public-health personnel in the position of border guards. Only a brave few speak of solidarity and support.”42 Along these lines, public health experts have proposed a distinction between human security and national security. The former attempts to humanize and possibly deterritorialize and demilitarize notions of protection and security, recasting them in terms of care, resilience, and growth. The latter maps onto the concerns voiced by critical geographers Brown, Craddock, and Ingram, who wonder about the “Euclidean geography of the nation-state system as ill-suited to complex topologies of emerging infections, where one thing can morph into another, and distinctions between inside and outside are blurred.”43 A national security model also reinvigorates the distinctions described earlier: us versus them, purity versus danger, fact versus belief, and so forth. These concerns become all the more fraught as we learn about the prolonged effects of Ebola not only on individual bodies but also on enduring local and regional experiences with humanitarianism and public health that have been punitive or extractive, that have pitted compassion against predation.

Ebola  81

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Jennifer Liu, Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Doug Henry and Paul Farmer for their encouragement and feedback on previous versions of this essay. I also appreciate the insightful comments and questions from audiences at the Interdisciplinary Institute at Southern Methodist University, the Center for Science, Technology and Human Values at the University of Texas-Dallas, and the Center for Humanities at Washington University.

Notes 1 World Health Organization, Ebola Situation Report; Aylward, Testimony to the International Development Committee: Bruce Aylward, the Special Representative for the Ebola Response at the World Health Organization testified before the International Development Committee of the UK House of Commons, that the PHEIC is not the only “alarm” system for the international health emergencies: “WHO has a separate process under what is called our Emergency Response Framework. Under that, we would look at how something is evolving and grade it 1, 2 or 3. This was declared a grade 3 crisis by WHO before it was even declared a PHEIC, which means we felt it had outstripped the ability of the country and even the regional system to manage it. The problem was that was not a trigger for the international community. As we look going forward, what we need to do is ensure that there is international consensus around the grading of infectious pathogens as they evolve from an outbreak to a health emergency to a health crisis to truly a destabilising security crisis, as this one did. That should be what triggers the involvement, because a PHEIC may be too late; it is not designed to grade an escalating crisis.” 2 Benton, “What’s the Matter Boss, We Sick? A Meditation on Ebola's Origin Stories.” 3 Obermueller and Waters, “Ebola Fears Spark Claims of Racism in Europe.” 4 Hudson and Chambers, “Germany Urges its Citizens to Leave Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia over Ebola.” 5 The Associated Press, “Peace Corps Evacuates Hundreds of Volunteers Amid Ebola Outbreak.” 6 AFP, “Liberia President Sacks Ebola-Fearing Ministers, Officials Who ­Haven’t Returned Home.” 7 Fassin, “That Obscure Object of Global Health,” 105–107. 8 These groups are not mutually exclusive. 9 Benton and Dionne, “International Political Economy and the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak.” 10 Grover, “AIDS: Keywords”; Williams, Keywords. 11 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Facts about Bushmeat and Ebola.” 12 Vogel, “Bat-Filled Tree May Have Been Ground Zero for the Ebola Epidemic.” 13 Farmer, “The Caregivers’ Disease.” 14 McGovern, “Bushmeat and the Politics of Disgust.” 15 Ibid. 16 The international edition’s cover featured an image of two hands clasped together as if to suggest a couple holding hands. The headline read, ­“Contagion:

82  Adia Benton

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 2 5

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Reporting from Ebola’s Frontline.” The cover can be seen at www.newsweek. com/2014/08/29/issue.html. Pailey, “Liberian While Travelling”; Pailey, “In a World Obsessed with Passport Tiers, Citizenship Is Personal and Political”; Dionne and Seay, ­“American Perceptions of Africa During an Ebola Outbreak.” Piot, No Time to Lose; Gholipour, “How Ebola Got Its Name.” Kuhn, “Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever – Uganda (19): (KI) Nomenclature, 15 August 2012.” Koblentz, “Ebola Infection.” Bowker, “The History of Information Infrastructures,” 51; see also Bowker and Star, “Invisible Mediators of Action.” Lachenal, “Chronique d’un film catastrophe bien préparé”; Nguyen, ­“Ebola: How We Became Unprepared”; Lakoff, “The Generic Biothreat.” Lakoff, “The Generic Biothreat”; Lachenal, “Chronique d’un film catastrophe bien préparé.” Yates-Doerr and Labuski, “The bookCASE: Introduction.” An exhibit titled “Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS,” at the I­ mperial War Museum in London, features objects used by the UK military during Operation Gritrock, in its “fight against Ebola.” Objects in the exhibit include a “tippy tap” chlorinated water dispenser for hand washing and the “multi-terrain pattern” camouflage shirts worn by military personnel; ­images show personnel in camouflage disembarking aircraft at F ­ reetown’s Lungi airport; video interviews with military lab scientists and a military nurse who contracted Ebola while providing care for a patient. “Safety and Health Topics: Personal Protective Equipment.” Doctors with Borders/MSF USA, “Struggling to Contain the Ebola ­Epidemic in West Africa.” Graham, “Public Health, Private Profits.” Pollack, “Opting against Ebola Drug for Ill African Doctor.” Benton, “Race and the Immuno-Logics of Ebola Response in West Africa”; Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life”; Benton, “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism.” Arie, “Ebola: An Opportunity for a Clinical Trial?”; Kelland, “MERS, ­Ebola, Bird Flu”; Sample, “Britain’s Slow Response to Ebola Crisis Cost Lives.” Sengupta, “Ebola Presents Challenge.” Anderson, “Cuba’s Ebola Diplomacy”; Lee, “Ebola Outbreak Opens Opportunity for Unlikely US-Cuba Cooperation”; Garrett, “How Cuba Could Stop the Next Ebola Outbreak.” Glencourse and Mukpo, “The Ebola Opportunity.” Brittain, “The Fear of Ebola Led to Slayings”; Faye, “L’« exceptionnalité » d’Ebola et les « réticences » populaires en Guinée-Conakry.” Thomas, “Army Major Palo Conteh to soon become head of state.” Meltzer et al., “Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola Epidemic.” The White House, “Remarks of President Barack Obama.” “As Ebola Kills Some, It May Be Quietly Immunizing Others.” Eastman, “Mining Immune Systems of Ebola Survivors for Therapeutic Gold.” I owe this phrasing to Paul Farmer, who is developing a manuscript around this theme. Farmer, “Russia’s Tuberculosis Catastrophe.” Brown, Craddock, and Ingram, “Critical Interventions in Global Health,” 1183.

Ebola  83

Bibliography AFP. “Liberia President Sacks Ebola-Fearing Ministers, Officials Who Haven’t Returned Home.” Mail and Guardian Africa, 2014. http://mgafrica.com/ article/2014-08-27-ebola-hit-liberia-fires-absentee-ministers. Anderson, Jon Lee. “Cuba’s Ebola Diplomacy.” New Yorker. New York, November 2014. www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cubas-ebola-diplomacy. Arie, Sophie. “Ebola: An Opportunity for a Clinical Trial?” BMJ (Clinical ­Research Ed.) 349, no. aug06_9 (January 6, 2014): g4997. doi:10.1136/bmj. g4997. “As Ebola Kills Some, It May Be Quietly Immunizing Others (Press Release).” UT News, 2014. http://news.utexas.edu/2014/10/14/as-ebola-kills-some-it-maybe-quietly-immunizing-others. Aylward, Bruce. “Testimony to the International Development Committee, House of Commons.” Oral evidence: Responses to the Ebola crisis: Follow-up, HC 338. 25 November, 2015. http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/international-development-­committee/­ ebola-responses-to-a-public-health-emergency/oral/25348.html Benton, Adia. “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 8, no. 3 (2016): 266–277. ———. “Race and the Immuno-Logics of Ebola Response in West Africa.” ­Somatosphere, 2014. http://somatosphere.net/2014/09/race-and-the-­immunologics-of-ebola-response-in-west-africa.html. ———. “What’s the Matter Boss, We Sick? A Meditation on Ebola’s Origin ­Stories.” In Ebola’s Message: Public Health and Medicine in the 21st C ­ entury, edited by Maimuna Maia Majumder, Nicholas Evans, and Tara Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Benton, Adia, and Kim Yi Dionne. “International Political Economy and the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak.” African Studies Review 58, no. 01 (March 16, 2015): 223–36. doi:10.1017/asr.2015.11. Bowker, Geoffrey C. “The History of Information Infrastructures: The Case of the International Classification of Diseases.” Information Processing & Management 32, no. 1 (1996): 49–61. Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. “Invisible Mediators of Action: Classification and the Ubiquity of Standards.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7, no. 1–2 (May 22, 2000): 147–63. doi:10.1080/10749039.2000.9677652. Brittain, Amy. “The Fear of Ebola Led to Slayings—and a Whole Village Was Punished.” Washington Post. February 28, 2015. www.washingtonpost. com/world/africa/the-fear-of-ebola-led-to-murder--and-a-whole-village-was-­ punished/2015/02/28/a2509b88-a80f-11e4-a162-121d06ca77f1_story.html. Brown, Tim, Susan Craddock, and Alan Ingram. “Critical Interventions in Global Health: Governmentality, Risk, and Assemblage.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102, no. 5 (September 30, 2012): 1182–89. doi:10.1080/00045608.2012.659960. Dionne, Kim Yi, and Laura Seay. “American Perceptions of Africa During an Ebola Outbreak.” In Ebola’s Message: Public Health and Medicine in the 21st Century, edited by Nicholas G. Evans, Tara C. Smith, and Maimuna Majumder. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

84  Adia Benton Doctors with Borders/MSF USA. “Struggling to Contain the Ebola Epidemic in West Africa.” Voices from the Field, 2014; www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ news-stories/voice-field/struggling-contain-ebola-epidemic-west-africa. Eastman, Quinn. “Mining Immune Systems of Ebola Survivors for Therapeutic Gold.” Emory News, 2015. http://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/02/darpa_ ebola_antibodies/. Farmer, Paul. “Russia’s Tuberculosis Catastrophe.” Project Syndicate, 2001. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-s-tuberculosis-catastrophe. ———. “The Caregivers’ Disease.” London Review of Books. London, May 2015; www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/paul-farmer/the-caregivers-disease. Fassin, Didier. “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life.” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 499–520. ———. “That Obscure Object of Global Health.” In Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Histories, Activisms, and Futures, edited by Marcia Inhorn and Emily Wentzell, 95–115. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Faye, Sylvain Landry. “L’« exceptionnalité » d’Ebola et les « réticences » populaires en Guinée-Conakry. Réflexions à partir d’une approche d’anthropologie symétrique.” Anthropologie et Santé, no. 11 (November 25, 2015). doi:10.4000/anthropologiesante.1796. Garrett, Laurie. “How Cuba Could Stop the Next Ebola Outbreak.” Foreign Policy, May 6, 2015. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/06/cuba-ebolawest-africa-doctors/. Gholipour, Bahar. “How Ebola Got Its Name.” Live Science, 2014. www.livescience.com/48234-how-ebola-got-its-name.html. Glencourse, Blair, and Ashoka Mukpo. “The Ebola Opportunity.” Global ­Policy Journal, 2015. www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/06/01/2015/ebolaopportunity. Graham, Janice. “Public Health, Private Profits: Lessons from the Ebola Crisis for a Global Response.” Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, 2014. http://imaginativeethnography.org/imaginings/responding-to-current-events/ public-health-private-profits/. Grover, Jan Zita. “AIDS: Keywords.” October 43 (1987): 17–30. doi:10.2307/ 3397563. Hudson, Alexandra, and Madeline Chambers. “Germany Urges Its Citizens to Leave Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia over Ebola.” Reuters, 2014. www.reuters.com/article/health-ebola-germany-idUSB4N0PR00S20140813. Kelland, Kate. “MERS, Ebola, Bird Flu: Science’s Big Missed Opportunities.” Reuters, 2015. http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-epidemic-researchinsight-idUKKCN0SK0P020151026. Koblentz, Gregory. “Ebola Infection: Same Disease, New Name.” The Pandora Report: The Blog for All Things Biodefense, 2014. http://pandorareport. org/2014/04/22/ebola-infection-same-disease-new-name/. Kuhn, Jens. “Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever – Uganda (19): (KI) Nomenclature, 15 August 2012.” ProMED-Mail, 2012. www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=1246087. Lachenal, Guillaume. “Chronique d’un film catastrophe bien préparé.” Libération, 2014. www.liberation.fr/planete/2014/09/18/chronique-d-un-filmcatastrophe-bien-prepare_1103419. Lakoff, Andrew. “The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3 (August 2008): 399–428.

Ebola  85 Lee, Brianna. “Ebola Outbreak Opens Opportunity for Unlikely US-Cuba Cooperation.” International Business Times, October 21, 2014. McGovern, Mike. “Bushmeat and the Politics of Disgust.” Hot Spots: Cultural Anthropology Website, 2014. www.culanth.org/fieldsights/588-bushmeatand-the-politics-of-disgust. Meltzer, Martin I., Charisma Y. Atkins, Scott Santibanez, Barbara Knust, Brett Petersen, Elizabeth D. Ervin, Stuart Nichol, Inger Damon, and ­M ichael Washington. “Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola ­Epidemic— Liberia and Sierra Leone, 2014–2015.” MMWR: Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report Supplement 63, no. 3 (2014): 1–14. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6303a1.htm. Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. “Ebola: How We Became Unprepared, and What Might Come Next.” Hot Spots: Cultural Anthropology Website, 2014. www. culanth.org/fieldsights/605-ebola-how-we-became-unprepared-and-whatmight-come-next. Obermueller, Nele, and Angela Waters. “Ebola Fears Spark Claims of R ­ acism in Europe.” USA Today, 2014. www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/ 10/30/berlin-immigrants-ebola-racism-africa/18187819/. Pailey, Robtel. “In a World Obsessed with Passport Tiers, Citizenship Is Personal and Political.” Ebola Deeply, 2015. http://archive.eboladeeply.org/ articles/2015/06/7971/robtel-neajai-pailey-world-obsessed-passport-tiers-­ citizenship-personal-political/. ———. “Liberian While Travelling.” Al Jazeera, 2014. www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/2014/10/liberian-while-travelling-201410257415839632.html. Piot, Peter. No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. Pollack, Andrew. “Opting against Ebola Drug for Ill African Doctor.” New York Times. August 12, 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/world/africa/ ebola.html. “Safety and Health Topics: Personal Protective Equipment.” www.osha.gov/ SLTC/personalprotectiveequipment/. Sample, Ian. “Britain’s Slow Response to Ebola Crisis Cost Lives, MPs’ Report Says.” The Guardian, 2016. www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/25/britainsslow-response-to-ebola-crisis-cost-lives-mps-report-says. Sengupta, Somini. “Ebola Presents Challenge, and an Opportunity, for U.N. Leader.” New York Times. September 19, 2014. www.nytimes. com/2014/09/19/world/africa/ebola-presents-challenge-and-an-opportunity-­ for-un-leader.html?_r=0. The Associated Press. “Peace Corps Evacuates Hundreds Of Volunteers Amid Ebola Outbreak.” National Public Radio, 2014. http://www.npr. org/2014/07/31/336743868/peace-corps-evacuates-hundreds-of-volunteersamid-ebola-outbreak. The White House. “Remarks of President Barack Obama – State of the Union Address as Delivered.” Office of the Press Secretary, 2016. www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama%E2%80%93-prepared-delivery-state-union-address. Thomas, Abdul. “Army Major Palo Conteh to soon become head of state.” Sierra Leone Telegraph. October 26, 2014. www.thesierraleonetelegraph. com/?p=7852.

86  Adia Benton US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Facts about Bushmeat and Ebola.” Fact Sheet, 2014. www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/bushmeat-and-ebola.pdf. Vogel, Gretchen. “Bat-Filled Tree May Have Been Ground Zero for the E ­ bola Epidemic.” Science, 2014. www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/bat-filled-treemay-have-been-ground-zero-ebola-epidemic. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. https://books.google.com/books/about/­ Keywords.html?id=KnNWD9EYCGgC&pgis=1. World Health Organization (WHO). Ebola Situation Report. March 30, 2016. Geneva: WHO. http://apps.who.int/ebola/current-situation/ebola-situationreport-30-march-2016. Yates-Doerr, Emily and Christine Labuski. “The bookCASE: Introduction.” Somatosphere, 2015. http://somatosphere.net/2015/06/the-bookcase-­introduction. html.

4 A Panicky Atmosphere On the Coloniality of Climate Change Alex Chambers

Not long after the turn of the millennium, environmental activist Mike Tidwell put solar panels on his house in suburban Washington, D.C. As he recounted in the Washington Post, Tidwell refurbished a gas-free lawn mower, bought an energy-efficient refrigerator, and started ­eating locally grown food. Ten years later, after historic wildfires in R ­ ussia, floods in Pakistan, and food riots around the world, Tidwell had new dead bolt locks installed on his doors and plans to put bars on his ­basement windows. He was testing out shotguns on the skeet shooting range to decide which to buy, and he’d spent a thousand dollars on a g­ enerator—the latter as much an investment in his son’s future as his college fund. He needed these ramped-up home security measures because of climate change, he said. If the planet warms five degrees by the end of the century, the North American breadbasket will turn into a desert. Skyrocketing grain prices and hunger will bring ever more food riots. So, he decided to protect his house from the social unrest exemplified, for him, in the protests by hungry people “from Mexico to Mozambique to Serbia.”1 Although metropolitan D.C. has yet to see an administration o ­ verthrown due to hunger, food protests in Haiti in 2008 were violent enough to force the president to resign. An episode in the Public ­Broadcasting ­Service (PBS) documentary series Journey to Planet Earth makes this point in a segment on Haiti’s environmental devastation, “Plan B: ­Mobilizing to Save Civilization.” Shots of bare mountain slopes illustrate how years of uncontrolled logging, soil erosion, and a general lack of environmental stewardship denuded the country’s landscape. “Soon,” the voice-over tells us, “Haiti became the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.”2 Superimposed over images of children walking across a trash-strewn landscape and young men throwing rocks in the streets, experts from the US and Canada explain that environmental stress increases the likelihood of social instability and violence. For these experts, the depletion of Haiti’s soil caused its poverty rather than the other way around. Since “Plan B” makes no mention of the centuries of international debt, and political and economic colonization that the country has faced, the implication is that its environmental degradation is due to a failing in the national character, some sort of moral degeneracy among the people.3 The episode warns that climate change will bring the increased likelihood of “failed states” such as the Haiti presented here.4

88  Alex Chambers As these examples show, mainstream discussion of climate change in the US has been shifting in the second decade of the millennium from the way global warming threatens ecosystems to the way it threatens society. But as writers in outlets such as PBS and the Post sound the alarm on the likelihood of bread riots, massive influxes of poverty-stricken ­immigrants into European and North American countries, failed states, gang violence, and resource wars, they are leveraging the fear of other people to call for action on the climate. As I argue in this chapter, rather than addressing global power structures, these climate panics reproduce colonial relationships in which the people and populations of the global south are seen as either threatening agents of chaos or helpless victims in need of rescue. These panics, I suggest, rest on an assumption that the view of global others is transparent: that the people whose desperate faces appear on page or screen have needs and intentions that are clear to all, even (or especially) viewers far from their local contexts. In this sense, they evince classic symptoms not just of panic but of moral panic, and global moral panic at that. My invocation of transparency derives in part from Stanley Cohen’s inaugural discussion of moral panics in 1972. For Cohen, a moral panic coalesces when a public conversation concludes that an identifiable group of people threatens societal values. Politicians and other leaders wall up the borders of socially acceptable behavior; experts explain the problem and proffer solutions. This reliance on the knowledge and power embodied in expertise is reflected in the fact that the objects of moral panics, according to Cohen, “are transparent (anyone can see what’s happening)—but also opaque: accredited experts must explain the perils hidden behind the superficially harmless.”5 This mix of opacity and transparency allows moral panics to function as ideological ramparts, buttressing the power dynamics of their day. ­Today, as Stuart Hall and his collaborators showed in Policing the ­Crisis, this means that they index crises in capitalism and the state: fractures and shifts in the political-economic order of things.6 Hall and coauthors also show that by the late twentieth century, panics about crime, at least, pivot on race. In the last section of their book, Hall et al. explain that racialized reserve armies of labor in “Third World colonial societies” are necessary components of global capital, making it clear that insofar as panics involve race, they develop through mechanisms of imperialism and capitalism that function across national borders.7 Transparency is further critical to contemporary moral panics in the two major categories of victims on which they rely. One is the potential victim of violence and disruption at the hands of racialized masses, as in threats to suburban homeowners or the potential mugging victims of Policing the Crisis. The other victim is the vulnerable, often rural, resident of the global south, such as the woman trafficked for sex, as recent scholarship on anti-trafficking campaigns has shown.8 Both of these victimized positions depend on either violence or helplessness ­(supposedly) born in the global south. Cohen’s formulation reminds us that in the views of

A Panicky Atmosphere  89 politicians and the press, the object of the panic can’t stop this bad behav­ sychiatrists, the ior, and it will take forces of social control—experts, p police, the state, international aid agencies—to solve the problem. Eventually, the panic recedes, but, as this volume agrees, it frequently leaves a more muscular apparatus of expertise and enforcement in its wake.9 Some critics of moral panics attempt to reveal what is rendered opaque, debunking the panic in order to disrupt ideology. I want to do something slightly different: accept opacity, if toward a different end. For Cohen is right, I think, that an assumption of transparency underpins moral panic. Insofar as that is the case, abiding with opacity and obscurity rather than trying to overcome them might allow the temptation to panic itself to fall away. At this point in this chapter, then, I want to dwell for a moment on the question of transparency and opacity that Cohen mentions in passing and attempt, alongside theorists of the African diaspora, to think about the power relations embedded in those terms. Saidiya Hartman and Édouard Glissant in particular have struggled with the problem of how and what “we” can know about others in the context of globally unequal power relations with roots in c­ olonialism and slavery, and Hartman echoes Glissant’s call for a “right to obscurity” rather than greater transparency.10 I would argue that this right becomes even more important in the harsh light of climate change. To assume transparency is to assume that one can know what someone else is about. It is to assume, if you are an educated resident of the global north with resources at your disposal, that you can know the hopes and plans, even the character, of people in the global south. For Hartman, the assumption of transparency is a form of violence. In her consideration of humanitarian concern about slavery in the nineteenth century, she notes that slave songs had a “subterranean and veiled character” that came across to whites as nonsense or even joy but that, for the enslaved, acted as a “veiled articulation of the extreme and paradoxical conditions of slavery.”11 White humanitarians thought they knew what they were hearing. In light of “the dominative imposition of transparency” that characterized humanitarian responses to slavery, the kinds of concealments and opacities that slave songs enacted should, Hartman insists, be considered a form of resistance. “The right to obscurity,” she concludes, “must be respected.”12 Hartman’s call for the right to obscurity derives, as she notes, from Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, in which he writes that “the attempt to approach a reality so hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications.”13 Global relationships— legal, epistemological, political, infrastructural—that assume the possibility of authoritative knowledge are based on a refusal to admit a social reality that always already exists outside of them. Glissant elaborates his theory of opacity in Poetics of Relation, where he admits that the development of cultural relativism in the twentieth century has been productive yet notes that privileging “Difference” still tends to reduce relationships to “the Transparent,” in part because accepting

90  Alex Chambers difference does not necessarily acknowledge the play of power in creating it. Human behavior is complex—fractal is Glissant’s word—which means that even elements of our own actions and identities remain obscure. We should, therefore, “give up trying to reduce such behaviors to the obviousness of a transparency.”14 Relinquishing the drive toward transparency would, among other things, lighten the load of those behaviors or of our drives to reduce them to reason and rationality. Letting go of the desire for self-understanding can also allow one to accept others’ opacity, which creates the possibility of solidarity with an other without “grasping” him or her, making him or her in one’s own image, or reducing him or her to “a truth he would not have generated on his own.”15 Instead, Glissant suggests, we could “clamor” for a general right to opacity for everyone, a right to exist in relation to others—­including not just personal, unofficial relation but also global and political ­relation— without the prerequisite of having been represented. In an especially telling phrase, Glissant points out that “[w]idespread consent to specific opacities is the most straightforward equivalent of nonbarbarism,” a beautifully ironic invocation of the accusations of barbarism; savagery; or, more recently, underdevelopment that have often been substituted for the opacity of the other in order to justify invasive attempts at transparency.16 Moral panic depends on the assumption of transparency. Rather than exploring the murky, messy details of a particular situation—including, for example, the political and economic circumstances that make environmental instability such a threat in many parts of the global south— panics see certain groups of people as unmistakable victims in need of rescue. As Julietta Hua argues in this volume, the necessity of rescue applies in particular to non-Western subjects, who are, in a logic that derives from colonialism, always awaiting the freedom and morality that the West has already achieved. As these non-Western, globally southern subjects cross national borders, they’re presented as either subjects or perpetrators of violence; in both cases, the suffering they stand for generates the need for concerned interventions from citizens and experts of the enlightened West. Studying global moral panics can thus reveal how easy it is for activists in the North to reproduce coloniality in their attempts to create concern for vulnerable populations. A 2010 film entitled Climate Refugees, directed by Michael Nash, illustrates this beautifully. In its attempt to display representative victims of climate change, the film whips up an emulsion of pity and fear to mobilize political action. Climate Refugees’ view of global others reveals how panics exacerbate colonial relationships in climate change discourse. As my opening examples suggest, this film is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to climate panic. There are, however, accounts that suggest more hopeful ways to relate to environmental vulnerability. After discussing the multiple facets of panic in Climate ­Refugees, I turn briefly to one such account, an online media project called Bridge the Gulf, to consider how it defends the right of global others not to be represented in

A Panicky Atmosphere  91 simplistic, transparent frameworks. It suggests one of the ways in which a right to obscurity might confront assumptions that any single standpoint can grasp all there is to know on earth and all one needs to know.

Faces, Voices, Recognition The poster for Climate Refugees features the right side of a human face, painted blue, with the American continents in green and brown laid out from forehead to chin (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1  F  ilm Poster for Climate Refugees; climaterefugees.com.

92  Alex Chambers The southern tip of Greenland, in white, reaches down from the hairline, and the far eastern coast of Africa almost crosses the bridge of the nose. In a quite literal sense, the image—whose green eye stares at the viewer from somewhere around Chesapeake Bay—humanizes the planet. By conflating the scale of the global with that of the individual, the film hopes to bring our attention to the “human face of climate change,” as a line of print above the face informs us. Specifically, Nash’s goal is to raise concern for the populations around the world whose homelands are becoming uninhabitable due to rising seas, expanding deserts, and other climate-related dangers. In attempting to humanize a planetary phenomenon, the poster gives the impression that a single human face can stand in for the planet’s complexity if it’s painted in the right colors. The film as a whole depends on the idea that when we experience a face representing an idea, we recognize something true. But if the faces of suffering global others are typically meant to evoke a universalized compassion that will lead to humanitarian or legal action, the recognition of their suffering also fortifies colonial relationships that compound their vulnerability. Climate Refugees opens with the classic 1968 Earthrise photo of the planet over the moon’s horizon, evoking a standard visual trope of the universal that derives from both colonial histories of spatial enclosure and Cold War military technology and rhetoric, as E ­ lizabeth DeLoughrey has observed.17 Narrating, Michael Nash comments on how peaceful the planet looks from that perspective. But “as we look closer,” he tells us over a visual approach to the planet through s­ atellite images of ­Hurricane Katrina, African dust storms, and C ­ alifornia wildfires, that “our world is changing.” In light of this change, Nash wants to know, “How is man going to survive on this beautiful planet?” His question reveals a tension in the film between the universal of humanity—encapsulated here in a single gender—and the particulars of transnational relationships among various historically situated groups. While the planetary shots at the beginning and end invoke the sentiment that we’re all in this together, the film spends the bulk of its energy emphasizing differences between people in rich and poor countries. As the opening sequence unfolds, the centrality of the filmmaker’s role versus that of his subjects becomes clear. The fact that climate change will affect millions of people is something “we’ve learned,” Nash tells us in reference to either the film crew or the broader public. Then he immediately modifies the statement to say “what I learned” over the course of these travels. By shifting to the first-person singular, Nash acknowledges his position as an interested observer, not the putatively neutral witness of earlier documentary and journalistic accounts. At the same time, he disavows the particularity of his position by turning himself

A Panicky Atmosphere  93 ­ niversal subject with whom the audience is supposed to identify. into a u ­ resuming the audience member to be similarly compassionate, uninP formed, and geographically situated, the framework imagines that he or she will experience the same journey of discovery that Nash did in making the film. Nash turns out to be the film’s unacknowledged protagonist, over and above the putative subjects of the film, the climate refugees. In orienting the film’s narration around his own process of discovery, Nash rehearses a long tradition of imperial writing that constructs both its first-person protagonist and its audience as a white, male, m ­ iddle-class “everyman.” Climate Refugees echoes the genre of scientific travel writing Mary Louise Pratt has called the “anti-conquest,” which consists of a pursuit of knowledge in which “the naturalist naturalizes the bourgeois European’s own global presence and authority” without acknowledging his own dependence on political conquest.18 Similarly, in examining the effects of climate change on vulnerable human populations, using the camera’s gaze to present the faces of suffering others to its compassionate (though always fearful) American viewers, Nash naturalizes the presence and authority of the global north in addressing climate-induced migration. The presumed authority and expertise of the global north as it gazes on the south is a continuation of colonial epistemologies, as scholars such as Walter Mignolo; Aníbal Quijano; and, more recently, Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva have shown.19 Wynter explains that the figure of “Man,” standing in for all of humankind in dominant Western discourse, has in various guises for the past four centuries been represented by a Christian, European masculinity in the act of colonizing, and that figure continues, today, to be represented by the global middle class. 20 This global “ethnoclass,” to use Wynter’s word, presumes its own expertise. 21 As Silva puts it, the “others of Europe” lack moral authority or the ability to reason; they are “affectable” others in contrast to the self-possessed, rational subjects of Europe. 22 As these scholars make clear, this ongoing racialized coloniality gives the rational subjects of Europe (and the global north more generally) the responsibility to study and save its others. Climate Refugees suggests the UN save its global others by creating a legal category recognizing “climate refugees.” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights agrees there is a “legal gap” regarding the protection of people crossing borders “in the context of disasters and climate change.”23 But like Nash’s humanitarian gaze on the global south, categories such as the refugee erase the particular histories and politics of the people to whom they are applied. Liisa Malkki has shown this erasure at play when large-scale bureaucracies undertake humanitarian interventions: as history and p ­ olitics are leached out, refugees “stop being specific persons and ­become pure

94  Alex Chambers victims,” creating a situation “in which it is difficult for people in the ­refugee category to be approached as historical actors.”24 Similarly, Climate Refugees insists that people who have experienced political-­ environmental upheaval must be recognized as certain types of victims, apart from the political and historical circumstances that have created their vulnerability. The documentary camera purports to make them transparent so that the UN can do the same. In so doing, the complexities of their lives and societies are stripped away. The stripping of history that fits people into legally functional categories is part of a larger epistemological project in which a particular idea of the human becomes the standard by which all people are measured. Being recognized as fully human in the modern world system, as Sylvia Wynter has shown, means hewing to the features of a particular global ethnoclass. Applying Wynter’s logic to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) suggests that this document does not simply list the rights that all humans deserve but describes the dominant Western mode of being human. In this sense, those who lack access to “human rights” also lack access to full humanity. Whether or not they might be seen as human when faced as individuals, they are, by the logic of UNDHR, living in a subhuman state. Pun intended: it is not just their social condition that’s subhuman, it is also the mechanisms of the political and legal state within whose boundaries they live. Legal scholar Teemu Ruskola explains that, in the international legal and political order instituted by European states in the nineteenth century, states that did not meet “the elusive standard of civilization” were barred from membership in the Family of Nations, and their deficiencies meant they did not have to be treated with honor or dignity. These other communities, outside the civilized family, “were lesser persons, and even nonpersons.” In order to gain political and legal recognition, non-Western states had to simulate the political institutions of their sovereign Western counterparts. 25 As Jacqueline Bhabha notes, refugee human rights law extends this international order by basing the power to recognize and protect on Western concepts of what constitutes legible suffering and forced movement. 26 The coloniality of this system reproduces itself in part through the visual: the gaze of the global north on the faces of its others creates a world-system in which the others are affectable, “thereby needing to be corrected,” as Julietta Hua puts it. 27 Although it’s a rare modern society that can boast of having enacted every article in the UDHR, human rights law imagines non-Western nations as its primary and proper targets, since they most visibly lack the modern application of universal human rights. The idea of universal human rights thus relies on the assumption of an other who is always already lacking: lacking modernity,

A Panicky Atmosphere  95 ­ uman lacking agency, lacking subjectivity to the law. According to Hua, h rights “seem unable to leave behind the onto-­epistemological conditions that result in the re-presentation of colonial logics casting third world peoples and practices as less advanced and therefore less capable of enacting human rights principles.”28 The system, in which third-world societies are cast as backward, depends on vision moving in one direction: certain faces can be seen, can be represented, but they cannot see. Only when they become members of the modern ­(“universal”) north can they slough off their affectability and develop their own gaze on the world. It should not be surprising, then, that the colonial system of knowledge also sees non-Western peoples as incapable of creating workable responses to environmental instability, except, occasionally, through an exotic spirituality. 29 If contemporary coloniality reiterates forms of knowledge developed during earlier moments of colonialism, such as the idea that the only way to help colonized/third-world populations is through the expertise of the developed world, the appearance of Madeleen Helmer in Climate ­Refugees offers Nash a chance to complicate this position. Helmer, who was at the time of filming head of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center, explains that the organization is currently investing in local capacity for dealing with disasters. The image of white doctors flying all over the world helping people is “really an old-fashioned image,” she says. She points to how local infrastructures are becoming more resilient, and the film provides a brief illustration: as we see a man in a community center using a white board to describe the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme, his voice overtakes Helmer’s. Logistical planning such as this suggests the potential of coordinating between local and international organizations. It may not be sexy, but its very practicality bespeaks an optimism in the face of future disasters. But the film is uninterested: we hear the man say only a few explanatory words before a female voice singing a wordless, haunting melody drowns him out. The preparedness program disappears. Heavy wind and driving rain fade in. The feeling of disaster eclipses logistical planning. And so, while Helmer and the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society offer possible responses to environmental disaster in the global south, Nash cuts short their pragmatic optimism in favor of the melodramatic potential of flooded villages and the faces of suffering victims. In the scene that follows, “the human face[s] of climate change” are revealed as the embodiment of suffering. A Bangladeshi woman in hijab—by many Western accounts already a subject of gendered ­oppression—recounts losing her baby to the force of the flood waters of Cyclone Sidr in 2007. “My baby girl was ripped from my arms,” says the

96  Alex Chambers voice-over translation. The woman cries, while elegiac music plays in the background. As she speaks, there are shots of an older man, and of two teenage boys standing in a doorway—unspeaking bodies caught up in the ruins of the village. Idle, as if unable to act, their lives seem emptied of meaning, their landscape a post-disaster dystopia. They do, however, convey abundant meaning for the film itself, since they function as symbols, like the woman, of the victimhood that the environmental disaster unleashes on poor people. As this scene shows, the black and brown faces that stand in for the world’s poor can only suffer. By the film’s colonial logic, they do not have reflective thoughts, solutions, or desires beyond mere survival. It’s an attitude that depends on melodrama to create affective concern and a feeling of sentimental recognition, a move not unfamiliar to critical students of documentary narrative. Melodrama, as Carole Vance explains in a discussion of anti-sex trafficking documentaries, achieves its effects “through the equation of parts with the whole, severe decontextualization, the juxtaposition of tangential or irrelevant examples that aim to shock, and a sustained effort to mobilize horror and excess.”30 Film narrative is especially suited to this kind of melodrama in its ability to focus on putative victims’ faces. Whether a victim of sex trafficking or climate change, the presence of the (typically female) victim’s face, and the feeling of recognition in seeing her raw, genuine emotion, creates an immediate sense of empathy that seduces viewers into investment in the more abstract societal story. The scene of survivors of Cyclone Sidr is the first moment in which we see a “real person” speaking about her own experience; prior to this, the speakers in the film have been experts discussing either their own research or speaking more generally about global climates. The ­Bangladeshi woman becomes an exemplary case of climate change creating terrible suffering. It is a story meant to shock—even the translating voice sounds like it’s close to tears—and to mobilize horror and excess through the face of an innocent woman. Three other scenes in the film parallel this one. In one, an older Bangladeshi woman, also in tears, tells the filmmakers that “Nature is now at war with us. Cyclone Sidr killed many. Millions and millions are now hungry and homeless. Is this a message from God? I don’t know.” Later, in China, a woman says her family had to leave their rural lives due to the spread of the Gobi desert. As water became too scarce, they moved to the outskirts of Beijing, into what is known in China as “ecological government housing.” She starts to cry, saying that in their older life, “we were poor, but nature wasn’t bad. Now, nature has gotten worse. It forced us to run like animals in search of water.” Soon afterward, a Chinese farmer is shown standing under a tent as he, too, breaks down in tears while describing a flood in which his daughter’s family was lost.

A Panicky Atmosphere  97 These are just a handful of scenes in which victims of environmental disaster are given a chance to speak. Only two have had opportunities to analyze the situation, and their analyses—that “nature is at war with us” or that it might be a message from God that “nature” has forced them to run—are implicitly dismissed through the film’s emphasis on their suffering and through a lack of curiosity about the origins or complexity of their worldviews. The documentary argues that this kind of suffering will only increase due to climate change, and that, along with mitigation through technoscientific solutions such as solar panels and wind turbines, the solution lies primarily with the UN. Like all victims in melodramas, the victims whose faces we see in this film need rescue. What I want to emphasize here is the reason they need rescue. ­Unlike the narrator, whose gaze is central to the film but whose presence only occurs as a disembodied voice, the objects of the film—the distant global others to the narrator’s North American whiteness—are meant to be seen and not heard. As the “face” of climate change, they serve as examples. Although it would seem that seeing their faces would convey their individuality, the film’s lack of interest in historical or biographical context reduces them to suffering bodies. Their faces serve as the expression of their victimhood, and as transparent windows into the obvious meaning of their suffering. This relationship, in which global others are forced into embodiment both through environmental destabilization and through the film’s representation of them, reiterates racial schematics of whiteness and coloniality. Nash’s white skin is glimpsed only once in the film, yet his whiteness reinforces itself reiteratedly, unavoidably, through its ability to elude its own materiality in the way people of ­Bangladesh, China, and Sudan cannot. According to the film, they occupy an inescapably material world, one in which hunger, drought, and floods have immediate bodily consequences. In the moral panic’s characteristic mix of compassion and fear, this narrative line in the film evokes compassion by way of different degrees of embodiment, depending on where in the world people live. The ­narrator—the white North American man—is disembodied, a transparent eyeball, as Emerson put it in a different context, while the people of the global south embody suffering. As a corollary, they’re given little chance either to analyze problems or to act on them. It is through the authenticity of their suffering that they become legible as deserving of human rights: they become recognizable, in liberal discourse, as victims. We might consider the film’s melodramatic emphasis on victimhood to be a deliberate editorial move. It seems equally likely, though, that the filmmakers simply failed to consider the many ways people of the global south are developing their own analyses and solutions to climate and migration issues. 31 If by the film’s logic, the modern, global north’s superior knowledge systems

98  Alex Chambers and resources make it the place that can weather climate change, then it stands to reason that everyone in the vulnerable south would want to move there.

Dwindling Security The flip side of the desire to help those forced into migration by climate change, equally bound up with the globally northern subject’s disembodied agency, is fear, specifically a racialized fear of chaos and violence as a result of dwindling resources. While the concern about resource wars in the twenty-first century is a serious one, it slides into moral panic as perceived vulnerability slips from some people’s physical survival to others’ material comfort. Climate panics use the fear of dangerous hordes of immigrants, deviating from proper, moral behavior out of desperation and a lack of civilized values, on the doorstep of wealthy countries, as a reason for addressing climate change. They buttress neocolonial relationships wherein a feeling of security for people in developed countries trumps the dignity and survival of people in less developed ones. In Climate Refugees and elsewhere, fears about the permeability of particular national borders percolate through supposedly universal statements of concern. After the invocation of the planetary universal of “mankind,” and the title credits, a quote from US Navy Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn appears onscreen: “Addressing changes in the Earth’s climate is not just about saving polar bears and preserving the beauty of mountain glaciers. Climate change is a threat to our national security.”32 His statement begs the question of what particular threat to national security climate change poses. The answer in the film is resource wars and masses of desperate climate migrants. His focus on “our” national security presumes the people most worth protecting are citizens of the US. Others matter only insofar as they present a threat to the US and, by the film’s logic, other already-developed nations. As UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres has pointed out, this panicky atmosphere is effective in keeping migrants from “threatening” the wealthiest nations: “Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industrialized countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. It is poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden” of environmental refugees who have already been refused by industrialized countries.33 As Climate Refugees tacks between compassion and fear, one series of graphics especially emphasizes the latter. With each new place the director visits, ominous red arrows on satellite maps leap from vulnerable locations and land in the more urban, wealthier places migrants are likely to go. As the following series of images demonstrates, after

A Panicky Atmosphere  99 beginning in central China, the danger moves consistently west and north, from Asia to Africa to Europe and then North America. First, the arrows arc from central China to its major cities (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2  Still from Climate Refugees.

Then bigger arrows move from those cities to India, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3  Still from Climate Refugees.

The next graphic makes the danger from the global south especially vivid. As the following image comes on screen, a voice-over says, at the moment, Europe is spending millions to defend itself against immigration from Africa. Where are those 250 million people going to go? Can they be stopped at the borders of Europe, and what are they going to do to try to get in anyway? (Figure 4.4)

100  Alex Chambers

Figure 4.4  Still from Climate Refugees.

And to bring the panic home for Nash’s target audience, arrows from all over the world converge on North America (Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5  Still from Climate Refugees.

Somehow, defying both geophysics and global wealth distribution, climate change has become a bigger threat to North America than anywhere else (Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6  Still from Climate Refugees.

A Panicky Atmosphere  101 These arrows evoke nothing so much as a Cold War diagram of nuclear missiles bearing down on the US. The difference here is that the imagined danger is from people rather than the physical destruction of the landscape, infrastructure, and bodies. And yet, curiously, that movement of people is now evoked through alarmingly red ­a rrows, rather than the faces of vulnerable people. In these graphics, there’s little concern about anyone’s physical survival. Instead, the fear is of people out of place. The graphics, and the security narrative behind them, create a panic simultaneously about security and morality: a worry about bodies of the global south, a fear that if too many of them push their way into Europe and the US, they will bring with them their deviance and desperation, their poverty and their blackness. As the film closes, it turns to a montage of children and adults from around the world, with a fisherman from Tuvalu saying that we all have to love one another, regardless of color or language. The film returns to its planetary vision, over which the narrator reiterates his question about the fate of “mankind,” and whether we will “solve the challenges of ten billion people, living in a world with limited resources and a changing climate.” It’s certainly a pressing question, though more productive, maybe, not to reiterate the threat of whether but to ask how. How, then, might we imagine living in a world with limited resources— a situation most humans, through most of time, have faced? If panicky humanitarianism doesn’t cut it; if state-based structures of legal recognition reiterate Western expectations of legibility and transparency, reducing people to populations and rendering history and politics irrelevant; if fear of and for constitutes the primary form of relationship with global others, how might we face a destabilized climate and each other differently such that we can improvise and plan together in a shared appreciation of the limitations of our knowledge? Although its overarching narrative reinforces global moral panic, there are moments when Climate Refugees calls forth a different ethical imperative. Late in the film, climate scientist Hans Schellnhuber suggests an international quota system in which nations would have to accept refugees according to their accumulated histories of carbon emissions: if the US contributed 25 percent of all greenhouse gasses, it would have to take in 25 percent of the world’s refugees. Similarly, writer Andrew Simms contends that either countries like the US will have to share some of their space with 30–50 million climate refugees, or they will have to offer up enough resources to other countries, so they can deal with huge influxes of refugees without overwhelming state infrastructures. The notion of sharing resources, such as money and space, expands the film’s imagination beyond legal categories, border security, and ­energy-efficient light bulbs, and gestures toward

102  Alex Chambers an ethics of relatedness that refuses to insist on legal recognition as a prerequisite for survival, a focus exemplified on the website Bridge the Gulf.

Opacity with Infrastructure Bridge the Gulf: Voices from the Gulf Coast, an online “community media project” based in the US coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico, posits an approach to representation that contests the forms of ­k nowledge underpinning Climate Refugees. Although the geographical focus of Bridge the Gulf is within the US, there are many similarities between the Gulf Coast region and other colonized territories to its south. The Gulf Coast has been at the heart of extractive global economies, from ­plantation slavery to the oil industry, for centuries, and as Michael Watts argues, it continues to exist as a resource frontier, largely through offshore oil development. 34 Bridge the Gulf was founded in 2010 as a site of convergence for “media-makers, community advocates, and regional experts” to “amplify the voices of those on the front lines of struggles for survival … in the region.”35 The project publishes articles on a range of topics, including climate and environment, criminalization and justice, and gender and sexuality. Through the juxtaposition of the topics and frequent analysis of the connections between them, the site highlights their interconnectedness, reflecting its mission to advance “a regional, inclusive, and intersectional understanding of the Gulf Coast region.”36 Articles on the local effects of transcontinental oil pipelines, the Federal government’s response to the BP oil disaster, and the effects of climate change on wetlands and vulnerability to extreme weather reveal how global economic and geophysical processes affect the region. Whereas Climate Refugees emphasizes the vulnerability of its subject populations, Bridge the Gulf focuses on “struggles for survival,” refusing to represent residents of the region as purely vulnerable or victimized. This may be in part because the majority of its articles and interviews are written by residents of the region, many of whom have been directly affected by the economic and environmental problems they write about. Similarly, rather than being from an individual (concerned, humanitarian) authorial perspective that gazes on the region from ­outside with the presumption that it can be made transparent, Bridge the Gulf highlights the range of faces and voices in the region. A page called “People” includes, as of January 2016, 63 names and photos linked to articles that each person has contributed. In its multitudes, the project’s list of contributors suggests its own failure of representation: there are too many experiences, perspectives, positions, and analyses to aspire to completeness.

A Panicky Atmosphere  103 Bridge the Gulf refuses a singular, uniform perspective, showing the plurality rather than the universality of experiences in an environmentally devastated region. Even as the overall thrust of the website is to ­resist the massively destructive economic and environmental practices that dominate the Gulf South, the always-growing list of people, articles, and projects it presents emphasizes the impossibility of understanding the whole of any particular situation. The contributors do not serve as representative figures of a broader idea, as in Climate Refugees, but as individuals with distinct perspectives. In its proliferation of faces and voices, Bridge the Gulf acknowledges limits to knowledge and assumes the possibility of justice without the prerequisite of transparency. It is in this context then that Bridge the Gulf cuts across the narrative drive of Climate Refugees. By proliferating the archive of faces and voices from the Gulf Coast, Bridge the Gulf opens a space in which Climate Refugees’ assumptions of transparency become clear. Unlike watching Climate Refugees, it’s hard to explore the Bridge the Gulf website without experiencing dislocation, without realizing how much more there is to know about each situation it describes, whether Africatown’s fight against storage tanks for tar sands oil, the health problems of the shrimpers who cleaned up BP’s spill, struggles for fair housing in New Orleans, or otherwise. Bridge the Gulf hosts multitudes, urging us ­toward responses to climate instability that acknowledge opacity without consigning others to oblivion. The challenge in acknowledging opacity, after all, is that it would seem to deny a relationship with the other. As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva point out, readings of Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—which can be understood as another consideration of the dominative imposition of transparency—can easily devolve into the idea that “We have no relation to the subaltern, so why should we care?”37 That response leads to a form of “ethical oblivion,” in which granting the other’s opacity turns into a denial of the other’s existence, or, more accurately, a denial of any relationship between the subject and the other’s circumstances. Chakravartty and Silva thus call for a politics that “acknowledges temporal and spatial differences” and, in so doing, allows historical and geographical specificities to emerge without allowing for the easy out of ethical oblivion. 38 But the decidedly material challenges posed by climate change ­demand more than just opacity without oblivion. They also call for opacity with infrastructure. Such a politics would make available the space and resources for communities to strengthen their resilience without presuming their transparency to the global north. Opacity with ­infrastructure would require an examination of resource distribution that does not ­eschew politics, history, or geography—an examination that also refuses to assume it knows what’s best for others. It would call for a struggle not

104  Alex Chambers toward transparency or recognition but toward relation, where we can face each other and mutually accept each other’s opacities as well as our own, and the historical, geographical, and representational structures by which we are always already linked.

Conclusion: Protecting the Gulf What if Michael Nash saw his subjects not as helpless, suffering, or dangerous others but as others whose relationship to the modern world system he could never fully understand? He might begin to explore the depths of experience and history that bring him and them to such distant shores. Bridge the Gulf offers that possibility by creating a space for the always partial, incomplete coming together of overlapping interests, which may or may not ever converge. The faces it presents are those of people with complexly intertwined histories and ever-incomplete stories. As the planetary climate destabilizes, we could try to face each other across the gulf of experience, with neither fear nor the presumption of understanding. The structures that make legal recognition, h ­ umanitarian concern, and panic possible depend on the illusion of transparency. But a challenge on the scale of climate change calls on us to embrace each other’s unfathomability, to face the limits of our knowledge. For all the dire predictions about human survival on this planet, the future, luckily, remains opaque.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to the Global Moral Panic Working Group, to Nzingha Kendall, Courtney Mitchell, Phaedra Pezzullo, Caitlin Reynolds, and  to the anonymous readers, whose comments deepened the argument.

Notes 1 Tidwell, “A Climate Change Activist Prepares for the Worst.” 2 Weiner and Weiner, “Plan B.” 3 In Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, Laurent Dubois examines the circumstances, including colonialism, international debt, and imperial occupations, to which centuries of outside commentators have turned a blind eye as they blamed the country’s troubles on shortcomings of the people themselves. 4 Weiner and Weiner, “Plan B.” 5 Cohen, Folk Devils, viii. Emphasis in original. 6 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 218. 7 Ibid., 381. 8 See, for example, Agustín, Sex at the Margins; Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights; and Vance, “Innocence and Experience.” 9 Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1. 10 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 36.

A Panicky Atmosphere  105 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. Quoted in Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 36. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 193. Ibid., 194. Ibid. DeLoughrey, “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 26. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs; Quijano, “Coloniality of Power”; Wynter, “Unsettling the Power of Being”; Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. Wynter, “Unsettling,” 283–313. Ibid., 313–14. Silva, Toward, xviii, 2. United Nations, UNHCR, The Environment, and Climate Change, 15. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries.” Ruskola, “Raping Like a State,” 1493–94, 1528. Bhabha, “Embodied Rights,” 3–5. Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights, 96. Ibid., 2. James Cameron’s 2009 enviro-blockbuster Avatar provides maybe the ­highest-budget example of this. Vance, “Innocence and Experience,” 203. Organizations working with indigenous and local knowledge on b ­ uilding climate resilience abound. Examples include Many Strong Voices, the Alaska Native Science Commission, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, Via Campesina, Navdanya, Idle No More, and, as I discuss later, Bridge the Gulf. Turning to US military commanders—who carry far more authority among US conservatives than do scientists—to “prove” the urgency of addressing climate change has been a common move. A short video featuring General Charles H. Jacoby (Ret.) produced for The Weather Channel’s The Climate 25 is a case in point: “I deal with the facts,” the General says in an attempt to avoid the politics of climate change. “Whatever the cause is less r­ elevant to me than the effect” (http://weather.climate25.com/project/general-charlesh-jacoby-ret/). I am arguing here, of course, that understanding the cause(s) is essential to dealing with the effects. Quoted in Sassen, Expulsions, 61. Watts, “A Tale of Two Gulfs,” 444–46. “About the Project,” Bridge the Gulf. “About the Project.” Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt,” 380. Ibid., 382.

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106  Alex Chambers Chakravartty, Paula and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Accumulation, ­Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction.” ­A merican Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–85. doi:10.1353/aq.2012.0033. Climate Refugees. Directed by Michael Nash. Los Angeles: LA Think Tank, 2010. www.snagfilms.com/films/title/climate_refugees. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, Third Edition. London: Routledge, [1972] 2002. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 257–80. doi:10.1215/08992363-2392057. Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2012. Ferguson, James. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of M ­ innesota Press, [1990] 1994. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1978. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Malkki, Liisa H. “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and ­Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 377–404. www. jstor.org/stable/656300. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, ­Second Edition. New York: Routledge, [1992] 2008. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. Ruskola, Teemu. “Raping Like a State.” UCLA Law Review 57, no. 5 ­(2009–2010): 1477–536. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Silva, Denise Ferreira da. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Tidwell, Mike. “A Climate Change Activist Prepares for the Worst.” Washington Post, February 25, 2011. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/­ article/2011/02/25/AR2011022503176.html. Vance, Carole S. “Innocence and Experience: Melodramatic Narratives of Sex Trafficking and Their Consequences for Law and Policy.” History of the Present 2, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 200–218. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ historypresent.2.2.0200. Watts, Michael. “A Tale of Two Gulfs: Life, Death, and Dispossession along Two Oil Frontiers.” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 437–67. doi:10.1353/ aq.2012.0039.

A Panicky Atmosphere  107 Weiner, Marilyn and Hal Weiner. “Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.” Journey to Planet Earth, Episode 12. PBS. March 30, 2011. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Power of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. United Nations. UNHCR, The Environment, and Climate Change: An ­O verview. Geneva, Switzerland: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2014.

5 The Panic over Human Smuggling From the Nineteenth-Century Coolie Trade to Today’s Migrants Elliott Young In the mid- to late nineteenth centuries, abolitionists and humanitarians in the US and England decried the brutality of the Chinese “coolie” trade as a form of slavery in disguise. There was a lot of evidence on their side. Coolies were oftentimes recruited through trickery and deception, transported on slave ships, locked in barracoons, and flogged under the hot sun on sugar plantations. There was even one documented incident of a Peruvian owner branding his coolies with a hot iron.1 The horrors of the trade led to scores of violent mutinies on the ships transporting coolies and high numbers of suicides on the plantations where they labored. All of this is true. The humanitarian critique of coolie labor, however, turned attention away from empire and capitalism as causes for labor exploitation and served in its place a melodramatic narrative in which evil recruiters and traders took advantage of innocent Chinese migrants. 2 This narrative helped to mobilize humanitarians to end the coolie trade in 1874 while at the same time further reinforcing imperial state power and global inequality. The idea of humanitarianism encompasses a wide variety of impulses that coalesced in the late eighteenth century as caring for others became an institutionalized part of state policy and civic society. Caring for people we know, family members, and people in our community is not a new phenomenon, but the impulse to organize the care of people who are distant from us and whom we may not know personally was a modern development. As Michael Barnett puts it, in the eighteenth century, compassion “moved from part of the private realm and into the public realm.”3 This organized compassion often came in the form of paternalism on the part of Western empires, which sought to civilize and Christianize other parts of the world that were seen as barbarous and savage. Slave abolitionists were the quintessential humanitarians in the age of empire; the impulse to end slavery also motivated the anti-coolie labor movement. The coolie was in many ways a slave, but he was also technically a free laborer. Coolies occupied a liminal space between slavery and freedom, and depending on the definition, they could be seen as either or both.

The Panic over Human Smuggling  109 Their in-between status shares a great deal with Jamaican sugarcane guest workers in the US in the twentieth century, who were neither slaves nor entirely free. Although Jamaican workers jumped at the opportunity to work in the US, as Cindy Hahamovitch details in No Man’s Land, they did not have the opportunity to break their contract and look for better opportunities; their only choice was to return home. If they skipped their contracts, they would become “illegal aliens” and be subject to deportation. Jamaican guest workers, therefore, like ­Chinese contract laborers before them, were motivated to leave the impoverished conditions of their home country but were also severely restricted in their movements once on the plantation. As Hahamovitch writes, “Guestworkers were neither slave nor free; they were both. In the wide world of international migration, dissatisfaction and desire are two sides of the same coin.”4 In addition, Chinese contract labor agreements and guest worker programs mandated the return of their subjects once they completed their contracts, but in neither case were authorities successful in forcing the return of temporary workers. Thus, there is more in common between the nineteenth-century coolie system and the guest worker programs that have followed than has been recognized. The end of the coolie trade in 1874 brought other forms of migrant labor that reproduced labor exploitation in a different guise. British and American reformers pushed for the end of the coolie trade but simultaneously developed new mechanisms for regulating Chinese labor. In the US, Chinese exclusion in 1882 turned many Chinese into “illegal aliens” who were vulnerable to exploitation and lived in fear of incarceration and deportation. Meanwhile, the British condemned the coolie trade that was conducted by the Spanish and the Portuguese, but they continued their own form of indentured servitude with Chinese and Indians. While British indenture and US exclusion laws may have seemed less barbaric than the whips and chains on coolie ships, they often led to similar forms of bondage. In fact, the British emerged as the leaders of indentured labor at the same time that they pressed for an end to the Chinese coolie trade. Further, in the US and elsewhere in the Americas, anti-Chinese restrictionist movements grew, coinciding with the anti-­ coolie trade campaign. Restrictionism did not keep the Chinese out, but it did affect the conditions of their lives and work. Chinese migrants who arrived without authorization or overstayed their visas may have been putatively free laborers, but they were laid bare to the exploitation of the market and to deportation—and to the intimidation and exploitation the threat of deportation allowed employers to levy. Chinese “illegal aliens” after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act were in many ways simply the new coolies. 5 Humanitarians who condemned the coolie trade, including politicians, journalists, and religious ministers, minimized the will, intention, and complicity of the Chinese migrants in migrating. In their

110  Elliott Young efforts to protect coolies, humanitarians portrayed the Chinese as innocent and naïve victims of more powerful and deceptive recruiters, shippers, and plantation owners. The campaign to end the coolie trade succeeded in part by creating an image of weak and desperate victims who required the intervention of a Western imperial state. Humanitarianism and US and British imperialism were not at odds with each other but rather worked symbiotically together. As reformers saw it, a strong imperial state with a global reach was necessary to bring civilization and liberty to the backward and despotic parts of the world. In short, saving the coolie from opportunistic recruiters and corrupt Chinese officials was part of this civilizational mission led by the British and the Americans. The derogatory term coolie deserves a moment of contemplation before continuing with the narrative. The word refers to low-paid manual laborers from Asia, and although Europeans first started using it in the eighteenth century, the derivation is traced to Tamil (kuli); Urdu (quli); Chinese (kuli); and possibly the Turkish word qui, meaning slave. ­Additionally, although it was used widely from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century in the Americas, coolie never had a legal definition. Even the quintessential coolies—those Chinese contract workers brought to Cuba and Peru between 1847 and 1874— were referred to in their contracts as “colonos asiáticos” (Asian colonists). ­Despite the lack of a legal definition, politicians, journalists, and employers used the term “coolie” throughout the Americas to refer to low-paid Asian workers. The coolie label racialized particular forms of labor and invoked the specter of a servile bonded worker. As such, the coolie, like the slave, came to be seen as a helpless person who could be easily exploited and therefore needed saving. Some scholars reject the term “coolie” because of its association with slavery, arguing that Chinese in the US were not “coolies” but “immigrants” because they were not slaves. Historian Moon-Ho Jung has pointed out how such a false binary—coolies versus immigrants—“not only reifies coolies and American exceptionalism but ironically reproduces the logic and rhetoric of nineteenth century debates on whether Asians in the United States were, in fact, coolies.”6 Rather than avoid the use of the term coolie, I am interested in interrogating the way it was deployed. Although “emigrant laborer” or “contract worker” would be more neutral terms, avoiding the use of the term “coolie” erases the particular racialization of these laborers, which is precisely the history I aim to excavate.7 As the controversy over the term confirms, the question of what constituted free versus slave labor was at the center of the debates surrounding coolies. The Anti-Coolie Bill signed into law by President Lincoln in 1862 was one of the last antislavery statutes and first immigration laws, and it illustrates the connection between the two. The law prohibited

The Panic over Human Smuggling  111 Americans from taking part in the Chinese coolie trade and importing Chinese subjects “known as ‘coolies’ to be held to service or labor.” Nonetheless, the right of “free and voluntary immigration of any ­Chinese subject” was explicitly protected.8 Free labor in the US context meant the absence of prearranged contracts, whereas in the rest of the Americas, contracts were supposed to guarantee better conditions for labor. In either case, free labor was an ideology that aimed to distinguish this new labor relation from slavery and other forms of forced labor.9 In Reinventing Free Labor, Gunther Peck shows how difficult it was for immigration officials to enforce the law that outlawed contract labor in the US (the 1885 Foran Act). As Peck writes, “the boundaries between free and unfree labor, voluntary and involuntary migration, coercive and consensual contracts… were in practice profoundly ambiguous and difficult to discern.”10 Campaigns against the coolie trade imposed a false clarity regarding the line between free and unfree labor, thereby overestimating the freedom of free wage laborers and underestimating the knowing complicity of contract laborers. This chapter now turns to the anti-Chinese coolie trade discourse in the nineteenth century as a way to understand how humanitarian discourses condemning human trafficking serve to bolster state power in the name of protecting victims of exploitation. Humanitarian critiques of trafficking usually push for a more robust role of the state in cracking down on smugglers rather than focusing attention on the state’s immigration restrictions that create the conditions for trafficking in the first place. The result of such policies has not been an amelioration of suffering for vulnerable migrants but rather the beefing up of state policing of migrants at the border and in interior communities. I argue, along with other scholars critical of moral panics in this volume, that such discourses rarely benefit the subjects of such campaigns but usually lead to greater state intervention, incarceration and deportation, and labor exploitation.

Saving the Coolie The trade in indentured migrants from 1831 to 1920 brought over two million people, mostly Indian, Chinese, African, Pacific Islander, and Japanese, to plantations in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and other parts of Asia.11 Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, and France orchestrated the trade along with several countries in the Americas, including the US and Peru.12 The largest contingent comprised more than 1.3 million Indian laborers, most of whom were imported by the British to Mauritius, British Guiana, and Africa.13 A smaller group of about 300,000 Chinese coolies was brought to the Americas between 1847 and 1874, mostly to Cuba and Peru. Although the transportation of indentured labor everywhere was exploitative and harsh, the Chinese coolie trade to Cuba

112  Elliott Young and Peru was particularly brutal, including longer contracts and harsher conditions of work, resulting in higher than average mortality rates on ships and plantations. The British, who were by far the global leaders in indentured labor, criticized the harshness of coolie labor in Cuba and Peru, and defended their own well-regulated system of indenture. The mortality rates on ocean voyages during the nineteenth century for Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba and Peru were much higher than for other migrant groups. These high mortality rates cannot just be seen as the result of the natural dangers of oceanic travel in this period but reflected the variable treatment of different kinds of passengers. Chinese mortality averaged 12 percent compared to 6.5 percent for Indians, 3.5 percent for Africans to the British West Indies, and only 1 percent for Europeans. Even correcting for the length of journeys, given that the Chinese traveled for three times as long as the Africans, there is still a significant differential between mortality rates: 6 percent for African slaves per month of journey; 1 percent for Europeans; and 2–3 percent for indentured Chinese, Indians, and Africans.14 Average statistics also mask horrific death rates for particular ships or bad years, such as 1862, when more than 40 percent of Chinese laborers died en route to Peru.15 The point is that the conditions on coolie ships were more similar to those on African slave ships than to European immigrant vessels. Even though it was in the ship captains’ and traders’ interests to keep the ­Chinese alive for sale in the Americas, traders could make large profits even when 12 percent of their passengers died in transit.

Imagining the Coolie Victim The death rates on the Middle Passage to Cuba and Peru demonstrated the horrific conditions for Chinese emigrants and motivated humanitarians to save the coolies, whom they viewed as weak, vulnerable, and backward. Religious leaders, journalists, and politicians alike painted Chinese migrants as feminized, racially inferior, and vulnerable to hyper-­masculinized recruiters and coolie traders. Just one of many examples of this portrayal was an American historian and pastor, John S. C. Abbott, who condemned the coolie trade as a form of slavery in his 1860 account of his trip to Cuba. Abbott’s Christianity-inspired critique of the coolie trade expressed a hierarchical view of race in which the Chinese were portrayed as weak, dirty, and feminized victims of virile, superior whites. “What is to be the doom of these debased and fallen races?” he asked. “How are they to be rescued from the tyranny of pride and avarice, and elevated to the dignity of manhood?”16 In a similar vein, an 1873 New York Times article reasoned that although the “‘heathen Chinee,’ taken as a moral fixture, may not be all that we could wish in the matter of manhood and honesty,” he was still a “creation of God’s formation” and therefore deserved the right to liberty.17

The Panic over Human Smuggling  113 Americans, like the British and other Europeans, presented themselves as civilized men who could shield the victimized Chinese emigrant from the barbaric Spanish and Portuguese coolie traders, and the effeminate and ineffective Chinese prince. The Western view of Chinese men as effeminate helped justify the humanitarian mission. Civilized nations thought of themselves as honorable men protecting vulnerable nations, constructed as feminine, from despotic leaders. As early as the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci complained that Chinese mandarins “in their inner hearts… are just like women” because they disliked violence and rarely killed one another. In the nineteenth century, the US diplomat Peter Parker complained about the “painful want of manliness and sincerity” of Chinese officials, while others blamed Oriental kowtowing, a ritualistic bow, and lack of a manly code of honor on the absence of a martial ideal. Western observers also commented on the widespread practice of sodomy in China as proof of their deficient masculinity.18 Legal historian Teemu Ruskola shows how the anthropomorphizing of the state in the liberal imagination helped to construct the idea of “rapable” or penetrable states. Ruskola argues that China, like the figure of the coolie, was seen as “queer” in the Western imagination to make it “rapable,” that is, subject to domination by the West. China, though never colonized like Africa and the Americas, was subject to repeated penetrations, occupations of territories (Hong Kong and Macao), and extraterritorial control by European states in treaty ports. This was intercourse, to use the parlance of the time, but it was an intercourse that was predicated on a great deal of outside pressure and force.19 Newspapers, reformers, and politicians often portrayed Chinese migrants in the Americas as effeminate or weak. Sociologist Clare Sears points to newspapers in nineteenth-century California that depicted Chinese as cross-dressers. As one newspaper put it, “In China the men wear skirts and the women trousers.”20 Debates over the coolie trade centered around issues of masculinity and whether the feminized coolie was capable of protecting himself from hyper-masculinized and sadistic traders. In Relations of Rescue, Peggy Pascoe describes a similar pattern in which Victorian women in the US constructed Chinese women as victims in order to save them. The way in which these mission women talked about Chinese culture and patriarchy served to reinforce cultural stereotypes deployed by anti-Chinese immigration activists, even though the women were not immigration restrictionists. By applying the term “slave” to Chinese girls who had been sold by dealers or parents to be used as servants or prostitutes, the mission women overlooked the possibility that the Chinese girls had entered their professions by choice. As Pascoe puts it, “Ignoring evidence that some Chinese women entered prostitution knowingly, mission workers always described them as powerless victims of evil men, women who had been ‘decoyed from their

114  Elliott Young native land by false promises and misrepresentations.’”21 In their efforts to save Chinese girls and coolies, humanitarians ended up depicting them as powerless and denying them any agency.

Coolie Complicity There is no doubt that the coolie trade often included some form of coercion and duplicity on the part of recruiters, shippers, and plantation owners. Government reports, journalistic accounts, and courtroom testimony provide strong evidence that coolies were often tricked, had limited information, or were forcibly held in barracoons and on ships. What is not often discussed in the historical accounts or in the abolitionist narratives is the extent to which Chinese or Indian migrants were complicit with the recruiters and lied to officials to pass the various inspections before they would be allowed onto ships. The complicity of Chinese migrants does not excuse the deception, brutality, and coercion of the traders, but it reveals a more complicated picture than one of vulnerable and weak migrants being taken advantage of by malicious recruiters and foreign shippers. The recruiting process was depicted by critics of the coolie trade as a thinly veiled system of kidnapping. The fact that Chinese sent to Cuba and Peru traveled on ships that had been African slave ships and that the emigrants were held below decks with armed officers meting out strict corporal punishments as discipline lent weight to this argument. One British judge in Hong Kong compared the coolie trade to slavery and declared emphatically, “the coolies were being forcibly taken against their wills.”22 An 1859 New York Times article describing a rebellion against coolie traders ran a headline “Kidnapping Coolies--Excitement at Shanghai.”23 The Cuba Commission that was sent by the Chinese government to collect testimony from coolies working on plantations in Cuba in 1873 provided evidence from over 2,000 Chinese laborers who said they were tricked and deceived by crimps (recruiters). 24 For example, Hsein Tso-Pang and 14 other coolies stated that the foreigners of Macao sent out vicious Chinese in order to kidnap and decoy men and to place these in barracoons and on board of ships from which they cannot escape, chastise them there without restraint, and conveying them against their will to Havana, after removing their queues and changing their clothing, offer them for sale in the men-market. Others claimed they were induced by “offers of employment abroad at high wages,” and only later discovered they were “sold as slaves.”25 Although the Commission Report highlighted the stories of kidnapping and enslavement, testimony of Chinese emigrants in court and a

The Panic over Human Smuggling  115 closer reading of the Commission Report reveal a more complex picture of emigrant complicity with their recruiters. According to the report, eight or nine out of every ten Chinese emigrants to Cuba were taken against their will. However, the vast majority of these were either decoyed (72%), entrapped (5%), or ensnared (10%). Only seven percent indicated that they were kidnapped, the same percentage who said they emigrated voluntarily. 26 Historian Philip Kuhn notes that although some Chinese emigrants paid for their own passage and some were coerced into signing contracts, most fell somewhere in-between, having indebted themselves to merchants, brokers, shipping companies, or relatives to pay for their passage. 27 Kidnapping and voluntary emigration were the extreme ends of the spectrum from total coercion to free choice, but most Chinese fell somewhere in the middle. Their dire circumstances in China led them to choose a dangerous path of emigration and bonded labor. Although not slaves, poor Chinese workers had limited mobility and few opportunities to break out of a system of exploitative plantation labor. What would motivate people to sign up for such a potentially risky voyage and for such harsh working conditions? Internal strife in China, long-term demographic pressures, and British forcing open Chinese ports to trade prompted the massive emigration of the mid-nineteenth century. The Christian-inspired Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) resulted in as many as 20–30 million deaths and created starvation conditions. 28 In addition, China’s population doubled in the eighteenth century to 300 million, and by the 1850s, at the start of the period of mass external emigration, grew to 380 million. The population explosion resulted in extreme land pressures, especially in the southern and southeastern coastal regions from which all Chinese coolies departed. What began as a local pattern of out-migration became international in the late 1840s when British, Spanish, and Portuguese seafarers showed up on China’s coast to recruit laborers. 29 In addition to the poverty and starvation conditions that pushed Chinese out, recruiters lured their targets with an eight-dollar advance and a salary of four dollars a month. Labor salaries in Cuba were generally three to four times as high as in Europe, and even accounting for the higher cost of living on the island, a laborer could expect to earn twice as much in Cuba as in Europe.30 Although the Chinese didn’t earn as much as other laborers, and in fact had it written into their contracts that their wages would be less than free laborers and slaves on the island, the eight dollar advance was often used to pay debts, and the promise of earning four dollars a month was a significant incentive compared to what they could earn in China. 31 Although it is very difficult to compare Chinese wages to those in Europe given the absence of data, economic historians have concluded that wages and living standards in China in the nineteenth century were much lower than the industrialized parts

116  Elliott Young of Western Europe.32 As Chêng A-mou and 89 others testified in the Cuba Commission Report, “we were induced to proceed to Macao by offers of employment abroad at high wages.” Given that wages in Cuba were even higher than in Europe, it is not difficult to understand the motivation for Chinese workers to sign these labor contracts. Paying off gambling losses was another important reason why Chinese signed contracts, accounting for almost eight percent of the Chinese in Cuba, by one count.33 Newspapers and government officials wrote extensively about the coolie trade, but the voices of the Chinese are virtually absent from their accounts. In addition to the Cuba Commission Report, court cases following mutinies on coolie ships provide some of the few sources where we can hear the coolie speaking, albeit through the mediation of a courtroom procedure. A mutiny and the sinking of the coolie vessel Don Juan as well as the ensuing court case in Hong Kong allow us to understand the motivations of Chinese emigrants for signing up to be contract laborers on sugar plantations. On May 4, 1871, the Don Juan sailed from Macao with 655 Chinese coolies, 7 Chinese servants, a crew of 47 Europeans, a Chinese doctor, and a Chinese translator.34 Four Chinese jumped overboard and attempted to commit suicide, three of them even before leaving the port in Macao.35 Two days later, a dispute between the interpreter and the Chinese over the amount of food rations ended with the interpreter striking the emigrants with his cane. At that point another group of ten emigrants shouted, “ta ta” (strike, strike), picked up pieces of wood, and hurled them at the interpreter. The melee became a full-scale mutiny when someone set fire to the ship while the Chinese remained locked below.36 Many Chinese died of suffocation or drowning, but some managed to break onto the upper decks and jump into the water. At around three or four in the morning, after being in the water for more than 15 hours, the survivors were rescued by a sampam (small boat), which brought them to Hong Kong.37 By the time it was over, more than 500 Chinese emigrants had drowned or burned to death on the Don Juan. Testimony by Chinese emigrants who survived the destruction of the ship Don Juan in 1871 provides a good example of the gray zone between free will and kidnapping. The British brought the survivors of the Don Juan fire to a Hong Kong court in an effort to indict the Portuguese who controlled most of the coolie trade from the port city of Macao. Of the 650 Chinese who boarded the ship, more than 500 died of suffocation or were burned alive after the ship caught fire. One of the survivors, Wong Ahfaht, testified that he was forced into a barracoon and threatened, so he agreed to play along when authorities asked him if he had joined willingly. He expected to be removed from the ship and replaced by another emigrant, but instead, he was locked on board. Wong reported no ill-treatment, and he signed a contract indicating that he had chosen

The Panic over Human Smuggling  117 to go voluntarily.38 Is such an emigrant a victim of kidnapping or the participant in a plot to receive an eight-dollar advance without actually becoming a contract laborer? His story suggests that he was threatened, but he also admitted to going along with the ruse and to profiting by doing so. He had a few occasions to ask for the help of government authorities, but he didn’t. Was he more afraid of the Portuguese authorities than he was of the coolie traders? Did he believe the coolie traders were in cahoots with the Portuguese officials? We cannot know the answers to these questions, but Wong’s testimony reveals a situation that can be called neither completely free nor outright kidnapping. Another survivor, Lum Apak, presented a story similar to Wong’s, of having an acquaintance offer him the prospect of a job in Macao. Once in Macao, he was told that if he pretended to be a man named Wong Achow, he would receive the eight-dollar advance given to coolies. Wong was ill and therefore could not pass the medical inspection that was required of all prospective coolies. Lum was also promised that once on the ship, Wong would come to take his place. Lum therefore believed that he was part of the plot to deceive the authorities and the coolie traders, which explains why he told authorities that he was going to a foreign country to work under his free will and that he had not been kidnapped or deceived. When Wong did not come to replace him on the ship, Lum realized that he had, in fact, been deceived. Nonetheless, he said, “I did not complain and made up my mind to go cheerfully.”39 Another of the Don Juan emigrants, a 29-year-old blacksmith from Canton named So Ayung, was brought to the barracoon in Macao, believing that he would find employment. After a few days, he was told that he would have to work off the debt he had incurred for eating rice in the barracoon. A Portuguese man who spoke Chinese told him that he could earn 13 dollars just by pretending to be one of the coolies who could not pass their medical inspection. Ayung testified, “I thought my case was hopeless. I never was permitted to leave the baracoon, although I tried.”40 This case suggests that So Ayung was tricked like the others but that he also played a part in deceiving the authorities so that he could earn money. The testimony in this Hong Kong courtroom, along with the thousands of Chinese coolies interviewed in Cuba while still serving under contracts on plantations, indicates that trickery and deception were used to recruit coolies but that Chinese emigrants also had an interest in playing along. Sometimes, they hoped to earn the advance simply by pretending to be a coolie. At other times, they needed to pay off debts and signing up seemed like quick and easy money. In few cases, however, were coolies simply kidnapped, and in almost no case did coolies claim they were being taken forcibly when questioned by government officials. In their situation, the human traffickers, unsavory though they may have been, were trusted more than government officials who offered no relief for poor migrants struggling to survive.

118  Elliott Young Gaiutra Bahadur’s brilliant account of her great grandmother’s journey from India to British Guiana in 1903 in her book Coolie Woman provides a speculative glimpse into alternative narratives to the dominant story of unwitting Asian workers swept up by evil recruiters. She identifies family stories that are narratives of either escape or kidnap. One family remembers the matriarch leaving from India on a ship with her baby daughter to escape female infanticide. “Her great granddaughter frames it as a flight to safety and freedom.” Another family recounts two versions of the story of their great grandmother’s departure from India. In one version, white men descend on the village and kidnap women to force them into indentured labor overseas. In another account, the great-grandmother’s father had left her mother, who was on the brink of suicide when she met a recruiter and signed up to leave for the colonies.41 These family stories suggest that women in particular may have had many reasons to leave India for various colonies as indentured laborers. As with Chinese male laborers, the chance to escape poverty and family crisis at home may have made the idea of signing up as an indentured laborer seem like a possible pathway to freedom, or at least more freedom. If many people later regretted their decision, it does not diminish their agency in choosing the possibilities of migration over the certain impoverishment and bondage of remaining at home. The voices of these Asian workers, so lacking in the historical archive, are often overshadowed by the loud proclamations of humanitarians from Europe and the US.

Humanitarian Imperialists Misrepresenting the true desires and complicity of the coolies in the trade was not a simple error; much was at stake. The humanitarian defense of coolies became a justification to expand British authority beyond even the extensive confines of the Empire. The legal case following a mutiny on the French coolie ship Nouvelle Pénelopé provides a dramatic example of how humanitarianism and imperialism worked together. In 1871, Judge John Jackson Smale issued a stunning decision in a Hong Kong courtroom, justifying the killing of a ship captain and crew by a Chinese emigrant who led a mutiny on the Nouvelle Pénelopé.42 The most far-reaching of Smale’s rulings was that “a man under unlawful restraint of his liberty at sea, as well as on shore, has a right to take life to free himself from such constraint on his personal liberty.” In a lengthy decision, Smale equated the Macao coolie trade to slavery, contended that the vessel was clearly outfitted as a slave ship, and declared that even if they had signed contracts, no man can give up his freedom willingly.43 In issuing his ruling, Justice Smale had to ignore Kwok’s own admission that the mutiny on the Nouvelle Pénelopé was the third such incident in which he was involved, an admission which suggests that he was less a victim than an experienced pirate intent on robbing ships. Arnold

The Panic over Human Smuggling  119 Meagher notes that the Nouvelle Pénelopé emigrants who provided detailed descriptions of how they were decoyed onto the ship were “vague or reluctant” when it came to their testimony about the mutiny, which occurred prior to the fire. The Daily Press of Hong Kong speculated that there was a conspiracy of silence, hinting that emigration agents and secret societies had planned the mutiny.44 The fact that so many of the Nouvelle Pénelopé emigrants were found in barracoons ready to reenlist for emigration following the debacle suggests that the coolies were willing emigrants and not kidnapped victims.45 Although we may applaud Judge Smale’s humanitarian impulse to side with the mutinous coolies over the French ship’s captain and crew, Smale’s gesture also reinforced the right of the British to intervene in a case involving a Chinese subject on a French ship on the High Seas who left from the Portuguese port of Macao. His legal reasoning rested on the notion that jus gentium (law of nations) prohibited the taking of slaves. He went further than simply asserting that the coolies had been enslaved, however, and argued that it would be impossible for anyone voluntarily to consent to give up their liberty.46 By declaring it “impossible” to volunteer to be a coolie, Smale decided that the Chinese could not consent to signing contracts to work on Peruvian sugar plantations. As if they were children unable to give proper consent, Smale implied that their desires and will should be ignored. In the quest to save the coolie, the British judge had to discredit the very people he was attempting to save. More importantly, British notions of natural rights including the right to liberty justified British jurisdiction everywhere to enforce its ban on the slave trade.

Connecting the Coolie Trade to Modern Migration Modern-day migrants and nineteenth-century coolies, though different in various ways, share many of the same characteristics. For some contract laborers such as the South Asians and Africans in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who are part of the kafala system, the comparisons with nineteenth century coolies are even more apt. Like Chinese coolies, UAE kafala laborers are hired using deceptive contracts that exploit the vulnerable and desperately poor with offers of decent wages that never materialize. Kafala workers are also tied to their employers, who exert almost total control over them and typically hold their passports, making it difficult for them to escape. Furthermore, these workers face social segregation, living in employers’ houses or in isolated labor camps. As anthropologist Andrew Gardner’s field work reveals, however, migrants to the Gulf states are often complicit in the deception about the labor conditions, presenting to their friends and family a much rosier picture of their lived reality than they experience.47 And as with nineteenth-­ century anti-coolie abolitionists, human rights activists who condemn

120  Elliott Young the kafala system usually target recruiters and employers rather than the underlying system of global capitalism that creates the conditions for such brutal labor exploitation.48 Not only does the kafala system echo the coolie trade, but the contemporary morality tale about evil human traffickers recaps the anti-coolie trade discourse of the nineteenth century.49 In fact, rather than seeing the coolie or kafala system as diametrically opposed to free wage labor migrants, it makes more sense to see all of these on a spectrum of unfree labor. The very terms of the modern debate often reproduce the free/­unfree binary. For example, the term trafficking is usually used when the media, politicians, or activists want to highlight the coercive nature of clandestine migration. Smuggling, on the other hand, implies an illegal crossing of a border but not a forced one. In Life Interrupted, Denise Brennan argues that the word “trafficking obscures what is going on.” She shows how “trafficking into forced labor,” the phrase she prefers, occurs when migration goes awry and when migrants who want to work in another country are taken advantage of by corrupt police, employers, and smugglers. Rather than focusing on the traffickers as the sole source of the problem, she proposes that we look at the context that creates the conditions for corruption and labor exploitation. Furthermore, Brennan suggests that we see forced labor as a continuum of exploitative labor practices rather than a bright dividing line between those who are trafficked and those who are not. She defines trafficked people in forced labor as those “having a compromised ability to walk away.”50 Although there are a few migrants being held in situations that look a lot like slavery, where workers are locked in and prevented by force from leaving, most migrants suffer under more subtle if no less serious forms of labor coercion, having their passports removed or suffering under threats of jailing and deportation as in the kafala system or with 11 million undocumented migrants in the US. Focusing on traffickers turns our attention away from global labor conditions and restrictionist immigration policies that force laborers to migrate clandestinely and opens them to exploitation by a range of state and non-state actors along the way. It was the same with nineteenth-century coolies who were vulnerable to exploitation not only because of corrupt recruiters but because the conditions of global capitalism made them vulnerable. Whenever there is a tragedy involving migrants, we see the same statements condemning traffickers, calling for stepped-up border enforcement and beefing up the immigration bureaucracy, all in the name of saving the victims. After 52,000 Central American children showed up on the US-Mexico border in the summer of 2014, alarms were raised in the US and throughout Latin America. Media and politicians blamed human traffickers, drug cartels, and gang violence for the exodus. President Obama requested 3.7 billion dollars from Congress to ramp  up

The Panic over Human Smuggling  121 border enforcement and hire more judges to speed up deportation proceedings. Makeshift detention centers in such remote locations as ­A rtesia, New Mexico; Karnes City and Dilley, Texas; and Berks County, Pennsylvania, were hastily set up to house the children, and judges from around the country began hearing cases remotely through video links. The response by the US government to this latest crisis echoes the treatment of so many more migrant “victims” over the past century and a half: incarceration and deportation. The Brookings Institution released a series of policy recommendations in light of the crisis. Number one on their list was stepped-up enforcement and prosecution of “criminal organizations which profit off unaccompanied children.” Number two was a recommendation for “sending a strong message to the sending country that their unaccompanied children will not be able to join their parent or family member while they wait 18 months or more for a court appearance.” They also called for increased funding for immigration judges and asylum officers so that claims could be processed more efficiently.51 The children who are escaping Central America are not only victims of smugglers, many of whom are actually helping them to cross into the US, but of the US Congress, which establishes the restrictive immigration legislation; the border patrol and the immigration judges who enforce the law; and social welfare agencies that jail the victims to protect them. Positing migrants as victims of tyrannical, criminal smugglers usually means silencing migrants’ voices and allowing others to speak for them. When journalists and academics do speak with coyotes (the term used for human smugglers in Mexico) or migrants, they find a more ambiguous reality than the black and white, good and evil one presented by politicians and humanitarian activists. One coyote from El S­ alvador published ads in the classified section of a newspaper announcing, “safe trips to the United States,” but most of his clients came based on referral, which means that he had to protect his reputation by providing safe passage. Although coyotes are usually depicted as cutthroat criminals, they are more like entrepreneurs working in the informal economy. The reason they charge upward of 7,500 dollars to transport a person from Central America to the US is because they have to pay off police and border officials along the way. In the wake of the attention to the unaccompanied Central American children arriving on the border, El Salvador’s president called for a crackdown on coyotes and there were even rumors of extraditing coyotes to the US to stand trial. 52 Targeting coyotes is an easy way for politicians to assign blame without changing any of the migration or economic policies that create the need for such agents in the first place. Human trafficking has been also identified as a major problem in ­Europe where nations are facing millions of migrants fleeing civil wars and economic crisis in Africa and the Middle East. In the last few years,

122  Elliott Young the Italian Navy launched a major campaign appropriately titled “Mare Nostrum” (Our Sea), and the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, has a military program called Operation Triton to police the Mediterranean Sea, where more than 20,000 migrants have died in the last two decades.53 According to the International Organization for Migration, in 2015, more than 3,600 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and globally, there have been over 5,000 migrant deaths. 54 In late 2014 and 2015, hundreds of migrants, mainly Syrians, were rescued from “ghost ships” abandoned in the Mediterranean by smugglers. The smugglers send these migrants toward Italy, leaving the European authorities with two options: rescue the migrants or allow them to crash and drown. Although he recognized that these migrants are legitimate refugees fleeing from a violent civil war in Syria, William Spindler from the United ­Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said, “there needs to be a crackdown on the criminal organisations that are prospering from this trafficking.”55 In April 2015, after more than a thousand refugees from Libya died trying to reach Greece and Italy, the leaders of England, Germany, and Italy declared that their top priority would be military operations to target traffickers in Africa by destroying their ships.56 And in October 2015, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution to allow European militaries to “inspect” and “seize” ships off the Coast of Libya that are suspected of human smuggling. 57 Focusing on the trafficker not only misses the point, but it authorizes European military intervention in Africa. In these cases, it’s hard to see the line between humanitarianism and imperialism. Australia, facing tens of thousands of migrants arriving on boats in the last decade, has begun to use its military to intercept such vessels on the high seas and direct them to Indonesia or Malaysia in an effort to prevent the migrants from claiming asylum in Australia.58 In both Europe and Australia, the government sees human smugglers as the problem rather than the restrictive legislation that makes it difficult for prospective asylum seekers to petition for entry from abroad. As one Australian government report noted, both major parties agree on the goal of breaking “the people smugglers’ business model.”59 To deter would-be migrants from attempting to reach their country, the Australian Navy has been sending hundreds of migrants detained at sea to the Pacific Island nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru where conditions are harsh, and internees face sexual abuse and torture.60 The response to increasing numbers of people migrating around the world from the global south to the north has been increased border security, incarceration, and the criminalization of smugglers and migrants. Moral campaigns against human trafficking from slavery to the ­nineteenth-century coolie trade to today’s migrants all have one thing in common. They all focus attention on the smuggler as a corrupt and sinister outlaw and turn our attention away from the structural conditions

The Panic over Human Smuggling  123 that spark migration and the restrictive laws that create a need for smuggling in the first place. By blaming the smugglers, anti-traffickers can claim to be addressing a human rights crisis without dealing with the root causes of that tragedy. It is not that human traffickers are always helpful and altruistic people looking to lend a helping hand to fellow migrants, but trying to end exploitation of migrants by jailing smugglers is like trying to stop the rain by banning leaky umbrellas. Looking back to the history of the coolie trade reminds us that humanitarian campaigns to rescue workers from the global south often result in strengthening of imperial states. Given that these are the same states that produce conditions of global inequality that lead to forced migration, it would be surprising to imagine that they would provide the solution.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the participants of the Global Moral Panics conference at Indiana University in October 2014 for their comments on my paper and their amazing scholarship.

Notes 1 El Comercio, June 10, 1868, as cited in Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, 148. 2 Carol Vance’s analysis of anti-sex trafficking videos makes a similar argument about the ways in which melodrama is employed to create heroes and victims and cover over the operations of state power that create global inequality. Vance, “Innocence and Experience.” 3 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 49. For a discussion of the continuities between nineteenth-century humanitarian discourses and the human rights notions of today, see Young, “Chinese Coolies, Universal Rights and the Limits of Liberalism in the Age of Empire.” 4 Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land, 2, 11, 16. 5 Young, Alien Nation. 6 Jung, Coolies and Cane, 4. 7 Some contemporary commentators have even reclaimed the epithet, such as the Mauritian and French poet Khal Torabully, who uses “coolitude” as a term of empowerment. 8 United States House and Senate, Act to Prohibit the “Coolie Trade,” 340–41. 9 Young, Alien Nation, ch. 2. 10 Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 113. 11 Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 159–160. 12 Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 190. 13 Northrup, Indentured Labor, 159–160. 14 Northrup, Indentured Labor, 89–90, 108–110, 156, 163. 15 Meagher, Coolie Trade, 171. 16 Abbott, South and North, 50–51. 17 “The Coolie Trade,” 19 July 1873, New York Times.

124  Elliott Young 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46

47 48

Ruskola, “Raping Like a State,” 1516–1517. Ruskola, “Raping Like a State,” 1501–1504, 1505, 1513. Call, 24 Feb. 1895, as cited in Sears, “All That Glitters,” 395. Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, 53–55. Chief Justice Smale, in the matter of Kwok-a-Sing on Habeas Corpus, March 25, 1871, 201. A transcript of the decision was published in the Hong Kong Daily Press, 5 April 1871. “China: Kidnapping Coolies.” For an excellent analysis of the testimonies in the Cuba Commission Report, see Yun, The Coolie Speaks. Helly, The Cuba Commission Report, 36–37. These statistics are derived from the 962 coolies who left from Macao, and gave testimony to the Cuba Commission. Helly, Cuba Commission Report, 37. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 113–114. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 107–112. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 13–16, 27, 110. Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 38. Meagher, Coolie Trade, 360. “Reglamento para la introducción y régimen de los colonos Españoles en la Isla de Cuba, Real Decreto de 22 de marzo de 1854,” in Pastrana, Los chinos en la historia de Cuba, 162. Bassino et al., “Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925,” 31. Helly, Cuba Commission Report, 37. Statement of Albert Herker before the Magistracy, Hong Kong, 19 May 1871, in British Parliamentary Papers, 274. Statement of Charles Kercop before the Magistracy, Hong Kong, 20 May 1871, in BPP: China v. 4, 274–276. Statement of Albert Herker before the Magistracy, Hong Kong, 20 May 1871, in Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 61–63. Statements of Wong Ahfhat, Lum Apak, So Ayung, Chan-a-Sin, and Tun-aLeung before the Magistracy, Hong Kong, 16–22 May 1871, in BPP: China v. 4, 273. Statement of Wong Ahfaht, 16 May 1871, Hong Kong. Statement of Lum Apak before the Magistracy, Hong Kong, 16 May 1871, in BPP: China v. 4, 269–271. Statement of So Ayung before the Magistracy, Hong Kong, 17 May 1871, in BPP: China v. 4, 271. Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 48–49. For a full discussion of this case and the connections of imperialism to humanitarianism, see Young, “Chinese Coolies.” Chief Justice Smale, in the matter of Kwok-a-Sing on Habeas Corpus, 25 March 1871, reprinted in Smale, “Supreme Court,” 195–207. A transcript of the decision was published in the Hong Kong Daily Press, April 5, 1871. Meagher, Coolie Trade, 184–185. Smale, “Supreme Court, Hong Kong, March 25th, 1871—Judge Chambers Before the Hon. Chief Justice Smale, in the Matter of Kwok-a-sing on Habeas Corpus- Judgment,” 202–205. “Chief Justice Smale, in the matter of Kwok-A-Sing on Habeas Corpus,” 25 March 1871, reprinted in “Supreme Court, Hong Kong, March 25th, 1871—Judge Chambers Before the Hon. Chief Justice Smale, in the Matter of Kwok-a-sing on Habeas Corpus- Judgment,” 201–205. Gardner, “Why Do They Keep Coming?” Amnesty International, The Dark Side of Migration, 10.

The Panic over Human Smuggling  125 49 There is a large literature that makes this point, including scholars in this volume. One place to find the argument is Snajdr, “Beneath the master narrative.” 50 Brennan, Life Interrupted, 6–8, 13. 51 Negroponte, “The Surge in Unaccompanied Children from Central America: A Humanitarian Crisis at Our Border.” 52 Martínez, “Why the Children Fleeing Central America Will Not Stop Coming.” 53 Carr, “The Mediterranean is Europe's Migrant Graveyard”; Hooper, “Migrants Give Thanks after Ghost Ship Ezadeen Rescued in Mediterranean.” 54 International Organization for Migration, “Mediterranean Update: Migration Flows Europe.” 55 As quoted in Squires, “Analysis.” 56 Traynor, “EU to launch military operations against migrant-smugglers in Libya.” 57 Sengupta, “U.N. Council Plan to Impede Human Smuggling.” 58 “At Sea: A court challenges a hardline policy toward asylum seekers.” 59 Barker, “The People Smugglers’ Business Model,” 2. 60 Human Rights Watch, “Australia: Appalling Abuse”; Amnesty International, “Nauru 2016/17.”

Bibliography Primary Sources “The Coolie Trade.” New York Times July 19, 1873. “China: Kidnapping Coolies—Excitement at Shanghai.” New York Times Oct. 21, 1859. British Parliamentary Papers: China v. 4, Correspondence, dispatches and other communications respecting the emigration of Chinese coolies, 1858–92, Irish University Press Area Studies Series. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971. Chief Justice Smale, in the matter of Kwok-a-Sing on Habeas Corpus, 25 March 1871, reprinted in Chief Justice Smale, in the matter of Kwok-a-Sing on Habeas Corpus, 25 March 1871, reprinted in John Smale, “Supreme Court, Hong Kong, March 25th, 1871—Judge Chambers Before the Hon. Chief Justice Smale, in the Matter of Kwok-a-sing on Habeas Corpus- Judgment,” in United States Department of State: The Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives during the Second Session of the Forty-­Second Congress (1871–1872), 201. Washington DC: US Department of State, 1872. Chief Justice Smale, in the matter of Kwok-a-Sing on Habeas Corpus, 25 March 1871, reprinted in Smale, “Supreme Court, Hong Kong, March 25th, 1871— Judge Chambers Before the Hon. Chief Justice Smale, in the Matter of Kwoka-sing on Habeas Corpus- Judgment,” 195–207. A transcript of the decision was published in the Hong Kong Daily Press, April 5, 1871. Secondary Sources Abbott, John S. C. South and North, or Impressions Received During a Trip to Cuba and the South. New York: Abbey & Abbott, 1860.

126  Elliott Young Amnesty International. The Dark Side of Migration: Spotlight on Qatar’s Construction Sector Ahead of the World Cup. New York City: Amnesty International, 2013. “At Sea: A Court Challenges a Hardline Policy toward Asylum ­S eekers.” The Economist July 26, 2014; www.economist.com/news/asia/21608798court-challenges-hardline-policy-towards-boat-people-sea Bahadur, Gaiutra. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Barker, Cat. “The People Smugglers’ Business Model,” in Research Paper, edited by Foreign Office. Canberra: Parliament of Australia, 2013. Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Bassino, Jean-Pascal, with Robert Allen, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925 in Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India. London: Economic History Department, London School of Economics, 2009. Brennan, Denise. Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Carr, Matt. “The Mediterranean Is Europe’s Migrant Graveyard.” Inter Press Service October 10, 2014. Gardner, Andrew. “Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Gulf States.” In Migrant Labor in the Gulf, edited by Mehran Kemrava and Zahra Babar. London: Hurst and Company, 2012, pp. 41–59. Hahamovitch, Cindy. No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Helly, Denise. The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1874]. Hooper, John. “Migrants Give Thanks after Ghost Ship Ezadeen Rescued in Mediterranean.” The Guardian Jan. 3, 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/ 2015/jan/03/relief-syrian-refugees-ezadeen-docks-italy-moral-blackmailsmugglers. Human Rights Watch. “Australia: Appalling Abuse, Neglect of Refugees on Nauru.” Aug. 2, 2016; www.hrw.org/news/2016/08/02/australia-appalling-­ abuse-neglect-refugees-nauru; Amnesty International. “Nauru 2016/17.” www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/nauru/report-nauru/. International Organization for Migration. “Mediterranean Update: Migration Flows Europe.” 2015; http://missingmigrants.iom.int/en/mediterranean-update4-december-2015. Jung, Moon-Ho. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Kuhn, Philip A. Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Martínez, Óscar. “Why the Children Fleeing Central America Will Not Stop Coming.” The Nation July 30, 2014. Meagher, Arnold J. The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, 1847–1874. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2008. Negroponte, Diana Villiers. “The Surge in Unaccompanied Children from Central America: A Humanitarian Crisis at Our Border,” Brookings Institution Up Front Blog, July 2, 2014.

The Panic over Human Smuggling  127 Northrup, David. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pastrana, Juan Jiménez. Los chinos en la historia de Cuba: 1847–1930. ­H avana: Editorial Ciencias Socialies, 1983. Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pérez de la Riva, Juan. Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847–1880: contribución al estudio de la inmigración contratada en el Caribe. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000. Ruskola, Teemu. “Raping Like a State.” UCLA Law Review 57 (2009–2010): 1516–17. Sears, Clare. “All That Glitters: Trans-ing California’s Gold Rush Migrations.” GLQ 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 395. Sengupta, Somini. “U.N. Council Plan to Impede Human Smuggling.” New York Times October 8, 2015. Snajdr, Edward. “Beneath the master narrative: human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery and ethnographic realities.” Dialectical Anthropology 37, no. 2 (2013): 229–256. Squires, Nick, “Analysis: Smugglers Turn to Bigger Ghost Ships That Can Be Used all Year.” The Telegraph (UK) Jan. 2, 2015; www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/europe/italy/11321856/Analysis-smugglers-turn-to-bigger-ghostships-that-can-be-used-all-year.html. Stewart, Watt. Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–1874. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1951, 148. Traynor, Ian. “EU to Launch Military Operations against Migrant-Smugglers in Libya.” The Guardian April 20, 2015. United States Congress, An Act to Prohibit the “Coolie Trade” by American Citizens in American Vessels. 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 12 Stat. 340, 340–41. Washington DC: Government Printing Office 1862. Vance, Carol. “Innocence and Experience: Melodramatic Narratives of Sex Trafficking and Their Consequences for Law and Policy.” History of the ­Present 2, no. 2 (2012): 200–218. Young, Elliott. Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. ———. “Chinese Coolies, Universal Rights and the Limits of Liberalism in the Age of Empire.” Past & Present no. 227 (2015): 121–149. Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008.

Part II

Too Mobile Panic at the Borders

6 Rescuing the Blonde Angel The Global Captivity Narrative and the Panic of 2013 Susan Lepselter Madeline and the Gypsies In the 1959 children’s book Madeline and the Gypsies by Ludwig ­Bemelmans, a “Gypsy Mama” spirits away the eponymous French schoolgirl from a carnival.1 In the “Gypsy”2 camp, Madeline and her friend Pepito are at first ecstatic with childish fantasies of freedom. “Gypsies do not like to stay—they only come to go away,” the book cheerfully singsongs. 3 But eventually the children tire of disorder, and the fearful shape of another knowledge emerges. Now, it becomes clear that the Gypsies are captors. The Gypsy Mama (using a crystal ball to track their rescuers) will not release the children. Finally, of course, the pair are rescued and restored to wholesome Frenchness. The centuries-old “Gypsy” kidnap and conversion fantasy seems as inevitable a part of French childhood here as the berets and baguettes dotting the pages. In rhyming couplets, the tale teaches children the same old lesson: longing for and dread of the other congeal in one impressionistic image, the image of a concealed world. In this story, after all, there is no ransom. The implication is that the Gypsy Mama simply wants these French children to become Gypsy children. Desire and abduction intersect as a single dream. Until Miss Clavel shows up heroically in her nun’s habit, the circus adventure threatens to become a reverse interracial adoption.

Maria In October 2013, police in central Greece stormed local Roma houses in search of illegal drugs and weapons. In the home of Christos Salis and his wife, Eleftheria Dimopoulou, the police found no contraband substances, but they did find a small, blonde girl among a group of darkhaired siblings. While insisting that the child was their own, Salis and Dimopoulou were charged with abducting a minor and holding false papers. They were quickly condemned by the high court of internet commentary and globally shamed as iconic “Gypsy Kidnappers.”

132  Susan Lepselter

Figure 6.1  T he “Blonde Angel”; https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-greece-girl/ greece-riveted-by-mystery-of-blonde-angel-idUKBRE99I06620131019.

Every news screen that October showed the blonde, blue-eyed child as she twisted her hands and squinted back at the camera (Figure 6.1). It was said that no one knew who she was or where she came from, but authorities thought that she was four years old. The old trope of a “white captive” provided a ready framework. Dubbed the “Blonde ­A ngel” by Greek police, her image circulated internationally with the panic and urgency of an Amber Alert. The intertextual narrative became established in quick strokes. The reports said things like “Greek officials are making an international appeal to help identify a mystery blonde girl discovered during a raid on a Roma Gypsy settlement” or “Maria was rescued during a raid of a transient camp in Tabakou last week” (emphasis in both quotes mine).4 These and many other news stories tucked the police raid into subordinate phrases, and in such unmarked poetics, naturalized the power of the state to break dark powers hiding contraband and trafficked things. The questionable legitimacy of the raid itself was submerged as background to an emerging mystery, at times an almost gothic-inflected story: the Greek police “were taken aback when the pale skinned child appeared.”5 “She was found in the care of a couple who claimed to be her parents, but her fair coloring and pale blue eyes raised the suspicions of authorities who said they fear the 4-year-old is a victim of child trafficking.”6

Rescuing the Blonde Angel  133 In online news from the Taipei Times to The Guardian, readers learned that she could barely speak or did not speak Greek, “and what little she did say was conducted in the Roma dialect”7—as if Romani people communicated not in a language but a mere “dialect,” a code as unofficial as its speakers. Thousands of tips came in to police, many from the US. A few days later, at the height of the panic, Irish police raided the homes of two Irish Roma families with their own blond children, a boy and a girl, similarly charging both these “Traveler” families with child abduction based on a perceived lack of physical resemblance.8 While the Greek Roma parents’ DNA did not match their child’s—further stoking rage against the Roma in police statements and anonymous internet comments alike—the Irish children’s DNA was indeed found to match that of their parents. From the outset, the Irish Roma parents had insisted that the children were their own. Nonetheless, the girl “was taken from the home after gardai [“guardians” or police] attached to a child protection unit were not satisfied with a birth certificate and passport for the child furnished to them by the family,” reported the Irish Times.9 A headline in the Daily Mail reported that “now” a blonde girl had been found among Roma in Ireland, the “now” suggesting a frightening accumulation of “Gypsy” kidnappings.10 ABC News from Australia pitted the word “found” against the word “claimed” in an increasingly familiar poetics of the sinister: The girl in Dublin was found to bear no physical resemblance to the couple who claimed to be her biological parents. Irish police found no record of the girl’s birth at the hospital where it was claimed she was born (emphasis mine).11 Although the article also quoted an Irish aid worker’s concern over the “witch hunt” against Roma families, the quote appeared at the bottom of the story, less eye-catching than the large image accompanying it: photos of missing Greek babies labeled with the caption, “The latest cases have prompted fears of wider child trafficking rings.”12 Then, due to the matching DNA, both Irish children were returned home to their families. In the face of this error, many other news stories criticized the media’s hasty condemnation. The international story shifted again. Although Maria did not share her parents’ DNA, she had been unofficially—but willingly—adopted by them; her biological mother was another Roma woman they knew, who was from Bulgaria. But soon it was this biological mother attacked for being a “typical Gypsy,” not for kidnapping this time but for plotting to defraud the public. A headline at the Daily Mirror, the British tabloid, asserted, “‘Greece girl’ Maria’s real mum looking to cash in on newfound fame,” followed by “The calculating mum-of-10 said she was expecting donations to come pouring in from people feeling sorry for her.”13

134  Susan Lepselter So, blonde little Maria, though not biologically the daughter of those who were raising her, was biologically Roma too, it turned out, and the story of the white captive lost its power. As one Romani writer bitterly put it in the Guardian, now that she was known to be Roma, she would become “invisible” again—not as a concealed captive but as an ordinary Roma child, obscured to the world in her poverty, in her decreased access to health care and education, and in the discrimination allowed against her.14 And though it shifted the discourse back away from indictable kidnapping, the revelations of unofficial adoption and the care of children through extralegal social routes did not relieve the Roma of the racial and cultural suspicion that had been unleashed upon them. There were, after all, no papers.

Captivities A fantasy of concealed worlds lodged in the stories’ word choices; for instance, articles described not towns or communities but camps and settlements, as if Maria had been seized from a tent instead of a house. When some reports did use a photograph of the house, the perspective simply foregrounded liminality and transience; the photo of the home showed laundry on the fence, a patch on the roof. The naturalized transience of the “Gypsies” was still their stigma. And, I think, the anachronistic inference of “Gypsy transience” in these reports intersected not only with old stereotypes of carnival-route “Gypsy Mamas” but also with a larger contemporary panic over vague underground “traffickers” concurrently mushrooming in global panics around the internet. I don’t minimize the serious misery of real human trafficking. But here, “trafficking” becomes a sign absorbing unspecified transgressions of mobility and capital. As Seigel writes in the introduction to this volume, These are terrors over things that (might) cross borders, and whose crossings threaten the sanctity of the structures anchored to territoriality and capital. These panics are defined not by place or scale but by travel, passage, transgression. These are panics over bodies that move.15 Now, like any established scapegoat, the contemporary iteration of global “Gypsy kidnappers” was linked to other meanings half-noticed in the dominant realm. They seemed to take on vague anxieties of neoliberal circulation occurring in multiple orders. The old stereotype of “nomadic,” “wandering,” and “kidnapping” Roma absorbed unmarked current public fears fueled by the increasingly enigmatic flows of ordinary goods and labor in a global market, expanding circulations of information, capital, and people—the changing circulations of a stillnew experience of capitalism that normally goes without saying— while discourses about “trafficking” and “pirating”—and now “Gypsy ­kidnapping”—take off with increasing terror in the global public sphere.

Rescuing the Blonde Angel  135 More thoughtful news sources in Europe and the US (such as National Public Radio, the Guardian, and the BBC) framed these events in light of long-standing, and escalating, official European racism against the Roma. France had been evicting Roma for years. But the same month as the Greek raid, a prominent story appeared about Leonarda Dibrani, a 15-year-old French Roma girl who was dramatically yanked off her school bus in front of her classmates for deportation. It was a distorted reversal of the Greek and Irish cases: this girl was, implicitly, concealing herself as a “real” French schoolgirl and had to be unmasked, then sent back to the invisible margins where she belonged. The visible nature of her apprehension during a school trip, and the fact that she was in fact integrated into French life—the only life she’d known—triggered student protests on a scale well beyond those generated by the large number of ongoing deportations.16 In response to public outrage, Dibrani was given permission to remain—but alone, without her family—since only a fraction of Roma were capable of integrating into French society, the Interior Minister said. The family was refused its bid for asylum.

The Uncanny Sense of Missing Children An odd thing happened then. The Greek “international appeal” for ­Maria’s identity attracted a storm of speculation that the mysterious Blonde Angel might be the missing child from various famous abduction cases, none of which could possibly fit. Across the English-speaking internet, there were claims that she could be Madeleine McCann, the English girl who had disappeared while on holiday with her parents in Portugal in 2007. However, police thought Maria was four years old in 2013, and Madeleine McCann had been nearly three at the time of her kidnapping six-and-a-half years earlier. Despite the wide circulation of computer-generated “age progression” images of Madeleine McCann, which people who followed the case surely had seen, the imagined overlap of these children suggested that the missing figure of Madeleine ­McCann could have been suspended in time. Hyperlinks from story to story, and anonymous comments in the strange public “below” internet news reports, built the fantastic discourse connecting Madeleine ­McCann and “Maria,” despite the impossible timeline and the overall extreme unlikeliness of the match. But in her official status as an enigmatic captive, the Blonde Angel became a symbol; she contained anxieties around all blonde children vulnerable to dark, capturing forces. One of the most widely circulated age-progression images of Madeleine McCann, still easily viewed online, showed two age images side by side, identical except for their coloring.17 The left-side image showed McCann as she might look at age nine, blonde and fair. The right-side was the same, colored to estimate how she might appear after “years in a warmer country.”18 This fantasy Madeleine, raised in a vague land

136  Susan Lepselter south of Northern Europe, had brown skin—presumably tanned from the sun—but also, quite fantastically, dark brown hair, which could not possibly be an effect of the sun in some imagined “warmer country.” Rather, the visual poetics in the seemingly high-tech graphic suggest a vague anxiety over the captive’s capacity for racialized conversion, fantastically materialized through the too-permeable conditions of borders. As the McCann speculation circulated, more stories of Roma “lurking” about continued to emerge. In February 2014, four months after the Blonde Angel went viral, the UK online tabloid the Daily Mirror reported that “a mum has told Scotland Yard she believes ‘gypsy’ restaurant staff in the Algarve” had tried to spike her drink in order to kidnap her own daughter, years before the McCann case.19 In other words, this mother already had established a fantasy linking the absent Madeleine to “Gypsies” living and working invisibly in the margins of well-lit spaces like resort restaurants. A week after the Greek raid in October 2013, the Daily Mirror had reported, “Police hunt three ‘gypsies’ seen lurking near holiday apartment” where McCann had vanished in 2007. 20 But no one knew who these men were. There were difficult-to-parse computer-­ generated images of their faces, smiling enigmatically with the chins oddly chopped out of the frame. Who were these men, and what was their background? The assumption of their “Gypsy” identity was another fabulous imposition. The uncanny potential spread to the US too. Here, parents of a missing Missouri girl resurfaced in the news, saying that they believed their missing daughter, Lisa Irwin, might be the Blonde Angel, trafficked away to Greece. It was reported that Greek police were taking the Lisa Irwin lead “seriously.”21 In one interview with her local Kansas City station, the baby’s mother, Deborah Bradley, said that even if little blonde Maria in Greece was not her daughter, the story gave her hope that the world would now know about the epidemic of human trafficking. 22 It seemed to go without saying that the Angel had been trafficked, made evident simply by her blondeness out of place. Their own baby daughter had vanished, two years before, from their home in Kansas City. There had been confusion over who had been in the house, with the mother drinking and the hardworking father coming home late at night from a job to find the house open, a screen damaged, and Deborah Bradley asleep with all the lights on. There had been suspicions aimed at the parents; it was said they would not cooperate with police and kicked a candlelight vigil off their lawn. Stories in 2011 seemed judgmental toward Deborah Bradley’s lack of conventional maternal vigilance that night. Now, the parents were interviewed sympathetically, with the mother in tears. A TV magazine reporter nodded as Deborah Bradley spoke. In light of Maria, the mother was now a white woman with a missing white baby, no longer a noncompliant citizen; in interviews now, the aura of suspicion was fantastically

Rescuing the Blonde Angel  137 erased. The potential of a missing space opened up. These news stories suggested ambiguous networks of invisible traffickers, dark marginal people permeating borders, nations, private houses; now they had come to Kansas City, taken the blue-eyed baby Lisa in the night. The idea took on the elements of an uncanny conspiracy theory echoing the racialized conversion photo of Madeleine McCann after years in a warmer country. Here too, “they” would abduct and convert the white girl. Maybe ­ omani “settleChristos Salis and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, in their poor R ment” in central Greece, were raising Lisa Irwin as a Gypsy. The old “Gypsy kidnap” rumor, of course, gives a deep core to the 2013 panic. But there is also more going on here. This moral panic is connected not only to the single, constantly re-emerging libel tale of “Gypsy kidnappers” (though this is present) but also to the wider genre of captivity narratives. The captivity genre has, for centuries, expressed anxieties of reverse power relationships as they typically feature dark “others” abducting, controlling, and potentially converting and contaminating captives from dominant societies. 23 Like the racist reports of “Gypsy kidnappers” circulating in Europe, centuries of American Indian captivity narratives also typically foreground captives leaving sedentary lives and joining the peripatetic movements in the travels of people who will not stay in place. Thinking through this genre, then, might suggest not just a single racist libel against the Roma returning again and again but also the more current, inchoate anxieties and uncanny fears that may re-animate such rumors globally. Seeing the 2013 panic in light of the polyvalent genre of captivity narratives suggests more fully how old forms of libel manage to latch onto new instabilities and renew themselves in fabulous but publicly convincing ways. At the height of Indian captivity narratives in the US during the fiercest periods of colonization and genocide, the most visceral fear, beyond worrying that a white female captive would be killed by her captors, was that she would choose to stay with the Indians. Most famously, Mary Jamison married into her captor’s Seneca society; her story became a staple of US settlement anxieties. Fears of conversion—of marriage and adoption, of cultural and sexual contamination—were familiar. 24 And like all compulsive narrative genres, captivity narratives make visible one story while concealing another: Indians captured by whites were a common—but rarely narrated—event. 25 In the Roma case, less visible captivities featuring a reversal of captive and captor threaten to erupt at the surface of things. For centuries, Romani children have been taken by whites with various institutionalized justifications—the idea that, as Roma-Canadian activist Ronald Lee said, “Roma were beyond the pale and had to be rescued from this [seemingly] terrible way of life.”26 For Lee, scenes from the wider historical view emerge as a pattern here, which he detailed: Romani men hanged on sight, leaving widows and children in the poorhouse; modernizers from the eighteenth-century to

138  Susan Lepselter Victorian times “rescuing” children from the very poverty inflicted by racist laws; contemporary refugees detained over bureaucratic-level errors of registration that wind up with their children put into foster care. In the ongoing international epidemic of Romani children taken by government child welfare boards to be raised in white foster homes, Lee suggested, Maria’s outcome was part of the order of things. Most scholarship on captivity narratives has focused on national troublings of race, gender, and change. But this 2013 global moral panic is also a global captivity narrative. I say this not just because of the international scale of the participatory internet discourses that mushroomed everywhere. I say it also because of some specific global tropes that emerged in that discourse. A more general anxiety around changing and ungraspable forms of circulation and containment emerges here. It is not a single national fear but a hyperlinked, semi-visible transnational one. The uncanny aspect of the Madeleine McCann stories suggests, as the uncanny always does, a hidden knowledge that is only partially visible at the surface of things. Here, I suggest, that hidden something is the rising public affect surrounding opaque processes of transnational circulation and movement accelerating in multiple, simultaneous global domains.

Circulations These events suggest transnational insecurities that originate well beyond the Roma. It is fitting that Greece and Ireland were the sites of “rescuing” European children from “Gypsies.” Suddenly Greece and Ireland performed themselves as key heroes of white “Europe,” not as the shamed outliers of the Eurozone whose financial disasters in 2013 had freshly threatened the economy of the EU. Greece, Ireland, and Portugal had all been anti-heroes in a public narrative of financial collapse, their growing debts a sign of their burdensome weight upon their neighbors. The specter of Portugal, the problem child of the outer Eurozone, was visible in the haunting figure of Madeleine McCann. For years in the McCann investigation, Portugal was consistently portrayed as inferior to England, their police needing intervention from Scotland Yard. The subtext of resentments and inequalities—her parents were British doctors vacationing in the sunny regions of a relatively poorer country— haunted the McCann coverage for years. And in the months after the Maria episode, Portuguese police accused a deceased African immigrant of kidnapping Madeleine McCann. He had no record of child abuse but had been arrested, years before, for trafficking drugs. The tropes of unseen human and capital circulation layered inside the stories, giving them resonance in place of evidence. One more level of the semi-visible is worth thinking through here. That fall, the news was flooded, too, with stories about breakdowns in international adoption policies. Developing countries were refusing to

Rescuing the Blonde Angel  139 allow their children to be adopted by wealthy nations. Meanwhile, just a week before the Maria case, there were stories about black American children being adopted by Europeans. America had joined the ranks of nations whose poor dark children were adopted by wealthy whites of other countries, where they would be raised in a new culture of privilege. These unstable international adoption stories appeared online during the fall of 2013, constantly blinking at the edges of vision. They surged through the news just a few weeks before the Roma kidnapping panic, bringing up half-recognized anxieties about capital, circulation, and conversion in the figure of the child. They half remind the distracted internet user that children, like things, circulate in ways that involve unequal access to resources. While in no way criticizing individual families, for example, Briggs shows that the politics and history of American parents’ adoption of transnational children have, for decades, both performed and perpetuated power differentials in political and economic relationships between nations. 27 Of course, parents always adopt and raise children out of generosity and love, both internationally and domestically. But as Anagnost puts it, the ability to adopt across national and economic borders makes visible “the conditions of postmodernity in which very small children are caught up in transnational flows of human capital.”28 Reversals in the flow of power are the key trope in the captivity narrative; here, in the troubled international adoption stories, that reversal threatens to denaturalize established orders that make some conversions benign and others transgressive. The adoption arrangement, as scholars such as Anagnost remind us, is meant to occupy a realm of affective and intimate logic distinct from the circulation of commodities. 29 But reversals in typical adoption relations remind us that under any circumstance, whether children are adopted or biologically conceived, the family is never an encapsulated unit. Whether through adoption, or through the familial absences generated by transnational migrant labor, the family is subject to economies beyond its affective borders. Official adoptions occur in systems that always threaten to transgress the domains of familial love with the domains of economic and material things. It is not only, or primarily, adoptive families who have to guard against market discourses permeating the realm of affect. There was internet outrage both when it was learned that the Romani families simply took on another child as their own, without papers, and when Maria’s biological mother imploded the naturalized dichotomy between market and family by asking for handouts while she held her own white baby. And the Blonde Angel, after the fuss had died down, was placed in foster care, reinstating the more invisible, hegemonic captivity story: poor children of color routinely becoming wards of the state. All these levels of meaning occur in a kind of semiotic unconscious, I believe—in the quick glimpses of photos that shoot across one’s screen

140  Susan Lepselter in the age of rapid clicks. In the police photo, which AP images displays online for any interested viewers, Maria’s vilified father wears an ­A merican sweatshirt.30 “Just Do It,” the sweatshirt says below his stunned, unyielding face. Perhaps the American logo on the sweatshirt half speaks as one clicks away at one’s computer in Paris or Athens or Kansas City—perhaps the logo, half-perceived, itself registers an invisible story about enigmatic changes in national circulating goods. The figure of the child reveals a glimpse of a something missing across affective and economic domains, foregrounding fears around contemporary capital, containment, and circulation.31 Taking more than a moment to gaze at the “Just Do It” logo on an arrested Romani man in central Greece, I think of Nadia Seremetakis—how she writes about her nostalgia for the local Greek peach of her youth; she remembers the texture and sweetness of its flesh, in contrast to the bland new peaches that have appeared seemingly from nowhere through the globalization of food production and distribution. 32 The missing local peach is an absence only acknowledged by a few as they metabolize the unmarked new ones. In the global captivity narrative and the racist frenzy it unleashed against the Roma in 2013, we can see, perhaps, hints of many things that are globalized beyond the missing child, things that seem impossible to fix in the inchoate architectures of a changing neoliberal modernity, and that rush in, sometimes, to re-animate the static toxicities of the past.

Acknowledgements I thank Ian Hancock for a conversation in October 2013 that propelled the writing of this article; Ronald Lee for sharing his knowledge, insight and time; and Diane Goldstein, Jane Goodman, David Kim, Laura Kunreuther, Shaka McGlotten, Jason Pine, Micol Seigel, the late Mary Steedley, and Lorraine Plourde for invaluable critique on presentations of this piece.

Notes 1 Bemelmans, Madeline and the Gypsies. Citations refer to the Puffin edition. 2 Here and throughout this chapter, I employ the incorrect and offensive term “Gypsy” only to represent the discourse of those who use this word in ways I do not condone. In this chapter, I use the word “Roma” as both a noun and an adjective, the latter especially in quotations and paraphrasings. I also use the word “Romani” as an adjective, following examples encountered on www.rromaniconnect.org/. I take responsibility for all unquoted misapplications of endonyms as unintentional errors of my own. 3 Bemelmans, Madeline and the Gypsies, 17. 4 Fields, “International Appeal to Identify Mystery Girl Found in Greek Gypsy Camp Raid”; MacIntosh, “US Couple Hopes ‘Maria’ is Missing Daughter.” 5 Helena Smith, “Photo of Blonde Girl Found in Greece Triggers Thousands of Inquiries.” 6 Fields, “International Appeal.”

Rescuing the Blonde Angel  141 7 Smith, “Photo of Blond Girl.” 8 McDonald, “Child Taken from Second Roma Family in Ireland by Police Returned to Parents.” 9 Lally, “Garda Removed Girl from Home after ‘Tip off’ to TV3.” 10 Eccles and Martin, “Now Blonde Girl Found at a Roma Home in Ireland.” 11 Miller, “Girl Found with Unrelated Irish Roma Couple in Similar Case to Greece’s Mystery Maria.” 12 Miller, “Girl Found.” 13 Rossington, “‘Greece Girl’ Maria’s Real Mum Looking to Cash in on Newfound Fame.” 14 Jovanovic, “Maria is Roma.” 15 Micol Seigel, “Introduction: Global Moral Panics and the Affective Contours of Power,” in this volume, p. 1. 16 “Migration Debate.” 17 The image can be seen at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224796/ Madeleine-­McCann-Is-looks-like-today.html, the site for Allen, “We want to find who took Madeleine and fight them.” 18 Allen, “We want to find who took Madeleine and fight them.” 19 Aldridge, “Mum Claims Madeleine McCann Kidnappers May Have Tried to Snatch her Child in Algarve Weeks Beforehand.” 20 Hill, “Madeleine McCann.” 21 MacIntosh, “US Couple Hopes.” 22 Shen, “Baby Lisa’s Parents Believe Girl Found in Greece May Be their Daughter.” 23 Derounian-Stodola, “Introduction,” xi. 24 In the mid-twentieth century, the trope of a white female captive who has been culturally converted and sexually contaminated reappears most famously via Hollywood in The Searchers as John Wayne’s character wants to kill his captive niece for “living with a Buck.” 25 Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others. 26 Lee, personal communication. 27 Briggs, Somebody’s Children. 28 Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition,” 299. 29 Ibid. 30 The photo is available at www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/REX-AP3219945a-Roma-gypsy-couple-accused-of-ab-/b3869be08af34e7e974b998 b04475dc4/10/0. 31 Ivy, “Have You Seen Me?” 32 Seremetakis, The Senses Still, 2–4.

Bibliography Aldridge, Gemma. “Mum Claims Madeleine McCann Kidnappers May Have Tried to Snatch Her Child in Algarve Weeks Beforehand.” Daily Mirror February 9, 2014; www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-claims-madeleinemccann-kidnappers-3127121. Allen, Vanessa. “‘We Want to Find Who Took Madeleine and Fight Them’: The Heartbreaking Words of McCann Twins Who Miss Their Sister.” The Daily Mail November 3, 2009; www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224796/ Madeleine-­McCann-Is-looks-like-today.html. Anagnost, Ann. “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 2 (2000): 389–421.

142  Susan Lepselter Bemelmans, Ludwig. Madeline and the Gypsies. New York: Puffin Books, 2004. First published 1959 by Viking Press (New York). Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle. “Introduction.” In Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, edited by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ix–xxxv. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Eccles, Louise, and Arthur Martin. “Now Blonde Girl Found at a Roma Home in Ireland: Blue-Eyed Child of Seven is Led Away by Police and Social Workers.” Daily Mail October 23, 2013; www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2471521/ Blonde-girl-Roma-gypsy-home-Ireland.html Fields, Liz. “International Appeal to Identify Mystery Girl Found in Greek Gypsy Camp Raid.” ABC News online October 13, 2013; http://abcnews.go.com/ International/international-appeal-identify-mystery-girl-found-greek-gypsy/ story?id=20622505. Hill, Patrick. “Madeleine McCann: Police Hunt Three ‘Gypsies’ Seen Lurking near Holiday Apartment.” Daily Mirror October 27, 2013; www.mirror. co.uk/news/uk-news/madeline-mccann-police-hunt-three-2644559. Ivy, Marilyn. “Have You Seen Me? Recovering the Inner Child in Late Twentieth Century America.” In Children and Politics of Culture, edited by Sharaon Stephens, 79–104. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Jovanovic, Zeljko. “Maria Is Roma – So Now She Will Become I­ nvisible Once More.” Guardian October 23, 2013; www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2013/oct/28/maria-roma-invisible#start-of-comments. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lally, Connor. “Garda Removed Girl from Home after ‘Tip Off’ to TV3.” Irish Times October 23, 2013. www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/ garda-removed-girl-from-home-after-tip-off-to-tv3-1.1570811. Lee, Ronald (Roma-Canadian activist). Personal communication with the author. October 22, 2013. MacIntosh, Jeane. “US Couple hopes ‘Maria’ Is Missing Daughter.” New York Post October 22, 2013; http://nypost.com/2013/10/22/us-couple-hopegypsy-child-maria-is-missing-daughter/. McDonald, Henry. “Child Taken from Second Roma Family in Ireland by Police Returned to Parents.” Guardian October 23, 2013; www.theguardian. com/world/2013/oct/23/second-child-roma-ireland-returned-athlone-dna. “Migration Debate: Deportation Scandal Grips France.” The Spiegel Online, October 21, 2013; www.spiegel.de/international/europe/french-minister-­ defends-decision-to-deport-roma-girl-and-family-a-929059.html. Miller, Barbara. “Girl Found with Unrelated Irish Roma Couple in Similar Case to Greece’s Mystery Maria.” ABC News Online (Australia) October 22, 2013; www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-23/irish-roma-child-greece-maria-childabduction/5039254. Rossington, Ben. “‘Greece Girl’ Maria’s Real Mum Looking to Cash in on Newfound Fame.” Daily Mirror October 28, 2013; www.mirror.co.uk/news/ world-news/greece-girl-marias-mum-sasha-2648199.

Rescuing the Blonde Angel  143 Seremetakis, Nadia. The Senses Still. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Shen, JiaoJiao. “Baby Lisa’s Parents Believe Girl Found in Greece May be their Daughter.” KSHB News October 22, 2013; www.kshb.com/news/local-news/ baby-lisas-parents-believe-girl-found-in-greece-may-be-their-daughter. Smith, Helena. “Photo of Blonde Girl Found in Greece Triggers Thousands of Inquiries.” Guardian October 20, 2013; www.theguardian.com/world/2013/ oct/20/blond-girl-greece-thousands-inquiries. Strong, Pauline Turner. Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

7 The Everywhere Drug War Narcoterror and the Global Flows of the Methamphetamine Imaginary Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez In their contribution to a Festschrift in honor of Stanley Cohen, Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon suggest that the intensely securitized present represents a condition of institutionalized moral panics, mapping a “permanent circuit of knowledge and power concerning crime.”1 Inverting Cohen’s original episodic model, Feeley and Simon see insecurity as “the norm” and argue that moral crusades are no longer mounted to reinforce solidarity, order, and security. Instead, even the most insignificant security measures are habituated practices invoked “in the face of ever growing threat.”2 If this is indeed the case, rather than attempting to diagnose moral panics, adjudicate the “real” threat, or find the proper balance between security and liberty, perhaps a better approach to the critical analysis of crime and insecurity is to view both not only as integral to contemporary statecraft but, more sociologically, as part of a broader cultural repertoire put to work by citizen-subjects in the course of everyday sensemaking.3 If the threat is ever-growing, it must necessarily sometimes be a stranger—new, unspecified. As Mark Neocleous recently noted, “it is by now well established that contemporary security strategy is heavily structured around the unknown, the uncertain and the unexpected.”4 This is to say, in the context of state-sponsored moral panics such as those detailed by Stuart Hall and his colleagues in Policing the Crisis, what orders everyday life is not so much the crisis of the present but that which lurks in the periphery—the crises yet to come. 5 For ­Neocleous, this way of thinking of danger, threat, and emergency is powerfully represented by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) nascent Universal Adversary Program. Acknowledged by DHS officials as a “real-­world tool for analysts and law enforcement personnel,” the Universal Adversary is an imaginary enemy created for military simulations and positioned as the generalized enemy in all manner of apocalyptic thinking, planning, and security infrastructure.6 In the opening pages of his 2016 book Failures of Imagination, for instance, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Michael McCaul references the 9/11 Commission Report which warned that of the many failures facilitating the attacks, the most important was one of imagination—“a mindset that dismissed possibilities.”7 Drawing upon

The Everywhere Drug War  145 the amorphous figure of the Universal Adversary, McCaul tries to “think like our enemies” in order to probe security weaknesses, plan for the next attack, and ultimately “expand the limits of our imagination.”8 He sketches a number “potential terror scenarios,” including Chinese interference in an American presidential election, a Black Friday “rampage shooting” at the Mall of America, and a “wide-ranging cyber attack” on the US power grid; through all, McCaul imagines that Hezbollah secures an “alliance with Mexican Drug Cartels” and “goes radioactive,” detonating a “dirty bomb” in Houston, Texas.9 As McCaul’s imaginative and terrifying book details, central to the generalized threat scenarios of the Universal Adversary is the merger of narco-traffickers and politically motivated terrorists: the so-called “narco-terrorists.” A broad, cavernous, universal catchall now encompassing global jihadists, shadowy financiers, street-dealers, and all those caught in-­between, narcoterrorism was first used to describe disparate revolutionary groups, such as Shining Path, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), and the Medellín Cartel.10 Following September 11, 2001, and subsequent interventions in the Afghan heroin trade, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and other US security groups broadened and perhaps simplified the term to include any “organizations that use drug trafficking proceeds to advance their political agenda.”11 Yet, as many detractors have noted, “narcoterror” often assumes a nonexistent relationship between “terrorists” and drug traffickers, projects the use of “terror” tactics by drug trafficking groups, overstates the importance of the drug trade in funding terrorist activities, and diverts attention from broader systems of corruption and state-sponsored violence.12 Perhaps most importantly, the new focus on “narcoterror” obscures how US drug control regimes have long been key facilitators of US business interests and the US’s broader geopolitical strategy.13 As Dawn Paley has recently shown, US interventions in Columbia and Mexico under the guise of anti-narcotics operations “Plan Columbia” and “Plan Merida” were simply “Trojan Horses” helping to reinforce the power of transnational corporations, facilitate resource extraction, and militarize host nations in accordance with US geopolitical interests.14 In order, therefore, to theorize the Wars on Drugs and Terror as part of an institutionalized background of (in)security, this chapter confronts the changing trajectory and cultural texture of drug war projects focused on methamphetamine. Encompassing taken-for-granted, commonsense knowledges and everyday affects that surround the drug; its users; and those concerned with controlling, treating, and punishing, what we call the methamphetamine imaginary helps theorize the innumerable sites where meaning is made, remade, consumed, and contested. Mapping the methamphetamine imaginary as well as the broader drug war imaginary from which it emerges, we trace the institutionalized flow of insecurity conditioned by the unknown, uncertain, and unexpected while offering a corrective to the episodic moral panics model.

146  Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez

The Midwest, Mexico, and Methamphetamine Since the late 1980s’ proliferation of scattershot “clandestine” labs, methamphetamine has been a priority for local, state, and federal police agencies.15 Following on the heels of the so-called “crack epidemic,” state authorities framed methamphetamine as the “new crack,” thereby forecasting a distinctly rural and uniquely racialized white drug epidemic.16 In a 1999 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “The Midwest Methamphetamine Crisis,” for instance, long-standing and controversial South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond introduced “the crisis” with the following: Methamphetamine…is one of the most destructive and dangerous narcotic substances ever to plague the United States. Meth destroys the lives of the users and their families, contaminates the environment, drains the resources of the public health system, and contributes to unemployment. It is such a toxic substance that it even poses an enormous threat to law enforcement officers…. The relatively cheap price of meth foreshadows a tidal wave of new drug addiction among school children that could dwarf any drug problem we have dealt with in the past. Meth trafficking and production in the United States is currently divided between independent organizations based in small towns all across America and those networks affiliated with the Mexican organized crime syndicates. Both groups are producing more methamphetamine than ever before. Mexican crime organizations are increasingly successful in smuggling finished meth into the United States or at least smuggling the precursor chemicals themselves into our country for use at production laboratories right here in the United States. The growing popularity and extremely low cost of meth compared with other synthetic narcotics has spurred a geometric increase in the number of independent meth producers operating in the United States. Surging demand for the drug and widening profit margins are driving an alarming boost in meth production. It has been shown that a minimal investment in precursor chemicals and cooking equipment can yield a ten-fold profit on the sale of the finished product. Moreover, the illicit manufacture of meth can occur in a nearly unlimited variety of places—in hotel rooms, apartment complexes, residential kitchens, industrial areas, farms and mobile homes.17 While at the time, anti-meth activities were mostly focused upon the domestic production of local “mom and pop cooks” and other “independent organizations,” Thurmond’s address foreshadowed long-range counter-narcotics planning directed at Mexico and the global south. The

The Everywhere Drug War  147 turn toward “Mexican meth” seems to have solidified with the widely advertised successes of federal methamphetamine precursor controls imposed by the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which was passed as part of the 2005 reauthorization of the Patriot Act.18 In another Senate Judiciary hearing, Breaking the Methamphetamine Supply Chain: Meeting Challenges at the Border, held just a year after the act’s implementation, then-Montana Senator Max Baucus credited it with a “42 percent decline in meth lab seizures nationwide” but pleaded for the funding, legislation, and political will to “do more” by shoring up enforcement efforts along the US/Mexican border.19 Through the work of well-placed politicians such as Thurmond and Baucus, as well as the popular news media, the notion that most of the methamphetamine in the US originates in Mexico is now largely taken for granted. 20 For instance, the Omaha World-Herald recently reported that the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act had effectively wiped out “mom and pop” meth production in Nebraska, making the state an attractive marketplace for Mexican cartels: One of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels is now the main distributor of methamphetamine in Nebraska, federal law enforcement officials say. The Sinaloa Cartel has built a sophisticated drug-­ trafficking operation in Omaha over the past five to eight years, according to the FBI. Cartels increased their presence in Nebraska about the same time state officials effectively shut down local meth labs through laws limiting the sale of cold medicines, U.S. Attorney Deborah Gilg said. Several top Nebraska law enforcement officials say methamphetamine trafficking from Mexico is the most serious drug threat to the state, and the problem is slowly growing. 21 Others, such as journalist Sharon Cohen, in her widely read 2015 essay “Not Mayberry Anymore,” have retold the familiar tale of small-town police—in this case, those working the oil field boomtowns of North Dakota, Montana, and Canada—besieged by invading Mexican cartels. 22 According to Cohen, police of the tiny boomtowns knew they were in a bad way when license plates from Sinaloa started to appear, again a sign that “one of the world’s most violent drug cartels” had arrived. Though local police had made no direct link to the Sinaloa Cartel, and it was just as likely that the Mexican newcomers had, like thousands of others, been drawn by promises of work, the narrative of invading Mexican cartels seems to have won out. Some are inclined to view the still unfolding history of ­methamphetamine—from “the new crack” to “Mexican meth”—as a series of state-sponsored moral panics. 23 This may be true, considering the claims of “epidemics” in relation to the paucity of the state’s own evidence. The 2014 edition of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health

148  Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez (NSDUH) estimated the number of regular or “past month” methamphetamine users in 2014 at 569,000 or 0.2 percent of the US population, slightly down from 595,000 in 2013. Similar rates were recorded in 2012 (440,000), 2011 (439,000), and 2010 (353,000 or 0.1 percent). 24 In fact, these estimates have not exceeded one-half of one percent since government agencies began making them. By comparison, the NSDUH suggests that meth’s upper-class cousin, cocaine, is regularly used by 0.6 percent of the population over 12 years old, while prescription drugs are misused by 2.5 percent. So, even if grossly inaccurate, the estimated number of regular methamphetamine users would need to be doubled and doubled again to outpace regular cocaine users, and still this would not reach the estimated number of prescription drug abusers. Perhaps more importantly, even if the state’s claims of a massive influx of ­“Mexican Meth” are accurate, as with similar claims made about a spike in production fed by small clandestine labs, these changes have not registered on the government’s own surveys. Again, this is not an attempt to locate an objective reality of methamphetamine use but rather to suggest that even when invoked as evidence of an “epidemic,” data such as these are but a small piece of a broader symbolic terrain: the methamphetamine imaginary. Following the philosopher Charles Taylor, who understands the social imaginary as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations,” we can say that the methamphetamine imaginary encompasses the many ways in which methamphetamine mediates the social world—how individuals imagine themselves and their relations to one another through this particular drug. 25 The dangers of methamphetamine and the drug war itself are enacted and made livable through a vast collection of images, gestures, cues, utterances, and dispositions put to work in the material practices of everyday sensemaking. Importantly, invoking the imaginary does not suggest that the problems associated with drugs are simple fabrications and thus without consequence. On the contrary, these often-overlooked symbolic dimensions are absolutely necessary to larger systems of subjective violence and domination. 26 The ideological, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, “is not constituted by abstract propositions in themselves, rather, ideology is itself this very texture of the lifeworld which ‘schematizes’ the propositions, rendering them ‘livable.’”27 Following this thinking, the drug war is enacted and rendered livable not simply by propagandized moral panics but by the background of routine symbolic cues, signs, habits, narratives, actions, and immaterial utterances that structure the ways people imagine their social existence and their relations with others—the imaginary. So, when a politician, police agent, or journalist warns of invading

The Everywhere Drug War  149 “Mexican Cartels” or a consumer must produce identification to purchase over-the-counter cold medicine because “people use it to cook meth,” the methamphetamine imaginary is invoked, thereby rendering the drug war a livable part of everyday life. 28 Yet the imaginary does not end with dire warnings from above and is very much part of that which we consume as entertainment. The wildly popular program Breaking Bad, which charts the transformation of everyman Walter White from milquetoast high school chemistry teacher to ruthless methamphetamine kingpin Heisenberg, offers yet another example of the dynamic background of the methamphetamine and drug war imaginaries. From bumbling through minor transactions with local dealers, tangling with Mexican cartels, distributing across the southwest US under cover of Gustavo Fring’s Los Pollo Hermanos restaurant franchise, to supplying Madrigal Electromotive’s global distribution network, Walter White and his partner Jesse Pinkman’s rise to the heights of the methamphetamine trade provides a recognizable conceptual reference point for the global scale of the drug trade. Similarly, the ensuing market-based violence that ensnares police, street-level dealers and users, white power gangs, Mexican cartels and shadowy multinationals alike, schematizes and renders livable the obscene and unpredictable violence of meth users and dealers. Following Raymond Williams’s understanding of cultural production as flow, we might say that the methamphetamine imaginary connects street-level dealers and users seamlessly through cartels and multinational corporations, in an endless stream—mediated and material—of drug-driven chaos and violence.29 Made up of the pronouncements, beliefs, gestures, and habits of police, politicians, journalists, citizen-subjects and the cultural work of documentary films, novels and hit television programs, the methamphetamine imaginary does not emerge in episodes or panics but flows perpetually in the increasingly securitized background of everyday life.

Imagining the Enemy and the Everywhere Drug War Returning to the specter of narcoterror, we are better able to apprehend the global flows of the methamphetamine and drug war imaginaries. With his signing statements on the Combat Methamphetamine ­Epidemic Act, George W. Bush materialized the conflation of domestic producers, Mexican traffickers, and “international terrorists.” Powerfully illustrating the alterity and universality of the enemy, Bush defended the controversial and invasive legislation as “vital” to the ongoing battle against adversaries ranging from “international terrorists” to “local drug dealers.” As he declared, This is a really important piece of legislation. It is a piece of legislation that’s vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American

150  Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez people. The law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials to continue to share information. It allows them to continue to use tools against terrorists that they use against drug dealers and other criminals. It will improve our nation’s security while we safeguard the civil liberties of our people. The legislation strengthens the Justice Department so it can better detect and disrupt terrorist threats. And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens, from international terrorists to local drug dealers [emphasis added]. 30 Statements such as these (and, of course, the adjoining legislation) reveal the always-already-together powers of war and police. 31 Here, US police are not militarized by the corrupting influence of the War on Drugs. Rather, police and war are two sides of the same coin, engaged in local and global counterinsurgency projects that, at base, function to open and regulate markets, and, in so doing, adjudicate the ways in which citizen-subjects may earn a living, thereby reaffirming the prevailing economic and social order.32 On the expanding terrains of the Wars on Drugs and Terror, the amorphous narco-terrorist is but one facet of the universal enemy and thus but one part of a vast project to shelter and expand the economic and geopolitical interests of the US. Consider a 2011 “strategic military assessment of Texas Border Security” commissioned by the state’s Department of Agriculture, authored by four-star General Barry McCaffrey, former “drug czar” under President Bill Clinton, and two-star Major-General Robert Scales, former Commander of all US troops in Central and South America. McCaffrey and Scales warn of a convergence of “crime, gangs and terrorism” operating on the state’s southern border: America’s fight against narco-terrorism, when viewed at the strategic level, takes on the classic trappings of a real war. Crime, gangs and terrorism have converged in such a way that they form a collective threat to the national security of the United States. America is being assaulted not just from across our southern border but from across the hemisphere and beyond. All of Central and South America have become an interconnected source of violence and terrorism. Drug cartels exploit porous borders using all the traditional elements of military force, including command and control, logistics, intelligence, information operations and the application of increasingly deadly firepower. The intention is to increasingly bring governments at all levels throughout the Americas under the influence of international cartels.33 As McCaffrey and Scales see it, the battle against narcoterror takes on all the “classic trappings of real war,” making all boundaries and

The Everywhere Drug War  151 interests “from across the hemisphere and beyond” vulnerable to a converging mass of (universal) adversaries. In the case of Texas, “cartel foot-soldiers” are “drawn from prison gangs such as the Mexican ­Mafia, Texas Syndicate, Tango Blast, Barrio Azteca and others” and engage in “cross-border gangs and narco-terror activities,” placing American citizens in danger. They continue, History has shown that a common border offers an enemy sanctuary zone and the opportunity to expand his battlespace in depth and complexity. Our border with Mexico is no exception. Criminality spawned in Mexico is spilling over into the United States. Texas is the tactical close combat zone and frontline in this conflict. Texans have been assaulted by cross-border gangs and narco-terrorist activities. In response, Texas has been the most aggressive and creative in confronting the threat of what has come to be a narco-terrorist military-style campaign being waged against them. 34 In the terrifying state of affairs foretold by McCaffrey and Scales, the drug war “is spilling over” amidst the flow of a “narco-terrorist military-­style campaign.” Narcoterror poses a threat to local businesses and agricultural capital as well, with the authors speculating that some “farmers and ranchers have even abandoned their livelihoods to move their families to safer ground.” McCaffrey and Scales see further economic devastation in the form of so-called “narco-refugees” fleeing the “cartel wars,” who will push north, straining already underfunded police, social services, and medical facilities along the border. 35 Even more instructive regarding this imagined state of emergency is a diagram offered by McCaffrey and Scales detailing the supposed “flow of transnational crime and violence” (Figure 7.1). Ribbons of red arrows jutting up through the southern US border and frenetically darting to every corner of every state illustrate the absolute reach of narcoterror in spectacular fashion. As imagined by McCaffrey and Scales, Mexican “narco-terrorists” driving a flow of transnational crime and violence deliver all manner of drugs and death to American doorsteps. In a way, McCaffrey and Scales’s insecure imaginations have brought into being what geographer Derek Gregory calls the “everywhere war.” This is a case of the everywhere drug war, expanding beyond traditional conceptions of “battlefields” to a multidimensional “battlespace,” a flow with no “front or back” and where everything is the site of permanent war.36 Under these conditions, all illicit drug activity contributes in some way to a borderless and boundless “war,” connecting small towns in the rural Midwest to distant battlefields in the Middle East. In one such instance, a February 1, 2016, DEA press release announced, “DEA and European Authorities Uncover Massive Hizballah Drug and Money

152  Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez

Figure 7.1  “  Flow of transnational crime and violence,” digital image from Bob Price, “Texas Border Security - A Strategic Military Assessment,” texasgopvote.com 30 September 2011; www.texasgopvote.com/­ immigration/texas-border-security-strategic-military-assessment-tx-agcommissioner-­todd-003353.

Laundering Scheme.”37 According to the DEA, “Hizballah” affiliates partnered with South American cartels to sell cocaine in European and US drug markets, and then used the laundered proceeds to “provide a revenue and weapons stream for an international terrorist organization responsible for devastating terror attacks around the world.” Further elaborating the scale and fluidity of narcoterror, the DEA credited some “7 countries involved in disrupting drug money flow for terror regime.”38 As the DEA, McCaffrey, and Scales would have it, from street corner to battlefield, the makings of war—weapons, drugs, money, bodies—­ course through byzantine webs of wire transfers, shipping lanes, and smuggling routes mapped onto “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas” by state power. This flow of “transnational crime and violence” is neoliberal predation par excellence and the sublimated horror of the methamphetamine imaginary. The everywhere drug war does not honor convention, custom, border, or boundary. It expands, consumes, and destroys. Yet there might be a more critical read of this diagram and of the broader drug and terror war from which it emerges. Might McCaffrey and Scales’s approximation more accurately depict a circulatory system and thus the life’s blood coursing through the security state’s veins?

The Everywhere Drug War  153 Which is to say, the security state—not unlike the human body—would soon wither and die if not for the imagined flows of narco-traffickers, terrorists, and insurgents, and the menacing drugs, “murder, assassination, kidnapping, assaults, torture, human smuggling and sex trade” they bring in tow.

Unknown Knowns, Failures of Imagination, and the Insecure Imaginary In his 2013 documentary The Unknown Known: the Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld, filmmaker Erol Morris asked the former Secretary of Defense to expand upon previous descriptions of the circumstances leading to Pearl Harbor attacks as failures of imagination. [Morris] Was it failure of imagination, or failure to look at the intelligence that was available? [Rumsfeld] They had thought through a great many more obvious possibilities. People were chasing the wrong rabbit. That one possibility was not something that they had imagined was likely [emphasis added].39 Chasing the wrong rabbit, as he would have it, not the sordid, tangled history of American foreign policy, accounts for the events of the day. If only authorities had imagined the correct threat and then invented and imposed the proper security measures, Pearl Harbor and, by implication, the September 11 attacks might have been averted. Rumsfeld’s thinking is precisely the sort that animates the Universal Adversary: Because the attacks could be caused by foreign terrorists; domestic radical groups; state-sponsored adversaries; or in some cases disgruntled employees, the perpetrator has been named, the Universal Adversary.40 To imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, and predict the unpredictable is the security state’s dream. And because no amount of policing or prevention will ever be fully sufficient, citizen-subjects must also perpetually imagine and thus actively engage the threats and dangers that surround. Of course, the logics underpinning “failures of imagination” allude to another line of famous Rumsfeldian thinking. During a 2002 press conference, fielding questions regarding Iraq’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks and if it did in fact possess “weapons of mass destruction,” Rumsfeld brought into being his dizzying array of “knowns and unknowns.” He explained, Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there

154  Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.41 And so it goes: the present state of affairs is not reducible a series of overreactions to mediated moral panics. To imagine the known, the unknown, and what has or might happen, is to rationalize and justify nearly any precaution and intrusion. It is precisely this “risk-crazed” logic that animates the methamphetamine drug war imaginaries and the contemporary politics of security. From popular television programs, novels, and warning after relentless warning, we imagine the dangers that surround jihadists; school shooters; shoe bombs; global pandemics; drifting serial killers; and, of course, drug epidemics. Particularly for those privileged citizen-subjects spared the incessant harassment of routine policing and lucky enough to not live in a war zone, it is the imaginary that schematizes and renders the drug war livable. Yet the imaginary as represented by Thurmond; Baucus; McCaul; Bush; McCaffrey and Scales; and, lastly, Rumsfeld, with his ontological inventory, neglects an important fourth category. As Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, it is the unknown knowns, those things we know but choose to deny that are perhaps most insidious.42 In the context of the drug war, then, it is not the occasional panic over meth, OxyContin, or heroin that is of greatest impact but the routinized background of insecurity that sustains broader systems of violence and dispossession, those largely taken-for-granted gestures rendering livable the everywhere drug war.

Notes 1 Feeley and Simon, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 39–53. 2 Ibid., 50. 3 Neocleous, “Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance,” 131–49. 4 Neocleous, “The Universal Adversary Will Attack.” 5 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. 6 Neocleous, “The Universal Adversary Will Attack.” 7 The 9/11 Commission Report. 8 McCaul, Failures of Imagination. 9 Ibid., 39. 10 Björnehed, “Narco-Terrorism.” 11 Walker, “Borders, One-dimensionality, and Illusion in the War on Drugs.” 12 Gomis, “Demystifying ‘Narcoterrorism.’” 13 Frydl, The Drug Wars in America; Reiss, We Sell Drugs. 14 Paley, Drug War Capitalism. 15 Jenkins, “The Ice Age.” 16 Linnemann, “Mad Men, Meth Moms, Moral Panic.” 17 US Senate, The Midwest Methamphetamine Crisis.

The Everywhere Drug War  155 18 Linnemann, “Governing Through Meth.” 19 Committee on Finance, Breaking the Methamphetamine Supply Chain, 1. 20 Recently at a panel discussion on “rural crime” at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, the authors observed a particularly egregious example of such thinking. When discussing the problems faced by rural communities, one noted expert reasoned that if a town has an “authentic Mexican restaurant, then it has methamphetamine.” Meaning the simple presence of Mexican immigrants determined local drug markets. 21 Skelton, “Mexican Cartel Picks up Slack.” 22 Cohen, “Not Mayberry Anymore.” 23 Ahrens, “Methademic: Drug Panic in an Age of Ambivalence”; Parsons, Meth Mania. 24 See National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports and data files at: www. samhsa.gov. 25 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 26 Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. 27 Žižek, Living in the End Times, 3. 28 Pine, “Embodied Capitalism and the Meth Economy.” 29 Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 30 Bush, “The Patriot Act: The White House.” 31 Neocleous, War Power, Police Power. 32 Williams, “The Other Side of the COIN”; Neocleous, War Power, Police Power. 33 McCaffrey and Scales, Texas Border Security, 8. 34 McCaffrey and Scales, Texas Border Security, 8–10. 35 McCaffrey and Scales, Texas Border Security, 10. 36 Gregory, “The Everywhere War.” 37 DEA, “DEA and European Authorities Uncover Massive Hizballah Drug and Money Laundering Scheme.” 38 Ibid. 39 Morris, Unknown Knowns. 40 Neocleous, “The Universal Adversary Will Attack,” 3, citing Homeland Security Council, 2004. 41 Rumsfeld, quoted at http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript. aspx?TranscriptID=2636. 42 Žižek, Event.

Bibliography Ahrens, Deborah. “Methademic: Drug Panic in an Age of Ambivalence.” Florida State University Law Review 37 (2009): 841. Björnehed, Emma. “Narco-Terrorism: The Merger of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.” Global Crime 6, no. 3–4 (2004): 305–24. Bush, George W. “The Patriot Act.” National Archives and Records Administration March 9, 2006; http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/ patriotact/. Cohen, Sharon. “January 15.” Not Mayberry Anymore”: Oil Patch Cops Scramble to Keep Up.” Associated Press: Washington Times (2015). Dodd, Brian. “The Nexus between Drugs and Terrorism.” US Drug Enforcement Administration, Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center, Special Operations Center, (n.d.); https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ ndia/2010/homeland/Dodd.pdf.

156  Travis Linnemann and Kyra Martinez Feeley, Malcolm M., and Jonathan Simon. “Folk Devils and Moral Panics: An Appreciation from North America.” In Crime, Social Control and Human Rights: From Moral Panics to States of Denial, Essays in Honour of Stanley Cohen, 39–53. New York: Willan Publishing, 2007. Frydl, Kathleen J. The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gomis, Benoît. “Demystifying «Narcoterrorism».” Policy Brief 9 (2015):12. Gregory, Derek. “The Everywhere War.” The Geographical Journal 177, no. 3 (2011): 238–50. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Jenkins, Philip. ““The Ice Age” the Social Construction of a Drug Panic.” Justice Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1994): 7–31. Linnemann, Travis. “Mad Men, Meth Moms, Moral Panic: Gendering Meth Crimes in the Midwest.” Critical Criminology 18, no. 2 (2010): 95–110. ———. “Governing through Meth: Local Politics, Drug Control and the Drift toward Securitization.” Crime, Media, Culture 9, no. 1 (2013): 39–61. McCaffrey, Barry R., and Robert H. Scales. Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment. Alexandria, VA: Colgen, 2011. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. By Thomas H. Kean and Lee Hamilton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Neocleous, Mark. “Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics.” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 2 (2007): 131–49. ———. “The Universal Adversary Will Attack: Pigs, Pirates, Zombies, Satan and the Class War.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8, no. 1 (2015): 15–32. ———. War Power, Police Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Paley, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014. Parsons, Nicholas L. Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Incorporated, 2014. Pike, John. “DEA and European Authorities Uncover Massive Hizballah Drug and Money Laundering Scheme.” GlobalSecurity.org - Reliable Security Information. February 1, 2016; www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/ news/2016/02/sec-160201-dea01.htm. Pine, Jason. “Embodied Capitalism and the Meth Economy.” vol. 1, The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings. (2010): 164–183. Price, Bob. “Texas Border Security - A Strategic Military Assessment,” texasgopvote.com September 30, 2011; www.texasgopvote.com/immigration/texas-­ border-security-strategic-military-assessment-tx-ag-commissioner-todd003353. Reiss, Suzanna. We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Rumsfeld, Donald. Known and Unknown: A Memoir. New York: Penguin, 2011: http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636

The Everywhere Drug War  157 Skelton, Alissa. “October 13. Mexican Cartel Picks up Slack after Nebraska Curtails Meth Trade.” Omaha World-Herald (2014); http://www.omaha. com/news/crime/mexican-cartel-picks-up-slack-after-nebraska-curtailsmeth-trade/article_35b47e4e-1d1b-57cf-8801-cc87648fce31.html. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. US Congress. Committee on Finance. Breaking the Methamphetamine Supply Chain: Meeting Challenges at the Border: Hearing before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, September 18, 2007. 1st. sess. Cong. Rept. Washington, D.C.: US G.P.O., 2007. US Congress. Senate. The Midwest Methamphetamine Crisis: Developing a Plan for Federal, State, and Local Cooperative: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice Oversight of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred Sixth Congress, first session. Kansas City, MO, March 30, 1999. Washington, D.C.: US G.P.O., 2000. Walker, Margath A. “Borders, One-Dimensionality, and Illusion in the War on Drugs.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 1 (2015): 84–100. Williams, Kristian. “The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing.” Interface 3, no. 1 (2011): 81–117. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974. Zizek, Slavoj. Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014. ———. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2011. ———. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008.

8 Black Bodies, Wrong Places Rolezinho, Moral Panic, and Racialized Male Subjects in Brazil Osmundo Pinho It does not have to be organized from on high (the Leninist presumption), and it does not need to have a single message (the Logocentric conceit), for assembled bodies to exercise certain performative force in the public domain. The “We are here” that translates the collective bodily presence might be re-read as “We are still here,” meaning: “We have not yet been disposed of.” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 196)

Introduction: Subjectivity and Contradiction in the Making of Rolezinho In this chapter, I present an interpretation of a Brazilian social phenomenon known as rolezinho, the gathering of crowds of impoverished black teenagers, usually in shopping centers, to listen to funk music, and the new social subject that this phenomenon mobilized. Using newspaper articles, videos, and other texts produced from the moment the phenomenon first started in the city of Vitoria in November 2013 up through February 2014, when rolezinhos seemed to fade from public attention, this chapter explores how interpretations of rolezinho in the media helped to build its sociological meaning and define the course of events in which it developed. I point to a moral panic that set the frame for the rolezinho’s spectacularized history, and then ask how processes of subjectification, marked by inequality, violence, racism, and contradictory relationships with the state and the market, are the basis of agency for the young people involved, precisely because subjectivity and performative agency appear to define the political and explosive content of the phenomenon. The rolezinho is not an organized social movement with explicitly political purposes nor is it stratified by a hierarchy or organized by a formal program. Neither is it a performance or flash mob, despite its clearly being “site-specific.”1 Rather, it appears to be relatively spontaneous, inspired by the ambitions of young people to gather in places they consider to be appropriate and interesting to talk, date, and take pictures

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  159 to post on Facebook and other social networks. Precisely because of its spontaneous nature, however, the phenomenon appears to be politically radical. This is because it is the collective expression of a subjective contradiction or rather of a structural contradiction in Brazilian society lived in a subjective way. In this sense, my point is that we can interpret the rolezinho as a kind of social performance, better analyzed as ritual or the expression of social contradictions via performance, because the youth are located, in their racialized subject positions, at a crossroads that trespasses on the dominant grounds of Brazilian social formation. Rolezeiros (participants in a rolezinho) really do nothing more than embrace the values that organize the spectacle of capitalism, giving the market the power to make their identities objective. Because they are racialized and marked as working-class subjects from the “periphery,” however, the realization of their aspirations seems to be impossible without disturbing the “proper” social order. It is in that sense that the conservatives who fiercely opposed the phenomenon in the media and public sphere were correct. It would be impossible for the shopping malls of São Paulo to integrate these subjects; their music; their style; their ways of talking, having fun, and living in public; their values and perspectives; and their racialized bodies, and remain what they are today. So, it is indeed the very subjectivity of the young people who seek to express themselves that produces panic, violence, and repression. I start with a fairly thorough chronology of the phenomenon followed by some theoretical remarks on performance and moral panic. I conclude by suggesting how and why these are new “securitized” social subjects trapped in the contradictions of the Brazilian national project, as discussed by Paul Amar and João Vargas, respectively. 2

Chronology of the Panic On November 30, 2013, an outdoor funk ball on the Enseada do Sua beach, the coastal area of the city of Vitoria in the state of Espirito Santo, was dispersed by military police with their usual methods.3 Some claimed that fights occurred; others claimed that there were “minors and drug trafficking” there; while still others said that it was just poor youth of the region having fun and listening to funk music, the demonized soundtrack of Brazilian favelas.4 Through a cell phone video distributed on the internet, it is clear that a group of boys fled from the police, taking refuge in the nearby Vitoria Shopping Mall.5 The police were called, and the young men were detained and made to line up. The officers, armed with heavy weapons, forced the youth to sit shirtless on the floor of the food court with their hands on their heads, and then escorted them in a line out of the building.

160  Osmundo Pinho

Figure 8.1  Police Action at Vitoria Shopping Mall. Video frame from YouTube, 2013; www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoLa1Rw42b8.

Shoppers who watched the scene applauded the police action. A week later, on December 9, according to several media websites, around 6,000 young people and teenagers—10,000, according to CBN (Central Brasileira de Noticias) radio—attended a meeting organized through social networks in the area outside the Itaquera Mall in São Paulo, the cosmopolitan megalopolis that is the financial and industrial capital of the country, known for its particularly severe socio-spatial segregation.6 The event in Itaquera was classified as a “funk party” by news websites and as an “arrastão” (literally a “big trawling,” used in Brazil to refer to a gang of kids who supposedly move through an area together to pickpocket with impunity), a “stampede,” and an “invasion” by newspapers and TV.7 In Itaquera, the police used even more extreme forms of violence than in Vitoria, including rubber bullets and tear gas.8 On December 16, it was the Guarulhos Shopping Center that turned into a rolezinho stage. According to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, “A ghost haunted Guarulhos International Mall yesterday: the ghost of funk.”9 As in Itaquera and Vitoria, poor youth and rolezinho were associated with funk music. In Guarulhos, the youth “invaded” the mall, singing the music of MC Daleste, a “funkeiro” from São Paulo who was murdered on stage while doing a show in the city of Campinas, which is close to São Paulo. The song in question, “Deixa eu ir” (Let me go), celebrates and makes fun of marijuana use.10 Then, on December 22, there was another rolezinho in the Interlagos Shopping Center. By that time, the press, especially the popular TV channels, accused the youth of being criminals and troublemakers, even though in none of these incidents had anyone been formally charged with any crime.11

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  161 Finally, in the rich and pleasant city of Campinas, the Iguatemi Mall banned the entry of unaccompanied minors unless they arrived at the shopping mall by car.12 This imbalance between the intentions of the young and the panic of the press, followed by the subsequent crackdown by police and by legal action, sparked intense debate.13 To explain the events, the media recruited experts from diverse backgrounds and from across the political spectrum, from far right to far left, including the black movement and even the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender) movement.14 On December 2, Douglas Belchior, professor of history and sociology, an activist in the black movement in São Paulo, and a columnist for the leftist magazine Carta Capital, entitled his column in the online version of the magazine “Vitoria Shopping Center: Black Bodies in the Wrong Place,” which I quote in my title here.15 Belchior points out, correctly, what later would be more obvious. The main, and only actual trespass, committed by these young people was the fact that they are who they are and tried to be there—in the malls—when they should be in another place or position. Reactions to Belchior’s article appeared immediately. Gabriel Tebaldi, a young college student and political columnist for a local newspaper in Vitoria, synthesized the opinions of those who came to support the police repression of rolezinho. The title of his article sets out this particular perspective: “The Attack of Imaginary Racism – What is the intention of this racist talk? To praise one group or foment discord between it and opposing social groups?”16 The concept of “cultural Marxism” as it circulates on the right in ultraconservative blogs and on the Facebook profiles of young affluent people, made an appearance here. As understood by Tebaldi and others, cultural Marxism is the artificial promotion of antagonisms between social groups or subjects, such as men and women, blacks and whites, or working and middle-class sectors of Brazilian society, as if the contradictions of social life and sociopolitical inequalities were effects of a leftist imagination. So, for instance, anti-racist activism is seen as “reverse racism,” as Tebaldi’s title suggests. It is the old discourse of the political right in Brazil that the “Marxists” are trying to destabilize Brazilian society and traditions, promoting chaos to destroy family values, Christianity, and racial harmony. This old discourse, very audible during the dictatorship in the 1970s, is now mobilized again. Following the spectacular and biased media coverage, the phenomenon of rolezinho entered a new phase, forcing public authorities and traditional political actors to comment. Many people in this public debate remembered several previous instances of discrimination in malls throughout Brazil. The Cidade Jardim Shopping Mall in São Paulo, for instance, was sentenced by a court to pay roughly 3,000 dollars to a musician who was denied entrance to the shopping mall. He was there for a performance, and he was the only member of his band to whom

162  Osmundo Pinho entrance was denied. Of course, he was the only black musician.17 Many other similar situations have been reported in the media, and quite a few protests of racial policing in Brazilian shopping malls have been lodged. It is impossible to overlook, as well, the background of state violence against Brazil’s black population, which persists regardless of the party in power or political trends. The states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which are the most populous and urbanized states, and Bahia, in the impoverished northeast where 80 percent of the population is of African descent, led the country in police-inflicted deaths (a total, just in 2012, of 1,890 people—in São Paulo alone, 563). Other studies, such as a “Violence Map,” indicate that black people are the most victimized in these statistics.18 In November 2013, almost at the same time that the rolezinho phenomenon started in Brazil, the press widely reported the results of a survey commissioned by the Brazilian Public Security ­Forum, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to public safety studies, confirming these lethal figures.19 Some members of organized social movements sought to reinterpret the rolezinho as a social movement, which it clearly is not; nor is it, as Ruda Ricci, researching the protests of June 2013 said, a “peripheral Occupy.”20 Instead, as I am trying to argue, it is better understood as a kind of social performance or “ritual” (in the anthropological, structural sense). Pro-rolezeiro actions were scheduled, and some people sought an association between rolezinho and the protests over bus fare hikes that shook Brazil in June 2013. These activists or observers failed, however, to take into account the obvious difference between the June demonstrators, largely college students, autonomists, and leftists committed to an anti-capitalist perspective, and the rolezeiros, who were poor youth fascinated with the world of commodities and media glamour. 21 The racist and exclusionary dimension of panic, motivated by the presence of young, working-class people, became more evident when the media and social networks noticed that since 2007, students of the Economics, Administration and Accounting College (FEA) of the University of São Paulo, the most elite and prestigious in Brazil, had performed a sort of ritual celebration for their program’s entering freshmen every year at the Eldorado Shopping Center. According to the magazine Caros Amigos and the evidence of several videos, hundreds of young people from the São Paulo elite “invaded” the mall singing their school’s alma mater, “Wonderful FEA USP, Best School in Brazil.” These students stood on top of the tables in the food court without the police ever being called to the mall or the mall administration responding in any way. 22 Rolezinho’s international repercussions began on December 23, 2013, when the Brazilian online edition of the Spanish newspaper El País published a long article, “Brazil’s Young Vandals.”23 On January 14, the same newspaper published “The Rebellion of the Excluded,” interviewing four Brazilian intellectuals about the phenomenon, including

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  163 the writer Paulo Lins, author of the well-known City of God, and the anthropologist Alba Zaluar, a leading expert in security studies and ­violence. Zaluar was quoted as asking, What needs to be examined is whether their presence in a shopping center is harmful. If I was in a mall, and found a group of people of any social class screaming, causing a riot, I would be frightened. They should go to the park. Why not go to Ibirapuera?24 The BBC News website also published several articles on the subject, piquing the English-language media’s interest. On January 5, 2014, the BBC offered “Rolezinhos, Brazil’s Flashmob Trend.” On January 15, the New York Times asked, “Whose Mall Is It?” and on January 19, it wrote, “Brazil’s Latest Clash with Its Urban Youth Takes Place at the Mall.”25 Due to these developments in both Brazilian and foreign media, it became impossible for the sectors of the black movement that were part of President Dilma Rousseff’s governing Workers’ Party to remain silent. Faced with pressures and demands coming from the more radical sectors of the black movement, Luiza Bairros, Minister for the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality, a radical black activist in the 1970s and 1980s, and now a sociologist and scholar of racism, gave a statement. On January 16, she explained, “The demonstrations are peaceful. The problems are derived from the reaction of white people who frequent these places and are frightened by the presence of young black people.”26

Race and Fear, a Brazilian Performance On a sunny Sunday in 2014, almost one year after the rolezinho first appeared, the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro initiated its “Operation Summer” campaign on the beaches of the southern zone of the city. The region is a tourist attraction and a residential zone for the local middle class. According to the newspaper O Globo, 650 military police, with the support of the civil police and the municipal guard, participated in the mobilization. The first day of the operation coincided with several public disturbances, including beach raids. According to the newspaper, groups of young people roamed the sand, robbing and terrorizing beachgoers. One street beer seller said to the Globo reporter that “the feeling was panic.” At least 15 people were arrested, among them eight minors under 18 years of age. Police used tear gas and dogs to contain the alleged turmoil. 27 The beautiful beaches of Rio have always been arenas for the reenactment of the conflicts and contradictions that shape Brazilian society. The beaches are public, but that doesn’t mean they are free and democratic

164  Osmundo Pinho spaces for social interaction. On the contrary, they transcribe the cartography of inequality, violence, and racism that marks the meanings of bodies and places in the “Marvelous City.”28 In the 1990s, the beaches witnessed a phenomenon that set the stage for the media’s hysterical reaction to the rolezinhos. I am talking about the infamous “arrastões” (crowds of looters, as defined earlier). These began in 1992, when Benedita da Silva, the first black woman candidate for governor of Rio de Janeiro, was ahead in the election polls. On another lovely summer Sunday, reports of arrastões appeared and then multiplied. 29 A whole web of connections with deep historical meanings was resurrected in this moment, crystalizing in the arrastões, which were mostly a media phenomenon manifesting the fears of “dangerous,” black/brown urban crowds that have terrorized whiter public subjects throughout the history of post-abolition Brazil. The arrastão is therefore a central trope in the production of contemporary urban B ­ razil’s moral panic, helping to articulate the young black male body with crime; “favela”; and, of course, funk music—the demonized, fetishized soundtrack of the slums—because the boys crossed the beach just as they “invaded” the shopping malls: singing funk songs. The association between young blacks from the slum-periphery and funk music, as already noted, furthered the criminalization of all these linked objects, as Carlos Palombini describes. What appeared consecrated in the images of arrastões in the early 1990s was repeated in 2013–2014, setting the body of the black man as a phobic focus in ­Brazilian society.30 Even during the short period since the early 1980s that Brazil has been a democracy, there has been spectacular media production inciting fear around the bodies of young black men. The connections between the slum, crime, and funk music are the primary ingredients of this mixture, which belies the myth of “racial democracy” in Brazil. To understand rolezinho, one must consider this constitutive dimension of social meaning for the racialized body. Blackness, in this way, is signified and printed on the body by semiotic and sociological means, so that its presence in public space will produce panic and terror, ultimately justifying any violence that falls on Afro-Brazilian shoulders. The connection between the body and public space could be examined using performance theory, especially the phenomena of rolezinho and arrastão. Some, as we have seen, compared the rolezinho to artistic performances or flash mobs. Yet the non-programmatic, spontaneous character of the rolezinho requires that we address the issue more carefully. Within the tradition of anthropology, studies of performance are identified with the work of Victor Turner.31 Turner helped to define the notion of “social drama” as a structured staging of social contradictions that may become visible and manipulated, that is, materialized, through stereotyped behavior. Social dramas, moreover, are charged

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  165 with symbolic and emotional intensity, assuming a cathartic dimension and forcing social antagonisms to shape themselves in agonistic format. As a methodological expedient for ethnographic practice, Turner recommends attention to moments of high dramatic intensity, defined, in a structural manner, by elaborate stages. Religious rituals, theatrical plays, and children’s games can be taken in this way as symbolic texts that say something about the culture in question, especially about its contradictions and tensions. This model allows Turner to take almost any form of standardized collective behavior as an expression of rituals, whether religious or secular, and interpret them as access routes to central structures of the culture in question. Despite his structuralist emphasis, Turner doesn’t see rituals as mere reproductions of abstract patterns but as the sites of societal processing and critical self-reflection, or “objectification,” as they can make visible the process of becoming a subject, in the Marxian sense that social relations, including social relations mediated by the commodity form, shape the subject. Rituals (or performances) are the sociocultural technology for that becoming. It is in this sense that Turner interprets the continuities and connections between performances of cultural rituals and theatrical performances as reflexive and critical works of art because both are sites for this mediation qua objectification. As Richard Schechner suggests, the heuristic potential of performance studies lies in the ability to analyze anything as a performance, if performance is taken to mean staging or putting into action symbolically significant behavior. Fundamental to this would be the incorporation of the performance as a way to establish, transmit, and question knowledge, as noted by Diana Taylor. The constitutive presence of these performative, vernacular modes of knowledge-transmission implies the setting of a stage. And that implies a physical location, a scene. The connection between the scene (the event) and the scenario (the material context) allows us to see the action as another structural element. Beyond the body and the scene, the setting, as the location of meaning, implies the presence of spectators and witnesses as part of performative mechanisms. 32 The “site-specific” dimension of performance gains meaning in this way. Like Turner, I think of the connections between art and social life as a methodological expedient to address the contradictory meanings of performance as significant practice, stereotyped, and self-conscious expressive behavior. So, we can follow the argument of Miwon Kwon on “site-specific” art to interrogate the localized dimension of rolezinho as the source of its deepest political significance. As Kwon underlines, “site-specific” art takes tangible reality as the very matter of the artistic proposition, which implies a “unique combination of constitutive physical elements.”33 The physical experience of place becomes a performative mechanism, which not only “means” but also “does” something, such as producing understanding or displacement

166  Osmundo Pinho through mediated interaction. The instantiation of the meaning, as in the staging of a ritual, is not the mere repetition of reified structural patterns, as in Durkheim’s sociology, the author says, but the creation or invention of new meanings.34 The site-specific meaning of rolezinho is, in addition, far from unanimously agreed-upon, as we have seen. What it means for the young people involved seems to be very different from what it means for the administrators of malls, the police, or other customers. It is, actually, the confluence of its contradictory meanings that gives the performance of rolezinho its intense symbolic and political charge. Writing of the work of politically committed performers such as Ronald Duarte, ­Eleonora Fabião celebrates “the potency of performative bodies and performative acts – bodies and actions that, by deconstructing habitats, de-­ mechanizing perception, subverting established norms, and suspending fixed meanings, reinvent possibilities for people, groups and places.”35 While rolezeiros may not act out of conscious political intent, the content of their performance is nonetheless highly political.

Phobogenic Moral Panic Having pointed out earlier the formal aspects of rolezinho as political performance, I can now consider the content of this performance mobilized in its phobic dimension. First, let us recall the ever-relevant insights of Frantz Fanon. Fanon, in his paradigmatic approach to racial panic, considers what he calls the “phobogenic” dimension, or the epidermal nature of racial violence, inscribed on the “fact of blackness.” Lewis Gordon and others discuss this bodily or epidermal dimension as the basis for antiblackness and racism through a reading of Fanon. The politics of the black body in an antiblack world is a historical reality, they say; it is a third presence that accompanies the black self.36 It is in this sense that he says blackness is “phobogenic,” literally productive of fear. 37 The black in an antiblack world is, by definition, the antihuman, nonsymbolic, always his own flesh. Always externally determined as a terrifying haunting. Terrible is the irony that victimizes this subject. Because the black man is the very manifestation of violence and barbarism, he is the object of violence and barbarism, in the West in a general way, and in Brazilian society without a doubt. Thus, young “funkeiros” or rolezeiros arouse fear and are violated, beaten, and killed by the police because of their presumed congenital fault—which is the spectacular projection of the phobogenic fantasies of the white gaze.38 We can understand how the bodily presence of young rolezeiros in Brazilian malls produces an intensely phobogenic performative effect, although this was not exactly the intention of the young people themselves. The fundamental fear of the black male body, which appears in

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  167 the phenomenological configuration described earlier, and which is connected with the recent historical tradition of criminalization and favela funk, achieved its amplification otherwise, through the moral panic created by the media.39 Fear, panic, and the reconfiguration of “dangerous” social subjects are recognized policy motivators. Several studies have described the impact of waves or outbreaks of moral panic in different contexts. Stuart Hall and colleagues discuss the wave of terror and racism that followed the translation of “mugging” from the sensationalist language of North American journalism to England.40 Before them, Stanley Cohen helped to define the sociological connotation of moral panic through his research on the class anxiety that the media helped to create around British Mods and Rockers, giving the term its paradigmatic definition: “Societies appear to be subjected, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”41 In the field of sexuality, Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter demonstrate how the panic around porn created by feminists and their unexpected conservative allies powered resentment against sex workers and other “non-respectable” subjects.42 Roger Lancaster, in “Panic and the Punitive State,” shows the parade of historical injustices and violence created in American society around sexual panics as “templates” for introducing punitive modes of governance based on the renewal of terror, panic, and scapegoating.43 With regard to antiblack racism, racial profiling—constitutive of police practices and discourses in diasporic multiracial societies—has, in the tabloid press, a key ally.44 As Stuart Hall and his coauthors explained about “mugging,” the statistical indicators are handled; a morbid character is created; an environment of hatred emerges; and a broader feeling of social insecurity is associated with the bodies of young black men, who are now converted into public enemies. The succession of press articles creates a chain of connections that constitute journalistic truth as absolute truth, and all the political and economic instability of social life finds its perfect embodiment in black youth. “In these conditions blacks become the ‘bearers’ of these contradictory outcomes; and black crime becomes the signifier of the crises in the urban colonies.”45 This is precisely what occurred with the Brazilian rolezinho in a context in which TV anchors called the young people criminals and troublemakers, even where no crime was committed.

Disjunctive Democracy and Racialized Public Sphere To locate rolezinho performance in the context of antiblack racism, it is necessary briefly to consider some recent transformations in the ­Brazilian public sphere. As they reveal, rolezinho represented the dramatization of contradictions in and fragmentation of this public sphere amidst the paradoxical conditions of Brazilian (re)democratization.

168  Osmundo Pinho In Latin America, broadly speaking, democratization after the authoritarian political regimes of the 1970s contradictorily brought an increase of violence and a “co-presence” of law and disorder.46 In Brazil, society seemed to find the path of reconciliation and ideological disarmament, but rates of violent crimes, including homicides, exploded spectacularly, and the feeling of insecurity grew apace. When society was re-founded by political amnesty after the dictatorship and a new constitution ratified that celebrated democratic values, the armed wing of the state intensified racially based genocide. Thus, there is a Brazilian paradox: democratic state and liberal legislation, on the one hand, and on the other, murderous police and a vicious breeding of racism.47 Teresa Caldeira calls this contradictory feature of Brazilian democracy “disjunctive.” While living conditions have improved relatively in recent decades, in the periphery and for the black population, social distance and inequality is still very large. Especially with regard to statistics on violence, the disproportion is enormous, mainly affecting young, black men—the social subjects who animate rolezinho.48 Young people, sons and daughters of rural migrants who have left the poor areas of the country, are no longer content with the meager progress achieved by their parents. Hyper-connected to information technologies, they crave more, and yearn to consume and circulate. Brazilian public space, historically segregated, acquires new dimensions of inclusion and exclusion through the participation of young people from the periphery and slums in social and cultural life, as we can see in hip-hop, graffiti, and rolezinho.49 Clearly, as we will see later, there is no coincidence here but the very embodiment of capitalism’s contradictions in the processes of subjectification of young people engaged in rolezinho. Caldeira is straightforward: the presence of these young peripherals as spectacularized by the rolezinho performance “breaks a state of things which once was constitutive of public order.”50 In this sense there is no exaggeration in the production of panic around rolezinho. The “moral entrepreneurs” who stood up to condemn rolezinho and rolezeiros understand correctly that the mere physical presence of black bodies, displaced from their traditional subordinate places, causes a deep subversion of order.

The Meaning of Rolezinho: The Market Place and the Subject Even if there is, as Mariana Assis contends, a lack of real public space for proper leisure in São Paulo as in other Brazilian cities, this is not enough to explain why rolezeiros chose malls, or why they did not go to Ibirapuera, as suggested by Alba Zaluar. For that we must understand the perspectives of young people themselves, the meaning of “public,” and the content of social interactions in highly regulated environments. After

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  169 all, one of the essential aspects that the “rolezinho crisis” highlights is the lack of social space in the full sense of a public place in which the different identities and subjectivities that make up urban life can coexist. 51 We must also interrogate the contradictory modes of production of subjectivity for these young men and women. How are they constituted as subjects, how do they manifest agency, and how do they live the contradictions of peripheral capitalism as scenario or setting for their self-making? What they are doing, I would suggest, is using the ­resources available to them in fetishized popular culture, especially music and, particularly in this case, the so-called funk ostentação (ostentatious or showy funk). In such a process, subjectivities can become objective for the people involved, through externalized relationships with the symbolic elements present as a grammar in “funk ostentação” and other genres defined by the worshiping of fetishized goods and (imagined) luxury consumerism. It is here, then, that the music genre called “funk ostentação” comes into play. Funk ostentação is one particular funk genre that emerged in the city of Santos, in the coastal region of the state of São Paulo.52 The production of funk ostentação hits is inseparable from the production of the video clips, which invariably show young boys from the urban peripheries driving expensive imported cars, wearing luxury jewelry and famous brand clothes, drinking champagne and whiskey accompanied by half-naked women, while paper money falls from the sky like rain on the delighted boys (www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9xoz7zRGn0). Especially revealing is the Facebook profile for Uallyson (Inho MC), 53 a novice singer of “funk melody,” a romantic version of funk. On his profile, Uallyson, who lives in Cachoeira, a small town 100 km away from the capital city of Salvador, comments and posts pictures of his visits to the nearby city of Feira de Santana, which, unlike Cachoeira, has a shopping mall. Uallyson titled his album, released in November 2013, before the events of December/January, “Rolezin no Shopping” (which, by the way, rhymes in Portuguese). Uallyson’s album and Facebook profile show how the “rolezin,” funk music, and participation in the imaginary and site-specific location of the shopping mall as a consumeristic temple come together to define the mechanism of subjective configuration for young men in Brazil’s urban peripheries. This is a configuration that seeks integration through consumerism even as it exposes and ironizes the impossibility of that integration.

Securitized New Subjects and Racial Antagonism In “The Security Archipelago,” Paul Amar offers an analytical framework that helps to contextualize the eruption of rolezinho in relation to new modes of global governance and their articulation in the production

170  Osmundo Pinho of subjects forced to navigate the contradictory confluence of neoliberal state hegemony and the securitized state. 54 Securitized domination, as Amar analyzes it, is a mode of domination in which sexuality is integrated into the calculus of value around adherence to control policies and regulation. This particular mode Amar calls “humanitarian securitization,” pointing out that it is guided by abstract conventions of morality and respectable behavior, aimed to provide protection to the average citizen and his [sic] family values, ostensibly under attack by the destructive forces of the wild market and nonconforming subjectivities. In Brazil, under Presidents Lula and Dilma, the Workers’ Party achieved hegemony, thanks to decisive support from morally conservative groups, such as neo-Pentecostal religious clusters. Their neoliberal rhetoric had a unique cast. In it, the “rescue” of morality, community, religious, and cultural values seemed more important than economics. In this environment, and in a society marked by untenable levels of violence, the discourse of security and return to family values (still) seems widely prevalent. If we consider how funk, strongly associated with rolezeiros and “criminals,” has been the target of intense moral panic for a long time, it is easy to understand how those involved in rolezinho seem corrupted by exaggerated “consumerism,” uncontrolled sexuality, and criminal potential. These sources of corruption, long associated by Brazilians with the US, that great capitalist behemoth to the north, and in particular its black cultures and citizens, provoke a deep ambivalence among Brazilians who both desire and fear these global currents. As with the other global moral panics analyzed in this volume, transnational exchange feeds the panic over rolezinho, as it has the other panics associated with black culture over the course of Brazilian history. In a society such as Brazil’s, the racial variable can never be underestimated. Neither race nor racism may be treated as incidental explanatory factors; on the contrary, they must be understood as structural elements of the state, of subjectivities, and even of the “national project.” As João Vargas questions, can Brazil as political-cultural “polis” fully integrate blacks and blackness? Vargas explores this unbearable position, hopelessly antagonistic, the (im)possible black subject in Brazil: It ensues that the gendered black subject is an impossible subject, one whose impossible gender, impossible blackness, impossible being, inhabits the very impossible co-ordinates of time and space that make the nation possible. The nation is possible because the gendered black subject, qua subject, qua citizen, is an oxymoron. 55 The oxymoron of the black gendered subject, immersed in contradiction, is objectified in popular cultural expressive forms as well as in subjective self-making. There is no space, as I said, for black bodies in wrong places in Brazil, and there is no possibility of integration. The only acceptable

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  171 response seems to be the widespread violence that takes shape as an effective genocide. Black bodies are then out of place not only in the malls, where this incongruity gained spectacularized visibility through the agency of young rolezeiros, but also in the country’s own national imagination and in its political and cultural landscapes as an uncomfortable and fundamentally inassimilable presence.56 The rolezinho as public, political, and bodily performance enacts these contradictions, deeply rooted in the very subjectivities of the agents, these new securitized subjects, as well as in Brazilian society.

Acknowledgements A version of this chapter was presented at the New Sexualities Seminar of the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. I thank Paul Amar and Mireille Miller-Young for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Justin Perez and Micol Seigel for the English revising.

Notes 1 Kwon, “One Place after Another.” 2 Amar, The Security Archipelago; Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness and the Impossible Brazilian Project.” 3 Starting in the early 1970s, the funk balls in Brazil, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, were massive musical spaces created to listen and dance to North American soul music. As Hermano Vianna and George Yúdice have described, in their own evolution, the balls defined a new musical genre, youth culture, and style, and are now known as funk carioca. Funk carioca now has several subgenres and many stars, usually young people from the slums who sing of the living conditions in peripheral areas, as well as of sexuality and the war of the sexes in the favelas (slums). They also sing of the lives and deaths of famous criminals, just as the narcorrido does: Vianna, O mundo funk carioca; Yúdice, “The Funkification of Rio”; Edberg, El Narcotraficante. 4 Miranda, “Confusão no shopping Vitoria deixa clientes em pânico.” 5 Racismo Não Passará, “Racismo dentro do Shopping Vitória.” 6 Caldeira, “Qual a novidade dos rolezinhos?” 7 About the “arrastões,” see, for instance, Amar, The Security Archipelago; cunha, “bonde do mal.” 8 Krepp and Souza, “PM usa bombas e balas de borracha em rolezinho”; Krepp, “Video mostra PMs”; CBN, “Rolezinho do shopping traz medo e pânico a sociedade”; Donato, “A onda de invasores a shoppings”; “Dois são presos após baile funk em shopping.” 9 Capriglione, “Mesmo sem crimes rolezinho causa pânico.” 10 MC Daleste, “Deixa eu ir.” 11 Silva and Orrico, “Rolezinho causa tumulto em shopping da Zona Sul.” 12 Polycarpo, “Shopping barra a entrada de adolescentes suspeitos.” 13 Moretti, “Com medo de rolezinho, JK Iguatemi barra a entrada ate de funcionarios”; “PM é chamada para conter tumulto em shopping”; Bunduky, “Rolezinho faz shopping fechar mais cedo”; “Shopping Metro Tucuruvi é alvo de rolezinho.”

172  Osmundo Pinho 14 As in Lima, “Seria possivel um ‘rolezinho’ guei?” (“Would a Gay ‘Rolezinho’ Be Possible?”). 15 Belchior, “Shopping Vitoria: corpos negros no lugar errado.” 16 Tebaldi, “Arrastão do racismo imaginario.” 17 Dias, “Shopping de São Paulo tera que indenizar músico negro.” 18 Waiselfiz, Mapa da Violencia 2011; Mapa da Violencia 2013; Mapa da Violencia 2015. 19 Anuário Brasileiro de Seguranca Pública, Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. 20 Ricci, “O fenomeno do rolezinho.” 21 Pinho and Seigel, “Brazil’s protests.” 22 Sartorato, “Shopping barra jovens da periferia.” 23 Brum, “Os novos vândalos do Brasil.” 24 Martin and Bedinelli, “A rebelião dos excluidos.” Ibirapuera is the biggest public park in the city of São Paulo, located far from the East Side of the city, where the Itaquera Mall is, which means that for the young people who chose the Itaquera Mall as a stage for their rolezinho, the Ibirapuera Park is not an option. Besides, the “funkeiros” chose the Mall especially because of its particular configuration as a shrine for consumerism. 25 Hebblethwaite, “Rolezinho’s Brazil”; Barbara, “Whose Mall Is It?”; Romero, “Brazil’s latest Clash with its Urban Youth.” 26 Franco, “Medo de rolezinho é reação de brancos.” 27 Menasce and Leal, “No primeiro domingo da Operação Verão.” 28 Farias, Corpo e classificação de cor. In a general way, moreover, we have to understand that in Brazil there is a different kind of relation between race, residence patterns, and national imagination compared to the US. Even though the rates of racial segregation in Brazil’s big cities are high, as Edward Telles has demonstrated, in poor neighborhoods there is more racial diversity than in affluent areas (Telles, Race in Another America). Recently, Keisha-Khan Perry has discussed the racialized character of spatial segregation in Salvador da Bahia, based on extensive fieldwork (Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab). 29 Amar, The Security Archipelago; Cunha, Bonde do Mal. 30 Palombini, “O som a prova de bala”; Palombini, “Funk proibido”; Palombini, “Funk Carioca and Musica Soul.” 31 Turner, From Ritual to Theater. 32 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire; Taylor, Performance and/as History. 33 Kwon, One Place after Another, 85. 34 Kwon, One Place after Another. 35 Fabião, Performing Rio de Janeiro, 5. 36 Gordon, Bad Faith, 101. 37 Gordon Bad Faith, “The Black and The Body Politic.” 38 Marriot, Haunted Life, 4. 39 Palombini, “Funk proibido”; Scruggs and Lippman, From Funkification to Pacification. 40 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. 41 Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1. 42 Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars. 43 Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State. 4 4 Sexton, “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control.” 45 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 339. 46 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Post-Colony.”

Black Bodies, Wrong Places  173 47 Caldeira, “I Came to Sabotage your Reasoning” ; “Inscrição e circulação”; Amparo-Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis.” 48 According to the “Map of Violence 2013,” 153.4 percent more blacks than whites die in homicides in Brazil. Mortality data from the Information System of the Ministry of Health show that 71.4 percent of the 49,300 victims of homicide in 2011 were black—a stunning total of 35,200 murders. Police action is one of the main reasons for these numbers. Official figures from the Public Security Institute (ISP/SSP-RJ) show that between 2001 and 2011, more than 10,000 people were killed in confrontations with police in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone. In 2012, the Bahia police killed 344 people, which gives a rate of 2.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (Waiselfiz, Mapa da Violencia; Anuário Brasileiro de Seguranca Pública; “Policia mata quase uma pessoa por dia na Bahia”). 49 Caldeira, “Qual a novidade dos rolezinhos?”; Silva, “Sounds of the Youth in the Metropolis.” 50 Caldeira, “Inscrição e circulação,” 63. 51 Assis, “Rolezinho. Or Is There Politics in the Shopping Mall?” 52 Based on the same formal-aesthetic structure of the funk carioca, the funk ostentação, as with gangsta rap in the US, focuses on luxury goods, beautiful and objectified women, and men’s sexual exploits (Jeffries, Thug Life). 53 Uallysson is one of the subjects in my current research on black masculinities in Bahia. 54 Amar, “The Security Archipelago.” 55 Vargas, “Gendered Antiblackness,” 5. 56 We can see, in this way, the history of black representation in the Brazilian national imagination, marked by the black presence as pure absence, defined by the stereotypical devices for black representation as a projection of the white gaze, or at the least realized as struggle around the predicaments of racialized representation. This has been particularly visible in the sexualization and commodification of black bodies in the culture and tourism industries.

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Black Bodies, Wrong Places  177 Jeffries, Michael P. Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2011. Kwon, Miwon. “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” OCTOBER 80, Spring (1997): 85–110. Lancaster, Roger N. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Marriot, David. Haunted Life, Visual Culture and Black Modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Palombini, Carlos. “Funk Carioca and Musica Soul.” In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, edited by David Horn, John Shepherd, and Paolo Prato. Volume IX Genres: Caribbean and Latin America, edited by Hettie Malcomson, Pamela Narbona Jerez, Mona-Lynn Courteau, and Heidi Feldman, 317–25. London: Blommsbery Academic, 2014. ———. “Funk proibido.” Dimensões políticas da justiça, edited by Heloisa Starling, Leonardo Avritzer, Newton Bignotto, Juarez Guimarães, and Fernando Filgueiras. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2013. ———. “O som a prova de bala.” IV Seminario Musica Ciencia Tecnologia. Fronteiras e Rupturas, 2012. Perry, Keisha-Khan. Black Women Against the Land Grab. The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Pinho, Osmundo. “Fogo na Babilônia”: Reggae, Black Counterculture and Globalization in Brazil. In Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, edited by Charles Perrone and Christopher Dunn, 192–216. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. ———. “Heróis Ultra-Modernos: raça, gênero e modernização desigual na periferia do Rio de Janeiro.” In Afro-Rio Século XXI - Modernidade e Relações Raciais no Rio de Janeiro, edited by Rosana Heringer and Osmundo Pinho, 173–251. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2010. ———. “The Songs of Freedom: notas etnográficas sobre cultura negra global e práticas contraculturais locais.” In Ritmos em Trânsito. Sócio-­antropologia da Música Baiana, edited by Livio Sansone and Jocelio T. dos Santos, 181–200. Salvador: Dynamis Editorial/Programa a Cor da Bahia/Projeto Samba, 1998. ———. “‘Tradition as Adventure’: Black Music, New Afro-Descendent Subjects and Pluralization of Modernity in Salvador da Bahia.” In Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship, edited by Idelber Avelar and Christopher Dunn, 250–66. Duke: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. “Ultra-Modern Heroes: Race, Gender and Unequal Modernization in the Rio de Janeiro Periphery.” Unpublished paper, presented at UC Santa Barbara, 9 May 2006. Pinho, Osmundo, with Micol Seigel. “Brazil’s protests reveal the tension of a people moving ahead of their country.” Quartz, September 4, 2013; http:// qz.com/121049/brazils-protests-reveal-the-tension-of-a-people-moving-­ ahead-their-country/. Schechner, Richard. “‘Pontos de Contato’ revisitados.” Revista de Antropologia 56 (2013): 23–66. Scruggs, Gregory and Alexandre Lippman. “From Funkfication to Pacification.” Norient: Network for Local and Global Sounds and Media Culture. 23/05/2012. http://norient.com/en/academic/rio-funk-2012/.

178  Osmundo Pinho Sexton, Jared. “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control.” In Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy: Warfare in the America Homeland, edited by Joy James, 197–218. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Silva, José Carlos Gomes da. “Sounds of Youth in the Metropolis: The Different Routes of the Hip Hop Movement in the City of São Paulo.” Vibrant 8 (2011): 70–94. Taylor, Diana. “Performance and/as History.” The Drama Review. 50, no. 1 (2006): 67–86. ———. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Telles, Edward. Race in Another America. The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. Vargas, João H. C. “Gendered Antiblackness and the Impossible Brazilian Project: Emerging Critical Brazilian Studies.” Cultural Dynamics. 24, no. 1 (2012): 3–11. Vianna, Hermano. O mundo funk carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editores, 1988. Waiselfisz, Julio J. Mapa da violência 2011: os jovens no Brasil. Instituto Sangari. Brasília: Ministério da Justiça, 2011. ———. Mapa da Violência 2013: Homicídios e Juventude no Brasil. Governo Federal. Brasilia: Juventude Viva, 2013. ———. Mapa da Violência 2015: Mortes Matadas por Arma de Fogo. Brasilia: Secretaria-Geral da Presidência da República; Secretaria Nacional de Juventude; Secretaria de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial, 2015. Yudice, George. “The Funkification of Rio.” In The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Post-Contemporary Interventions), edited by George Yudice, 109–32. Duke: University Press, 2003. Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1991.

9 Circulating Sin Sailors and Benevolence in Early Nineteenth-Century New York Dana Logan A member of the American Seamen’s Friend Society (ASFS) visited the mission’s floating chapel in 1853, a boat that never left the port of the New York harbor but moved around, providing religious services to men of the merchant marine. The ASFS member, not a sailor but a middle-class white man dedicated to saving sailors’ souls, stood by the boat, watching the sailors receive tracts and books, when he “was much struck by the manner and deportment of an aged and athletic colored man of great stature, who had come forward with the other sailors.” The black sailor addressed the minister handing out books: “I would like to have Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, see if you can give it to me.” The ASFS member was struck by the seriousness of the man and asked, “Are you a believer?” To which the sailor answered, “I think I may say I have a little spark of true religion.” The sailor then told the ASFS member about a time at sea: While I was reading my Bible as usual, the mate again came to the galley, and said ‘Cook, let me stand here and listen while you read,’… After pausing some little while longer, he added, ‘I want you to pray for me?’ ‘I do’ I replied… I told him my praying would not get him to Heaven—he must pray for himself, ‘Every tub,’ said I ‘must stand upon its own bottom’… after some further talking and inquiring from me, he did pray, his prayers were heard and he became a new man. The black sailor’s anecdote, as recounted by the member of the ASFS, demonstrated “the fruits of a ‘word in season,’ and what humble instruments are made the means of glorifying God.”1 A “humble instrument” twice over, this man converted the first mate and provided another inspiring story for the journal of the mission to sailors—The Sailor’s Magazine—in which the encounter was published. His anecdote also complicated the typical dynamic of a benevolent helper and the sinful recipient of aid, a dynamic that structured all benevolence at mid-­century. 2 Rather than simply receiving aid from the ASFS member, the sailor enabled Christianity’s movement through the ships of the Atlantic, his

180  Dana Logan body the conduit of God’s words. Even as he asked for religious books from the mission, his literacy demonstrated his religious self-sufficiency and the utility of his capacity for attending to the souls of the crew. This competence awed the ASFS member and yet also demonstrated the very issues that the ASFS aimed to address by forming a society for the spiritual reform and welfare of sailors. Independence and mobility made them perfect instruments of Christian expansion. Yet these same qualities also made sailors fundamentally irredeemable. The history of nineteenth-century benevolence to sailors demonstrates how moral panics serve as mechanisms of expansion, not only of markets but also of religion, as they aim to control and reform mobile bodies. This chapter focuses on New York, although the movement to aid and reform sailors also gained momentum in Boston, Charleston, and London.3 Sailors attracted fear and affection from white middle-class reformers because of their spiritual, social, and racial indeterminacy. Untethered from land, they suffered from a chronic homelessness in the eyes of reformers. I argue that sailors’ roles as vectors of both moral and dangerous influence made them particular targets of moral panic as well as crucial instruments in the creation of a more fluid and charged Christian body. The mission to sailors also demonstrates the historical ties between the history of benevolence, which functioned as a mechanism of both social reform and spiritual conversion in the nineteenth century, and the history of global moral panics.4 As scholars of moral panics in the twentieth and twenty-first century have demonstrated, moral panics serve to legitimize control over dangerous characters, imagined to be distributing illicit substances and objects, through highly mobile networks.5 For classes that benefit from these globalized flows of people and capital, the panic is ambivalent—reflecting a desire to keep the flows moving while also mitigating the invasion of the other. Representations of nineteenth-century sailors did not portray sailors simply as the folk devil threatening the common order but also as mediums of prosperity and agents of economic expansion. With a mix of fear and anticipation, reformers represented sailors as highly amenable to the gospel, even if their morality would always be tainted by their participation in illicit flows. In fact, it was precisely this representation of sailors as ruined but semi-redeemable that appealed to reformers. Black sailors represented a hyperdeveloped version of the dangers and possibilities of sailors’ roles in the circulation of capital and the gospel. In the last part of the chapter, I will describe how reformers built boarding houses for “colored sailors” in order to cultivate black sailors as agents of spiritual expansion and to protect them from alternative forms of influence. White reformers wanted to save black sailors not only from the dangers of drink, sex, and disease but also from the alternative authority of the black middle class and the potentially revolutionary networks of Afro-Caribbean affiliation. Black sailors seemed especially primed as spiritual instruments because of slavery’s damaging effects,

Circulating Sin  181 which reformers imagined made them especially ready for absorbing and spreading Christian ministry. The high stakes of revolutionary disorder and a bright millennial future rested on the bodies of sailors. Thus, when reformers painted an image of heathens, salvation, and capital intermingling in flowing currents around the world, they saw the conversion of sailors as a top priority. The bad could never be separated from the good in a global economy, so reformers reimagined the polluted and undomesticated sailors as conduits of a highly managed salvific power—extending out from New York ports to the frontiers of heathen territory.

Antebellum Moral Panics Reformers considered sailors to be a particularly problematic population in New York City because of their lack of permanent homes and their culture of drinking and carousing, but reformers also focused on sailors because New York’s international port made them a highly visible population within the city.6 In their attempt to minister to and reform these sailors, the ASFS acted as one arm of the Benevolent Empire, a set of voluntary associations run by middle-class and elite Protestants that managed the problems of poverty in the city and saved souls for the larger Christian cause. In the pre-1820 era, elites saw widows, orphans, and the occasionally out-of-work laborer as endemic parts of society and charity as their privileged responsibility. With the ascent of evangelical benevolence beginning in the 1820s, however, the rising middle class joined the elite in configuring the poor as objects of a moral panic rather than as an endemic aspect of urban life.7 In societies for the distribution of tracts, the promotion of Sunday Schools, and the reform of prostitutes and sailors, evangelical reformers argued that the recipients of charity needed to be saved not only from their conditions but also from themselves. The panic over sailors differed from the panic around prostitution, vagrant children, or even plain old intemperance amongst working-class men because sailors had a special role in the spread of capital in the city and the world. Sailors, unlike these other unmoored dependents, courageously performed essential labor, and the benevolence extended to them also uniquely affirmed their behavior, even as it tried to redirect their hearts toward God. A member of the ASFS clarified their mission by arguing that despite “[t]he bravery of this interesting class of men in war, and the value of their services in time of peace… their situation exposed them to peculiar temptations, as well as to the greatest dangers, and to sudden death”; considering these dangers, the Christian community did not seem to realize the importance of raising their moral views, and of leading them to a course of life, by which they might be prepared for greater usefulness in this world, and for a crown of glory in the world to come.8

182  Dana Logan These kinds of glowing descriptions of sailors’ value differentiated the ASFS from benevolence societies directed at other vulnerable populations, such as prostitutes.9 In distinction from these other benevolence societies, the ASFS spoke of sailors as their collaborators in the reform of the merchant marine. For example, the society’s journal, The Sailor’s Magazine, addressed both sailors and the non-sailor members of the ASFS, and amongst the editorials and articles written by non-sailor reformers, converted sailors also contributed their own letters and essays.10 Yet despite this unusual respect for their object of benevolence, reformers’ voices dominated the journal’s pages, and non-ASFS-­sponsored accounts of sailors’ lives reported that they had little use for the journal.11 Members of the ASFS thought of themselves as admiring friends of the sailor, but they funded chapels, boardinghouses, asylums, and banks for sailors because sailors failed to achieve true independence; in this sense, the ASFS participated in the larger panic over indeterminate dependency. As wage labor destabilized families in both cities and rural areas, poverty in New York rose in the 1820s, creating newly unstable categories of men and women who were neither fully independent (property owners) nor dependent (cared for by an independent man).12 The ­Benevolent Empire expanded in response to these “vulnerable” urban populations, which they defined as much by their resistance to middle-­ class Protestant values as by their income.13 Women in particular came to the city looking for employment and subsequently became the focus of one of the most pervasive panics in the antebellum period as reformers equated nondependent women with the moral depravity of prostitution. The crisis of prostitution, like the moral panic over sailors, responded to a flexible form of capitalism that broke down traditional structures of dependence through wage labor and promoted an increasing circulation of bodies through space.14 Anxiety about categorically indeterminate groups fueled elite and middle-class evangelicals’ attempts to control a quickly changing and unstable urban social structure, but in the case of sailors, reformers also celebrated mobility and indeterminacy. Converting sailors secured domestic stability not only by making the port a less sinful part of the city but also by expanding Christianity’s reach through converted sailors. Fear and optimism thus intermingled in reformers’ fantasies of sailors as conduits of sin and salvation.

Homeless Sailors The ASFS believed that sailors were a special case amongst the sinning lower classes because of their distinctive lives. Despite general concern for sailors’ involvement with prostitutes, alcohol, and disorderliness, the ASFS differentiated them from other wageworkers because they spent the majority of their lives within the regimented and highly masculine

Circulating Sin  183 structure of a ship at sea. Sailors represented a kind of rugged competence that reformers couldn’t help but admire. A member of the ASFS wrote that [t]he business of a sailor requires not only courage and fortitude, but strength and skill. He is often called upon to make the greatest possible exertions of which man is capable, and sometimes much skill is necessary to render those exertions effectual.15 Labor historians too have admired how sailors forged a fraternity of the forecastle that enforced cooperation and competence, but when the leadership of the captain became tyrannical or when their wages were not forthcoming, they also specialized in strategies of rebellion, such as mutiny and desertion. Amongst the working classes, sailors were thus uniquely capable of controlling their own livelihoods.16 Their uniqueness also extended to the particular ways in which they dressed, walked, and spoke, which were all expressions of their cosmopolitan professional experiences.17 These characteristics of their lives impressed members of the ASFS, but sailors’ unstable roles in society as neither dependents nor independent property owners also made them the focus of anxiety. Sailors could never fully achieve the moral status of men who lived with families and attended church regularly, and thus the ASFS argued that sailors lacked a domestic Christian life. Members of the ASFS imagined that the sailor lifestyle created longing for the comforts of mothers and wives that could never be truly fulfilled. The Sailor’s Magazine often presented stories of sailors’ longing for home, even as they died at sea, as evidence of their moral capabilities.18 In a story about a young sailor dying, the sailor declares, “O! If I could be privileged to die at home, I should be happy.”19 The young sailor’s enduring love for home represented a larger ideology of domesticity connected to the idea of “home” during this period. The word “home” anchored the separation between spheres and an idealized domestic sphere separate from the world of work and commerce. Men who returned to the domestic retreat were tempered by femininity’s moral force. 20 Sailors, the ASFS argued, were capable of such morality but were denied continuous cultivation of a stable home life. But most importantly, this was not a fixable problem. Unlike the image of preyed-upon female innocents driven to a life of prostitution, sailors could not stop being sailors. 21 And even if sailors could be domesticated, reformers were not sure that they wanted sailors’ hyper-masculinity to be tempered by feminine domesticity. Members of the ASFS wanted to harness the power of sailors’ chronic homelessness without changing the nature of their professional behavior. As evangelicals, the members of the ASFS envisioned Christianity spreading through the globe, with sailors playing a key role. For all their concern about sailors’ lack of domesticity, the ASFS celebrated sailors’

184  Dana Logan entrenchment in flows of capital. With converted sailors on merchant ships, trade tied foreign nations to the flow of Christianization. One writer for the ASFS explained that the cities which employed them to bring home the productions of other nations, should be compelled to send back the Gospel. It is that seamen should cheerfully aid the progress of our holy religion, and by their own efforts, as well as their example, help on the conversion of the world--that the ships of Tarshish might be FOREMOST in bringing sons of Zion from far, with their silver and gold, to the name of the Lord our God. 22 The “ships of Tarshish” could potentially bring about the Christianization of the world, not despite their sullied relationship to money and trade but because of their intrinsic ties to “silver and gold.” The failure to convert sailors imperiled the spread of Christianity. As the ASFS pointed out, foreign cultures encountered Western trade and culture as synonymous with Western religion. The ASFS feared that heathens would confuse unconverted sailors with representatives of Christianity. Heathens who encountered sailors were hardly capable of making nice discriminations, and have never seen the best proofs of the power of the gospel, will very naturally take such conduct as a fair specimen of the excellency of the Christian religion; and they will be likely to condemn the whole, as a system of hypocrisy and fraud. 23 If Western trade and religion were fundamentally indistinguishable to the foreign heathen, then it was necessary to bring trade and religion into harmony through sailors. After all, the practical execution of millennial goals in a world that contained oceans inextricably tied trade and religion. Reformers pointed out that knowledge of navigation is not only of great use in the commercial world, but it is indispensable requisite in completing the scheme of redemption. The Jews can never be carried home to Palestine, the gospel can never be proclaimed on all the islands of the sea, without the skill of mariners. 24 Sailors were necessary to the plan of redemption, a point illustrated by pragmatic assessments of their instrumental role in the millennium. But beyond their practical necessity for the transportation of bodies and goods in the trade routes of a Christian empire, sailors were necessary because they were spiritually flawed. The authors of the Sailor’s

Circulating Sin  185 Magazine believed that sailors’ imperfections made them perfect solutions to the problem of how trade and religion would simultaneously be presented to foreign populations. Heathens would look at converted sailors and “how soon would they take knowledge of them, that they came from a region of superior light, purity and benevolence.”25 Heathens would be impressed by converted sailors, these reformers hoped, because sailors were closer to heathens than a fully moral missionary who had grown up in a good Christian home could ever be. Sailors did not embody “purity and benevolence” themselves, but they could embody the potential synthesis of Western capitalism and religion in a partial and emergent image that paralleled the also unfinished idea of how foreign populations would join the Christian world. A kind of heathen Christianity could take shape between the ships of Christian sailors and foreign frontiers, all underwritten by the ambivalent virtues of capitalist expansion. Protestant reformers were not alone in their desire to save sailors while keeping them afloat in the flows of capital. The federal government also advanced a program to save sailors based on an understanding of sailors as dependent free men. Beginning in 1798, the federal government set up the first public health care service in the US in order to care for the merchant marine. Sailors paid 20 cents per month out of their wages in order to receive the care of doctors contracted by government in various ports. In larger ports, the government set up complete hospitals or separate wards for sailors. 26 Legal scholar Gautham Rao has shown how this system, a model of public health care that the federal government provided to no other population in the US, made sailors into a special class that mirrored reformers’ representation of sailors as dependents in need of saving and yet so instrumental to the economy that they must remain in their precarious position. The federal government weighed several interests in its decision to construct a sailor safety net in an era when social safety nets were generally considered undemocratic. 27 These included, first, the necessity of transatlantic trade for the health of the American economy, second, the extreme likelihood of sailors becoming injured and sick on the sea, and finally sailors’ “moral character.”28 Sailors could not be trusted to save their own money or take care of their own health, an aspect of the moral panic that also led to Savings Banks especially for sailors. 29 Thus, the federal government saved sailors’ money for them in a health care trust. Their ability to compel this tax from sailors was based in the socio-legal classification of sailors as dependents who were subject to the authority of their captains.30 Judges also saw sailors as a class that needed protection from their shipmasters and thus, Rao shows, over “the course of the 1790s, federal judges became well accustomed to coercively handling, limiting, distributing, redistributing, or garnishing mariners’ wages.”31 Concurring with reformers, the federal government believed sailors

186  Dana Logan could not be trusted to take care of themselves. Like destitute women and children, sailors inspired the benevolence awarded to dependents, but unlike women and children, they served such an instrumental purpose that they must be kept in danger for the common good. Sailors’ interstitial role as semi-dependents made them threats to the structure of white male patriarchy through their categorical indeterminacy. As both threat and necessity, sailors’ instrumental value to private and public interests also connects them to a longer history of moral panic subjects. Like immigrants in the twenty-first century, who simultaneously fulfill crucial labor needs and yet also open up networks of illegal bodies and substances that threaten the autonomy of the nation, sailors were a dangerous precondition of a growing economy.32 And as with panics over immigration, reformers looked for solutions that kept illicit bodies on the move. Unconverted sailors threatened the purity of the port, but the port also threatened the carefully calibrated homelessness cultivated by the ASFS and the US government. Beginning in the 1820s the ASFS built sailor boarding houses as a larger strategy for managing domestic threats to sailors.33 Merely keeping the men in working condition would not be enough to stave off the dangerous influences of prostitution, gambling, and opportunistic boarding house owners as well as the influences of sailors’ familial connections. Despite reformers’ affection for the idea of sailors as unmoored bachelors, many sailors had homes and families, and thus boardinghouses served as a place to manage not only sailors but also their wives and children. An ASFS member explained that if sailors’ participation in church services was the goal of the society, it was found necessary, in order to secure this end, to appropriate the lower floor of the church entirely to the accommodation of seafaring persons and the male friends of the institution, leaving the galleries for the use of the female members of the families. 34 Gender division enabled sailors to attend, the member argued, because “By this arrangement a barrier is removed to the attendance of many who might otherwise from diffidence or backwardness decline entering a more mixed assembly.”35 Sailors, in other words, needed the barrier between themselves and their own families, or the families of other sailors, because sailors might be timid in a “mixed assembly.” This argument continued to promote reformers’ fantasy of homeless sailors as alienated from their own families even as they were faced with evidence of sailors’ actual familial connections. Thus, in a certain sense, the boarding house protected the sailor from his wife—from full domestication that would render the sailor into something less wild, less mobile, and ultimately less free to spread the Christian faith. Boarding houses were a way of keeping the sailor in a tightly managed space between domestication and homelessness.

Circulating Sin  187 Local ties and domestic interests threatened the utility of sailors as carriers of the gospel, but sailors’ racial affiliations posed another major threat to sailors’ role as “humble instruments.” Yet, as with other romanticized characteristics, sailors’ racial otherness opened up fruitful channels of possible circulation. If reformers could mitigate the dangerous aspects of sailors’ transnational identifications, their mysterious otherness could be utilized for religious good. Learning to speak sailors’ exotic speech posed the first challenge in converting sailors and utilizing their racial difference.

The Sailor Dialect Reformers participated in the racial categorization of sailors by representing sailor speech and behavior in their publications. These depictions took on both mocking and loving tones but always emphasized the strangeness of sailors. The American Tract Society, an affiliated society within the circle of the Benevolence Empire, tried to recreate sailors’ unique speech patterns and maritime lifestyle in dialogues for their tracts. These pamphlets, which ASFS members distributed around the port, depicted sailors as categorically distinct from other kinds of independent and working-class men and thus pointed to the distinct spiritual possibilities of their racial otherness. 36 In tracts developed specifically for sailors by the American Tract Society, depictions of seafaring men called attention to the difference of sailors by reproducing their speech as a distinct dialect. In the tract “Tom Starboard and Jack Halyard,” they conversed in a jovial manner but longed for redemption. Written as a conversation, the author attempted a broad interpretation of sailor talk. Jack addressed Tom with a “Halloo, shipmate: what cheer?” and Tom responded in sailor slang and jargon: Who would have supposed that this weather-beaten hulk was my old messmate Jack Halyard, with whom I’ve soaked many a hard biscuit, and weathered many a tough gale on Old Ocean? And then you used to be as trim in your rigging as the Alert herself; but now it’s as full of ends as the old Wilmington brig that we used to crack so many jokes about at Barbadoes. Give me another grip, my hearty, and tell me how you come on.37 Grammatical contractions and comical references to hard biscuits and brotherly affection signaled the “sailor” qualities of the dialogue. The tract, meant for temperance and thus a demonstration of drunken behavior, depicted sailors as a lower class incapable of self-control but whose foibles amused rather than overtly threatened reformers. But these lovable fools were not entirely knowable. There was something mysterious and impenetrable about their special technical language and

188  Dana Logan inside jokes. The author of the tract tried in this dialogue to speak sailors’ language and thus reach them through their own references. In these attempts to reach across boundaries, reformers emphasized the cultural, national, and racial differences of sailors, which made sailors’ speech sound comically strange to white middle-class reformers. The “Tom Starboard and Jack Halyard” tract’s careful depiction of sailor language as its own distinct dialect also points to the sense that sailors existed somewhere in-between the comfortable boundaries of race and nation, not just a debased version of independent men but an exotic tribe of their own. Sailors’ speech was distinct from the language of middle-class white people in New York. As a transnational community, sailors fashioned a new language in order to communicate across national and racial borders. By the seventeenth century, ship-logs show specific maritime phonetics that combined nautical English, the “sabir” of the Mediterranean, and a West African grammatical construction. Forged partially through the slave trade, the pidgin of sailor talk was tinged with racial ambiguity.38 American maritime trade had utilized a transnational community of sailors since the early eighteenth century, and by 1813, about one-fifth of sailors in the American merchant marine were foreigners (a proportion that only grew throughout the nineteenth century).39 Diversity existed within the American crews as enslaved and free black men, including the entire male black-Indian community of Martha’s Vineyard, sailed in the merchant marine.40 When the American Tract Society authors used sailors’ language, as they did often, they invoked sailors’ long history of commingling with other cultures and their connections with lower classes and the despised races of the Middle East and Africa. In their attempt to communicate with sailors, the American Tract Society compressed this wealth of racial, national, and historical variety into a highly stylized cartoon of buffoonish sailor speech. Sailors’ categorical otherness fascinated the evangelical reformers, but the racial and national ambiguity of sailors also posed a concrete threat to the new republic. Sailors’ proximity to ongoing revolutions made them potent symbols of disorder as well as actual participants in transnational solidarity. The merchant marine visited and spread the news of the French revolution, the Haitian revolution, and the great British mutinies of the Atlantic. Not all sailors endorsed these movements, but their circulation through the ideas and spaces of revolution tinged them all by association.41 And when sailors did endorse these social movements, they celebrated their revolutionary spirit publicly on the waterfronts of cities in the US.42 The most threatening aspect of sailors’ revolutionary associations, however, came from the transnational flows between rebellion in Saint-Domingue and the black populations along the eastern seaboard of the US. All sailors were tinged with an ambiguous racial otherness, but black sailors were the subjects of a more directed panic

Circulating Sin  189 because unlike racially indeterminate sailors, black sailors also mingled with middle-class black society in New York City. In the final section, I will describe how reformers created particular institutions of management to mitigate these foreign and domestic influences in the lives of black sailors.

Institutions for the Colored Sailor Sailing played a crucial role in black culture in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The maritime historian Jeffrey Bolster shows that for slaves in both the North and the South of the US, sailing, unlike field labor, created opportunities for prestige, a lack of surveillance, and the possibility of escape.43 Sailing was also one of the few trades open to free blacks, and as free black families found it difficult to acquire productive land, sailing became a crucial profession for free blacks in northeastern cities. Considering the high proportion of black sailors, it is thus unsurprising that reformers focused on “colored” sailors. But the moral panic around black sailors was not merely a subset of the general moral panic around sailors. It was also a way of conceptualizing dangers and solutions through bodies that were particularly potent symbols of unfreedom, circulation, and spirituality. In 1839, the ASFS built a boarding house for “Colored Seamen” following the same logic of managed homelessness that gave reformers so much hope for a Christianized world; with black sailors, however, reformers also worried about a multidirectional flow of influences and authority challenging their managerial strategies. The question of where sailors stayed while in port was a particularly fraught issue when reformers thought about black sailors because in cities like New York, the black culture of reform and uplift threatened the clarity of sailors’ affiliation with the working class. William P. Powell, a black reformer closely associated with the Anti-Slavery Society and the ASFS, spearheaded the effort to create separate boarding houses for black sailors. Powell advocated for black sailors tirelessly in both abolitionist and moral reform periodicals, and he constantly reminded his white friends that it was their special duty to “ameliorate the moral and social condition of colored seamen.” In the Sailor’s Home for “Colored Seamen,” Powell hoped to shape a place where he is surrounded with all the comforts of a well-­regulated temperance boarding house; here he is secure from all the temptations of those whose chief study is to administer to his depraved appetites, and plunge him deeper in the vortex of eternal ruin.44 Powell’s entreaties were in part an answer to the question of why black sailors needed their own home when all sailors were understood as

190  Dana Logan tinged with racial ambiguity. Reformers saw black sailors, unlike other sailors, as members of multiple domestic and foreign networks, and thus as potentially vulnerable to other moral structures. As historians of New York’s black population in the early republic have pointed out, a network of mutual benevolence societies provided relief and spiritual sustenance apart from the missions of white reformers.45 These societies, like the New York African Society for Mutual ­Relief founded in 1808, were often unchartered by the state legislature and promoted mutual reliance rather than an exterior-directed charity. Benevolence organizations such as the African Free School, set up by white reformers, were also reinvented by black participants into institutions run primarily by other black New Yorkers in order to serve their own internal goals. Historian Leslie Harris shows how these black societies became incubators for a black middle class, a group that increasingly saw the black working class as the subject of their reforming zeal.46 Sailors, with their prolonged absences and participation in a rowdy labor culture, thwarted black middle-class ideals. Yet, because it was difficult for black men to find employment in other trades, sailors’ income provided crucial support to free black families in the Northeast. The mission of respectability might not have been directed at the black working class directly—historian Erica Ball argues that the aspiring members of the middle class were talking to themselves in their promotion of ­respectability—but they certainly were espousing an ideal of a stable home, with a black father as the head of household that no sailor or his family could live up to.47 A stable black family with a male patriarch, Ball argues, served a distinct theory of liberation in which Northern free families would model the kind of autonomy their enslaved brethren were denied. Thus, the “Home for Colored Sailors” embodied the ideals of black reform, with the connotations of black respectability and its own strategy of liberation, just as much as it served the ideals of the white ASFS. Historian Jeffry Bolster points out that black sailors’ interest in connecting New York to another network of support through their travels to Haiti also made sailors “precarious pillars of the northern free black community.”48 Not only did many Haitians come to New York during the early republic, creating a transnational black population there, but also black sailors frequently sailed back and forth between Haiti and the US, spreading the news of Haiti as a symbol of freedom and potential emigration point. Historian Paul Gilje finds that as many as 200 French-speaking blacks in New York City, inspired by the Haitian Revolution, “rioted in front of Madame Volunbrun’s house on August 10, 1801 in opposition to her planned attempt to export her slaves to Virginia and prevent their manumission in New York.”49 Black rioters also directly used the threat of Haiti in Philadelphia, where newspapers reported that blacks were “damning the whites and saying they would shew them St. Domingo.”50 The potential of this alternative, and

Circulating Sin  191 revolutionary, form of mutual assistance and influence conflicted with not only the visions of white reformers but also the form of uplift espoused by middle-class black reformers such as Powell. 51 I elaborate these conflicts between working-class black sailors and black reformers such as Powell to show that white reformers panicking over sailors had special reasons to be worried about black sailors because of these multiple possibilities of influence and authority. Even if Powell was in charge of the Home for Colored Sailors, the white members of the ASFS were not content to leave the ministry of black sailors to interested black reformers. White reformers saw the black middle class and the increasingly transnational flows of black affiliation as alternatives to their own authority, and the wrong kind of reform was particularly dangerous to blacks because reformers believed black sailors were easily influenced. As one ASFS member argued, “Here are seventeen hundred to two thousand souls thronging the broad avenues to eternal death… who, humanly speaking, present the very best soil to sow the seed in, for they are not Gospel hardened.” Black sailors’ malleability, however, came with both danger and potential. The author continued, “the deep interest in their spiritual welfare … of their white fellow-travelers … would undoubtedly affect their best feelings—for they are exceedingly susceptible of kindness.”52 When H. S., a white member of the ASFS, mused in the Sailor’s Magazine about the challenges of ministering to black sailors and their families, he worried in particular about their oversensitive ears, made particularly vulnerable through illiteracy. He wrote, “it is a serious question whether the declamatory kind of preaching in our churches for colored people—with one or two exceptions—would greatly advance their spiritual interests, could their attendance even there be secured.”53 The black middle class, who supplied the majority of New York’s black ministers, provided the gospel for black sailors, but this “declamatory” preaching was a little too loud, too emotional, and too dramatic. Perhaps it was the influence of all those foreign networks that made declamatory preaching necessary and appealing to black sailors’ over-sensitized ears. The author H. S. described these ears as “eager ears—ears habituated, unhappily in too many instances, to very different sounds.”54 Black sailors thus could not be left to the free black ministers with their dangerous auditory networks. H. S. summarized the ASFS’s plans for black sailors: First; a permanent chapel expressly for themselves. A plain and economical structure, where the words of eternal life should be spoken by a qualified and devoted minister of Jehovah. A white man with a heart burning with love and yearning over these precious and exposed souls, not emulous for earthly fame, but desirous only to glorify his Master, would perhaps prove a more effective Pastor than a colored one.55

192  Dana Logan Even segregated into their own chapel and boardinghouse and tended to by a white minister, black sailors, H. S. argued, would still be in danger from the influences of the black middle class with their standards of respectability. The chapel and boardinghouse for black sailors would need to be near the docks, the worst part of town, and H. S. mused that perhaps the families of the sailors would “object to the Mariners’ Churches on the ground of being placed at the extreme end, which separate and distinctive location wounds their pride.”56 The respectability of black families threatened the mission, H. S. argued, because their interest in domesticity would limit the mission’s ability to keep the sailors’ chapel a truly sailor-focused endeavor. As with the separation of sexes in other sailor boardinghouses, wives and families destabilized the careful balance of sailors’ homelessness that the ASFS worked to achieve. Black sailors inspired a special panic in white reformers because black sailors seemed uniquely sensitive to competing influences. As vectors of both white ministry and black mutual aid, they embodied the dangers of transnational flows as the basis for domestic stability. Through this anxiety, white reformers recognized that black sailors were not quite as homeless as their white counterparts. Black sailors’ ties to possible homes—a new nation in Haiti or a free black network in northeastern cities with its own methods of support—made them less manageable as objects of reform. And the only thing worse than an unsaved sailor’s soul was a sailor’s soul saved by the wrong people. Black sailors also had a distinctive role in white reformers’ plan. Even as particularly vulnerable men, black sailors were worth the effort because black people in the antebellum white imagination also had a special capacity for religion. This idea pervaded The Sailor’s Magazine through stories of “pious colored sailors” who often appeared at the end of stories and reports as shining examples of the power of the Holy Spirit.57 Black sailors’ special capacity for holiness came from their experiences under slavery. One chaplain to the merchant marine explained that black sailors sometimes came from the South, where “a greater number was religious among the colored people, (including slaves and free negroes,) than there was among the white population,” a condition stemming from slaves’ particular need for spiritual freedom. The chaplain reported that black sailors had told him that, “among the slaves there was this impression, that, although they could not enjoy civil and political freedom, yet they could become spiritually free! With many, salvation was more precious than temporal freedom could be.”58 The idea that blacks had a special capacity for religion stemmed in part from what historian Curtis J. Evans calls “romantic racialists”—or white abolitionists who argued that “blacks could offer something to the nation that the stern Anglo Saxon lacked… Africans would contribute meekness and ­Christian grace to the improvement of the American character.”59

Circulating Sin  193 Eighteenth-­century missionaries and slave-owning whites promoted the discourse of a unique black capacity for religion, but Northern white abolitionists also spread the discourse through books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and we can see in the mission to sailors that heightened religiosity also made the black sailor a unique object of worry and celebration.60 As Evans points out, this view of blacks as especially religiously gifted became “the burden of black religion”—a burden that put them at the center of the ASFS’s management of local bodies for the sake of global expansion. Spiritual potency and spiritual vulnerability were two sides of the same coin, and this condition stemmed from the history of dependence through slavery. Thus, even more than other sailors, institutions such as the ASFS boardinghouses targeted black sailors in order to manage interstitial dependents as instrumental conduits of the national economy. The establishment of special boardinghouses for black sailors, however, points to reformers’ need to tightly manage black sailors at port in order to regulate their behavior abroad. To ensure that black sailors spread the gospel instead of revolution in the dangerous global networks of the merchant marine, boardinghouses in the ports of northeastern cities would need to satisfy some of these men’s desires for domesticity—warm baths, good food—while keeping them away from the more stable forms of home offered by local and transnational black affiliations. To white reformers in northeastern American cities, the world seemed both open to expansion and terrifyingly porous and the people who moved between boundaries of nations and racial affiliation became the center of that fear. Evangelical reformers in the nineteenth century, however, were incredibly optimistic about their ability to save the dangerous classes from themselves and thus simultaneously to bring about the global spread of Christianity. Sailors as instruments of influence allowed reformers to imagine a safe world with open borders, but in order to spin this particular tale about sailors, reformers rendered sailors’ bodies as particularly porous. Reformers thought about black sailors’ spirituality, in particular, as an open wound that could never be fully closed because the history of slavery made blacks hungry for spiritual freedom. These representations of sailors, of course, had nothing to do with the actual spiritual state of sailors or the types of homemaking sailors themselves pursued, but reformers’ fantasies did structure the institutions in which sailors received relief and aid, and thus the moral panic over sailors was more than mere ideology. The moral panic over sailors in the antebellum US produced boardinghouses, banks, and hospitals that reflected reformers’ visions of manageable flows of influence. Moral panics in the mid nineteenth-century US conjured up—both materially and ­imaginatively—visions of sailors as vessels of sin and faith, stabilizing the home they left behind through their drifting movement.

194  Dana Logan

Acknowledgments Thank you to the members of the Global Moral Panics Working group at IU for helping me find such a useful framework for thinking about the nineteenth century. In particular thank you to Alex Chambers for including me in the American Studies community at IU. I also appreciate the help of Elizabeth Dolphi, John McGlothlin, and Sonia Hazard who provided useful feedback on this chapter.

Notes 1 “A Word in Season.” “I want you to pray for me?” is a way of asking the cook to pray for him. 2 Literary historian Susan M. Ryan points out that benevolence as a keyword in cultural discourse and in governmental policy during the nineteenth century emphasized social responsibility and social difference simultaneously. The term, like its close relative “sentimentalism,” signified “familial bonds of responsibility and affection, through which other kinds of social responsibility might be understood.” Unlike sentimentalism, benevolence fueled the vast bureaucratic organizations that made up the “Benevolent Empire” and created transparent processes for determining “whom to aid and to what extent.” Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions, 17–19. 3 Kverndal, Seamen’s Missions, 17. 4 For an excellent historiography of nineteenth-century benevolence as a blend of charity, mission, and social reform, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 4. 5 Schendel and Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things, 2. 6 New York’s port was a key aspect of its economy and the force behind the city’s dominance within global markets. By the 1820s, New York had surpassed Boston and Philadelphia in imports and exports, thus becoming the largest port in the nation. With all these trade ships, the port also brought sailors. During the 1830s, around 30,000 sailors entered the port every year. Despite the boom in New York’s shipping industry, sailors remained members of the working class, following a larger trend of New York’s expanding income gap during the early republic. Morison, The Maritime History of ­Massachusetts, 227; Davis, Joshua Leavitt, 49; On the labor practices that kept sailors in poverty, see, Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 11–23; on the income gap in early republican New York City, see Stansell, City of Women, 6. 7 Scholars like Carroll Smith-Roseburg have argued that the Second Great Awakening and the new emphasis on free will within evangelical theology made evangelical benevolence societies optimistic about their ability to end poverty. See Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 8. An emerging middle class defined antebellum evangelicalism, but in cities like New York, the old elite families remained central figures of civil society and in particular benevolence societies. Thus, to see reformers as synonymous with middle class would miss the crucial role of established elites in the work of reform. See Wosh, Spreading the Word, 10–13. 8 “Seamen in the Port of New-York,” 121. 9 Christine Stansell shows that benevolence toward working women did not come with admiration or sense of camaraderie. Stansell, City of Women, 70–72. 10 The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 3, 116; “A Sailor’s Address to His Seafaring Companions,” 233.

Circulating Sin  195 11 Davis, Leavitt, 60. 12 Stansell, City of Women, 9–11. 13 For general summaries of reform and benevolence during the antebellum era, see Walters, American Reformers, 3–20. 14 Stansell, City of Women, 21, 172. 15 “To Seamen,” 292. 16 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 199. 17 Rediker, Between the Devil, 11–12; Lemisch, “Jack Tar,” 372. 18 “The Homeward Bound Ship,” 216. 19 S.W., “Home: A Story of Real Life,” 2. 20 See Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood. 21 Stansell, City of Women, 91. 22 No author, no title, Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8, 4. 23 “Review: The Conversion of Mariners Will Enlarge the Praises of Zion,” 285. 24 “Review: The Conversion of Mariners,” 284. 25 “Review: The Conversion of Mariners,” 285. 26 Rao, “Administering Entitlement,” 627–628. 27 Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 153–54. 28 Rao, “Administering Entitlement,” 628. 29 “Seamen’s Savings Banks,” 289. 30 Rao, “Administering Entitlement,” 632. 31 Rao, “Administering Entitlement,” 632. 32 Quayson and Arhin, Labour Migration, 1–8. 33 Hubbard, “Chronology of the Seamen's Cause in the Port of New York,” 373. 34 “Society for Promoting the Gospel Among Seamen in the Port of New-York: Annual Report,” 124. 35 “Society for Promoting the Gospel,” 124. 36 The American Tract Society created more tracts for sailors than they did for any other occupational group. Schantz, “Religious Tracts,” 445. 37 Various Authors, “Tom Starboard and Jack Halyard,” 6. 38 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 152–53. 39 Despite a law that was passed in 1917 to preserve a minimum number of spots for American sailors on every American merchant ship, most captains simply lied about their numbers. Morison, Maritime History, 108. 40 Bolster, Black Jack, 74, 165. 41 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 133; also for the role of sailors in transnational revolutionary movements, see, Scott, “Negroes in Foreign Bottoms,” 72. 42 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 133. 43 Bolster, Black Jacks, 11, 24. 4 4 Powell, “Coloured Sailor’s Home,” 121. 45 Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 86. 46 Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 133. 47 Ball, To Live an Antislavery Life, 6, 7, 84. 48 Bolster, Black Jacks, 158. 49 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 137. 50 Quoted in Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 137. 51 Bolster, Black Jacks, 145; Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 86; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 137. 52 H.S., “Colored Seamen,” 383. 53 H.S., “Colored Seamen,” 382. 54 H.S., “Colored Seamen,” 383.

196  Dana Logan 55 H.S., “Colored Seamen,” 382. 56 H.S., “Colored Seamen,” 383. 57 Diell, The Sailor’s Magazine 7, 5; “The Old Slip Prayer Meeting,” 89; “A Word in Season,” 156–57. 58 Damon, “Pious Colored Seamen,” 218. 59 Evans, The Burden of Black Religion, 19. 60 Evans, Burden of Black Religion, 24.

Bibliography Primary Sources Christian Herald and Seaman's Magazine 8 (May 1821): 4. “The Colored Sailor’s Home.” The Sailor’s Magazine 27 (June 1855): 297. “Colored Sailor’s Home.” The Sailor’s Magazine 28 (June 1856): 311. “Colored Sailors.” The Sailor’s Magazine 35 (March 1863): 200. “Home for Colored Seamen.” The Sailor’s Magazine 25 (1853): 297. “The Homeward Bound Ship.” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (March 1829): 216. “The Old Slip Prayer Meeting.” The Sailor’s Magazine 31 (November 1858): 88. “Review: The Conversion of Mariners Will Enlarge the Praises of Zion.” Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (September 1821): 285. “Sabbath in Havre.” Religious Magazine. 7 (January 1835): 141. The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 3 (December 1830): 116. “A Sailor’s Address to His Seafaring Companions—on the Interesting Voyage over the Ocean of Life to the Haven of Eternity.” The Sailor’s Magazine 8 (April 1839): 233. “The Salvation of Seamen is Difficult.” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 11 (March 1824): 126. “Seamen in the Port of New-York.” The Christian Herald and Seaman’s Magazine 8 (July 1821): 121. “To Seamen.” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 1 (June 1829): 292. “Seamen’s Savings Banks.” The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal 6 (May 1834): 289. “A Word in Season.” The Sailor’s Magazine 25 (January 1853): 156–57. Diell, John. The Sailor’s Magazine 7 (October 1834): 5. Damon, Samuel C. “Pious Colored Seamen.” The Sailor’s Magazine 20 (March 1848): 217–18. H.S. “Colored Seamen.” The Sailor’s Magazine 18 (August 1846): 382–83. Hubbard, L.P. “Chronology of the Seamen’s Cause in the Port of New York.” The Sailor’s Magazine 25 (August 1853): 373. Powell, William P. “Coloured Sailor’s Home.” Christian Advocate and Journal 24 (August 2 1849): 121. S.W., “Home: A Story of Real Life,” The Sailor’s Magazine 14 (September 1841): 2. Various Authors, “Tom Starboard and Jack Halyard: A Nautical Temperance Dialogue.” American Tract Society [18] 150 Nassau, NYC, (published after 1832 based on the dating of tracts by S.J. Wolfe, cataloger of the American Antiquarian Society), 6.

Circulating Sin  197 Secondary Sources Ball, Erica. To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Balogh, Brian A. A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jack: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Davis, Hugh. Joshua Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist. Baton Rouge, LA: ­Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Dorsey, Bruce. Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Evans, Curtis J. The Burden of Black Religion. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Foster, Charles I. An Errand of Mercy: the Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1960. Gilje, Paul A. Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Kverndal, Roald. Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1986. Lemisch, Jesse. “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 25 (July 1968): 371–407. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000. Morison, Samuel E. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860. ­Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941. Quayson, Ato, and Antonela Arhin. Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations: The Commodification of Illicit Flows. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2012. Rao, Gautham. “Administering Entitlement: Governance, Public Health Care, and the Early American State,” Law & Social Inquiry 37 (Summer, 2012): 627–56. Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Ryan, Susan M. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebelum Culture of Benevolence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Scott, Julius S. “‘Negroes in Foreign Bottoms’: Sailors, Slaves, and Communications.” In Origins of the Black Atlantic, edited by Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott. New York: Routledge, 2010.

198  Dana Logan Schantz, Mark S. “Religious Tracts, Evangelical Reform, and the Market Revolution in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Autumn 1997): 425–66. Schendel, Willem van, and Itty Abraham. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Religion and the Rise of the American City: the New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1986. Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, 1815–1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Wosh, Peter J. Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

10 Transnational Securityscapes Central American (Immigrant) Youth and the “Military Option” Elana Zilberg Preface Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, images of Salvadoran immigrant soldiers en route to Iraq began appearing with some frequency in the “Departamento 15” section of a leading Salvadoran national newspaper, La Prensa Gráfica. “Departamento 15” is a regular section of the paper devoted to coverage of the Salvadoran diaspora in the US and elsewhere.1 Coverage of the Iraq War itself also featured in the international section of La Prensa Gráfica, where it spilled over into national headlines. Despite the unpopularity of the “Gringo’s War” among S­ alvadorans, the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) government was quick to send Salvadoran troops to join G. W. Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing” and remained steadfast in its commitment as the rest of the coalition dwindled. 2 The image of the young Salvadoran immigrant dressed smartly in military uniform with the US flag in the background is an interesting extension and reworking of the heroic el hermano lejano (the distant brother), the entrepreneurial emigré who sends their hard-earned American dollars back to their family in El Salvador: a responsible individual, a loyal patriot, and a national savior. The Salvadoran immigrant soldier, then, is an image of double sacrifice: for the economic security of their native country and for the homeland security of their adopted country. As if this is not burden enough, the immigrant soldier performs yet more labor—balancing, but not erasing, the stigma of migrant illegality and immigrant youth criminality.

Introduction I begin with these images not to explore the circulation of these figures in Salvadoran media arenas or political imaginaries but because together, they conjure the overlapping transnational and global fields that enfold the moral panics I consider in this chapter. These panics rely on and highlight the intimate connections forged between the nation-states

200  Elana Zilberg of the US and El Salvador by the circulation of dollars, people, and ideas, traveling in both directions, with and without state sanction, 3 which I would call “transnational,” and the more far-reaching links among the US, Latin America, and the Middle East forged by fighting the “War on Terror,” which, because those links are greater in scope and scale, I would call “global.”4 I aim to bring into the same field of view the overlapping paths of the Central American immigrant solider in the US military and the Central American soldier fighting in Salvadoran battalions in George W. Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing.” My particular transnational lens hopes to reveal the competing, not-quite-resolving moral panics in which Salvadoran youth are alternately objects of fear and savior subjects. The background for this ironic dilemma involves the period between the wane of the Cold War and the ascendancy of the War on Terror, which was rife with transnational moral panics organized in large part around subaltern male youth and discourses of criminality. In the early 1990s, the so-called “transnational gang crisis” between the US and Central America began to dominate discussions of migration and crime in newspaper headlines and in policymaking bodies in both regions. The response from law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US was and continues to be an aggressive policy of policing, incarceration, deportation, and detention, what Juliet Stumpf terms “crimmigration.”5 This War on Crime was extended to Central America, first through the deportation of immigrant youth associated with gangs in the 1990s, then through the exportation of its zero tolerance policing strategies in the early 2000s, and finally through the development of transnational security agreements. Since 9/11, these same “dangerous brown men” have become a favored demographic for recruitment into the US military to fight in the War on Terror.6 Joining the armed forces—the “military option”—is marketed as a productive alternative to gang membership for young men in both the US and El Salvador. In this chapter, I take up the “military option” as a provocation: that one moral panic, namely, transnational youth gangs, can be solved with another, namely, a war against Islamic terrorists. Both panics revolve around “dangerous brown men,” the first, Latino and the second, ­Muslim.7 As Cacho notes, “‘illegality’ in immigration discourses has been reified as ‘Latino/a,’” and the “suspected terrorist” has been reified as Arab and Muslim. Both Latinos and Muslims are “recruited relationally to conceal the violences that U.S. systems of value direct towards its devalued and disposable others.”8 Just as “the terrorist and the patriot are not distant or oppositional entities, but ‘close cousins,’” so too are the gangster and the terrorist (whether guerilla or jihadi), and even the gangster and the soldier.9 What this means is that one trope cannot erase or displace another: I argue that the “military option” does not reliably rehabilitate young brown men because gangland rivalry and war making

Transnational Securityscapes  201 operate on a continuum along which the subaltern or surplus male body is recycled back and forth between systems of incarceration and militarization as well as detention and deportation.10 Rather than as discrete subjects, then, the gangster, terrorist, and soldier must be understood in dialectical relationship with one another, and with prisons and the military, equally interlocking systems. All three figures—gangster, terrorist, and soldier—are objects of and protagonists in the “securityscapes” spawned by the US military in combination with various law enforcement bodies responsible for policing and controlling subjects considered to be dangerous.11 Although these security agencies operate as a continuum, one or another invariably dominates at particular historical junctures. In the period under consideration in this chapter, militarization would seem to trump criminalization. This is true even within the police, as the line between the police and the military becomes increasingly blurred through the introduction of counterinsurgency tactics in gang abatement strategies and with the cooperation between Homeland Security and local police departments.12 This amplification of the military plays out with Latino immigrants in very particular ways. The split between the “good” and “bad” immigrant operates along two divergent paths: on the one hand, the illegal immigrant makes good through military recruitment and so is eligible for an adjustment in immigration status to documented, resident alien, or perhaps even citizen; on the other hand, the illegal immigrant is further criminalized by the intersection of immigration and criminal law, and the shifting of immigration enforcement to the office of Homeland Security. Latino immigrants are simultaneously drawn into the nation-state through military recruitment and banished from it through deportation. This Janus-faced linkage is also at work in the US in schools in low-­ income Latino neighborhoods, where both the police and the military have become integral forces in public education. Both are beholden to and work to reproduce a shared hegemonic ideal of masculinity to flex the nation’s muscles at home or abroad. This entanglement of security industries through the policing and incarceration of Latino (immigrant) youth (“the school-to-prison pipeline”), on the one hand, and the recruitment of the same population into the military (“the school-to-­military pipeline”), on the other, is clearly an important mechanism for social reproduction. The military has long been represented and perceived as a path to political and cultural citizenship in both the US and Latin America for racialized others, native or immigrant. In this sense, the War on ­Terror should not be viewed as simply “a series of military interventions and transnational security measures; it also entails a cultural project that seeks to remake the terms of belonging, legality, and otherness.”13 Racial minorities, as well as documented and undocumented immigrants have fought on behalf of the US in every war since the American Revolution,

202  Elana Zilberg whether under conditions of slavery, colonization, occupation, or other forms of marginalization. The military has also been an important site for civil rights struggles by its nonwhite members protesting against ongoing racism and classism, despite their service to the nation-state.14 More recently, both its female and homosexual members have challenged the patriarchal and heteronormative power structure of the military.15 Indeed, Bhattacharyya goes on to note that the War on Terror operates through the deployment of ideas of both race and sexuality.16 While subaltern men are the focus of this chapter due to my concern with a particular transnational moral panic, women’s bodies and labor, as well as ideologies of masculinity and femininity, are also central to imperialist and militaristic projects.17 The case of Latino (immigrant) and Central American men in the military should, therefore, be understood within particular geopolitical hierarchies and the context of long and ongoing histories of empire, race, gender, marginalization, and contestation.

The Immigrant Soldier While Latinos have served the military interests of the US from the inception of the nation, they have done so in a new way after 9/11. Since then, Latino immigrants and the children of Latino immigrants have become particularly prime targets for recruitment to fight in the War on Terror. Military recruiters have sought out Latinos at about twice their rate in the general population and have mounted intensive campaigns in Latino schools and neighborhoods.18 Once again, immigrants and their children have been called upon to fill jobs that other “Americans” are not filling—in this case, the patriotic duty to defend the homeland. In the military, Latinos tend to fill its lowest ranks; serve disproportionately on the frontlines; and suffer the second-highest death rate by group, even though they are the third-largest racial group in the military.19 In exchange, Latinos have been offered fast tracks to legalization and/or naturalization. In July 2000, George W. Bush offered a fast track to citizenship for immigrants and green card holders in exchange for enlisting in the military. These provisions were made into law with the Armed Forces Naturalization Act of 2003. 20 The coincidence of the introduction of these bills after 9/11 and alongside the Iraq invasion is telling. On a related front, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) is the only other component of immigration reform to have gained any traction since the Bush administration—­ controversial as it is now. The DREAM Act was intended to break the barriers to higher education for undocumented immigrants. 21 The act was first introduced in 2001 but floundered until the “military option” was added to its original focus on education and when it was attached to the 2008 Department of Defense (DOD) authorization bill (S2919). The

Transnational Securityscapes  203 DREAM Act’s military service component feeds into the US military’s intense focus on recruitment in Latino schools and neighborhoods, and many Latino activists argue that it is a de facto military draft for Latino youth. These efforts to target first- and one-and-a-half-generation ­A mericans of Latin American origin gained considerable momentum after September 11, 2001, when the US military experienced a crisis in meeting its recruitment quotas. The DREAM Act’s new emphasis on the military was a logical extension of what activists point to as the militarization of schools in low-­ income and immigrant neighborhoods through Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs alongside an increased presence of military recruiters, as the chapter by Moyd, Clarke, and Plant in this volume details. 22 Teachers are trained to advise their students about career opportunities in the military and the Troops to Teachers (TTT) program, a collaboration of the DOD and the Department of Education in which military veterans are given a six-week crash course before being placed in classrooms as teachers. All these initiatives expose children to military values while they are still young, instilling them as a collective common sense. The military’s Strategic Partnership Plan for 2002–2007 takes full advantage of the nation’s “dysfunctional public school system” and increasing barriers to higher education in state universities. The plan targets college-age populations in weak labor markets. While affirmative action may be eroding in higher education, it is alive and well in the military. 23

Dying to be American The death of the immigrant soldier Marine Lance Corporal José Antonio Gutiérrez served as an important political text for proponents of and opponents to military recruitment in Latino communities. Corporal Gutiérrez was the first US marine to be killed in the Iraq War. 24 He died in “friendly fire” on March 21, 2003, the first day of the US ­military invasion. Gutiérrez was a Guatemalan immigrant who grew up as an orphan on the streets of Guatemala City. In 1988, at the age of 14, Gutiérrez came to the US as an undocumented immigrant and subsequently legalized his status as a minor through the foster care system. He later joined the marines and was, upon his death, awarded a purple heart, granted posthumous citizenship, and honored as a true American patriot. He became an iconic figure for both those advocating for the increased enrollment of immigrants in the military and those championing the legalization and naturalization of immigrants. Activists, journalists, and scholars have remarked eloquently on the macabre ironies that the Latino immigrant soldier—be s/he documented or undocumented, alive or dead—poses for questions of citizenship and belonging. 25 On its face, the voluntary enlistment by immigrants is a

204  Elana Zilberg means for them to prove their patriotism, to show that they too are real Americans. 26 The immigrant soldier strives to achieve the civic ideal of the citizen-soldier. Military service becomes discursively linked to citizenship, and militarism, like citizenship, is a powerful technology of governance and an effective instrument of self-governance. 27 But as Amaya notes, the notion of an all-volunteer force is “at best, a lazy idea, if not an outright fantasy which obscures the racialization of the military.”28 The recruitment of Latino immigrants is, in effect, a poverty draft. 29 Cacho sees posthumous citizenship as a “technology of necro­ power,” while Amaya sees it as an instrument of liberalism’s false promise of equality for all.30 While many view the military as a path to inclusion, nativists and anti-immigrant groups do not see a place for immigrants in the military. As Jorge Mariscal notes, “nativists and anti-immigrant groups see the recruitment of immigrants into the military as the creation of a fifth column of potential enemies within the U.S. military.”31 For these groups, US dependence on a “volunteer” force raises the specter of dangerous communities of color and immigrants threatening to take over the ultimate defender of US national security. To bolster their claims and fears, anti-immigrant groups point to overly aggressive recruitment officers and questionable recruitment practices. Anxious to meet their monthly quotas, recruitment officers have been found pressuring judges to give immigrants facing criminal charges the option of joining the military as an alternative to incarceration, and probation officers have been lobbied to support early probation terminations in order to facilitate military recruitment. “Moral waivers,” a tool by which ex-felons who join the army are forgiven for their criminal conduct, expanded dramatically after 2003. Although this critique comes from a decidedly conservative position, it reinforces the arguments I made earlier. Another worry about immigrants in the military comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has reported increased gang activity and crime in the military, although miniscule in relation to other criminal activity there. The FBI apparently believes that while gang members may enlist to escape their current “lifestyle” (though there are many things in common between gang and military life), 32 they may also join up “to receive weapons, combat and convoy support training; to obtain access to weapons and explosives.” The FBI report goes on to suggest that military children are vulnerable to recruitment by gangs because of the “transient nature of their lives” and feelings of isolation. Rather than as alternative, the military is presented here as fertile ground for gang activity.33 Even in this report, generated in a way that contributes to the criminalization of immigrants, it seems that militarization trumps criminalization. Undeniably clear overall, regardless, is the intimate connections between the two processes.

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The Coalition of the Most “Willing” The Latino immigrant soldier finds a counterpart in the Central American soldier fighting the same war. Both subjects are produced by the “transnational militarization of youth.”34 Indeed, the history of Marine Lance Corporal Gutiérrez from “no card” to “green card” to “fallen American” soldier must be placed in the context of the longstanding regional political structure and relationship between Latin America and the US. The image—be it heroic or abject—of the immigrant soldier, José ­A ntonio Gutiérrez, meets its familiar in the image of the Salvadoran soldier Natividad de Jesús Méndez Ramos, who was the first Salvadoran soldier in the Coalition to die in combat while stationed in Iraq. Natividad, or “Tivito,” was from Guayamango, a remote mountain village in El Salvador’s Ahuachapan Province, close to the Guatemalan border. He died on April 4, 2004 at the age of 20 in Najaf when his 16-­member squad “ran out of ammunition while fighting Iraqi insurgents, and were forced to wield knives.”35 His mother, Herminia Ramos, points to the tragic irony of her son’s death in Iraq. Speaking of the 12-year USfunded ­Salvadoran civil war, in which an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans died, she says, “I got through our war (my emphasis) without losing any family … and now my son was sent to fight in someone else’s war.”36 Of course, the Salvadoran civil war was also the US’s war against the Soviet Union and communism. Moreover, this was not the first time the US military had recruited Central American soldiers to its own cause and to fight “terrorists.” The School of the Americas is a case in point. There the US army trained more than 60,000 soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America. Many of the graduates of these courses were directly involved in gross human rights violations against their perceived enemies with impunity. During the Salvadoran civil war, US intervention thoroughly penetrated and transformed Salvadoran society and was crucial to the right wing government and the ruling party ARENA’s ability to stave off a triumph by the leftist revolutionary force, the FMLN. The strategy used by the US of low-intensity warfare, developed in the wake of the defeats in Korea and Vietnam, involved a counterinsurgency war by Salvadoran proxy under the guidance of the US military rather than through the direct introduction of troops. 37 The US penetrated foreign states further through police training, effectively turning foreign police into “appendages of U.S. foreign policy.”38 The US Office of Public Safety (OPS), for instance, hired municipal and state police officers to instruct foreign police in counterinsurgency strategies, “steering policing across domestic-foreign [and] civilian-military” divides. 39 Indeed the ARENA government painted the deployment of the Salvadoran Cuscatlan Batallion in Iraq as a way to acknowledge US support in “helping stop the civil war,” but behind the scenes, government

206  Elana Zilberg officials “point[ed] to all the benefits they believe[d] they [were] receiving from Washington as a result of their assistance, even as the Bush administration insist[ed] that it [was] not giving El Salvador special favors for its troop presence.” In a New York Times interview, Herrarte Rivas, a retired Salvadoran colonel turned center-right politician who accompanied a government delegation to the troops explained, “We’re doing this to help the Iraqis but we’re also doing this for our own people... The president can’t say that but that’s why we’re doing it.”40 As the Times article notes, Herrarte Rivas pointed to the Bush administration’s extension of temporary protected status for Salvadorans living in the US, despite strong anti-immigrant sentiment in that country, as evidence of the effectiveness of the Salvadoran government’s strategy. He also cited the $461 million in antipoverty funds that El Salvador was awarded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an American foreign aid agency, as another outgrowth of the war effort. By the mid 2000s, the tiny isthmus of El Salvador was also once again among the leading recipients of US military largesse. The American Dream was also extended to Iraq through yet another Salvadoran labor migration, via jobs with American private security companies in Iraq. Triple Canopy and Blackwater actively recruited experienced soldiers from the civil war and current and poorly paid police officers in the Salvadoran National Civil Police.41 Tellingly, Bush’s War on Terror drew directly upon US Latin American policy up through the Cold War. El Salvador, which provided a school for the US to execute imperial violence through proxies, is an iconic case of how Latin America has long served, in Greg Grandin’s terms, as a “workshop of empire.”42 It was no coincidence then that the “Salvador Option”—the use of local paramilitary forces, otherwise known as death squads—was proposed by Cheney as a successful model on which to base counterinsurgency operations in Iraq after direct intervention by US troops had failed.43 El Salvador had reentered the “global military gift-economy” with a vengeance unseen since its civil war”44 and was, once again, part and parcel of the US “protection racket.”45 A proposal for crime prevention put forth by the outgoing Salvadoran president, Nelson Funes, echoes the disciplinary logic of the DREAM Act and the JROTC programs in US junior high and high schools. Funes called for military training and service for several thousand “at risk” youth between the ages of 16 and 18. Youth would stay in “ ­ Citizen Training Centers” set up and run by the army. There they would receive six months training in military discipline and physical fitness but without weapons. The stated goals of the program were to promote “social integration,” to harness “the productive potential of youth” and to keep youth “out of the reach of criminal groups.”46 This turn is further bolstered by the growing incorporation of the military into zero tolerance policing projects, only a decade or so after hard won post-civil

Transnational Securityscapes  207 war reforms separated police from military functions and created the National Civil Police (PNC) (my emphasis).47 Indeed, the post-war demise of the soldier (Salvadoran Armed Forces) and ascendance of the cop (National Civil Police) has, since 2003, been notably reversed. If anything, the failure of the Salvadoran police to contain “gang crime” led to an emasculated image of a cop too frightened to enter certain zones of marginality. The soldier was, initially, brought back as a companion to the police officer, to protect him as he performed his duties. The soldier has since taken over many policing functions, and the military is seen, once again, as the legitimate enforcer of national security—abroad and at home.

Treacherous Contracts The figures of the Latino immigrant soldier Guitiérrez and the Salvadoran soldier Mendez, although absorbed into the plots of the US and Salvadoran regimes, respectively, also have the potential to unleash powerful transnational, indeed global, critiques of the securityscapes in which the two fallen soldiers are embedded (one is tempted to say “buried”). Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellions of Staff Sergeant Camilio Mejía, the memoir of a former staff sergeant in the US military who was deployed to Iraq, offers us a particularly generative view of the transnational dimensions of these securityscapes. Mejía was the first combat veteran to publicly refuse to redeploy to Iraq. He grew up in Nicaragua and Costa Rica before moving to Miami in 1994. Whereas Guitiérrez was Guatemalan, orphaned and undocumented, Mejía came from a family prominent in the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution—a revolution one might argue was fought on behalf of children such as Guitiérrez. How could someone grow up in the midst of a staunchly anti-­imperialist milieu only to participate in the US invasion of Iraq? Tellingly, Mejía’s 2007 memoir begins neither in Iraq nor in the US. It starts rather in Managua, Nicaragua, in the 1970s, with his father’s and mother’s participation in the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), the main revolutionary force fighting to bring an end to the ­Somoza dictatorship. The FSLN, Mejía notes, “took its name from General Sandino, who fought against the US Marine occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and 1930s, and who was assassinated by General Anastasio Somoza, [then] head of the National Guard in 1936.”48 Mejía grew up as a “privileged child of the revolution” under the Sandinista regime, lived in the best neighborhoods, and went to the best schools. But upon moving to the US with his mother and brother, Mejía became just another Latino immigrant (albeit documented) struggling to get ahead, working in a fast food restaurant by day and going to high school at night. His mother worked as a supermarket cashier.49 Not long after Mejía had begun working his way through community college, the

208  Elana Zilberg federal government withdrew his financial aid on the grounds that he was earning too much at what he describes as his “dead end job” in the low wage service sector. In 1995, over his family’s objections, Mejía signed what he now calls a “treacherous contract with the [US] military” in exchange for financial stability, college tuition and a means through which to “claim [his] place in the world.” At the end of his three-year term of active service, Mejía was taken aback to learn that he was in fact committed to a minimum of eight years. Those eight years were due to end in May, 2003. But earlier that same year, facing a manpower shortage in the military, Congress passed a “stop-loss order” that would extend his term until 2031. Given veterans’ testimonies and academic research, it seems credible to surmise that Mejía had been misled by the army recruiters who wooed and signed him up for service. His three years stretched into eight and then 36 years. The unfathomably long extension suggested, as Dick Cheney described it, that we had entered a permanent state of war. 50 As Mejía put it, “two and half months later I found myself in the Middle East participating in the invasion of Iraq.”51 The irony of Mejía’s deployment with US occupying forces in Iraq was certainly not lost on Mejía, who draws vivid parallels between the 1979 “TV footage of the toppling of the Somoza statue and the toppling statue of Sadam H ­ ussein in Baghdad some twenty four years later.”52 Driving through the streets of Ramadi, trailed by Iraqi children, Mejía writes that he felt as if he were driving through Nicaragua where he would equally have been pursued by “bare foot children with skinny bodies and dirty weather beaten faces... fighting for the opportunity to wipe windshields... and [to watch] cars.” For Mejía, these were the “same children” for whom his family had fought in the Sandinista revolution. 53 He became increasingly uncomfortable with his role in what he came to see as a “morally indefensible” war and an “imperial occupation.” Haunted by his platoon’s abusive treatment of Iraqis and “collective acts of sadism” which he would later describe as “war crimes,” Mejía refused to be redeployed to Iraq after a two-week R & R period in Miami. Despite the military’s own regulations that legal permanent residents may not serve in the army for longer than eight years, and a Congressional order specifically ordering the military to release him, Mejía was eventually court-martialed and sentenced to nine months in a military prison. Mejía’s prolonged struggle to clear his name and to win conscientious objector status opened the path for others in the military to follow his path. Mejía became the first executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War. As José Vasquez, who succeeded Mejía as director, explained, “[Camilo’s] story was very compelling and I saw myself in him.” Like Mejía, Vásquez came to identify with Iraqis, particularly after the horror of Abu Ghraib was exposed. 54 Vásquez recognized himself in Mejía, and as an accomplice to US imperialism.

Transnational Securityscapes  209 Mejía’s incarceration places the Latino (immigrant) soldier and the Salvadoran soldier in the fuller light of the historical day and calls into question the fundamental premise behind the “military option” as a viable policy solution to the so-called “transnational gang crisis”—be it as an alternative occupation or as part of an integrated strategy between police, immigration enforcement and the military. All three soldiers— immigrant, Central American or gang—are products of and protagonists within complex and interlocking securityscapes through and in which both the US and Central America have long been linked and complicit.

In/Exclusions Laclau and Mouffe have argued that the hegemonic power of state discourses of crime lies in the process of exclusion.55 For immigrants, taking the “military option” is an appeal for inclusion in the nation-state. Ironically, relative to the prison, the military here stands for the “ameliorative” rather than the “penitential state” inasmuch as it offers a way out  of poverty, criminalization and marginalization—though not violence.56 Gang membership, on the other hand, marks a radical exclusion. The exclusion of gang members operates on several fronts. First, gangs are produced in great part as a response to social marginalization. 57 Their members mark their bodies with signs of this exclusion from society. (These, of course, are also marks of belonging in the gang). Convicted of a gang-related crime, the immigrant, documented or undocumented, becomes a “criminal alien,” automatically expelled from the nation-state upon completion of his prison sentence. Upon arrival in his country of origin he again faces social marginalization and is quickly drawn back into a life of violence, whether victimizer, victim, or both. If, again, he flees north, and if again recaptured, he finds himself serving yet another prison sentence, at the end of which he is again deported to a country which itself has adopted US zero tolerance strategies and then some. 58 This cycle of radical exclusion from two nation-states is what Agamben might recognize as the reduction of political life (citizenship) to bare life (the body). The “criminal deportee” exists in a “state of exception” which allows states to suspend the law for particular populations (“illegal immigrants,” “criminal deportees” and “terrorists”) and thereby “physically eliminate whole categories of people … who cannot be integrated into the political system.”59 The deportee, however, provides a cautionary tale to the vast majority of undocumented immigrants, who are not “physically excluded” from the nation state. Rather they are “socially included but under imposed conditions of enforcement and protracted vulnerability” to exploitation and the ever present threat of deportation.60 This “inclusion” is further compromised by an “erasure of legal personhood” where migrants are physically present but legally invisible.61 As Benjamin noted,

210  Elana Zilberg “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”62 The state of exception rather than a measure of emergency operates as the rule for undocumented immigrants, and as such serves as an effective “technique of governance.”63 The military, on the other hand, promises immigrants full membership in the nation-state—at least on the surface of things. Immigrants are recruited into the nation-state via military service. As members of the armed forces, they achieve citizenship of the highest order as “citizen-­ soldiers.” This is not only true for immigrants to the US but in Latin American states in relation to their racial others, often indigenous people. As Lesley Gill and Andrew Canessa have explored in the Bolivian case, for indigenous Bolivians, mandatory conscription operates as an “effective system of incorporation, co-optation, and political control” by the state, on the one hand, and as means for indigenous men to “challenge their exclusion from full participation in Bolivian society,” on the other.64 An example from literature is Longoria, the retired sergeant from the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army in Hector Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier, a marvelous composite of poor Central American men, many of them indigenous, for whom the military was a way to better themselves and to become men of accomplishment. Military service is the most important prerequisite for the development of successful subaltern manhood, because it signifies the rights to power and citizenship [and] a dignified sense of masculinity that serves as a counterpoint to the degradation experienced from more dominant males and an economic system that assigns them to the least desirable occupations.65 While citizenship is closely conjoined with military service as a form of governance, citizenship nonetheless comes with a set of “political mechanisms intended to control and regulate the level, type, and range of societal membership.”66 In the U.S, the legal rights gained through citizenship by Latino immigrants are undermined by “cultural understandings of citizenship” as well as the “disconnect between the promise of democracy and equality and the lived experience of working class people of color in the U.S.”67 Mejía’s example makes the case plainly. First he is misled into believing that the contract he signed stipulated a three-year commitment to the military. The three years turned into eight and the eight, somewhat incredulously, into 36 years. If this is inclusion, then, it is an enforced inclusion that gives truth to the lie of a voluntary force. Mejía found himself imprisoned in the military against his will and despite his rights as an immigrant under the military’s own regulations. After a court-­martial, Mejía was literally imprisoned for nine months in a military prison.

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Conclusion In The Male Body at War, Christina Jarvis argues that the Great Depression took an enormous toll on American men’s ability to prove their manhood. In order to respond to the rapid and full-scale mobilization demanded by World War II, the US had to reassert its “sense of itself as a masculine nation.”68 The state had to reconstruct and maintain a ­“coherent and strongly gendered body politic” around a hegemonic militarized masculinity in order to “flex its muscles abroad.”69 This masculine ideal was later interrupted with the emasculated image of the physically and psychologically wounded Vietnam veteran and the defeated nation. The missions to reassert American military might and restore the hegemony of a militarized masculinity, were very much at the center of both the Reagan and Bush (W) regimes, and their respective projects, the New Cold War with Latin America and the global War on Terror. Militarization and securitization go a long way in enabling these state and global projects. Not unlike the young Algerian soldier saluting the French flag discussed in Barthes’s well-known essay, “Myth Today,” both the Central American immigrant and Salvadoran soldier fighting in the War on ­Terror—as members of the US or Salvadoran military—become “accomplice[s] of a concept which comes to them fully armed.”70 In this sense, the ideology of “choice” that undergirds both the participation of Latino (immigrant) youth in the US’s “all-volunteer force,” and the Salvadoran state’s participation in the “Coalition of the Willing,” brings the intersection of neoliberal and imperial projects into view. On the one hand, the immigrant soldier is the ideal neoliberal subject whose rights to citizenship only accrue through the fulfillment of particular responsibilities. On the other hand, the Salvadoran soldier’s deployment in Iraq is the perfect sign of the neo-imperial relationship between the US and El Salvador. Both the “military option” and the language of war, or what Catherine Lutz terms “the military normal,” have dominated longstanding regional political structures and patterns between Latin America and the US.71 Indeed, the “transnational youth gang crisis” emerges precisely at the nexus of all of these wars in and between the US and El Salvador: The US-funded Salvadoran Civil War fought within the paradigm of the Cold War, the War on Crime fought within the paradigm of the War on Drugs as it combines with the War on Immigrants in the US, and finally the War on Terror.72 War making and its attendant militarized masculinities may well be the only viable path to a modicum of economic security and membership in global society for impoverished (male) youth and underdeveloped nations, but it does not reduce violence, or for that matter, migration and refugee flight. Moreover, far from arising in the Third World and threatening the First, these various “threats” must be

212  Elana Zilberg understood in their full transnational and global contexts, not the least of which is US intervention. Finally, the rubrics of transnational and global moral panics are helpful here in thinking through how the intersection of the various wars on the poor, immigrants, gangs, drugs and terror (each of which rely on the production of crises) works to criminalize young subaltern men, and to expand the punitive and militaristic state. Rather than replace each other, these panics feed off each other; they sometimes take turns as dominant framework but invariably operate simultaneously and even in concert with one another. The substitution of one panic for another solves neither, though it certainly helps to obscure the origins of both. As I argued earlier, the gang member and the soldier are not discrete subjects but must be understood in a dialectical relationship to one another, prisons, and the military as interlocking systems. Moreover, to alternate between gangster or terrorist as folk devil or savage other du jour does nothing to dislodge any of the conditions of their production. Instead, transnational and global moral panics combine to work very effectively in the maintenance of state power and the production of difference and inequality in and between the Americas through the reproduction of militarized masculinities, be they gangster or soldier. And in so doing, contribute to the reproduction of the very thing they fear.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Luis Plascencia, Nancy Postero, Pablo Piccato, Veronica Schild, Micol Seigel, Susan Lepselter and the anonymous reviewers of this volume for their helpful comments on this chapter.

Notes 1 As with so many countries in the region, El Salvador is highly dependent on remittances derived from immigrant labor abroad. Nearly one-fifth of the population fled during the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992), most of whom came to the US. As Cecilia Rivas notes in her work, “Departamento 15” re-spatializes El Salvador by creating a transnational “fifteenth department,” a complement to the country’s 14 departments or states (Rivas, Salvadoran Imaginaries, 7). In so doing, it attempts to establish itself as a “crucial space for shaping citizenship” (79) in a highly transnationalized moment. 2 Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, the only other Latin American countries to participate in the coalition, withdrew their troops in 2004. 3 See Zilberg, Space of Detention and Coutin, Nation of Emigrants, among many others. 4 I do not use the term “postcolonial” given that the US relationship to both regions, Latin America and the Middle East, is better described as “imperialistic” and because contemporary US relations in these regions can hardly be termed “postimperialistic.” 5 Stumpf, “The Crimmigration Crisis.”

Transnational Securityscapes  213 6 Battacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men. Battacharyya employs this term to talk about moral panics surrounding Muslim men, but I find it equally fitting for the Latino and Central American men who are perceived as a national and transnational threat. 7 Ibid. 8 Cacho, Social Death, 98–99. 9 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 38; Zilberg, “Gangster in Guerilla Face.” 10 Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”; Cowen and Siciliano, “Surplus Masculinities and Security.” 11 See Gusterson, People of the Bomb and Weldes et al., Cultures of Insecurity. The “securityscape” is Hugh Gusterson’s friendly amendment to Appadurai’s globalscapes. As per Weldes et al.’s discussion of the term, the securityscape has been deployed to demonstrate how national security policy and militarism are at the center of both local and transnational life and to reveal how US imperialism has been the unmarked category in security studies—­ the traditional domain of international relations and political science. I extend this concept to include patterns of circulation that result from the efforts of states to police and control the mobility of surplus or redundant populations, be it in the US or Central America, as well as the transnational security arrangements between states.   Just as our understanding of globalization is enhanced by attending to the effects of militarism and policing, discussions of securityscapes should be attentive to global processes spawned by neoliberalism and market logics. The alarm surrounding the body of subaltern male youth has done much to grow the economy (Gilmore, Golden Gulag). Indeed, the military and the larger security industry are deeply dependent on these “surplus masculinities” as both the object of security and the labor source for security work (Cowen and Siciliano, “Surplus Masculinities and Securities”). Transnational and global moral panics animate these “neoliberal securityscapes.” 12 See Manwaring, “Street Gangs”; Wilson and Sullivan, “On Gang, Crime and Terrorism”; and Zilberg, Space of Detention. 13 Mahajan, “The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism”; quote from Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men. 14 Levy, “Militarizing Inequality”; Mariscal, Atzlan and Vietnam; VelezIbañez, “The U.S. Military and the Latino Population.” 15 See Puar for a discussion of how the recognition of gay rights by the military has given rise to a “homonationalism” where homosexuality comes under “the purview of normative patriotism, incorporating aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the normalized nation” (Terrorist Assemblages, 46). See Mhahjan for a discussion of how the inclusion of women has, in the context of the War on Terror, “served as evidence of the civilizational progress achieved beyond the Muslim world” (“The New Crusade,” 7), and the ways in which feminism has been “misused” as an instrument of foreign policy (Ibid., 18–45). In both cases, particular kinds of otherness are embraced but within the “‘us-versus-them’ rhetoric of U.S. patriotism” and imperialism (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 46). 16 Bhattacharyya, Dangerous Brown Men, 4. 17 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 9. 18 Mariscal, “Homeland Security,” 46. 19 Gonzalez, Militarizing Culture. See Levy for a discussion of how the military reproduces the inequities in civil social structures. Inequality is built into the structure of the military by virtue of the differences between frontline and rear-line units, elite and non-elite combat troops. This subordination and domination may be transmitted back to civil society. In this sense, while subordinated groups may achieve a modicum of social mobility through the

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

military, it is a case of “going up a downward escalator” (“Militarizing Inequity,” 873–79, 898). The qualifying time to apply for citizenship was reduced from three years to one year for members of the military. The DREAM Act would permit certain undocumented immigrant students who have grown up in the US to apply for temporary legal status and ­eventually obtain permanent legal status and become eligible for US citizenship if they go to college or serve in the US military. The Act would also eliminate a federal provision that penalizes states that provide in-state tuition without regard to immigration status. Advocates argue that, if enacted, the DREAM Act would have a life-changing impact on the students who qualify, dramatically increasing their average future earnings—and consequently the amount of taxes they would pay—while significantly reducing criminal justice and social services costs to taxpayers. While the DREAM has not passed, Obama's executive order Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has been in effect since 2012. While not granting a path to legalization and citizenship, DACA temporarily suspends the deportation of undocumented immigrant youth who were brought to the US as children, meet certain education requirements, and have not been convicted of certain crimes or otherwise pose a safety threat. It also allows the youth to apply for work permits. Pérez, “Discipline and Citizenship” and “Hispanic Values, Military Values.” Mariscal, “Homeland Security,” 45–49. The first three soldiers killed in the Iraq War were all Latino (Amaya, “ ­ Dying American”). Amaya, “Dying American”; Lovato, “The War for Latinos”; Mariscal, “Homeland Security”; Pérez, “Discipline and Citizenship”; Plascencia, “Citizenship through Veteranship”; Cacho, Social Death. Mariscal, “Homeland Security,” 43. Amaya, “Dying American,” 16. Amaya, “Dying American.” Halbfinger and Holmes, “Military Mirror”; Moskos, “A New Concept of the Citizen-Soldier”; Amaya, ”Dying American”; and Cowan and Siciliano, “Surplus Masculinities.” Cacho, Social Death, 110; Amaya, “Dying American.” Mariscal, “Immigration and Military Enlistment,” 361. While the military may serve as an alternative to gang life, there are also significant convergences. Both tend toward hyper-aggressive notions of masculinity that demean women. Gang members talk about gang membership and prisons in terms often used to describe the virtues of military service. Both the military and the gang are important disciplinary forces that teach respect, obedience, and hierarchy. Federal Bureau of Intelligence. “(U) [Unclassified] Gang-Related Activity.” Mariscal, “Homeland Security,” 363. Wheeler, “Iraq War Comes Home to El Salvador.” Lacey, “Salvadoran’s Death in Iraq Leaves a Mother Fuming.” Gill, School of the Americas; Robinson, Transnational Conflicts; Grandin, Empire’s Workshop; Zilberg, Space of Detention. Huggins, Political Policing, 2. Seigel “Objects of Police History,” 152. See also Caldeira, City of Walls for a discussion of this complex interplay between military and civil police in post-authoritarian Brazil. Lacey, “Salvadoran’s Death in Iraq Leave a Mother Fuming.”

Transnational Securityscapes  215 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

Harman, “Firms Tap Latin Americans for Iraq.” Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop; Lomas, “The War Cut Out My Tongue.” Klima, The Funeral Casino. Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime;” Stanley, “Protectors or Perpetrators?” Huggins, Political Policing, Zilberg, Space of Detention. Amaya, “Dying American.” Zilberg, Space of Detention. Mejía, Road from Ar Ramadi, 3. Mejía, Road from Ar Ramadi, 308. Sterngold, “Cheney’s grim vision”; Joyner, “How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology.” Mejía, Road from Ar Ramadi, 18. Mejía, Road from Ar Ramadi, 9. The analogy, of course, breaks down in terms of where the US stood vis-à-vis the demise of these respective statues, although both dictators had enjoyed the backing of the US. While the US government eventually turned on its former ally in Iraq, it remained loyal to Somoza, quickly launching a counterinsurgency offensive against the Sandinista regime by illegally funding the CONTRA war and imposing severe sanctions on Nicaragua. Mejía, Road from Ar Ramadi, prologue. Oral presentation at American Anthropological Association meetings, Philadelphia, December 6, 2009. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Schild, “Care and Punishment in Latin America.” Vigil, Barrio Gangs. Zilberg, “Gangster in Guerilla Face.” Agamben, State of Exception. De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” 429. Coutin, Legalizing Moves, 30. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Agamben, State of Exception, 6. Gill, Teetering on the Rim, 107; Canessa, Intimate Indigeneities. Gill, Teetering on the Rim. Amaya, “Dying American,” 5. Amaya, “Dying American”; 13, Mariscal, “Homeland Security,” 41. Faludi in Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 4. Jarvis, The Male Body at War, 10–11. Myth, as Barthes notes, is not a lie but a distortion and an inflection. The principle function of myth, he argues, is to “transform history into nature.” Nonetheless, the form cannot fully repress meaning; it only impoverishes it (Barthes, “Myth Today”). Lutz, Homefront; Menjívar and Rodríguez, When States Kill. Menjívar and Rodriguez use the term “interstate regime” to describe this relationship between the US and Latin America. Zilberg, Space of Detention.

Bibliography Amaya, Hector. “Dying American or The Violence of Citizenship: Latinos in Iraq.” Latino Studies 5, no. 1 (April 1 2007): 3–24.

216  Elana Zilberg Appadurai, Arjun. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working In The Present, edited by Richard G. [Editor] Fox, Second Paperback edition, 191–210. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM 1992. Arana, Ana. “How the Street Gangs Took Central America.” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 3 (2005): 98–110. doi: 10.2307/20034353. Ayala, Edgardo. “EL SALVADOR: Military Service Plan for At-Risk Youth Raises Controversy | Inter Press Service,” June 29, 2011. www.ipsnews.net/2011/06/ el-salvador-military-service-plan-for-at-risk-youth-raises-controversy/. Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, 109–58. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Battacharyya, Gargi. Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror. New York: Zed Books, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Brown, Wendy. “Finding the Man in the State.” Feminist State 18, no. 1 (1992): 7–34. Cacho, Lisa. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Caldeira, Teresa. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Canessa, Andrew. Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Connell, Raewyn W. “Masculinities and Globalization.” Men and Masculinities 1, no. 3 (1998): 3–23. Connell, Raewyn W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19 (2005): 829–59. Coutin, Susan. Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Coutin, Susan B. Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States. First edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Cowen, Deborah, and Amy Siciliano. “Surplus Masculinities and Security.” Antipode 43, no. 5 (2011): 1516–41. De Genova, Nicholas. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419–47. Federal Bureau of Intelligence. “(U) [Unclassified] Gang-Related Activity in the US Armed Forces Increasing,” January 12, 2007. https://narcosphere.­ narconews.com/userfiles/70/ngic_gangs.pdf. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, edited by Michel Snellart. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Gill, Lesley. Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Lie and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. ———. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Gilmore, Ruth W. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Goett, Jennifer, and Elana Zilberg. “Gender and the Sexual Politics of Security in the Americas,” unpublished paper.

Transnational Securityscapes  217 Goldstein, Daniel. “Towards a Critical Anthropology of Security.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 4 (2010): 487–517. Gonzalez, Roberto. Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. Gusterson, Hugh. People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Halfinger, David M., and Steven Holmes. “Military Mirrors and Working Class America.” New York Times, March 30, 2003. Harman, Dana. “Firms Tap Latin Americans for Iraq.” USA Today, March 3, 2005. Huggins, Martha. Political Policing: The United States and Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Huggins, Martha, and Mika Haritos-Fatouros. “Bureaucratizing Masculinites Among Brazilian Torturers and Murderers.” In Masculinities and Violence, edited by Lee Bowker, 29–54. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998. Jarvis, Christina S. The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. Joyner, James. “How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology.” The Atlantic. May 11, 2011. Klima, Alan. The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Lacey, Marc. “Salvadoran’s Death in Iraq Leaves a Mother Fuming.” New York Times, January 26, 2007. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso, 2001. Levy, Yagil. “Militarizing Inequity: A Conceptual Framework.” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 873–908. Lomas, Laura. “The War Cut Out My Tongue: Domestic Violence, Foreign Wars and Translation in Deetria Martínez.” American Literature 78, no. 2 (2006): 357–87. Lovato, Roberto. “The War for Latinos.” The Nation, September 15, 2005. Lutz, Catherine. Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002. Mahajan, Rahul. “The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism.” Monthly Review, February 1, 2002. Manwaring, Max G. “Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency.” Strategic Studies Institute, March 2005. www.thestrategycenter.org. Mariscal, Jorge. Aztlán and Vietnam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. ———. “Homeland Security, Militarism, and the Future of Latinos and Latinas in the United States.” Radical History Review 93 (Fall 2005): 39–52. ———. “Immigration and Military Enlistment: The Pentagon’s Push for the Dream Act Heats Up.” Latino Studies 5, no. 3 (Autumn 2007): 358–63. McDowell, Linda. Redundant Masculinities? Employment, Change and White Working Class Youth. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Mejía, Camilo. Road from Ar Ramadi. New York: The New Press, 2007. Menjívar, Cecilia, and Néstor Rodríguez. When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005.

218  Elana Zilberg Mohanty, Chandra T. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs 28, no. 2 (2002): 499–535. Moskos, Charles. “A New Concept of the Citizen-Soldier.” Orbis 49, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 663–76. Pérez, Gina. “Discipline and Citizenship: Latino/a Youth in Chicago JROTC Programs.” In New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, edited by Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2008. ———. “Hispanic Values, Military Values: Gender, Culture and Militarism of Latino/a Youth.” In Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America, edited by Adrian Burgos, Frank Guridy, and Gina Pérez, 168–88. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Plascencia, Luis. “Citizenship through Veteranship: Latino Migrants Defend the US ‘Homeland.’” Anthropology News, May 2009. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Rivas, Cecilia. Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Robinson, Bill. Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Changes and Globalization. London: Verso, 2003. Schild, Veronica. “Care and Punishment in Latin America: The Gendered Neoliberalization of the Chilean State.” In Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America, edited by Nancy Postero and Mark Goodale, 195–224. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Seigel, Micol. “Objects of Police History.” The Journal of American History 102 (June, 2015): 152–61. Stanley, William. Protectors or Perpetrators? The Institutional Crisis of the Salvadoran Civilian Police. Washington, D.C.: Office on Latin America and Hemisphere Initiatives, 1996. Sterngold, James. “Cheney’s grim vision: decades of war. Vice president says Bush policy aimed at long-term world threat.” San Francisco Chronicle. January 15, 2004. Stumpf, Juliet. “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime and Sovereign Power.” American University Law Review 56 (2006): 367–419. ­ ringing Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In B the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Tobar, Hector. The Tattooed Soldier. Reissue edition. Penguin Books, 2000. Velez-Ibañez, Carlos G. “The U.S. Military and Latino Populations: Accommodation and Resistance,” 2018. Vigil, James Diego. Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California. Reprint, 1994 edition. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988. Waquant, Loïc. “The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State.” Qualitative Sociology 32 (2009): 101–29. Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, eds. Cultures Of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. First edition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Transnational Securityscapes  219 Wheeler, Jacob. “Iraq War Comes Home to El Salvador.” SFGate.Com, 2005. Wilson, Gary I., and John P. Sullivan. “On Gangs, Crime, and Terrorism, Special to Defense and National Interest.” Draco Group, February 2007. www. dracosecurityconsultants.com. Zilberg, Elana. “Gangster in Guerilla Face: The Political Folklore of Doble Cara in Post-Civil War El Salvador.” Anthropological Theory 7, no. 1 (March 2007): 37–57. ———. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Part III

Resisting Rescue Sex/Work

11 Stop the Woman, Save the State Policing, Order, and the Black Woman’s Body Rudo Mudiwa It is May 2005, and a black woman in Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe, berates police officers as her entire livelihood—her market stand, or the vegetables she grew in her plot, or the imported clothes and shoes she sold daily—is razed and destroyed under their supervision. As ­Zimbabwe plunged deeper into an economic and political crisis, municipal governments across the country abruptly began demolishing physical structures that did not comply with previously unenforced zoning and planning laws. The English translation of the cleanup operation’s official Shona name, Murambatsvina, was “Reject Filth,” referring to the act of ridding the streets of urban blight. Operation Murambatsvina was swift, arbitrary, and devastating, leaving 700,000 people—most of whom were workers in the informal economy—without homes and indirectly affecting an approximate 2.4 million in total.1 Just two years later, as citizens rebuilt their decimated homes and livelihoods in the midst of historic inflation and unemployment, a series of anti-prostitution campaigns, all dubbed “operations,” similarly swept through the country’s urban centers. 2 Like Murambatsvina, these operations were unexpected and arbitrary in scope. This time, officials did not randomly bulldoze homes and businesses but detained and imprisoned women engaging in sex work, dancing in clubs, walking to their cars, or merely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to one report, the unpredictable nature of these operations created conditions in which women were “virtually banned from the streets after dark.”3 Within a two-year period, a black woman hustling in Zimbabwe’s informal economy might have been subject to two different policing campaigns in which she was part of the targeted population. Yet the intersections of race, gender, and class—shaped by global currents as they flowed through local contexts—that made her body a compelling target of state power have largely gone unexamined in contemporary studies of state repression and policing in Zimbabwe. While many have observed that Murambatsvina discursively positioned citizens as “internal enemies”4 to be quite literally swept away by the police and military, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the anti-prostitution raids that specifically targeted black women as enemies of public order.

224  Rudo Mudiwa Even though they occurred on the same streets, the mass displacement of urban dwellers brought about by Murambatsvina and the policing of women’s bodies have not been treated as intimately related phenomena. 5 This chapter, in contrast, imagines these events not as distinct incidents but as complementary pieces of a larger narrative about state power, violence, and contingent citizenship in an era of economic precarity exacerbated by global conditions. Linking disparate policing campaigns that took place in Zimbabwe’s urban centers between 2007 and 2014, I argue that the logic of Murambatsvina, which positioned citizens as dirt to be purged from public spaces, is not only related to but was presaged by a history of arbitrary policing against black women. While the fact of these women’s blackness might seem irrelevant in a black-majority state, I argue that the drive to purge them from public spaces is one of the many aftereffects of white supremacist rule. The colonial discourse that positioned mobile black women as vectors of disease and immorality in white urban spaces did not simply vanish at independence—it adapted nimbly to suit the needs of black patriarchal rule. That black women are the explicit targets of these policing campaigns—and not the relatively small population of white, colored,6 or South Asian women—is reflected in both the invocation of “African culture” under internal threat from wayward black women and the practice of policing largely black and lower-income neighborhoods. Therefore, this chapter suspends the clean divide between the colonial past and postcolonial present, probing how colonial constructions of gender, race, and class continue to be invoked in service of managing economic decline. By bringing the historical and contemporary policing of black women’s bodies into conversation with the literature on Murambatsvina, this chapter examines how the politicization of gender and sexual identity is crucial to the performance of what Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and James Muzondidya have described as Zimbabwe’s “grotesque nationalism.”7 This form of nationalism depends upon bizarre and often contradictory mobilizations of the law, history, culture, and politicized identities, and is characterized by the capricious use of violence against perceived enemies of the state. The violent excesses of grotesque nationalism are intensified by the fact that it is posited as a continuation of anti-colonial struggles against “the West.” Consequently, any ideologies, practices, or people branded as Western, however specious the connection, become targets of exclusion, derision, or elimination. In this context, the transnational histories that have created “the black woman” as a discursive object are activated as the state attempts to steady itself by throwing its weight on women’s bodies. In contemporary ­Zimbabwe, the black woman’s body, symbolically weighed down by a history of colonial anxiety about social upheaval and venereal disease, is now, in this long-awaited postcolonial future, branded as a gateway to a corrupting Western decadence.8 The containment of this body and its excesses becomes essential to the preservation of national and cultural borders.

Stop the Woman, Save the State  225 In short, Murambatsvina and the anti-prostitution raids reveal how a class of expendable subjects—the urban and rural poor, workers in the informal sector, and women—becomes a useful instrument as the Zimbabwean state scrambles to display its might during a period of economic decline. These policing campaigns drew upon the common topics associated with moral panics as the official obsession with deviance, disease, and disorder gestured to broader anxieties about space, belonging, and citizenship. The first section of this chapter situates these c­ ampaigns within what has been called Zimbabwe’s “crisis period,” an era defined by greater state repression, a breakdown in the delivery of public services, and a rapid decline in the economy. This period, which began in the late 1990s, has been characterized by a style of governance that creates an illusion of order and stability by cultivating a sense of uncertainty among citizens. In particular, the right to use and occupy public space is always precarious as movement and assembly are often inconsistently criminalized and policed. This chapter’s second section takes Murambatsvina as evidence of this kind of double-minded production of both order and chaos. The state’s moral panic over the criminality and deviance purportedly fostered by sprawling urbanization prompted aggressive and arbitrary policing in the name of a return to order. Through this logic, the margins of the cities, along with the informal economies that powered them, first had to be destroyed so that they might be saved. Finally, in a third section, I examine how these logics of control were reflected in the treatment of black women’s bodies as policing measures approached all black women as potential sex workers undeserving of rights and protection. The performance of state power relied upon positioning black women’s bodies as perpetually vulnerable to immobilization and containment. Taken together, Murambatsvina and the anti-prostitution sweeps illustrate how power continues to be brought to bear upon the body in the precarious African state, marking the distinction between citizens who belong and expendable, undesired subjects.

Crisis and Uncertainty The nature of policing in Zimbabwe—arbitrary, endless, corrupt, and often brutal—both reflects and has fueled the country’s economic and political decline, commonly referred to as “the crisis.”9 From the late 1990s onward, the country experienced dramatic currency depreciation, mass unemployment, and a near halt in the functioning of public services. A range of causes is often cited in explanations of the crisis: the imposition of austerity measures via Economic Structural Adjustment in the 1990s, economic mismanagement, and the ruling party’s land reform program, which undermined the once robust agricultural trade. In other words, the current crisis is fueled by and has deepened Zimbabwe’s precarious position within the global economy. Moreover, the crisis is a product of

226  Rudo Mudiwa the explosive entanglements of colonial and postcolonial histories. Unresolved conflicts over land and urban space, citizenship rights, and the proper role of the state continue to animate contemporary politics in the country.10 Despite the ruling party’s perpetual claim to an unqualified anti-coloniality, the old colonial order not only lingers but is actively and eagerly mobilized in service of state power. Detentions, disappearances, and displacements—all colonial strategies of control—are used to secure the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front’s (ZANU–PF’s) nearly four-decade rule. The collapse of the economy is thus inseparable from the rise of authoritarianism, producing what Martin Rupiya has called a form of “governance through military operations.”11 The Zimbabwean crisis permeates all spheres of life in the country, but it is most clearly visible in the dramatic transformations of the national economy. The country’s period of hyperinflation, which began in 2003 and ended in 2009, allows us to quantify—even if inadequately— terms such as crisis, panic, and shock. By November 2008, one estimate placed Zimbabwe’s peak inflation rate at an astounding 79.6 billion percent, the second-highest rate ever recorded in history.12 During this period, citizens saw the value of their money evaporate within hours, shattering the necessary semiotic link between cash and value. News images of life in Zimbabwe that seemed to declare, this is what precarity looks like proliferated in international media: Zimbabweans queuing by the hundreds for basic goods, clutching stacks of soon-to-be worthless cash, pacing in grocery stores with empty shelves. Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) tinkered with the books, while the economy was in free fall. Playing a high-stakes game of what RBZ governor Gideon Gono proudly dubbed “casino economics,” the RBZ alternately shaved zeros off of the currency and printed larger bills to keep up with the cost of living.13 In January 2009, the 100 trillion dollar note, equivalent to US $30, was introduced as the largest denomination in the Zimbabwean currency.14 Just two months after this last-ditch effort, the government scrapped the Zimbabwean dollar altogether, replacing it with the US dollar and the South African rand. The shock of hyperinflation, alongside rising authoritarianism and state violence, transformed everyday life in Zimbabwe. A frenetic uncertainty defined the public imaginary as time and value were “contained and exhausted in the moment,” and money became “volatile and frivolous.”15 As inflation soared, inventive Zimbabweans had to rely on their own wits in order to make do. Showers Mawowa and Alois Matongo note that during this period, “informality became the order of the day and perhaps the most significant arena for meaningful accumulation and household economic survival.”16 Informal economic activity in ­Zimbabwe involved “self-employed entrepreneurs operating at different scales and skill levels, or as usually poorly paid employees of such entrepreneurs.”17 Such activity had been a survival strategy for Zimbabweans

Stop the Woman, Save the State  227 since the colonial era, when illicit beer brewers and traders evaded colonial policing and economic control.18 However, while the informal economy had long run parallel to the formal economy, it assumed greater importance as employment in state-supported industries contracted. By 2004, the informal sector accounted for 40 percent of employment.19 The overwhelming buzz of millions of Zimbabweans hustling to make do animated the crowded city streets. Regular employment was augmented or altogether supplanted by the “pavement economy”—selling clothes, sweets, livestock, and vegetables, trading in foreign currency, and importing goods from neighboring countries. 20 With middle-class stability no longer guaranteed for even the well-educated, many citizens became adept at juggling multiple jobs and opportunities. Jeremy Jones argues that the crisis produced new relationships to time and space in a context in which money circulated endlessly with no fixed value. Jones describes this new Zimbabwean economy driven by the many side hustles of citizens as a “kukiya-kiya” economy, a term derived from a local Shona idiom that means “to make do.”21 Kukiya-kiya relies upon physical mobility and a sense of timeliness as citizens have to move quickly and strategically in order to capitalize on opportunities for profit. As one Zimbabwean woman told the New York Times in 2008, “It’s the survival of the fittest. If you’re not fit, you will starve.”22 During the peak of the crisis, one had to be ready to jump into a queue for petrol, to show up at a store where a shipment of scarce goods had just come in, or to travel to a neighboring country in order to buy foreign currency. Your feet were your hustle. While the central government remained paralyzed by a host of problems, its citizens never stopped moving in new and creative ways in order to survive. These mobilities, which often circumvented state regulations and institutions, subsequently emerged as the target of policing campaigns.

Cleaning Up In this era of economic panic, governance came to rely upon the skillful production and manipulation of uncertainty. Achille Mbembe has argued that the transformation of African economies via a range of transnational forces produces political cultures that are characterized by instability and volatility. Mbembe insists that in the coming years, “practices of informalization will no longer limit themselves solely to mere economic aspects and strategies of survival. They will become, bit by bit, privileged forms of the cultural and political imagination.”23 This happens when legal and monetary systems become instruments for the introduction of unpredictable changes that quite literally disrupt and displace citizens. “Instability and the unexpected become, from this vantage point, resources for the exercise of power.”24 As the African state itself becomes a fragmented object, competing actors attempt to exploit uncertainty in order to secure power.

228  Rudo Mudiwa As the Zimbabwean economy rapidly declined, this type of strategic ambiguity was utilized by a variety of state actors—military and police officers, municipal security, and ruling party officials—in order to maximize the strength of their grip on the public. As political and economic instability reigned, order became a master term in official discourse. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Muzondidya describe this incongruous mix of “disorder, death, and indiscipline” alongside “discipline and order” as a defining characteristic of governance during the crisis period. 25 The production of order relied upon leveraging instability in order to produce erratic conditions in which citizens were never certain of the law or of their own safety. The arbitrary application of the law became a key mechanism of power, as the law was used to punish those who contravened its perpetually shifting boundaries. In particular, public spaces—already contested sites in a country shaped by a colonial history of urbanization—were subject to draconian and often erratic policing. The Public Order and Security Act (POSA), passed in 2002, exemplifies this approach to order and security. POSA, which went into effect two months before a contested presidential election, severely limited rights to speech, due process, and assembly. The act drew upon and strengthened colonial-era provisions that were originally crafted in order to suppress black resistance efforts. Therefore, it was widely interpreted as an attack on political activists and opposition members as it criminalized essential political activities. Under POSA, the restoration of order required the strict regulation of uses of public space that did not explicitly work in favor of the state. In particular, the right to protest was severely undermined by a set of requirements that forced citizens to negotiate ineffectual legal bureaucracies before they could take to the streets. For example, the law required organizers of “public gatherings” to give police a four-day advance notice of any planned meetings. Police were then empowered to prohibit any gatherings that they had “reasonable grounds” to believe would “occasion public ­disorder.”26 POSA failed to define clearly what constituted a “public” gathering, a strategic ambiguity that police and other state actors exploited for their benefit. In practice, this meant that meetings held in private homes, opposition party workshops, and trade union exec­ utive meetings were all subject to police interference. In one instance, members of parliament from the opposition party were even barred from holding meetings with their own constituents. 27 Moreover, POSA prohibited any gatherings conducive to “riot, disorder, or intolerance.”28 Unsurprisingly, this section of the law was routinely used to break up or prohibit public demonstrations under the guise of preventing violence and lawlessness. In all, POSA signaled the state’s willingness to arrest and contain any political actor deemed threatening to state. While the central government claimed to be committed to the maintenance of order, agents acting on behalf of the state waged an often unpredictable

Stop the Woman, Save the State  229 war on civilians. Just as the value of money could not be pinned down, the law itself was seemingly untethered to any real meaning. As citizens scrambled busily to piece together new sources of revenue, the state intervened in order to curb sprawling urbanization and the flurry of economic activity in informal markets. Overnight, previously overlooked zoning and planning laws were defended and enforced with vigor. In a May 2005 speech announcing the launch of Murambatsvina, the chair of the Harare Commission, Sekai Makwavarara, announced, These violations of the by-laws in areas of vending, traffic control, illegal structures, touting/abuse of commuters by rank marshals, street life/prostitution, vandalism of property infrastructure, stock theft, illegal cultivation, among others have led to the deterioration of standards thus negatively affecting the image of the City. The attitude of the members of the public as well as some City officials has led to a point whereby Harare has lost its glow. We are determined to bring it back. 29 Operation Murambatsvina was also officially titled “Restore Order,” pointing to the state’s association of a kind of creative destruction with the emergence of legibility and order. According to Makwavarara’s reasoning, the demolition of illegal structures would rid the city of the deviance and criminality that ran rampant in the streets. As the operation spread beyond the capital city into other urban centers, traumatized residents who had witnessed the swift destruction of their homes and livelihoods countered the narrative that the campaign would “Restore Order.” Zimbabweans connected the devastation wrought by the operation to another global event characterized by unexpected and punishing ­violence—the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. While citizens had been given prior warning and were encouraged to demolish their own structures, in some instances, officials preempted their own announced deadline and began razing, bulldozing, or burning down buildings. As bulldozers claimed the houses, livelihoods, and well-being of ill-­ prepared residents, the name “Tsunami” became the popular descriptor for this sudden and irreversible violence. Within three months, 92,460 houses and 32,583 small businesses had been destroyed.30 The 700,000 citizens directly affected by Murambatsvina included over 20,000 people arrested within the first week.31 In all, about 18 percent of the population experienced the direct or indirect effects of the operation. 32 Maurice Vambe argues that Murambatsvina functioned as a “spectacle of excess” that was mostly about “the politicians’ own dirt and their failure to deliver on economic promises.”33 Its swift violence seemed to exist for no other reason than to demonstrate the extent of the state’s power over poor urban dwellers. In this regard, Murambatsvina was a particularly chilling and effective spectacle as it left its victims grasping

230  Rudo Mudiwa for legitimate reasons as to why their government would so readily destroy their lives. In the absence of a compelling rationale, rumors abounded about Murambatsvina’s true purpose and function. 34 Many citizens speculated that Murambatsvina was designed to punish urban voters who had voted en masse against the ruling party in the previous elections. It was also viewed as a “preemptive strike against urban discontents,” an attempt to demoralize working class citizens before they could form an organized resistance.35 Other rumors pointed to a competition for power between different ethnic factions within ZANU–PF, or a cynical attempt to draw foreign investment into the country.36 One female cross-border trader even speculated that “Authorities saw that women were carrying out initiatives on their own, boosting the standards of lives for their families. So, Operation Murambatsvina actually targeted women in order to undermine their efforts, in the process depriving people of their money, livelihood and property.”37 Contrary to the perspective that assigns a counterhegemonic function to political rumors, Joost Fontein argues that the circulation of rumors in this case buttressed rather than undermined state power. Fontein insists that “the barrage of different, conflicting rumors must have simultaneously reinforced the sense of ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety about what the purpose of the tsunami was.”38 In this sense, these rumors actually reflected the effectiveness of a style of governance that leverages insecurity, producing a climate in which citizens were perpetually on edge. In the face of growing domestic and international opprobrium, the central government defended itself as the protector of an authentic ­A frican social order imperiled by foreign incursions. As citizens speculated about the “real” rationale behind Murambatsvina, officials repeatedly insisted that the aggressive nature of the campaign was commensurate with the severity of the threat to order in the streets. For instance, it released a response to a scathing United Nations document that catalogued the extent of the destruction by making the case that Murambatsvina was an essential operation that would revitalize urban areas across the country. The government’s report invoked the common topics associated with moral panics, claiming that by destroying informal market zones, it sought to “minimize the threat of major disease outbreaks due to overcrowding and squalor,” “reduce high crime levels by targeting organized crime syndicates,” and “stem disorderly and chaotic urbanization.”39 In other words, the state was protecting the public from imminent harm. Foreign Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi told the state-owned ­Herald newspaper that, “Zimbabweans generally disliked the disorder and chaos that was the order of the day before Operation Murambatsvina.”40 Moreover, in a performance of nationalism, Mumbengegwi associated the operation with an anti-colonial perspective, criticizing “the stereo-type thinking that romanticises squalor and shacks as fitting habitats of Africans.” He further “reject[ed]

Stop the Woman, Save the State  231 any prescriptions designed to consign her [Zimbabwe’s] people to the sub-standard conditions boldly tackled by Operation Restore Order.”41 In this regard, Murambatsvina was spun into an opportunity for the state to reassert its sovereignty in defiance of the scrutiny of watchful Western eyes. The references to dirt and filth in official discourses pointed to deep anxieties about belonging and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Vambe argues that “Murambatsvina showed that citizenship is a social construct; that it is brittle and can be subject to revision, especially in contexts of political contestations.”42 In other words, it demonstrated what other theorists have described as the contingent nature of citizenship.43 ­Citizenship is not a fixed set of rights or obligations but a constantly shifting relationship to the state. In a nation-state sullied by the dirt of urban disorder, the policing campaigns functioned as rituals of purification that returned people and things to their rightful (subordinate) places.44 ­Ashleigh ­Harris argues that “In the official discursive construction of Operation Murambatsvina, dirt became metonymically and metaphorically linked to disease and infection, and this nexus of metaphorical connections was moralised so as to justify discursively the evictions as an act of ‘purifying the cities.’”45 If some Zimbabweans were imagined as dirt to be washed away from the streets, then Murambatsvina was a moment in which “identities [were] coercively authored and imposed to legitimate an arbitrary boundary between who is in and who is out.”46 In particular, the working poor were marked as enemies of state as the police commissioner argued that the operation was necessary in order to exterminate a “crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy.”47 This “crawling mass” survived by circumventing official regulations of currency trade, evading police, and appropriating public space for its own entrepreneurial uses. Moreover, officials specifically suggested that migrant workers from countries such as Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique were among the urban filth corrupting the cities.48 In this regard, Murambatsvina reflected a broader crisis of citizenship brought about by unreconciled colonial and postcolonial histories. ­Migrant workers who had been key participants of the colonial economy were positioned as illegitimate Zimbabweans, despite their long residencies in the country. As they lost their urban residences, these workers were told to “return to their rural homes,” an especially cruel response in light of the fact that most foreign-born Zimbabweans did not have rural domiciles to which they could return.49 Willem Maas notes that “governments have historically viewed the bestowal or denial of citizenship not as an expression of fundamental justice or intrinsic standing but rather as a tool of policy.”50 It can therefore be revoked, undermined, or rendered completely useless. In Zimbabwe, the citizenship of foreign-born migrants, alongside that of the urban poor, was violently cast aside as the state asserted its ability to control and regulate public space.

232  Rudo Mudiwa

Sex Work and Order During this moment, how was the uncertainty experienced within the nation-state passed onto its female citizens? The turn toward the policing of women’s bodies was anticipated in a newspaper editorial published in the immediate aftermath of Murambatsvina. While praising the success of Murambatsvina, the writer suggested that the next clean-up could address the “issue of dressing, especially of our women folk.”51 As such, “something with a name like Operation Kupfeka Kunehunhu [literally meaning operation dressing with dignity] will definitely be most welcome.”52 In 2007, two years after the start of Murambatsvina, the government began a series of anti-prostitution policing raids in order to combat this alleged lack of decency and propriety among Zimbabwean women. The titles given to these raids were meant to be suggestive of a widespread problem regarding sexually active young women in urban spaces. They were explicitly directed toward women whose promiscuity and indulgence of Western values were framed as threats to the moral fabric of the nation. Each campaign was given a didactic official title that had an imagined addressee. Chipo Chiroorwa (2007) entreated a fictional sex worker named Chipo to “get married.” Chengetedza Hunhu (2011) implored those participating in the sex industry to “maintain their dignity.” Dyira Bonus Kumba (2012) was the rare campaign that addressed the john, encouraging him to spend his year-end bonus on his family at home. Two campaigns were launched in 2013, No Loitering and Zvanyanya, which declared in the language of panic, “It’s Become Unbearable!” Zvanyanya extended into 2014 and prompted substantial criticism and protest from women across the country. What fed the anxieties about the visibility of black female bodies in public spaces? What made their bodies useful instruments for the state during this moment of crisis? Elizabeth Wilson argues that “[a]lmost from the beginning, the presence of women in cities, and particularly in city streets, has been questioned, and the controlling and surveillance aspects of city life have always been directed particularly at women.”53 In Zimbabwe, black women’s unencumbered movements have historically been associated with social disorder. This image is rooted in colonial histories that have associated black female mobility with transgression. Black “vagrant women” were quickly linked to prostitution, venereal diseases, mental illness, and adultery. 54 This colonial history produced the Shona pejorative for a female sex worker, “pfambi,” which is derived from “mufambi” or “walker.”55 Sex work was particularly viewed as a threat to colonial power and African patriarchy because it enabled the production of mobile female subjects whose labor and sexuality could not be controlled by the colonial government or by their male relatives. Therefore, the woman whose sexual labor could not be appropriated

Stop the Woman, Save the State  233 by the colonial state or translated into a dowry by her family had to be immobilized. In the early twentieth century, a range of disciplinary measures were passed to ebb the flow of black women’s movement into cities and mining towns. For example, colonial administrators mandated that women seeking access to towns undergo invasive venereal disease examinations or possess marriage certificates. 56 This relationship between black women’s mobility, policing, and crisis continued even after the transition from white settler to black majority rule. In fact, the first Operation Clean Up in Zimbabwe happened in ­October 1983, three years after the formation of the independent ­Zimbabwean state. That particular sweep occurred during a moment in which real and imagined enemies of the state were lurking in every corner of the country, engaging in acts of subterfuge designed to undermine the new black government. In May 1983, the ruling party initiated a series of ethnic cleansing campaigns against perceived “disloyal factions” in the Matabeleland region, now known as Operation Gukurahundi. Alongside Gukurahundi, the state also launched Operation Chinyavada, which sought to flush out double-agents allegedly acting in concert with the apartheid South African government to destabilize the nation-state. By October, this “governance through military operation” was extended into the city spaces as the first Operation Clean Up was initiated to rid the streets of thieves, squatters, and sex workers. Remarkably, Clean Up eventually led to the arrest of over 6,000 women across the country’s urban centers. Thus, the policing of women’s bodies was part of a larger application of violence against the unruly bodies of citizens deemed unfit for the new postcolonial order. As with the more recent raids, the criteria determining which activities merited suspicion of prostitution were seemingly arbitrary as police arrested swathes of women caught walking alone, including “old women, young mothers with babies on their backs, nurses coming off duty, and thousands of other innocent women,” on suspicion of solicitation.57 The women were held in outdoor detention centers across the country for several weeks to be released only after the assurance of a husband, employer, or relative who could vouch for their respectability. During this time, an editorial published in Moto Magazine, a left-­leaning ­Catholic publication, wondered whether the raids were part of “a backlash against democratic rights so recently granted to black women in ­Zimbabwe.”58 According to Moto, the government’s unexpected raids were a response to the unsettling transformations of the social order produced by the new freedoms now exercised by black women. Women’s public citizenship in the new nation-state was intimately linked to their mobility as they now enjoyed “the right to live where they like, rights to work, to walk unaccompanied, to choose their own associates and to go about their daily lives without interference.”59 Moreover, the editorial

234  Rudo Mudiwa pointed out that these raids essentially criminalized the movements of all women, noting that It is common in many societies that male ideas about women divide them into two “types”: “good” women (mothers, goddesses) and “bad” ones (e.g. prostitutes, witches). Operation Clean-Up seems to undermine even this distinction: all women, especiall [sic] all black women, are presumed to be evil unless proved “good.”60 Black women were imagined as the filth contaminating the nation, and their guilt rested in their very bodies. The new Zimbabwean nation-­ state, eager to demonstrate its power, directed its energies toward the containment of the excesses of black female bodies. In the years following the first Clean Up, the Zimbabwean government repeatedly fell back on the trick of immobilizing black women’s bodies whenever political or economic tensions flared up. I focus on the period between 2007 and 2014, when the perceived rise of sex work in the country’s urban centers prompted a startling series of aggressive and loosely organized police raids. This is despite the fact that a comparison of demographic studies conducted in 2005–2006 and 2010–2011 showed that there were “essentially no changes in the percentage of ­Zimbabwean men who paid for sex in the 12 months preceding the interview, [and] those who did engage in paid sex were more likely to use a condom.”61 Nevertheless, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre noted that the anti-­ prostitution raids were officially justified as “part of an effort to reduce touts,62 street children, and prostitutes in the city.”63 The police commissioner argued that “There is need for public order and public morality to be preserved for the benefit of minors … [O]ne way of doing that is to invoke the provisions of the law against violators.”64 While the purported target of these campaigns was the urban sex worker in violation of the law, in practice, all women were to be policed for violating conservative social values. By 2004, the controversial segments of POSA had made their way into the Criminal Law or Codification and Reform Act, which attempted to streamline criminal law in Zimbabwe. The Act was among a series of laws passed in anticipation of the 2005 parliamentary elections, which saw the ZANU–PF’s victory despite allegations of voting irregularities from the opposition party. It is under this new law, which prohibited public solicitation, that women faced arrest for prostitution. By most accounts, the criteria used to determine criminal behavior were frustratingly arbitrary. These campaigns targeted women in bars and nightclubs, women walking home at night, and women deemed to be dressed inappropriately on the street. The state’s own discourse fomented insecurity as it justified its policy of arresting women found “loitering for the purposes of prostitution.”65 As many women discovered, “loitering” could mean simply walking on the street, the intentional vagueness of

Stop the Woman, Save the State  235 the term creating conditions in which women were vulnerable to arrest. Uncertainty was once again being leveraged in the exercise of power. The extent to which chaos masqueraded as order was demonstrated by the police officers’ own lack of clarity on the law. One woman arrested in 2014 under Operation Zvanyanya claimed that a “policewoman who testified in the ongoing trial … did not know what the charge meant but was instructed to only arrest women standing or walking in the streets whom police suspected of soliciting.”66 The law was again an instrument to be wielded strategically against a targeted population. In this case, the selective application of the law effectively criminalized women’s physical mobility. On the basis of suspicion, every woman seen in public at the wrong time and place was a potential sex worker. Zimbabwean women’s responses to the raids critiqued and resisted the attempts to position them as marginal subjects whose bodies could be swept away from public view. Feminist organizations have conducted public demonstrations contesting the legality of the raids and the unjust punishment of female sex workers. Challenging the binary between “respectable” and “bad” women, sex workers allied with feminist lawyers and activists to bring suit against police officers for unlawful arrest. The discourse of activists consistently linked women’s right to be visible in public spaces with citizenship. After 53 women were arrested in 2013 in clubs, bars, and on the streets as part of Zvanyanya, Netty Musanhu, director of the Musasa Project, indignantly asked, So are we supposed to then go and vote freely when police can just arrest us willy nilly? Women fought alongside men during the liberation struggle so it really does not make sense that only women are being arrested … What they are telling us is that it is not safe for women to go out. Women then are not free and should go back to the bush and fight another liberation war.67 Musanhu explicitly connected black women’s citizenship to the right to use and occupy public space, arguing that arbitrary arrests compromise women’s ability to exercise the basic right to vote (sidestepping the question of whether the vote itself actually counts in Zimbabwe). By suggesting that black women still have their own liberation war to fight, Musanhu linked the policing of women’s bodies to regressive colonial policies. In doing so, she troubled the nationalist temporality that imagines colonialism as a past from which citizens have been liberated by the heroic ruling party. Feminist advocacy forced the state to account for policing practices that routinely subjected women to violence in the name of public morality. After years of urban policing that targeted women with impunity, a May 2015 Constitutional Court ruling was widely interpreted as a tacit decriminalization of sex work, granting women temporary reprieve from arbitrary arrest.68

236  Rudo Mudiwa

Conclusion The major red-light district in Harare is in The Avenues neighborhood, where streets lined with jacaranda trees provide cover for sex workers at night. Just a few blocks away are the skyscrapers and office buildings that comprise the city’s main business district. The proximity of the sex industry to more “legitimate” economic activity bespeaks the intimate relationship between formal and informal economies in present-day Zimbabwe. The female sex worker is another laborer in the peripheral economy, using a combination of street smarts, flexibility, and mobility to survive.69 At the same time, her mobility carries the threat of transgression. By selling her sexual labor, she uses her body in ways that her assailants perceive as violations of hegemonic Christian or “traditional” African values. She is therefore doubly positioned as a target—a participant in an informal economy that produces urban disorder, and a deviant who perverts the moral order. Reading the anti-prostitution raids alongside Murambatsvina highlights how the panicked policing of both space and undesirable bodies is a central element of state repression in contemporary Zimbabwe. Imagined as an urban criminal, unwelcome foreigner, or sex worker, the informal laborer was subject to detention, arrest, and violence. In short, a moral panic concerning urban space provided cover for the state which sought to assert its power—brutally and indiscriminately—over bodies and their freedom of movement. Even so, some bodies are more useful than others when states need to enact a spectacle of power. In times of unrest or crisis, the Zimbabwean state has turned toward black women’s bodies to secure order. Throughout colonial history, the black female body that dared to roam beyond prescribed physical and social boundaries was always an especially troubling figure. Therefore, during the peak of the economic crisis, the wandering woman, symbolized by the figure of the sex-worker, became a problem worthy of state attention. In the midst of crisis, the nation-state, eager to demonstrate its power, repeatedly targeted this body, seeking to contain the transgressive mobility that it symbolized. As police and military might is increasingly brought to bear upon women, what other unsettling bodies might emerge as convenient targets?70 One might consider how the turn toward the criminalization and policing of gay, lesbian, and transgender populations across African states function similarly to uphold the fiction of sovereignty in the wake of economic and political crises. In his wry analysis of antigay legislation passed in 2014 in Nigeria, Ayo Sogunro observes that what lies beneath all of these state-manufactured moral panics is the strategic demonization of particular sexual and gender identities to mask the state’s own inadequacies.71 Indeed, the policing of women’s bodies is often part and parcel of larger campaigns to stamp out expressions of sexuality

Stop the Woman, Save the State  237 that deviate from heterosexual norms, now spun as “tradition.” During such moments, the link between unbridled female sexuality and homosexuality is often made plain. In Zimbabwe, members of parliament derided gays as “cultural prostitutes” bent on perverting the social order.72 In Uganda, the passage of the controversial Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2014, which made homosexuality an offense punishable by life in prison, was quickly followed by the Anti-Pornography Act. Among other things, the Anti-Pornography Act sought to ban indecent clothing worn by women, and quickly earned the appellation, “mini-skirt bill” as a result. While women’s rights activists successfully lobbied to take out some of the more offensive portions of the bill, “it remains a vague and problematic law that gives broad discretion of state officials to define pornography and arrest those suspected of an ill-defined crime.”73 The ambiguity of the law thus produces a climate in which women remain vulnerable to arbitrary and violent policing. Moreover, panics concerning sexuality are often enfolded into discourse about the corrosion of traditional society due to the invasion of Western media and its glorification of permissive cultural values. This fixation with the West as a contaminant in African spaces suggests that these panics are also related to contemporary crises of global governance. Theories of the state increasingly advance the idea that the contemporary nation-state is less a coherent body than it is a fragmented unit subject to a variety of forces that drive economies, local politics, social movements, and culture. Mbembe argues that as the centralized African economy dissipates, states move to “a diffracted economy composed of several intermeshing centers which maintain changing and extremely volatile links with both the surrounding environment and international pathways.”74 Similarly, James Ferguson has noted the emergence of a “transnational governmentality,” as he takes into account the immense power that transnational IGOs possess in African states and their alarming ability to usurp traditional state functions.75 As transnational forces impinge on sovereignty with seemingly greater intensity, the assertion of state power, along with the all-important performance of an assertively postcolonial nationalism, may rest upon demonstrating the capacity to arrest and remove particular bodies within contested public spaces. The fragmentation of African economies also suggests an increasing diffusion of power that makes it difficult to pin down the agents or intentions behind purportedly state-run initiatives. While this chapter focused on the relationship between policing and state power, a series of spontaneous eruptions of public violence against women suggests that at this moment, it is not just “the state” that has an interest in the violent policing of female bodies. Yael Navaro-Yoshin argues that “There is a level of agency and spontaneity among the so-called people, a willing initiative to stand in for the state.”76 This desire to act as the state’s proxy might explain the recent rash of public beatings meted out against

238  Rudo Mudiwa black women in a number of African countries, including Zimbabwe, for the crime of dressing indecently. These brutal attacks—such as the one in which a Nairobi woman was beaten and stripped by a mob of men in 2014—are recorded and instantly turn viral online, serving as visual spectacles that reify black women’s tenuous claim to public life and nationhood.77 In their naked violence, these images illustrate the continuing struggle that many African women face in becoming legible as public citizens whose lives and bodies matter. At every turn, black women are resisting attempts to police their bodies, loudly demanding their right to take up public space and to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. In 2006, Patricia McFadden predicted that black women “are on the cutting edge for the emergence of a different kind of politics on the continent, which can lead to all citizens living the wholesome lives promised by the extraordinary moment of change that independence promised.”78 Perhaps it is this threat of looming transformation—compounded by economic crisis, panic, and acutely felt uncertainty—that prompts these renewed and particularly vicious rehearsals of the old adage that women must always be kept in their place.

Notes 1 Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact Finding Mission, 7. 2 Given the rather nasty connotations of the term “prostitution,” my repeated usage of the term here is confined to references to the state’s campaigns and its own discourse. These campaigns existed because of the images of excessive and vulgar female sexuality conjured by that term. Therefore, substituting “sex work” for that term would blunt the misogynistic sentiments driving the initiation of the raids. The use of the term also refers back to the status of “prostitution” as a criminal offense in Zimbabwean law. In all other instances, I use the term “sex work” to emphasize its status as labor within an informal economy. 3 Chimunhu, “Night Curfew for Women in Harare.” 4 M. Vambe, “Historical Antecedents to Operation Murambatsvina,” 3. 5 One study of Murambatsvina gestured to the importance of gender, examining the operation’s effects on female cross-border traders. B. Vambe, “Murambastvina’s Assault on Women’s Legal and Economic Rights.” 6 “Colored” is a racial category in use in much of Southern Africa to mark people of mixed-race lineage. 7 Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Muzondidya, “Introduction,” 3. 8 See Jackson, Surfacing Up. Jackson’s careful reading of mental institution records in colonial Rhodesia untangles the link between black women’s ­mobility and mental illness. She demonstrates how “madness” was constructed by a clinical white gaze that saw mobile black women as threats to the spatial and political order. 9 The crisis spawned the creation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the opposition party that emerged to challenge the one-party state governed by the ZANU–PF. For the MDC, the crisis was not just an economic one but also a crisis in governance. The MDC argued that,

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

“The crisis expresses itself in a failure of government to observe the separation of powers between the executive, legislature, and judiciary, to obey the basic rules of accountability and transparency, to respect human rights and to decentralise power in ways that enable meaningful participation of people in public institutions.” See Raftopoulos, “The Crisis in Zimbabwe,” 209. See Alexander, The Unsettled Land. See Rupiya, “Zimbabwe: Governance Through Military Operations.” Hanke and Kwok, “On the Measurement of Zimbabwe’s Hyperinflation,” 354. See Gono, Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy. Chagonda, “Dollarization of the Zimbabwean Economy,” 7. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 308–9. Mawowa and Matongo, “Inside Zimbabwe’s Roadside Currency Trade,” 320. Potts,“Restoring Order?” 273–91. See West, “Liquor and Libido.” See Mukonori, The Genesis of Violence in Zimbabwe. Chimedza, “Bulldozers Always Come,” 89. Jones, “Nothing Is Straight in Zimbabwe.” Dugger, “Life in Zimbabwe.” Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 312, emphasis in original. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 319. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Muzondidya, “Introduction,” 10. Sokwanele, “Public Order and Security Act.” Ibid. Ibid. Potts, “Restoring Order?” 275. Mukonori, The Genesis of Violence, 89. Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact Finding Mission, 12. Ibid., 34. M. Vambe, “Historical Antecedents to Operation Murambatsvina,” 4–5. Fontein, “Anticipating the Tsunami,” 369–98. Minister of Security Didymus Mutasa reportedly warned government officials of the potential for uprisings in the urban areas where many of the underemployed laborers in the informal economy resided. As the Wikileaks documents reveal, the US State Department took an interest in getting to the bottom of the various rumors surrounding Murambatsvina, soliciting the opinions of prominent Zimbabwean politicians and insiders. See Cable 05HARARE991_a: Operation Restore Order in Bulawayo. B. Vambe, “Murambastvina’s Assault on Women’s Legal and Economic Rights,” 81. Fontein, “Anticipating the Tsunami,” 380. Sachikonye, When a State Turns on Its Citizens, 26–27. “Zimbabwe: Government Dismisses UN Report on Clean-Up Operation as ‘Biased.’” Ibid. M. Vambe, “Historical Antecedents to Operation Murambatsvina,” 3. See Cook, “Effectiveness of the Beijing Conference Advancing International Law Regarding Women”; Maas, “Contingent Citizenship and ­Reversible Rights in the European Union”; Gibney, “Should Citizenship Be Conditional?”

240  Rudo Mudiwa 4 4 Delany, Times Square Red; Grano and Zagacki, “Cleansing the Superdome.” Although these studies do not use the moral panic framework, they serve as compelling analyses of how racial and sexual difference is deployed in the management and purification of urban space in the US. 45 Harris, “Discourses of Dirt and Disease in Operation Murambatsvina,” 49. 46 Chimedza, “Bulldozers Always Come,” 90. 47 Ibid., 89. 48 Ibid., 90. 49 Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact Finding Mission, 74. 50 Maas, “Contingent Citizenship and Reversible Rights in the European Union,” 279. 51 Fontein, “Anticipating the Tsunami,” 381, n. 53. 52 Ibid. 53 Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 14. 54 Jackson, Surfacing Up, 2005. 55 Cheater and Gaidzanwa, “Citizenship in Neo-Patrilineal States,” 191. Pfambi has clear resonances with the English term “streetwalker,” gesturing to a transnational anxiety about women on the move. 56 Jackson. “When in the White Man’s Town.” 57 Watson, “Why WAG Was Formed.” 58 “Operation Clean-Up Takes Women’s Lib One Step Back,” 9. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZIMSTAT) and ICF International, Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey 2010-1, 197. 62 “Touts,” like sex workers, are notorious figures in this new informal economy, scapegoats for the social and economic ills plaguing the country. They are young, often underemployed men who operate “kombis,” the private buses that have supplanted the mostly defunct public bus system. Even though the majority of the population employs their services, touts are broadly perceived as a public nuisance. The main complaints are that their buses are unsafe, they are aggressive and rude, and they contribute to the disorder in the city by driving without regard for traffic laws. Consequently, like sex workers, they are often targets of police harassment. 63 “Policing Sex Work in Zimbabwe – an Appropriate Response?” 64 Ibid. 65 “Zimbabwe: Sex Workers and Police Play Cat and Mouse.” 66 Nemukuyu, “Loitering Laws Challenged.” 67 “Zimbabwe: Outcry Over Women’s Arrests.” 68 “Editorial Comment: Court ruling on prostitutes welcome.” 69 The movements of Zimbabwean sex workers have not been limited to spaces within the state’s borders. As the economy declined, Zimbabwean women migrated into neighboring countries such as South Africa, taking up sex work in order to survive. See Nhlapho, “Zimbabwean Sex Workers Dominate South African Streets.” 70 On its face, the distinction made here is problematic, since it would seem to suggest that the categories “woman,” “queer,” or “transgender” are mutually exclusive. However, it is reflective of the fact that in state discourses, “women” and “gays” are constructed and invoked as discrete populations. To put it another way, women are not often imagined as the derided or feared homosexual. The distinction between “women” and queer populations obtains to the extent that while most Zimbabweans believe that the

Stop the Woman, Save the State  241

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

law broadly criminalizes all same-sex relations, it actually only prohibits sex between men. Some queer Zimbabwean feminists I have spoken to have argued that this erasure from the law both benefits them (in that it allows them to evade arrest by arguing tactically that they are not a criminalized population) and serves as yet another legal instantiation of the cultural notion that female sexual desire is nonexistent. Sogunro, “One More Nation Bound in Freedom,” 50. Aarmo, “How Homosexuality Became UnAfrican,” 262. Msimang, “The Backlash Against African Women.” Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 302. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 40. Fontein, “Anticipating the Tsunami,” 390. Karimi, “Kenyans Rally.” McFadden, “Becoming Postcolonial,” 2.

Bibliography Aarmo, Margrete. “How Homosexuality Became UnAfrican,” In Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures, edited by Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wierenga, 255–80. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Eric T. Schultz. “Operation Restore Order in Bulawayo.” Wikileaks Cable: 05HARARE991_a. Dated July 20, 2005. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/­ 05HARARE991_a.html Chagonda, Tapiwa. “Dollarization of the Zimbabwean Economy: Cure or Curse? The Case of the Teaching and Banking Sectors.” A conference paper read at “the Renaissance of African Economies Conference,” in Dar Es Salam, Tanzania, during December 20 and 21, 2010. www.codesria.org/ IMG/pdf/papers14.pdf Cheater, Angela and Rudo Gaidzanwa. “Citizenship in Neo-Patrilineal States: Gender and Mobility in Southern Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 189–200. Chimedza, Tinashe L. “Bulldozers Always Come: ‘Maggots’, Citizens and Governance in Contemporary Zimbabwe.” In The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina, edited by Maurice Vambe, 87–104. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2008. Chimunhu, John. “Night Curfew for Women in Harare.” Zimeye, 2009. www. zimeye.org/?p=9668 Cook, Rebecca J. “Effectiveness of the Beijing Conference Advancing International Law Regarding Women.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 91 (1997): 310–17. Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: NYU Press, 1999. Dugger, Celia W. “Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for Useless Money.” New York Times, October, 2008. “Editorial Comment: Court ruling on prostitutes welcome.” The Chronicle, May 29, 2015. http://www.chronicle.co.zw/editorial-comment-court-rulingon-prostitutes-welcome/

242  Rudo Mudiwa Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal Order. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Fontein, Joost. “Anticipating the Tsunami: Rumours, Planning and the Arbitrary State in Zimbabwe.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 79, no. 3 (2009): 369–98. Gibney, Matthew J. “Should Citizenship Be Conditional? The Ethics of Denationalization.” The Journal of Politics 75, no. 3 (2013): 646–58. Gono, Gideon. Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy: Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges. Harare, Zimbabwe: ZPH Publishers, 2008. Grano, Daniel A. and Kenneth S. Zagacki. “Cleansing the Superdome: The Paradox of Purity and Post-Katrina Guilt.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 201–23. Hanke, Steve H. and Alex F. Kwok. “On the Measurement of Zimbabwe’s Hyperinflation.” Cato Journal 29, no. 2 (2009): 353–64. Harris, Ashleigh. “Discourses of Dirt and Disease in Operation Murambatsvina.” In The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina, edited by Maurice Vambe, 40–52. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2008. Jackson, Lynette. Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1908–1968. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Jones, Jeremy L. ‘“Nothing Is Straight in Zimbabwe’: The Rise of the Kukiya-­ Kiya Economy 2000–2008.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 285–99. Karimi, Faith. “Kenyans Rally for Woman Stripped Naked in Nairobi.” CNN. www.cnn.com/2014/11/17/world/woman-stripped-kenya/index.html Maas, Willem. “Contingent Citizenship and Reversible Rights in the European Union.” The Columbia Journal of European Law 15, no. 2 (2009): 265–80. Mawowa, Showers and Alois Matongo. “Inside Zimbabwe’s Roadside Currency Trade: The ‘World Bank’ of Bulawayo.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 319–37. Mbembe, Achille. “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” In Law and Order in the Postcolony, edited by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, 299–335. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. McFadden, Patricia. “Becoming Postcolonial: African Women Changing the Meaning of Citizenship.” Meridians 6, no. 1 (2006): 1–18. Msimang, Sisonke. “The Backlash Against African Women.” The New York Times, January 10, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/the-backlashagainst-african-women.html Mukonori, Fidelis. The Genesis of Violence in Zimbabwe. Harare: Centre for Peace Initiatives in Africa, 2012. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. and James Muzondidya, “Introduction: Redemptive or Groteque Nationalism in the Postcolony. ” In Redemptive or Grotesque Nationalism? Rethinking Contemporary Politics in Zimbabwe, edited by ­Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and James Muzondidya, Oxford  and New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Nemukuyu, Daniel. ‘Loitering Laws Challenged.’ The Herald, March 6, 2014. Nhlapho, Benedict. “Zimbabwean Sex Workers Dominate South African Streets.” Voice of America, December 27, 2013, www.voazimbabwe.com/content/­ zimbabwe-sex-workers-no-jobs-in-south-africa/1818714.html

Stop the Woman, Save the State  243 “Operation Clean-Up Takes Women’s Lib One Step Back.” Moto Magazine, December 1983/January 1984. Policing Sex Work in Zimbabwe – an Appropriate Response? Southern Africa Litigation Centre. www.southernafricalitigationcentre.org/2012/06/29/ policing-sex-work-in-zimbabwe-an-appropriate-response/ Potts, Deborah. “‘Restoring Order’? Operation Murambatsvina and the Urban Crisis in Zimbabwe.” Journal of Southern African Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 273–91. Public Order and Security Act, January 22, 2002, http://archive.kubatana.net/ html/archive/legisl/020122posa.asp Raftopoulos, Brian. “The Crisis in Zimbabwe, 1998–2008.” In Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Precolonial Period to 2008, edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, 201–32. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2009. Rupiya, Martin. “Zimbabwe: Governance Through Military Operations.” African Security Review 14, no. 3 (2005): 116–18. Sachikonye, Lloyd M. When a State Turns on Its Citizens: 60 Years of Institutionalised Violence in Zimbabwe. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2011. Sogunro, Ayo. “One More Nation Bound in Freedom.” Transition 114, (2014): 47–59. Sokwanele. “Public Order and Security Act.” August 20, 2003. www.sokwanele. com/articles/sokwanele/POSA_20aug2004.html Tibaijuka, Anna Kajumulo. Report of the Fact Finding Mission to Zimbabwe to assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina by the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe. New York, 2005. Vambe, Beauty. “Murambastvina’s Assault on Women’s Legal and Economic Rights: An Interview with a Cross-border Small Trader” In The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina, edited by Maurice T. Vambe, 75–86. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2008. Vambe, Maurice Taonezvi, ed. The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2008. Vambe, Maurice Taonezvi. “Historical Antecedents to Operation Murambatsvina.” In The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina, 9–24, 2008. Watson, Peggy. “Why WAG Was Formed.” Speak Out/Taurai/Khulumani 43 (1998): 4–5. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. 1st University of California Press ed. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZIMSTAT) and ICF International. Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey 2010–11. Calverton, MD: ZIMSTAT and ICF International Inc, 2012. “Zimbabwe: Outcry Over Women’s Arrests.” July 14, 2013, All Africa, Lexis Nexis. “Zimbabwe: Sex Workers and Police Play Cat and Mouse.” August 5, 2013, All Africa, Lexis Nexis.

12 “Modern-Day Slavery” The Analogy Problem in Human Trafficking Reform Julietta Hua

In September 2011, the web page Slaveryfootprint.org went live, asking visitors to the site, “How many slaves work for you?” The culmination of a collaboration between filmmaker and anti-trafficking activist Justin Dillon and the US State Department, the web page aims to present a “narrative that would allow individuals to understand their connection to modern-day slavery.”1 The website is part of a broader set of anti-­trafficking tools; Slaveryfootprint acts as an interactive survey that allows users to enter information about their lifestyle (age, location, homeownership, consumables, diet) by answering questions such as, “What’s on your plate?” At the end of the survey, the website provides users with an estimate of how many slaves they use, a number ostensibly based on the answers given about consumer practices. As the website’s “our story” narrative recounts, it is designed to address a presumed subject who is neither victim (slave) nor abuser (trafficker) by evoking US histories of transatlantic slavery. 2 By tracing the supply chain of commodities, the web page attempts to connect the consumer of a product with the enslaved laborers who produced it, thereby mobilizing these consumers to become rescuers. The web page in many ways illustrates the successes of anti-trafficking legislation and activism in the US. It works because “modern-day slavery” is now part of an everyday lexicon that describes contemporary human trafficking. I continue to think about the work of slavery3 and the effects of analogizing US histories of transatlantic slavery to human trafficking because in many ways, we still struggle and live within transatlantic slavery’s structures—the relationships, social structures, and ideologies that transatlantic chattel slavery sediments into the present lived realities of communities in the US (perhaps the most evident aspect of which today is the uneven impact of policing and the legal system on black communities). In this chapter, I revisit slavery and the logic of analogy in order to think about what the analogizing of global gender violence can obscure. Specifically, I want to think through how the analogizing of human trafficking with transatlantic slavery, in an effort to make labor exploitation more visible (by, for example, exposing commodity chains), can hide the violence of a humanitarian industry premised on the professionalization

“Modern-Day Slavery”  245 of intervention through nongovernmental organizations (or NGOization) as well as the routinized and often legal violence taking place in ­legitimated spaces of labor. What follows is thus a polemical chapter that draws together, first, criticisms of analogy as means to conceptualize identity and difference, drawn from scholars of sexuality and race, and, second, criticisms of the humanitarian and human rights industry that illustrate how they operate as sites of violence. I revisit these literatures in relation to human trafficking because, a decade and a half into the national legislating of anti-trafficking in the US, anti-trafficking policing continues to deploy a carceral feminism4 that simply grows local criminal codes, which we know are unevenly enforced and experienced in ways that deepen existing racialized and gendered inequalities. This chapter has three goals. The first is to unpack the work of the slavery analogy. The analogy not only narrates human trafficking as a distinctly US moral story but also makes it difficult to consider transatlantic slavery and human trafficking as intertwined and co-constituted in ways that extend beyond a temporalized “it-happened-then-and-ithappens-again” frame that defers in perpetuity and thereby maintains colonial conditions. That is, chattel slavery, which Slaveryfootprint invokes, is premised on the rendering of the laboring person into property. What the analogizing of transatlantic slavery with human trafficking obscures are the ways in which both transatlantic slavery and human trafficking perpetuate colonial conditions of accumulation that naturalize the extraction of “vital energies” (organs, fluids, affect) as the cost of flourishing for some: “Colonial labor extraction was based on a principle of the extraction of not only economic (monetary) sources of value, or raw materials and labor-power, but also of life itself.”5 The logic of analogy, by flattening global others into each other, not only enacts a representational violence but also upholds the financial infrastructures that fund human rights interventions. The second goal of this chapter is to consider how the infrastructural elements of human rights interventions concentrated in the form of nongovernmental and nonprofit “third spaces” perpetuate what Neda Atanasoski names humanitarian violence or what Pheng Cheah terms the inhuman conditions of human rights. If analogy’s logic enables a flattening of global “others” into similar figures competing for aid, the financial infrastructure of humanitarianism and human rights interventions renders such figures into commodities competing for intervention. While the “third space” or “third actor” of NGOs and nonprofits is in part conceived as distinct from the state, the financial principles of the “third sector” simply entrench accumulation that treats some bodies as the raw materials of the life sustained in others. Rather than seeing human trafficking as a criminal activity remedied through growing criminal codes or better consumer practices, I want instead to think about it as an occasion to (re)consider reproductive labor—or labor premised

246  Julietta Hua on the extraction and transmission of vitality from one life to enable the flourishing of another, which might better enable us to connect the routinized forms of violence taking place in the structuring and financing of NGOs, or in factories and other legitimated sites of production, to the framework of human trafficking. Thus, in the concluding section, I draw from the important work of the Foxconn Research Group, a team of teachers and students from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan whose goal is to understand and document the experiences of workers that make up the Foxconn Technology Group (the corporate entity). Foxconn gained notoriety in 2011 when a series of worker suicides became publicized in Chinese and English language ­media. For many consumers of personal technology products (phones, tablets, laptops), the coverage of the worker suicides was their first occasion of learning about the technology supply chain. Rather than advocating for better supply chains, I want instead to destabilize the routinization of violence taking place in legitimated sites of production by rethinking the commodity chain in ways that center modes and means of production rather than consumer and producer subjects. When the focus of human trafficking is on the subjects (consumers, criminal traffickers, “slaves”) rather than the terms through which subjects emerge, solutions tend to remain limited to either moving from subject position to subject position (making consumers rescuers, for example) or applying the proper actions to a subject (putting criminals in prison or freeing slaves). Instead, what the Research Group’s findings on labor conditions at Foxconn factories press us to consider are how conditions of labor in the legal, legitimated technology component part factories (as in the context of transatlantic slavery) are not criminal, despite what can only be described as the very criminal abuses that become a routinized part of workers’ lives. There is no analogy here; rather, what I hope this chapter will illustrate are the relational structures of dispossession that draw together the labor conditions in factories like Foxconn to plantations and other work sites that benefit from the structures of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Logic of Analogy and the Collapsing of Difference Analogies, Nancy Leys Stepan points out, work as a science or knowledge project. That is, rather than simply describing existing similarities, Stepan argues, analogies create and establish systems of meaning: “It is the metaphor that permits us to see similarities that the metaphor itself helps construct. … Metaphors, then, through their capacity to construct similarities, create new knowledge.”6 Yet, in creating new meanings, analogies also disallow others. For Stepan, this aspect of metaphor and analogy led race scientists in the 1800s to suppress any measurements that challenged their preconceived belief in the intellectual and moral superiority of white men over white women and people of other races.

“Modern-Day Slavery”  247 Given Stepan’s insights, what does it mean then that the infrastructure of financing that structures how many human rights interventions take place both shapes and is shaped by ways of thinking that enable analogies of violences? As postcolonial and feminist critics have long argued, the ways we think, represent, and make-into-knowledge global “others” render global “others” monolithic in their inability to “catch up to” the privileged subjects of humanity (namely, the European self consolidated through post-Enlightenment philosophical, political, and economic projects). What meanings, connections, and interdependencies are clouded when analogy becomes the mode of comparison, particularly in the example of analogizing the violence of human trafficking to that of transatlantic slavery? The logic of analogy, which likens human trafficking to transatlantic slavery, flattens global others into each other in the likeness of being behind (e.g., “veiling women is to Islam what FGC is to Africa”). This is a racial project, one that sexuality scholars such as Chandan Reddy explain as constituting subjects through presumptions of racialized development. For example, in a San Francisco Chronicle news feature covering the anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement march to Selma, the march is described this way: “Fifty years after a violent civil rights clash in Selma, Alabama is again taking a stand against expanding civil rights, this time to lesbian and gay couples seeking marriage.”7 The presumption of racialized development frames the fight against state-imposed antiblack racism as a prior, now past, barrier to freedom, one that is resurrected in the barriers to gay marriage. The limits of the “like race” analogy, in which homophobia becomes like white supremacy, temporalize “racial experiences into a past, a present, and future” in ways that erase or make mundane state violence.8 Writing about the context of the War on Terror, scholars including Sarah Bracke, Fatima El-Tayeb, Eric Fassin, Jennifer Petzen, Jasbir Puar, and others explain that the inclusion of certain forms of homosexuality into the national project (“homonationalism”) works through the temporalizing of freedom that names Muslim patriarchy, particularly in ­European contexts, as the global threat rendering “not only ‘brown gays’ … in need of rescue” but also white gays “in need of rescue from (the ­homophobia of) minoritarian Muslims/migrants.”9 This analogical link, where the new threat of homophobia is likened to the old threat of colonial racism to democracy, is precisely what such scholars trace in their analyses of the post-9/11 rhetoric of sexual democracy that hinges on the construction of Muslim difference as sexually excessive and perverse. This high-stakes logic, Reddy explains, places “gay rights” in the narrative of progress as the newest iteration of immigrant rights (or, in the US, the rights of racial minorities), where winning rights becomes “a contest … now figured as between ‘gays and lesbians’ and ‘immigrants’ in the domain of law for legal recognition,”10 leading to what Evelynn

248  Julietta Hua Hammonds describes as the “inadequate characterization of the problem of the visibility of gays and lesbians of color.”11 The critiques of homonationalism in the context of the War on Terror trace a different but related formation. In these literatures, being Muslim is constructed as both homophobic and perversely queer, as Deborah Cohler points out in her examination of the proliferation of representations of terrorists as both brown and gay. Yet what draws these racial formations together is the national investment in proper forms of reproduction, once only heterosexual, but which can now include normative forms of homosexuality. The notion of democratic progress to a more diverse future remains, and by situating blackness as the earlier problem of racism, this discourse rewrites blackness into the contemporary problem of homophobia in ways that dovetail with the construction of Muslim backwardness.12 Blackness, like Islam, becomes a site attached to the past; blackness and Muslim difference become indicators of a reluctance and refusal to move forward. These conceptual terms, which assume freedom and morality as intrinsic to some subjects, while others await their arrival, rehearse colonial grammars that, as Johannes Fabian, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and other scholars have pointed out, temporalize freedom only to entrench the very conceptual conditions that keep global “others” perpetually in the waiting room of history. As Neda Atanasoski, Thu-Huong ­Nguyen-­Vo, Mimi Nguyen, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others explore, discourses of freedom, democracy, and development in the post-socialist context (consolidated through the War on Terror) (re)framed global subjects through what Silva describes as a moral grammar in which “new friends of freedom” double as the enemies of freedom; they are unreliable friends, made into friends only through US and Western European aid and intervention, making freedom a gift that is accompanied by debt. The fact that perpetrators of violence (“enemies of freedom”) are also the subjects of violence requiring rescue (“new friends”) simply writes difference as inescapable—an effect of what Silva terms the racial.13 The aforementioned conceptual conditions, in which analogy enables the racial project of naturalizing developmental progress, are important to highlight because they foreclose other ways of linking violences. ­Further, the conceptual conditions that render “sex slaves” like transatlantic slaves, or that collapse veiled women into homophobia and terrorism, produce a global landscape where multiple similar figures of global gender violence compete for rescue. If global others are constituted through their inability to escape their potential to be “enemies of freedom,” even as they might also be “new friends to freedom,” Western intervention becomes the necessary premise to a human rights-enacting globe. Analogy enables the veiled woman to be like the immolating wife and like the victim of genital cutting. That these figures also represent the failure of civilization (or colonialism’s imposition of civilizational

“Modern-Day Slavery”  249 time) also works to naturalize the analogizing of violences. The veiled woman, the trafficked victim, the slave—these figures are rendered familiar. Yet they are not similarly oppressed, as early “sexual slavery” feminists, such as Kathleen Barry, argued.14 What these figures share is the conceptual apparatus that has drawn them into a kind of contingent legibility in which the understanding of one figure is tied to the shaping of another. As feminist scholars, Chandra Mohanty prominent among them, have argued, the subjects of global gender violence become collapsible and interchangeable in their similar rendering as culturally backward, constituting a monolithic and categorical understanding of the “Third World Woman” in Western scholarship. This construction of the impoverished global subject as interchangeable is exactly the gendered premise that maquiladoras, export processing factories, plantations, sweatshops, and other mass production facilities use to justify the principle of flexible production. Workers, many times women, are considered interchangeable by employers. This is the principle of labor organization that enabled structural adjustment programs in the 1990s. These workers also often migrate, enticed by factory representatives into transporting themselves across state borders into free trade zones or simply within a state but into high-production factories in special economic zones where their work conditions require constant surveillance, the surrendering of identity (both in the form of state-sponsored identification documents and personal identity traits), and limited worker mobility. That the labor conditions attached to (often World Bank- and International Monetary Fund-supported) development are not legible as part of the narrative of human trafficking is precisely my concern. The slavery analogy enables a system of meanings that produces similarity. If trafficking is like transatlantic slavery, the evil of transatlantic slavery is captured in trying to make false commodities and perverting capitalism. This logic is evident in the anti-trafficking strategy of the website Slaveryfootprint, which asks donors/rescuers to be more discerning about where they put their money; they are asked to look for the better product. For instance, on each page of the survey there is a related slavery fact that reads like this: “Bonded labor is used for much of Southeast Asia’s shrimping [sic] industry, which supplies more shrimp to the U.S. than any other country. Laborers work up to 20-hour days to peel 40 pounds of shrimp. Those who attempt to escape are under constant threat of violence or sexual assault.”15 The implication here is that consumers might then choose to buy shrimp that is not farmed in Thailand or perhaps refrain from purchasing shrimp at all. The structural conditions that dispossess are never critiqued strongly, since solutions to dispossession are framed in terms of better and smarter buying practices.16 The slavery analogy implies that transatlantic slavery and human trafficking share a perversion of capitalism correctable through better

250  Julietta Hua consumer practices. Yet, because the analogy necessitates that transatlantic slavery and human trafficking be episodic moments in a larger shared, temporal narrative, it erases the interconnected dispossessions that link the practices of transatlantic slavery to contemporary uneven distributions of global wealth. Rather, the uneven global distribution of wealth is taken for granted as a natural part of the world order— the commodity chain need only be corrected, its existence is presumed. In failing to ask how global distributions of wealth and poverty come to take shape in particular ways, the web page erases larger questions around labor, dispossession, and inheritance. For instance, the slavery analogy never considers that chattel slavery and undervalued labor might be necessary aspects of capital accumulation. It simply assumes that enslaved labor is morally wrong; it never considers that undervalued labor and enslaved labor enable the existence of commodity chains in the first place. Slaveryfootprint’s investment in working within a consumer capitalist framework demonstrates that the “human” conceived at the center of human rights is also the primary economic actor of neoliberal formations.17 The stakes of analogic moral economies are starkly tangible in Slaveryfootprint.org, whose focus on consumer activism refuses to admit (and helps to obscure) that “consumers have a limited economic role—they can decide to consume more, consume less, or consume differently.”18 Instead of assuming commodity chains, critical readers might instead take a step back and ask how commodity chains take shape as they do. For instance, the web page offers the fact about bonded labor in Southeast Asia’s shrimp industry, which exports primarily to the US. What the web page cannot ask, because of its own investment in consumer capitalist practices, is why Southeast Asia has become the central production site for shrimp exported to the US market. Asking this question would point to a series of relational and structural factors— colonial occupation, transformations of the land, pollution, militarism, development practices focused on producing export markets, repressive state regimes, and so on—that now make shrimp farming for export a central part of Southeast Asian economies. Thus, if analogy draws parallels that treat transatlantic slavery and human trafficking as discrete, temporally mirrored problems, attention to something like inheritance might instead enable relational interconnections. For instance, if relational structures of dispossession become the focus of the problem, the relationship between transatlantic slavery and human trafficking broadens. As Annie Fukushima and I elaborate elsewhere, the context of Slaveryfootprint’s production reveals a series of inherited structures of dispossession. The website’s development was in part funded by a portion of a $11.5 million grant offered by Google in 2011.19 Google’s ability to offer such technological “development” grants, its ability to become an actor in the economy of human rights,

“Modern-Day Slavery”  251 stems from a series of relational dispossessions. These dispossessing structures include indigenous displacement; transformations of the land into and out of agricultural production, which includes enslaved and highly undervalued and often undocumented labor; the Cold War investment in an “academic-military-industrial complex”; and the stratified labor of hardware production. 20 The wealth of Silicon Valley, including the emergence of a software industry alongside hardware production, continues to rely on the segregated labor of innovators (software engineers) and non-innovators (service workers whose reproductive labor sustains the Google campus). These relational structures inherit colonial paradigms of dispossession, and this is perhaps most evident in the uneven distribution of economic and health costs that continue to stratify the local community. Alongside the wealth of Silicon Valley are some of the most polluted areas in the US, where many of the low-wage workers of the Valley’s hardware production industry continue to reside. Citizens and immigrants of color disproportionately carry the burden of the Valley’s undervalued labor and the high rates of cancer and other diseases that proliferate as a direct result of their laboring conditions. 21 And as Alison Veith points out, these patterns reproduce themselves in Google’s stratified labor structure, where service workers—janitors, security guards, grounds crew, cafeteria workers—are often contracted out, technically not considered employees of Google at all. These workers are also disproportionately immigrants and people of color. 22 That these labor conditions, which could easily be “slavery-like” in the ways they restrict the mobility, safety, and health of workers, are not easily accepted as human rights violations, nor tied to human trafficking, is exactly the point. Or put another way, the fact that the ubiquitous iPhone, on which I assume many users of Slaveryfootprint access the website, depends on subcontracted factories operated by companies such as Foxconn, which are heavily critiqued for controlling all aspects of workers’ lives—and that this disappears in Slaveryfootprint—points to the limits of the slavery analogy.

“Humanitarian Violence” Humanitarianism conceals great violence, as Atanososki understands: Since the USA and its allies portray themselves as waging wars against tyrannical creeds and not against the peoples of a particular nation, culture, or racial or religious group, humanitarian militarism prohibits attention to its own death dealing. It is, instead, represented as a struggle to restore human dignity by protecting diversity (though not material equality), made sacred in the rule of law … conceal[ing] instances of ‘our’ brutality, enacted in the name

252  Julietta Hua of peace, reconciliation, and the rule of law, while paradoxically reinscribing violence and injury through the process of humanizing the other. 23 “Modern-day slavery” names a kind of aberrant creed that resurrects so-called old evils. “Modern-day slavery” shapes intervention into a project to, as Atanasoski names, “restore human dignity” rather than establishing material redistribution. The focus on commodity chains and “slave free” products makes clear the privileging of “restoring human dignity” over any kind of material redistribution that would call into question the terms of capital accumulation. Signaling a growing means to combat human trafficking, Slaveryfootprint.org focuses on drawing attention to commodity chains and individuals’ participation and places in them. Following the general trend of using socially conscious marketing, Slaveryfootprint’s sister project, Made In a Free World, applies the principles of supply chain ethics into software that can aid businesses to assess and manage their “social risk.” As Allison Page’s examination of Slaveryfootprint articulates, the web project and software tools draw from a long history and accompanying scholarly literature around mobilizing notions of ethical consumption, one that advances “neoliberal poverty management and consumer activism” even as challenges to racial capitalism remain lukewarm. 24 The scope of this frame is vast; there is even a pizzeria in downtown Berkeley, CA, that markets itself through a mission to join good food with social awareness of issues like human trafficking. Its web page includes a link to “human trafficking” that notes, “Since our establishment in January 2013, we felt it important to voice our support for those on the front lines fighting human trafficking every day. Each month, [the business] makes it a point to provide financial and/or moral support to freedom organizations.”25 Financial support here is on par with moral support. What this turn toward consumer activism and commodity chains reveals are the ways individualized moral panic (around slavery, in this case) has become part and parcel of a humanitarian and human rights infrastructure operating on capitalism’s calculus of value that hierarchizes care—where will there be most return on investment? Panic establishes the need for immediate interventions but, as postcolonial and feminist scholars have long argued, problematically affirms “the premise of the global power [of the “west” that] perceives that its self interest is secured by granting to another the advantage of human freedom as the gift of freedom,” which, as Mimi Thi Nguyen argues, necessarily incurs debt. 26 These colonial ontological conditions, which shape the ways the subjects of human rights and human trafficking might know each other, are captured in Made In a Free World’s investment in global capital and commodity chains (desiring better chains) and Slaveryfootprint’s investment in a unidirectional consumer activism (where “slaves”

“Modern-Day Slavery”  253 exist outside the national and economic contexts of users/consumers). As Aziz Choudry puts it, “the ascendancy of NGOs and the rise of ‘global civil society’ [have been critiqued for] attempting to humanize capitalist exploitation. … [T]hrough their refusal to confront ongoing colonial practices, these NGOs are themselves behaving as colonizers.”27 Human rights might best be taken as a terrain of institutional actors, rhetorical narratives, and ideological apparati through which subject formation around “the human” takes place. Most human rights scholars mark the end of World War II and the emergence of the UDHR and United Nations (UN) as a significant moment in the institutionalization of an international apparatus organized around this human question. For example, Marc Abélès explores how post-World War II formations of the political shifted representations of the political from notions of conviviality to those of survival, where the rise of humanitarian organizations—or the institutionalization of humanitarianism— frames politics in terms of ensuring survival (of the species), a survival threatened by nation-states, whether through benign neglect or overt agendas. This institutionalization of humanitarianism and human rights through extra-­national structures (from the UN to NGOs) shapes these structures as antithetical to the state; NGOs are conceived as actors that address what the state can or will not—the abandoned voices and subjects of the world conceived of as on the brink of survival. Yet, when the NGO and other humanitarian and human rights institutions are structured as alternatives to (and outside of) the state, such institutions must compete for funds to sustain their missions from mostly non-state sources. For Abélès, this explains the contradictory logic that sustains the NGO, in which competition over both private funding and worthy victims shapes the institutionalization of humanitarianism into a kind of market: NGOs become “subcontractors of public power,” sharing a logic more readily evident in private enterprise than in public works. 28 Furthermore, NGOs increasingly treat “intensely political choices as technical and managerial ones [that] impos[e] control and regulation through external solutions to local problems.”29 In creating a political space for “those with no voices,” Abélès further argues, they induce disorder and discordance in an economic structure marked by greater professionalization in a competition over the most “worthy” victims. 30 These “worthy” victims become worthy and thus good precisely because they mobilize donors. Moral value is constituted on exactly those subjects positioned as furthest away from the norms of valuable life; there is great value in being devalued within the scope of human rights and humanitarianisms. Indeed, as many feminist scholars have noted, despite the nomenclature, NGOs are far from “non-governmental.” Rather, as Victoria ­Bernal and Inderpal Grewal note, NGOs are never separate from states or markets, and “non-profit” and “non-governmental” might simply

254  Julietta Hua point to a need to unpack the complex relations that shape the “geopolitical context of the knowledge and power frameworks of the expanding modern West.”31 Both “non-profit” and “non-governmental” are deeply gendered in the ways they politicize and globalize “the private as an organized entity, but also as a private entity that is not a profit-making enterprise.”32 In these ways, nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations rehearse the problematic gendered distinctions made when spaces and labors are divided into public and private. Public funds are often re-routed into private pathways, and these private pathways presume the undervaluing of the labor of NGO workers or simply operate on gendered logics that substitute care for compensation. Furthermore, given the underrepresentation of women in official state and extra-state-level positions, NGOs become a key vehicle to give women a voice, so to speak. Yet, as at-best deeply contradictory and conflicted sites, NGOs, by relying on this premise of “giving voice to women,” can reproduce deeply hierarchical, unfeminist relations “that constitute some women as benevolent providers and others as worthy or deserving recipients of development.”33 This NGOization, which is marked by the “professionalization of dissent, the valorization of certain kinds of knowledge, the devaluing of other forms which emerge from within social struggles and dubious claims to representation,” is in part an effect of an infrastructure of financing tied to the ever-growing landscape of foundations. 34 This infrastructure works by channeling the economic means to intervene in human rights as one that (often invisibly) centers wealthy multinational corporations and the individuals who have extracted the most wealth from globalized capital and allows these actors to further shelter their wealth from taxes. As Craig Willse recounts, the tax forms attached to one nonprofit organization that runs multiple programs to service homelessness reveal that the organization’s founder and president paid himself a salary of over half a million dollars a year in 2011, his wife a salary of almost $300,000, and his son compensation of more than $200,000, while the highest paid participants of one of the programs the organization sponsors earned only $285/week. 35 The economic scope of foundations is staggering. One data-­collecting nonprofit whose sole purpose is “to strengthen the social sector by advancing knowledge about philanthropy in the U.S. and around the world,” the Foundation Center, reports that in 2014, over 86,000 foundations held assets totaling more than 865 billion dollars. 36 Nearly $6 billion funded specifically non-US projects in 2014, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continuing to be the top international funder of organizations since 2004. The competitive nature of foundation funding has been critiqued by many scholars, including Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, who notes the ways funders establish institutional mechanisms that perpetuate violence against women in the anti-violence movement.

“Modern-Day Slavery”  255 She notes, for example, how privatized funding shifted accountability from constituents to funders, “literally split[ting] [the antiviolence movement] in two when funding came in to work discretely on either domestic violence or sexual assault, but not both.”37 One violent outcome of this economy of humanitarianism and human rights is in the competition it fosters amongst organizations ostensibly working toward common goals. In another example, one local nonprofit working on transnational, gendered labor that I have been supporting for several years has recently come to a crossroads. As their work increasingly intersects with a related and coalitional organization, they have felt pressured to fold into the larger, national organization. The local group’s main funding comes from a $125,000 grant; the grantor that provides those funds also awarded the related national organization (with much better-known individuals attached) $1 million in the same year to do similar work.38 Thus, leaders in the local organization have been pondering whether it might be strategically better and financially more efficient to release some of their autonomy and join the larger national organization. Our concerns, of course, are that joining the national organization may then place us at risk of losing autonomy and losing the very localized focus of our projects—in fact, of changing the nature of our work while increasing oversight from above. As more and more competition occurs around funding, smaller and less recognized organizations face increasing pressures as larger organizations doing related or similar work win more of the private funding available. While the logic at work in part presumes that larger, national organizations, because of their size, have wider and greater impact, this is not necessarily the case. As scholars critical of NGOization have pointed out, large organizational size and scope often means larger managerial classes organized hierarchically above the “local” or grassroots workers and members. Such a structure of management encourages, or at best implies the need for, rescue from outside. As a group of rural, grassroots organizers (Sangtin Writers) in India recount, “We, and other NGO workers like us, are becoming more and more distant from our rural worlds with respect to our lifestyles and aspirations as we try to become more impressive in the NGO society.”39 Professionalization, these organizers recount, mandated an imposition of hierarchy between those associated with the NGO and those still outside its managerial scope. Or, as Tina Wallace, Lisa Bornstein, and Jennifer Chapman put it, “The increasingly bureaucratic management of aid, which seeks to control, count, and account tightly for both finances and complex processes of social change, is underpinned by a set of beliefs about how to achieve change, which draws less from experience and the analysis of success or failure in practice and more from the shifting ideologies of those designing the development project.”40 Connecting this pressure—to act, dress, and identify with the paid professional NGO workers—to the pressure

256  Julietta Hua that comes from donors who want to see immediate results favoring single issue projects, the local organizers of Sangtin lament, “The issue is the same old one, however: If we don’t have the money to gather even the basic resources, how could we build or sustain a movement? After all, no funding agencies give funds to carry out a movement!”41 This is admittedly a schematic gloss of some of the infrastructural conditions that shape the institutionalization of human rights and humanitarian interventions, but it nonetheless demonstrates how human rights are tied to mechanisms dictated through a kind of moral economy, one that creates distance between the needs of a locale and the conservative desires of the funding mechanisms to shelter wealth and maintain sedimented pathways of accumulation and dispossession. With so many resources tied to private and corporate donors, which organizations flourish and which are folded into larger organizations has everything to do with selling panic (to donors) around the suffering of victims and the horrific nature of human rights violations. These infrastructural conditions help shape the ways in which the “human” of human rights can be imagined, divided among victims, perpetrators/violators, and (potential) rescuers, which, as the Sangtin Writers note, stymies more expansive visions and projects that might be better understood as enhancing livelihoods and liveliness.

Conclusion In 2010, English-language media reported a series of worker suicides at Foxconn Technology Group buildings, a component parts supplier for companies including Apple. Initially reported in prominent US media outlets as “a China-specific problem,” the issue later gained various framings in Chinese- and English-language media, including those that emphasized the suicides as human rights abuses, as reflecting psychological issues tied to Chinese youth, and as a problem with China’s economic model.42 Since that time, researchers, media, and activists have attempted to provide a deeper narrative that more fully contextualizes the suicides and attempted suicides at Foxconn, which include 24 individuals aged 17–25 between January 2010 and December 2011, and that span several Foxconn factories.43 If the conditions of labor inside the myriad factories that produce components for devices such as laptops, smart phones, and tablets on which Google’s wealth depends are known to be so dire that workers commit suicide, how is it that these conditions escape the analogy of slavery? Why do the narrative conventions of human trafficking make it difficult to connect and bring together the undervalued, non-innovative labor of Silicon Valley with that of workers in a globalized corporate electronics industry? How might human trafficking instead offer an opportunity to destabilize the routinization of violence taking place in legitimated sites of production? Or how might

“Modern-Day Slavery”  257 we rethink the commodity chain in a way that centers modes and means of production, rather than consumer and producer subjects? Factories like those that make up the Foxconn group (Foxconn being only one of many corporate entities operating similar component parts worksites) emerged in part as a result of shifts in China’s national economy and its relation to global capitalist circuits over the past 60 or so years. As technology development firms solidified in Silicon Valley in the post-World War II period, they simultaneously established transnational networks linking development firms to component suppliers and assembly service companies.44 Hardware production, which was once a mainstay of Silicon Valley, eventually became more efficient and profitable when it was outsourced. As the computer electronics industry consolidated around key companies in the 1990s—Apple, Microsoft, Cisco—the industry solidified a model of large-scale outsourcing of manufacturing to lead companies in “emerging markets” such as China that themselves became global corporations (like Foxconn).45 And as the push for rush orders in the growing personal electronic computing devices sector intensifies—in part through the designed obsolescence of these very devices—the configuration of factory labor in China also shifts, geographically, from coasts to inland and closer to mines as well as from smaller to mega factory cities. In this context, the Foxconn Research Group documents a myriad of trends premised on the extraction of vitality and life from workers. Factories become “living zones” and “campuses” designed to capture, in comprehensive fashion, workers’ lives, and local governments and schools provide free labor recruitment often through advertising internships at the factory, which then exempt student interns from labor law protections. Once on the factory campus, workers (mostly students) live within a “dormitory factory regime, which organizes the sphere of production and the sphere of reproduction” where one factory (Foxconn’s larger Shenzhen Longhua facility) might include “twelve-story dormitories, a psychological counseling clinic, an employee care center, banks, two hospitals, a library, a post office, a fire brigade … an exclusive television network, an educational institute, bookstores, soccer fields, basketball courts, a track and field, swimming pools, cyber theaters, supermarkets, a collection of cafeterias and restaurants, and even a wedding dress shop.”46 Beyond the long work days, lack of adequate breaks, confiscation of personal items, and punitive surveillance that characterize life in the factory, the Research Group’s interviews reveal the ways living spaces not only become an extension of the controlled and routinized structures of the factory (“food and drink, sleeping, washing and other aspects of workers’ daily lives are scheduled just like production lines”),47 they are also premised on worker isolation. Random reassignment of dormitory space is a normal practice, sexuality is regulated, sleep disruption is designed into the space of the dormitory, and “every

258  Julietta Hua Foxconn factory building and dormitory has security checkpoints with guards standing by 24 hours a day.”48 It is in this context that workers committed suicide, in all but two cases by jumping off of buildings.49 That the suicides implicated Foxconn buildings is significant; they point to the (infra) structures that limited the ability of workers to live and move. At the same time that young workers were committing suicide on Foxconn properties, in mid-2011, a young Chinese teen from a poor province was hospitalized for renal complications. It was then that his mother discovered the teen had arranged to sell one of his kidneys in order to purchase an iPad and iPhone; his renal failure was linked to his illegal kidney removal surgery. This story did not garner as much English-language media coverage as the Foxconn suicides, nor were the stories ever linked. In fact both stories quickly receded from US news ­media,  even  while  ­human  trafficking continues to garner media attention. Most US media coverage of the story was similar to that of Wired, which framed the story in terms of the inequality in compensation (the youth received only $3,500 from the exchange, which net over $35,000); the trials of the surgeon, medical staff, organ broker, and other (­Chinese national) individuals involved; and the problem of the black market organ trade in China. Nowhere was the youth’s ordeal linked to the ­Foxconn suicides nor was it linked to the structures of dispossession that have continued to enable exponential wealth accumulation amongst the most elite workers in the technology industry. Instead, the lesson that Wired conveyed about the story captured the extent of the coverage: “Let this be a lesson to any other crazed Apple fans out there: An electronics device is not worth compromising your health. Or your life.”50 The trade in human organs is an oft-cited example of trafficking, but we might rethink this exchange, as Vora suggests, not as trafficking but as a matter of vitality and reproductive labor. The slavery trafficking analogy suggests following the commodity chain—such that the Foxconn suicides, for example, would move consumers to pressure Apple (and other companies using Foxconn Group factories in their supply chain). What such a focus cannot address, however, is the fact that accumulation, in the form of accessibility to iPhone upgrades every couple of years, will always necessitate the extraction of vitality from some. What the Wired article, in offering their lesson to “crazed Apple fans” cannot address, is the fact that those electronic devices require the compromising of worker health; they necessitate that the lives and liveliness of some workers be sacrificed as the cost of doing business. And the fact that the magazine writers and editors were never able to see the racial implications of framing the Chinese teen’s identity as just another “crazed Apple fan” (effectively pathologizing and individuating the teen’s actions into a moral failure of the Chinese) speaks to the limits of supply and commodity chain logics. The structures of transatlantic

“Modern-Day Slavery”  259 slavery that remain deeply embedded in our current relations are precisely those that render mundane and expected the deaths of some workers and the transmission of vitality for the privilege of others. When so many users of Slaveryfootprint are likely using devices with component parts manufactured by Foxconn and similar companies, why isn’t Slaveryfootprint asking about these commodity chains or the website’s own embeddedness in legitimated but at best exploitative labor practices? Human trafficking, for me, is most productive when it allows us to consider interdependencies, not only between workers and consumers but in modes and means of production. The slavery analogy that proliferates in human trafficking literatures should be examined not only for the similarities it allows but also for the connections it disallows. To be willing to see commodity chains is admirable, yet it cannot then substitute for projects that try to reveal what is assumed in the structuring of those chains. That is, seeing the commodity chain is not the same as asking how the commodity chain comes to take shape in certain ways and not others. Without unsettling the assumptions around the moral subject of Man’s progress, we cannot question the idioms of vulnerability and degradation at work in framing how human rights and global gender violence become legible. Reflecting critically on the frames taken for granted in describing trafficking as slavery is just as important as addressing trafficking’s exploitations. As Stepan insists, “metaphors shape our perceptions and in turn our actions.”51 Attentiveness to how something like human rights or global gender violence is accounted for—how it comes to matter—can dramatically shift how we understand violence and redress. For example, if we are willing to see how the conceptual apparatus naturalizing linear notions of development limits our accounting of human rights, we might reflect more carefully on how we take account of the world. Ethical relations might be just that, a relation rather than an outcome. For Karen Barad, the ethical relation must also rethink temporality and consider the fact that the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present ­moment … Not even a moment exists on its own. “This” and “that,” “here” and “now,” don’t preexist what happens but come alive with each meeting. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade with each moment. 52 In accounting for human trafficking, taking seriously the simultaneity of past and future might mean thinking of transatlantic slavery not as the forerunner to human trafficking but as entangled with it. Such entanglement would mean considering how human trafficking actually enables a particular understanding of transatlantic slavery and how transatlantic

260  Julietta Hua slavery enables us to understand trafficking in a particular way. This kind of accounting could not be reduced to simple analogy but would follow Barad and others, such as Michelle Wright, who consider alternative organizations of time. For example, in problematizing analogy and its developmental frame, we might then be able to consider the epiphenomenal. As Wright describes it, “the now, through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted … ‘Epiphenominal’ time denotes the current moment, a moment that is not directly borne out of another (i.e. causally created).”53 Thinking about the mutual constitution of human trafficking and transatlantic slavery demonstrates an epiphenomenal orientation, where transatlantic slavery is not taken as the precursor and the privileged relation is not necessarily causality. Rather, looking at the relation between them unsettles what might otherwise be taken for granted.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Kitty Millet, the participants of the Global Moral Panics symposium (October 2014), and anonymous reviewers for all their generative and valuable feedback and intellectual companionship that made this chapter possible.

Notes 1 “Our Story,” Slaveryfootprint.org. 2 See Page, “How Many Slaves Work for You?” 3 See Hua and Fukushima, “Calling the Consumer Activist.” 4 See Musto, “Carceral protectionism and multi-professional anti-trafficking human rights work in the Netherlands”; Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism.” 5 Vora, Life Support, 4. 6 Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 271. 7 Lochhead, “Same-sex marriage fight in Alabama like racial equality battle.” 8 Reddy, Freedom With Violence, 192. 9 Bracke, “From ‘Saving Women’ to ‘Saving Gays,’” 247. 10 Reddy, “Time for Rights?” 153. 11 Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” 381. As Hammonds, Roderick Ferguson, Kara Keeling, and others point out, the conceptual terms through which sexuality and race emerge together leave little room to exist as black and queer. 12 Cohler, “Keeping the Home Front Burning”; Jennifer Petzen points out that “those racialized as ‘Muslim’ can only ever be late-comers” (“Contesting Europe,” 99). 13 Unlike racialization or racial formation, which describe efforts to define, measure, and make scientific bodily differences, the racial accounts for the onto-epistemological regimes that instituted Man as the privileged subject of history (and civilization) consolidated through post-Enlightenment texts, which presumed self-knowing and independent action and thinking as the basis for Man’s accounting. See Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. 14 Suchland, Economies of Violence, 30–31.

“Modern-Day Slavery”  261 15 Slaveryfootprint.org. 16 In its most explicit form, this contradiction exists in calls to buy a slave’s freedom. 17 See Hesford and Kozol, eds., Just Advocacy? 18 Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy, Take Back the Economy, 7. 19 Molko and Cohen, “Google joins fight against slavery.” 20 See Pellow and Sun-Hee Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams. 21 Ibid. 22 Elder, “Blacks, Latinos Dominate Silicon Valley’s ‘Invisible Workforce.’” 23 Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence, 2. 24 Page, “How Many,” 48. 25 http://sliverpizzeria.com/human-trafficking/. 26 Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom, xii. 27 Choudry, “Saving Biodiversity,” 25. 28 Abeles, The Politics of Survival, 170. 29 Wallace with Bornstein and Chapman, The Aid Chain, 2. 30 Abeles, The Politics, 177. 31 Bernal and Grewal, eds., Theorizing NGOs, 8. 32 Ibid. 33 Mindry, “Non-Governmental Organizations,” 1189. 34 Choudry and Kapoor, NGOization, 15. 35 Willse, The Value of Homelessness, 14. 36 “Our Mission,” foundationcenter.org/about-us; “Aggregate Foundation Data of Foundations in the U.S., 2014,” http://data.foundationcenter.org/. 37 INCITE, “We Were Never Meant to Survive,” 117. 38 Author’s personal correspondence and notes from July 26, 2017. 39 Nagar and Sangtin Writers, Playing With Fire, 113. 40 Wallace with Bornstein and Chapman, The Aid Chain, 2. 41 Nagar and Sangtin Writers, Playing, 125. 42 Lei Guo, Shih-Hsien Hsu, Avery Holton and Sun Ho Jeong, “A case study of the Foxconn suicides.” 43 Ngai and Chan, “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers.” 4 4 Luthje and Butollo, “Why the Foxconn Model Does Not Die.” 45 Ibid. 46 Ngai and Chan, “Global Capital,” 393–394. Another, smaller factory in the same city has none of the extra features, only multi-story dorms. 47 Ibid., 402. 48 Ngai and Chan, “The Spatial Politics of Labor in China,” 184. 49 Ngai and Chan, “Global Capital,” 393. One youth slit his wrists after failing to jump (Chen—surname only), another youth hanged himself (Xie Yanshe). 50 Bonnington, “5 Charged in Case of Chinese Teen Selling Kidney for IDevices.” 51 Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 275. 52 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 234, 396. 53 Wright, The Physics of Blackness, 4.

Bibliography Abeles, Marc. The Politics of Survival. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Atanasoski, Neda. Humanitarian Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

262  Julietta Hua Bernal, Victoria and Inderpal Grewal, eds. Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms and Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Bernstein, Elizabeth. “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism.” Signs 36 no. 1 (2010): 45–71. Bonnington, Christina. “5 Charged in Case of Chinese Teen Selling Kidney for IDevices.” Wired, April 12, 2012. www.wired.com/2012/04/five-chargedteen-kidney/ Bracke, Sarah. “From ‘Saving Women’ to ‘Saving Gays’: Rescue Narrative and their Dis/continuities.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, no. 2 (2012): 237–52. Cheah, Pheng. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Choudry, Aziz and Dip Kapoor, eds. NGO-izations: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects. New York: Zed Books, 2013. Cohler, Deborah. “Keeping the Home Front Burning: Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in US Mass Media After September 11.” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 3 (2006): 245–61. Elder, Jeff. “Blacks, Latinos Dominate Silicon Valley’s ‘Invisible Workforce.’” Wall Street Journal (blog), August 26, 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/26/ blacks-latinos-dominate-silicon-valleys-invisible-workforce/ Fukushima, Annie and Julietta Hua. “Calling the Consumer Activist, Consuming the Trafficking Subject: Call + Response and the Terms of L ­ egibility.” In Documenting Gender Violence, edited by Lisa Cuklanz and Heather ­McIntosh, 45–66. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Gibson-Graham, J.K., Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Guo, Lei, Shih-Hsien Hsu, Avery Holton and Sun Ho Jeong. 2012. “A case study of the Foxconn suicides: An international perspective to framing the sweatshop issue.” The International Communication Gazette 74, no. 5 (2012): 484–503. Hammonds, Evelynn. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” In Feminism and Race, edited by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, 379–93. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol, eds. Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Lochhead, Carolyn. “Same-sex marriage fight in Alabama like racial equality battle.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 2015. Luthje, Boy and Florian Butollo. “Why the Foxconn Model Does Not Die: Production Networks and Labour Relations in the IT Industry in South China.” Globalizations 14, no. 2 (2017): 216–31. Mindry, Deborah. “Non-Governmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and the Politics of Virtue.” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1187–1211. Mohanty, Chandra. “Under Western Eyes.” Feminist Review 30, (1988): 61–88. Molko, David and Lisa Cohen. “Google Joins Fight Against Slavery with $11.5 Million Grant.” CNN, December 14, 2011. www.cnn.com/2011/12/14/us/ google-anti-slavery-grant.

“Modern-Day Slavery”  263 Musto, Jennifer. “Carceral protectionism and multi-professional anti-­trafficking human rights work in the Netherlands.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12, no. 3/4 (2010): 381–400. Nagar, Richa and Sangtin Writers. Playing With Fire. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2006. Ngai, Pun and Jenny Chan. “Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience.” Modern China 38, no. 4 (2012): 383–410. ———. “The Spatial Politics of Labor in China.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 179–90. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Page, Allison. “‘How Many Slaves Work for You?’ Race, New Media and Neoliberal Consumer Activism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 17, no. 1 (2017): 46–61. Pellow, David N. and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy. New York: NYU Press, 2002. Petzen, Jennifer. “Contesting Europe: A Call for an Anti-modern Sexual Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, no. 1 (2012): 97–114. Reddy, Chandan. “Time for Rights? Loving, Gay Marriage, and the Limits of Comparative Legal Justice.” In Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, 148–74. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Rojas, Ana Clarissa. “We Were Never Meant to Survive.” In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, edited by INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007. Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “A Tale of Two Cities: Saigon, Fallujah, and the Ethical Boundaries of Empire.” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 121–34. ———. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Stepan, Nancy Leys. “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science.” Isis 77, no. 2 (1986): 261–77. Suchland, Jennifer. Economies of Violence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Wallace, Tina, Lisa Bornstein and Jennifer Chapman. The Aid Chain: Coercion and Commitment in Development NGOs. Warwickshire UK: Practical Action Publishing, 2007. Willse, Craig. The Value of Homelessness. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2015. Wright, Michelle. The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Veith, Alison. “‘Don’t Be Evil’: Google’s Labor, Technology, and the Limits of Corporate Good.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 2015. Vora, Kalindi. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2015.

13 Saving Love Compassion, Desire, Violence, and Deceit in Late Capitalism Courtney Mitchel

Desire drives the global contrivance that is late capitalism. Whether it is the consumer’s fetishizing desire for commodities, the desire for power by those ascendant in capitalism’s machinations, or the desire for greater autonomy and dignity by those most pinioned by its structures—and these categories are far from mutually exclusive—desire animates the currents that pull goods; services; and, occasionally, their human counterparts around the globe. Human trafficking is the name given to one such current, in which people become goods and services, extralegally relocated in the hope that their labor may be exchanged for greater value in the new locale. Many observers decry human trafficking as a tragic desecration of human dignity because people are moved coercively. This narrative has a degree of truth value as this displacement is often an act of profound violence. Yet it is problematically simple in an intertwined number of ways. First, as a discourse, it focuses especially on the plight of brown women from developing countries, well deserving Gayatri Spivak’s injunction against white men (and women, now) saving brown women from brown men.1 Second, as this anthology attempts to disentangle, this simplified account dovetails too seamlessly with the desires of activists, academics, and legislators to understand human trafficking as an immoral aberration of global capitalism rather than an emblematic function of it. Third, this narrative frequently emphasizes sex work over the other kinds of labor for which people are trafficked, disregarding the “diverse impulses that have led some people to sell sex,” as Laura Agustín has pointed out, 2 and ignoring the much more frequent kinds of work that people coerced into migrations perform (agricultural, domestic, and industrial), distorting the sense of labor with the moral prudery of a Victorian and highly ideological investment. It is the last point that is the topic of this chapter as I attempt to understand why human trafficking, with its implied assumption that the labor involved is sex work, has emerged as a global moral panic par excellence. My argument is that it has become a moral panic not because of fear or even compassion regarding the plight of those who acutely suffer from the stratifying forces of capitalism in developing countries but because

Saving Love  265 it threatens to reveal a paradox at the heart of late capitalism: that love, rather than being the singular exception to the unremitting force of commodification, is instead the motor that drives it. Love, inextricable from desire, pervades the core of essentially all capitalist transactions.3 The Beatles sing “can’t buy me love”; Hollywood insists that even purchased sex leads to love (think Pretty Woman); and as this chapter will later take up, federal anti-trafficking Public Service Announcements (PSAs) express the well-worn trope that human affection and intimacy are beyond the realm of capitalist purchase. But it’s not quite that easy. It’s not that you can’t buy love, Paul McCartney. The problem is that you can’t buy anything without it. Love requires a sharp analytic to see its obfuscatory operations in our day. In seeking to contain sex-trafficking-as-human-trafficking, activists, academics, and legislators are also (inadvertently or deliberately) seeking to maintain a collective illusion about the moral exigency of global capitalism: that it provides opportunities for greater economic equality rather than voraciously stratifying inequality. It is at this register that I situate the violences of human trafficking as a function of global capitalism, and I illustrate how its place as a moral panic depends upon an illusory view of love’s operation within this system. Here, I will examine two interlocking sets of desires: those of individual consumers to extricate love from capitalism and defend their own consumerism through their symbolic disavowal of human trafficking, and that of the US state to interpolate citizens into the project of policing human traffic. Both sets of desires redirect attention toward external global relations and away from awareness of or self-reflection on one’s own relationship to human trafficking. The consumers’ desires involve continual redirection of a moral gaze away from oneself-as-perpetrator (e.g., of the consumer as engine of the global economy and its accompanying disarrangements) and toward designated “victims,” while the state yearns neatly to demarcate humans into appropriate and inappropriate citizenries and thereby to permit or prevent their mobility. These desires are provoked by the vision of capitalism’s violence contained within the phenomenon of labor mobility—how deeply a person must be deprived in order to uproot themselves for a wage—and resolved by these same desires, in turn, as I will tease out. For now, suffice it to say that the privileged neoliberal subject is a necessarily uneasy position, and a performance of potentially genuine yet misguided compassion can do much to alleviate this uneasiness without requiring self-awareness or self-recrimination. A favorite prevailing fantasy, in this moment of globalization’s tremendous inequality, planetary decimation, and the ravages of the War on Terror, is that this version of global capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. All the economic and political systems tried over the last centuries, so the narrative goes, had a giant wrestling match, and

266  Courtney Mitchel neoliberal capitalism won. The ur-expression of this opinion may be Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?”, written on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history,” Fukuyama ventured, “but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”4 Reversing the Marxist notion that communism would be the end point of history, Fukuyama and friends place liberal democracy (ergo, capitalism rather than communism) as the be-all and end-all of political economic systems. 5 We call this logic “neoliberal” because it builds on the classic liberal hope that one can and often will be guided by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” realized in neoliberal paladin Milton Friedman’s absurd delusion of “the possibility of cooperation without coercion.”6 This fallacious fantasy animates the moral imperative of neoliberal capitalism: let the market set us free. Smith, Friedman, and their followers are banking on an unacknowledged force, however. To prevent the excesses of greed and domination that create the profound violences of laissez-faire capitalism, they count on human compassion, animated by love. Here, they reach back to classic liberal economist Max Weber, who recognized “the central emotional feature of ‘love’” in capitalism. Love, Weber understood, “is a necessity where capitalist economic structures have developed most fully.”7 Otherwise, as Alan Macfarlane pointed out in an essay aptly titled “Love and Capitalism,” the system could really get a person down. The “loneliness and alienation created by this particular form of society,” Macfarlane wrote, commands an analgesic remedy to the constant wear of alienation and drudgery, the ideal version of which is love. “Romantic love is, of course, possible and present outside capitalism, but only in capitalist, or capitalist-influenced societies, is it made the cultural pivot of the ideology,” he explains.8 Love, then, that ideal supposedly far outside the rational logics of capitalism, is actually required to compensate for capitalism’s unsurpassed capacity to alienate. “If love can exist without capitalism,” Macfarlane wonders, “it is more questionable as to whether capitalism could have existed, or could continue to exist, without love.”9 Macfarlane understands love, the intimacy that counterbalances alienation, as a relationship between two people epitomized by the monogamous heterosexual union. Yet the love that fuels capitalism is so much more. This love is the polymorphous perversity of all credit card transactions, of a college education purchased by over-mortgaged parents, of a suit or a dress purchased for a job interview or a prom or a wedding, or of each cup of Starbucks coffee consumed every morning around the world.10 The individual under capitalism is made up of an infinity of such transactions, assembled painstakingly through the labor that is the

Saving Love  267 care of the self. Through this labor, we indulge in the fantasy that is the salve for our alienation, the eternally deferred realization of self through consumption—and it is deferral, inherent and inescapable even for those whose purchasing power is near-infinite, that is, therefore, its own fulfillment. Desire and its spark, love, fuel the engines of capitalist forward motion, and yet we must disavow their role in the everyday practices of consumption and craving, and pretend to exclude them from any portion of its realm. This ordinary, everyday kind of love that is the basic building block of contemporary capitalism is very hard to see. Mostly, when people think about love, they think of couples, of the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family, that foundation of democratic capitalism, as thinkers as long ago as Engels well understood. When they contemplate purchasing and love together, they think about “prostitution.” These opposing ends of a legitimacy spectrum, marriage and prostitution, are deeply informed in the US as in other contemporary Western nations by histories of Christianity. Sex and love are irreparably yoked under the moral aegis of Christianity, an association that hasn’t dissolved over time. We live the legacies of a religion that “enjoined celibacy, monogamy, a freedom of choice in marriage, and a severe sexual code prohibiting sexual relations before and outside marriage,” the confluence of which serves to heighten “frustration, eroticism and desire.”11 Romantic love as a concept, in Western Europe and thus the US, and thus many places colonized and under the neocolonial thrall of these respective metropoles, emerged from a system that privileges celibacy outside and monogamy within the confines of marriage. Critic of anti-human trafficking campaigns Laura Agustín points out that the family is not now, nor has it been historically, a haven for all. Indeed, for many people, it is rather often a site to be eluded. Sex work is indeed the “oldest profession” as it has been and continues to be a promising avenue for such leave-taking, offering, as Agustín notes, “such advantages as travel, meeting new people and being admired and desired.”12 These diverse impulses are rarely taken into account, she contends. This is why sex work must be repudiated and punished, as it violates the tenet that love must be contained within marriage. Instead, it reveals love and adjacent constructs, such as sex and companionship, as well within the reach of the purse. The illusion of romantic love as the underpinning of the nuclear family, and the family as the haven from a rational capitalist world, is undercut and dissolved by the ease with which sex can be bought and sold—and its traffic across state lines or national borders reveals the impotence of the state to “protect” its citizen units: the family, the worker, love. It is also why we must punish human trafficking, whether for sex or any other commodity: it threatens to reveal the artifice of ideology, as Althusser might put it, not just

268  Courtney Mitchel about marriage but about capitalism’s violence broadly. Human trafficking incites panic because it conceptually undermines Milton Friedman’s laissez-­faire mantra about “the possibility of cooperation without coercion” by insinuating its unavoidable implication that all work, including marriage-based domestic and sexual labor, is at least partially coerced under capitalism—that trafficked labor is emblematic, not exceptional. Thus does human trafficking so often dissolve into sex trafficking, and the two, entangled, incite such rousing panic: because both phenomena suggest that sex and love are not outside capitalism, not wholly uncontained. The existence of human trafficking threatens to reveal that our world craves, requires, is fueled by both love and violence, inextricably and devastatingly—and even further, that love drives the violence of capitalism rather than mitigating its excesses. Human and sex trafficking gesture to the full extent of the paradoxical relationship between love and capitalism: that love is not something exterior to capitalism but rather, at the heart of it, animating every act of purchase. To illustrate and clarify this argument, let us examine a handful of PSAs about human trafficking published by the US federal government.

“We Need to Tell Somebody:” Fantasy, Desire, and the Genre of the PSA The constancy of sex work over the ages and its inextricability from capitalism means that those who would prefer to frame it instead as exceptional and external face no small ideological labor. The panic over human trafficking is a small part of this labor. One US federal campaign targeting human trafficking reveals this quite well, as the this chapter will now explore. This particular campaign is as much an ­argument— that sex work in particular and human trafficking more generally are exterior to a healthy capitalist economy—as it is a workable tool meant to teach ordinary citizens how to help identify and eradicate these “problems.” The PSA is a genre that attempts to instruct through the enactment of an imagined scenario dramatizing a relevant threat. It is therefore always both a warning and a fantasy, a microcosm in which the roles of hero, victim, and perpetrator are invoked before the action ever begins. The acting is generally about as good as this plot development would suggest. Public efforts by the US federal government to combat human trafficking fall squarely in the center of the genre. In 2010, White House National Security Council Senior Director ­A lice Hill founded the Blue Campaign, operated by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the intent of combating human trafficking through the coordinated efforts of a number of government agencies and affiliated corporate partners.13 Their website, operated through the DHS, contained a wealth of features and information, including PSA training videos that could be used to assist in the spotting of victims

Saving Love  269 of human trafficking. One such video was a dramatization of a human trafficking event recorded at a rest stop.14 In true PSA fashion, the clip served both as an instructional video for how to respond to potential incidents of human trafficking, and also as a fantasy about the public’s ability to identify and report human trafficking after exposure to the Blue Campaign’s training tools. In the video, a middle-aged heterosexual couple (our heroes), both appearing to be more or less white, pull into a rest area and emerge from their car, bickering in English about the woman’s need to urinate. Seconds later, a minivan pulls up and parks next to their car. Five people emerge from the minivan, three women and two men, all of whom look perhaps Latino and are speaking Spanish, subtitled in English. They shuffle toward the restroom. The man from the couple follows the woman to the restrooms but waits outside, gazing up at a Blue C ­ ampaign poster about labor trafficking. In the poster, a sweaty man in a stained A-shirt, who is also racialized as something other than an unmarked whiteness, sits at a sewing machine in a grimy industrial setting, gazing forlornly into the camera, his face half in shadow. Gritty white text above his head reads, “What good is a timecard, when his freedom clocked out long ago?” Below him are the Blue Campaign logo and the following text: Often lured by promises of steady work and a better life, victims are robbed of their freedom, and forced to work in factories, farms, restaurants and small businesses – for little or no money. This is human trafficking, and it’s a heinous crime. The Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign was created to give a unified voice to DHS agencies and their dedicated partners who combat human trafficking. Learn what you can do to help at dhs.gov/bluecampaign.15 The man stares at the poster in consternation for several seconds. The video then cuts again to the five people from the minivan. Two have a whispered conversation about getting or not getting paid, before a third violently shushes them and forcefully directs them to keep walking. A rest stop employee sweeping the ground glances up at them, then returns to her work, unable to detect what is strange about them. As they walk past the man from the couple, however, he watches them with suspicion before rereading the poster. The video cuts to the two men emerging from the bathroom, one again being violently shepherded by the other. The woman from the couple also emerges and immediately approaches her partner, whispering, “That was strange!” He responds, “I know, what about these two guys?” gesturing to the two men behind him, then indicates the poster, whispering, “Look at this, look at this!” The woman glances at it, then dramatically gazes up at him and cries, “We need to tell somebody!” It is here, in the space of legitimate romantic union, that these agents of moral salvation are able collectively to comprehend that what they

270  Courtney Mitchel just witnessed was human trafficking, and to report it. The video then cuts again to a scene of two police officers pulling over the minivan, which has now left the rest stop and is traveling along the highway. This video functions on several levels. At its most literal, it’s a narrative about a human trafficking event caught in media res. This narrative aims to induce action on behalf of the viewer, namely, to inform the proper authorities about suspected human trafficking, so that state intervention might occur. The video also functions as a dramatization of a fantasy, the fantasy of the Blue Campaign’s posters having the ability to change how the ordinary citizen sees and reads other people—namely, how a normative compassionate couple is able to identify human trafficking and respond in a way that is useful to the state. The video’s fantasy of successful visual instruction conveys critical ideological contours of contemporary-looking relations. The visual field is far from neutral, as theorists such as Judith Butler have elaborated. Butler dissected the Rodney King video and trial to point out that the act of seeing is always ideologically fraught: “The visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.”16 Nor is it possible ever to see something in isolation as the visual field is always in relation. “We never look at just one thing,” John Berger explained in his classic Ways of Seeing; “we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”17 The Blue Campaign video offers a textbook example of a fraught visual field, a deeply implicated act of looking. In it, the savior couple performs a highly ideological intervention through and thanks to their imbrication with the visual field, represented as exposure to the Blue Campaign poster. As Butler shows, the visual field is a racial formation; in this DHS fantasy, this racialization functions in part via the meeting of nation (the citizen everyman and -woman) and state, where citizenship and lack thereof are made legible. Through the training the couple receives from the poster, they learn to assess the relationship between citizenship and mobility as demonstrated by the traveling group they encounter. Their assessment is that the group is aberrant, and that further evaluation and perhaps action are required by state actors, whom (it is implied) they alert. This movement on their part, the hailing of the state surveillance mechanism, in turn reinforces and strengthens their own status as morally upright citizens. This desire to train citizens in appropriate protocols of looking and seeing becomes even more evident in the DHS’s next generation poster campaign. All posters feature a large headline, “CAN YOU SEE HER/ HIM?” with smaller subtext reading, “It’s time to open our eyes. ­Victims of the sex trade, domestic servitude, and forced labor have been invisible until now.” Larger text further below commands the viewer, “Recognize human trafficking.”18 These advertisements portray human trafficking as problematic because it is invisible, evading state surveillance.

Saving Love  271 To compensate, they attempt to interpolate the ordinary citizen into the project of state surveillance. This is a well-worn trope in the War on Terror, also evident, for example, in the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “If you see something, say something” advertising campaign. Both campaigns have abundant precedents in US visual history, companions to an auditory component reaching back to the World War II War Advertising Council’s slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” These visual practices and the recruitment to state surveillance have prepared the contemporary citizen to fill the gap between the “ ­ victim” awaiting services promised by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the DHS. The citizen in these campaign spots is projected as latent, an adjunct of the state waiting to fulfill a vocation to provide “human rights,” saving the victims from the unprotected position of statelessness. While these materials work visually, ostensibly emphasizing the ability to see clearly and with moral acuity, they actually obfuscate the complexity of the relationships they portray. Our theoretically postcolonial world is still animated by colonial logics, even and especially in the realm of human rights provided by citizens of the global north to those of the global south. Human rights is one of the arenas that most extends colonial logics, as scholars such as Julietta Hua have observed. In her critique of “the systems of knowledge that enabled colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and Euro-American empire building,” Hua identifies the rhetoric of human rights as particularly charged.19 The discourse of human rights itself is mired in Enlightenment constructions of subjectivity, Hua worries; to speak of a being called a “human” in possession of what are called “rights” is to evoke concepts that developed as part and parcel of colonialism. To disregard the complicity of human rights frameworks in colonialism is to fail to see the state’s integral relationship to both. In these PSA clips, the roles are easily mapped—the savior white couple as heroes, the traffickers as villains, the trafficked as victims—though they communicate an infinitesimal portion of its characters’ relationships. A more comprehensive representation would include the historical, political, and economic ties that connect them: the acts of settler colonialism and genocide that have produced the deceptively whitewashed nature of so much of the US landscape, and the laws and state actors that prosecute human trafficking, even while policies and corporations circumnavigate these to ensure maximum profit for minimal human and environmental care and protection. The couple very likely wears clothing made by subcontracted labor in sweatshops, enjoying the waning protections of the labor movement in their own lives, and the trafficked and traffickers, if seen in another light, illuminate the inequality of their privileged labor and consumption on a hemispheric and indeed global scale. The police depicted in the PSA are also implicitly heroes, of course, a status that is more complicated as well. Human trafficking is indeed a

272  Courtney Mitchel problem for the state in its disregard for visa and immigration protocols, but as Carol Vance argues, it is the state that engenders the conditions that encourage trafficking: States impose stringent immigration controls such that people cannot safely and legally migrate, or hope to do so in the future, after submission of immigration applications. Corrupt border officials and immigration police themselves work with smugglers and traffickers, as well as abuse and extort undocumented migrants. While ritually decrying trafficking, many states wink at undocumented migrants, exploiting their cheap labor such that their enforcement of labor regulations as well as anti-trafficking law is ultimately unserious. 20 The call-to-action of the DHS materials, summoning citizens to step in and assist in spotting human trafficking, shifts from a moral black-andwhite to a richly subtle grayscale when framed with Hua’s and Vance’s arguments. A citizen-viewer is hailed to save victims, both terms troubling for the hierarchies of agency that they suggest. The “solution,” ensnaring and enmeshing trafficked subjects into the state apparatus that they are evading, appears less like the ethical gesture the advertisements lead one to believe. Highlighting the paradox between state policies on trafficking and their material effects, Vance regrets that “the states’ new restrictive policies and subsequently increased smuggling provide the conditions of vulnerability, desperation, and dependency under which trafficking flourishes.”21 The ostensible feminism of anti-trafficking campaigns cannot counterbalance the misogynistic effects of state-based “solutions.” Agustín pointedly wonders, “Why do many feminists, who want a different, better world, propose solutions [to human trafficking] based on policing and punishment?”22 She notes this strategy allows women to make no personal connection between their class peers and that guilty category of “clients,” and gestures to the satisfaction middle-class women achieve by assuming they need to save their working-class sisters. Overall, then, who or what is the watchful citizen serving when they see and say something? Primarily, I would argue, the fantasy of their subject selves, and the equivalent dream of neoliberal capitalism as a just and compassionate system, one in which that their acts of love toward the victims of trafficking could be unrelated to their acts of loving consumption of goods and services. Playing the dutiful, compassionate citizen, the reporter of human trafficking enters into the narrative of moral panic regarding human trafficking and sex work, namely, that by some violent aberration, the trafficked subject has been deprived of their freedom of mobility and their right to decide whom they will love and sex, choosing agentially far beyond the forces of commodification. The citizen reporter, who is offered the position of the subject already in possession of these freedoms, can exercise the ability to intervene in this

Saving Love  273 projected chain of violence, restoring the “victim’s” subjecthood and reifying their hegemonic illusions about capitalism and the protective state. I propose a reformulation. Rather than saying that human trafficking is problematic because, as anti-prostitution campaigners reiterate, the exchange of money for sex and love is morally wrong or, as critics of anti-trafficking campaigns imply, an inappropriate expression of capitalism, a more revealing conclusion is that human trafficking exposes the inherent erotic and affective nature of capitalism, the love for both the goods and services that are purchased and for the act of purchasing itself. This reframing reveals a larger global economy of violence that recasts the stock roles, in which the savior is as culpable as the trafficker.

Acknowledgments Thanks to my colleagues in American Studies at Indiana University, the other participants of the Global Moral Panics Conference, and Paula Cotner and Carol Glaze. Immense gratitude to Ashley Theissen for proofreading and Sarah Brewster for support, and Micol Seigel for close readings and comments.

Notes 1 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 296. 2 Agustín, “At Home in the Street,” 69. 3 If the concern of those in the global north was at all oriented toward their counterparts laboring in the global south, they would cease or at least abate shopping at H&M, The Gap, J. Crew, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Target, Walmart, and the panoply of other retailers that rely on cheap subcontracted sweatshop labor to maintain their outrageously low prices. See Ramstad and McIntyre, “Not Only Nike’s Doing It.” 4 Fukuyama, “The End of History,” 3. 5 Fukuyama reaffirmed this claim in a 2014 article in the Wall Street Journal, titled, “At the ‘End of History’ Still Stands Democracy.” 6 Friedman, “Introduction,” 3. 7 Macfarlane, “Love and Capitalism,” 140. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 143. 10 The lavish wedding, one could argue, is the ultimate act of love-as-capitalism, or capitalism-as-love, and the resultant couple, heterosexual or homonational, the building block of capitalist consumption. 11 Macfarlane, “Love and Capitalism,” 138. 12 Agustín, “At Home in the Street,” 69. 13 US Department of Homeland Security, “About the Blue Campaign.” 14 US Department of Homeland Security, “Labor Trafficking: Rest Area.” 15 This poster is no longer in circulation, but an archived version is available at the time of this writing at www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ blue-campaign/BC_8.5x11_Poster_Clocked_Out.pdf. 16 Butler, “Endangered/Endangering,” 17. 17 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 9. 18 US Department of Homeland Security, “General Awareness Posters.” 19 Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights, 1.

274  Courtney Mitchel 20 Vance, “States of Contradiction,” 939. 21 Ibid., 935. 22 Agustín, “At Home in the Street,” 69.

Bibliography Agustín, Laura. “At Home in the Street: Questioning the Desire to Help and Save.” In Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity, edited by Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffner, 67–81. New York: Routledge, 2005. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corp.; London: Penguin Books, 1972. Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 15–22. New York: Routledge, 1993. Friedman, Milton. “Introduction.” In I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read, by Leonard Edward Read. Irvington on Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1999. www.econlib.org/library/Essays/ rdPncl1.html Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18. ———. “At the ‘End of History’ Still Stands Democracy.” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2014, sec. Life and Style. www.wsj.com/articles/at-the-end-of-historystill-stands-democracy-1402080661 Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Macfarlane, Alan. “Love and Capitalism.” In The Culture of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. McIntyre, Richard and Yngve Ramstad. “Not Only Nike’s Doing It: ‘Sweating’ and the Contemporary Labor Market.” In The Fashion Reader, edited by Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, 219–24. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007. Sassen, Saskia. “Global Cities and Survival Circuits.” In American Studies: An Anthology, edited by Janice A. Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank and Penny Von Eschen, 185–93. Chichester, U.K. and Malden, MA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2009. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. London: Macmillan, 1988. Vance, Carole S. “States of Contradiction: Twelve Ways to Do Nothing about Trafficking While Pretending To.” Social Research 78, no. 3 (October 1, 2011): 933–48. US Department of Homeland Security. “About the Blue Campaign | Homeland Security.” Blue Campaign. www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/about-blue-campaign ———. “Labor Trafficking: Rest Area | Homeland Security.” Blue Campaign. www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/labor-trafficking-video ———. “General Awareness Posters | Homeland Security.” Blue Campaign. www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/materials/posters-general-awareness

14 “And Still We Rise” Moral Panics, Dark Sousveillance, and Politics Otherwise in the New New Orleans Laura McTighe On March 30, 2012, a letter entitled “Our Win” began to make its way through social media networks before the Friday morning East Coast commute. In it, Deon Haywood, the Executive Director of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans, celebrated the people “who courageously stood up to combat the criminalization of their lives” and claimed their victory “for every group that has ever been criminalized.”1 For the simple act of trading sex for money to survive, hundreds of Louisiana cisgender and transgender women, nearly 80 percent of them Black, had been convicted of a felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) and forced to register as sex offenders for periods of 15 years to life. After a more than five-year fight against CANS, this quarter-­century-old Black women’s health and social justice collective, buttressed by a chorus of local, national, and international allies, had secured a federal judicial ruling. On March 29, 2012, US District Judge Martin Feldman found that nine plaintiffs, all WWAV members, “have been deprived of equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”2 Deon Haywood was clear that WWAV understood their victory as the steady uprising of Black women in the South: At a time in this country right now when we feel like justice is not on the side of the people, the people most affected spoke their truths— not some abstract “speak truth to power,” but their truths from their hearts—and that is what made the difference. This was not a legal fight or a legislative fight. This was a fight for women’s lives and wellbeing. This was a fight, simply put, about everything…. Especially in the South, most people feel like we come in last. But this is where the Civil Rights Movement started. And today it continues in the South.3 *** In this chapter, I center WWAV’s process of organizing against the CANS statute in order to (1) trace the making of this moral panic in the wake

276  Laura McTighe of Hurricane Katrina and (2) clarify the victory that Deon Haywood claimed in March 2012. Since 2008, I have been a partner to the WWAV family in New Orleans. Deon Haywood and I began working together closely when WWAV was just starting to piece together the disaster that the post-Katrina enforcement of CANS had wrought. At that time, I was working as a grassroots organizer—traveling the country to build a locally-rooted national network to challenge mass criminalization as a structural driver of the domestic AIDS epidemic. In 2009, Deon invited me to New Orleans to facilitate the launch meeting for the WWAV-led coalition that took on the CANS statute. Over the next three years, I journeyed to the city at least every other month. In-between, Deon and I debriefed by phone: she would talk; I would type. She used this practice to apprentice me to WWAV’s generations-honed method of grassroots organizing. Since the CANS victory, I have returned to New ­Orleans as an ethnographer and oral historian, working alongside WWAV staff and members to document their decades of labor to craft a legible past and a commonly foreseeable future for their community. This chapter unfolds in the intimacy and endurance of these relationships. Though this story is set in New Orleans within the US, I follow the leaders of WWAV in affirming that the forms of displacement deployed against so-called “third-world threats” are often learned and refined within the US’s own borders. Indeed, imaginaries of a backward elsewhere are inseparable from fears of an impure home. I use the moral panic framework to describe and connect a series of responses—from institutions and from individuals—through which Black cisgender and transgender women were identified as a social and political problem in post-Katrina New Orleans, the incarceration capital of the world.4 This panic was triggered by the haphazard enforcement of a 1982 law expressly designed to criminalize gay male sex workers amid mounting AIDS hysteria. With WWAV leaders, I ask the following: (1) how could the CANS statute be so seamlessly applied to Black women in the city? and (2) why did its application rise to the level of panic in the wake of the storm? To understand this peculiar confluence, I analyze the CANS statute and its enforcement as an afterlife of the antebellum and post-emancipation production and reinforcement of the impossibility of Black womanhood. I then explore how the mundane terror of Black women’s criminalization under the CANS statute in the 1980s and 1990s became a hyper-­v isible assault after Hurricane Katrina. In the midst of this panic, I argue, WWAV leaders and members artfully evaded the interpretive and self-referential framework of this manufactured crisis, which purported to explain the behavior of Black cisgender and transgender women for all time. To do so, WWAV mobilized generations-honed techniques of what Simone Browne calls “dark sousveillance” to carefully observe the matrix of post-Katrina authority

“And Still We Rise”  277 and to leverage their insights about surveillance after the storm in order to resist it.5 I excavate the meticulous analytics through which WWAV worked “to render ourselves visible” in order to expose the quotidian terror of CANS and challenge the complicity of parole officers, job interviewers, and store clerks in this gendered racialization.6 Furthermore, I keep a steady focus on the “politics otherwise” that were being built by WWAV in the context of lived struggle: politics that exceed (just like the techniques of dark sousveillance that birth them) what at face value may appear to be just another activist campaign to secure state recognition against an “unjust” law.7 I also proceed carefully here, so as not to shine too much light on that which has been carefully concealed in order that it may persist. Finally, I conclude by reflecting with my WWAV colleagues on the stakes of exposing these techniques of dark sousveillance (as well as the new worlds and forms of social life being built) in the victory WWAV claimed in March of 2012—to suggest, without quite illuminating, the radical otherwise that was embedded in “Our Win.” In so doing, I argue that WWAV’s work provides an invaluable example of how the “folk devils” of moral panics might call on a very different “spirit” of conceptual and physical resistance to disrupt a panic’s own logics. Through their organizing, WWAV was able not only to demonstrate what a morally appropriate social response looks like, but also to prefigure a society in which that vision could be realized.

Creating a Crime Against Nature When Judge Feldman ruled that the CANS statute was unconstitutional, his decision rested on more than five years of work by WWAV leaders, members, and allies to expose and challenge Louisiana’s curious two-tiered system for criminalizing street-based sex work. Statewide, people accused of soliciting sex for money could be criminally charged in two ways: either under Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution statute or under the solicitation provision of the state’s felony-level Crime Against Nature statute. Both laws prohibited the offer or agreement to exchange sex for money, though CANS explicitly criminalized only the solicitation of oral and anal sex. Moreover, while both laws carried the possibility of imprisonment and/or fine, CANS was an automatic felony and mandated sex offender registration—15 years for a first offense and for a person’s entire lifetime upon the second. The solicitation clause was actually a relatively new addendum to ­Louisiana’s centuries-old Crime Against Nature statute, which itself was the product of centuries’ more theological and legal argumentation around sex and sexuality, and around race.8 King Henry VIII is to be credited with helping the “sin against nature” jump the tracks from ecclesiastical legalities into seventeenth-century English civil law. It was, however, eighteenth-century English legal scholar Sir William

278  Laura McTighe Blackstone who first described “peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum [that horrible crime not to be named among Christians]” as the “infamous crime against nature, committed either with man or beast.”9 Blackstone’s language was delivered to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 by the Virginia lawyer William C. C. Claiborne.10 In 1805, Louisiana enacted its first criminal code, which included the explicit prohibition of the “abominable and detestable Crime Against Nature, committed with mankind or beast,” a direct quote from ­Blackstone.11 Despite multiple challenges, the Supreme Court and ­L egislature refused to specify what conduct constituted “that horrible crime not to be named among Christians” until the turn of the century, when the state’s Black Codes were being made law after the violent disassemblage of Radical Reconstruction.12 In 1896—the same year that the US Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson enshrined the “separate but equal” doctrine in law—the Louisiana legislature amended the Crime Against Nature statute to explicitly name oral sex.13 Seventeen years later, in 1913, the Louisiana Supreme Court further clarified that the statute prohibited oral and anal sex—irrespective of consent, the sex of participants, and their marital status.14 In 1942, the Louisiana legislature undertook a comprehensive revision of the state’s criminal code with the intention of streamlining and systematizing decades of legislation and case law surrounding the raced and gendered boundaries of sex. All previous miscegenation acts and rulings were consolidated into a single statute in the state’s “criminal neglect of family” articles.15 Statutes that addressed “sexual immorality” were also combined, including a series of articles prohibiting prostitution and related offenses, as well as a host of wartime acts that expanded policing and surveillance in order to “stamp out” sex work around army camps in Louisiana. During this 1942 legislative session, the state’s Crime Against Nature statue was amended to read, “Crime Against Nature is the unnatural carnal copulation by a human being with another of the same or opposite sex or with an animal.”16 The solicitation of such acts was also explicitly discussed. The legislature made specific note of how “the sexual pervert who frequents parks and other public places and solicits abnormal sexual practices” exhibited “a very reprehensible conduct which had given the police department in New Orleans and other large cities considerable trouble.”17 However, members of the legislature rejected the idea that such conduct rose to the level of a felony Crime Against Nature. Instead, such solicitation was added as a sub-article of the state’s misdemeanor obscenity statute, which included “the sale or display of any indecent material.” In the early 1980s, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) lobbied the Louisiana legislature to reopen the misdemeanor obscenity versus felony Crime Against Nature debate. They claimed that they needed a tool to clamp down on a “growing problem in male prostitution.”18

“And Still We Rise”  279 Their language intentionally invoked the rhetoric of a mounting AIDS panic. Nationwide, sex workers and gay men were being scapegoated and criminalized as vectors of disease transmission. Media pundits and public figures alike circulated calls for quarantines of people diagnosed with HIV, for mandatory testing and contact tracing of social groups presumed to be at high risk of HIV, and for public registration of all prostitutes and licensed brothels.19 Conservative religious leader ­Donald Wildmon, of the Mississippi-based American Family Association, famously bolstered his lobbying efforts through direct-mail appeals that warned, “These disease-carrying deviants wander the streets unconcerned, possibly making you their next victim.”20 In this climate, the NOPD could and did argue that the solicitation of oral and anal sex had become more than just an obnoxious practice (an “obscenity” in the state’s own language); it was a deviance that threatened the moral order. Treating this solicitation as a felony-level “Crime Against Nature” was presented as a concrete (and moral) step that the legislature could take to protect the health and well-being of its citizens. 21 On July 6, 1982, the Louisiana legislature agreed, adding the felony-level CANS law to the criminal code, with mandated sex offender registration.

Policing the Boundaries of Black Womanhood In practice, the CANS law was quickly extended beyond the “growing problem in male prostitution” it was enacted to address. At arrest, police had sole discretion over whether to charge someone with CANS or prostitution. Through their predatory patrolling and booking practices, the NOPD mapped the CANS statute onto the racialized and gendered bodies of Black cisgender and transgender women. By 2011, when WWAV’s challenge to the CANS statute was in full force, 97 percent of women registered as sex offenders were mandated to do so because of a CANS conviction. Seventy-nine percent of those registered because of CANS were Black. These statistics confirm the gross discrepancy between the expressed purpose of the law and its actual application. They do not, however, tell us how or why a law created to criminalize gay male prostitution could so easily be extended to poor Black women. To understand this, I argue that we must analyze the CANS statute and its enforcement as an afterlife of the antebellum and post-emancipation production and reinforcement of the impossibility of Black womanhood. 22 Recent scholarship on the subjectivity of Black women in the American nation illuminates the ways in which Black women’s definitions of and searches for freedom have historically been deemed inherently criminal and sexually deviant. Through her research on carceral culture in early America, Jen Manion has argued that it was Black women— not Black men—who quickly outnumbered their white counterparts in the nation’s first penitentiaries, a disparity that largely went unnoted.

280  Laura McTighe Indeed, Black women working in marginal economies were more frequently arrested, received longer sentences, and were less likely to be pardoned than other women. Furthermore, enslaved Black women and children were criminalized from the moment they broke free from the chattels of plantation life—punished for seeking freedom, that very cornerstone of democracy. 23 When the system of modern state racism crystalized under Jim Crow segregation, southern criminal justice was fully black-washed through practices similar to those in place in the antebellum North. White women were a protected class; Black women (and men) filled the courtrooms.24 Those few white women who stood trial were disproportionately charged with miscegenation. Black women, however, were arrested in droves and booked mostly for petty crimes, such as theft and distributing alcohol. At sentencing, they were steadily funneled into the expanding Jim Crow carceral sphere: both through domestic servitude to the former planter class and under the convict lease system, where they were forced to live with the mining boss or prison manager often as the sole woman among a band of a hundred incarcerated men.25 In her work on gender and race in Jim Crow Georgia, Sarah Haley theorizes how this carceral complex became a key infrastructure for producing and reinforcing the impossibility of the postbellum black female subject. 26 Even when state law specifically prohibited sending women to work on chain gangs, only white women were recognized as such and diverted. Black women were “what a woman was not;” they were sent to work on chain gangs by the thousands.27 The “unbearable flexibility of nonbeing” produced through the Jim Crow carceral sphere was intimately tied to the everyday policing of Black women’s claims on freedom and work to make a living in the socalled “free” streets. Essential for the assemblage of the new South was the proliferation of a myth of Black womanhood as naturally licentious and prone to prostitution—and irredeemably criminal, should a Black woman be convicted of any number of gendered crimes. 28 When more and more Black people fled the racialized terror of the South during the decades of the twentieth century now known as the Great Migration, a not dissimilar idea about Black womanhood began to take root as Black woman asserted their claims on freedom and tried to make a living in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. 29 In her field-defining essay, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Hazel V. Carby argues that it was the free movement of Black people seeking to chart lives of their own designs in the urban North that made Black womanhood a hyper-visible threat capable of generating a series of “moral panics.” Black women were defined by state officials and ordinary citizens alike as a social and political problem to be rectified in order to restore moral order; this manufactured social crisis spurred by migration produced an interpretive and self-referential framework that purported to explain Black women’s behavior for all time.30

“And Still We Rise”  281

Making a Post-Katrina Moral Panic This historical production and reinforcement of the impossibility of Black womanhood is critical for understanding how the CANS law, while enacted to police gay men’s public sex solicitation practices, could be used to criminalize New Orleans’ Black women en masse. The pre-Katrina enforcement of the statute unfolded within a social and political climate in which Black womanhood had long been defined as inherently criminal and sexually deviant.31 The predatory policing of Black cisgender and transgender women working in the street-based sex trades was an everyday fact of life. So too were the coercive strategies that police officers used to arrest women and escalate their charges. As one of the Black women who would become a leader in WWAV’s challenge of the CANS statute explained, “I have been selling sex since I was 13 years and the police are always stopping me… I have done had the police tell me: ‘If you give me head I’ll let you go.’ So I do it and they still bring me to jail.”32 After being entrapped into selling oral sex, Black cisgender and transgender women were often charged with both prostitution and CANS, an overbooking practice that police and prosecutors use nationally to strong-arm people awaiting trial into entering guilty pleas in exchange for sentencing leniency. In this way, Black women became the grist for the mill of stringent criminalization, much as they did in the days of the early republic and the postbellum convict lease system. There was, however, a bureaucratic error in this system of expulsion. While CANS mandated sex offender registration, there was no integrated statewide or national sex offender database to facilitate the tracking of people convicted of CANS.33 In fact, many women did not even know that they had to register as sex offenders. For them, CANS was just another stringent charge accumulated in the course of everyday survival in 1980s and 1990s New Orleans. And then suddenly survival itself became uncertain. It was late August 2005. Tropical storm Katrina had strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane. Black women were on the move—gathering their families, fleeing the terror of the storm, and making ends meet by whatever means they could. After the flood waters receded, with thousands of people displaced, developers and congresspeople set their sights on accelerating the decades of divestment that had predated the event of Hurricane Katrina—divestment that facilitated the immediate lack of response to the levee breaches and prefigured the crisis in the storm’s wake. In the process of realizing what developer Joseph Canizaro christened as “a clean sheet to start again,” the movement and survival work of Black cisgender and transgender women was portrayed and surveilled as a hyper-visible threat that needed to be eliminated in order to restore moral order in the Crescent City.34 Immediately after the storm, the Department of Justice made more than 20 million dollars available for rebuilding the New Orleans

282  Laura McTighe criminal justice system. These funds were dispersed with a mandate for targeting and apprehending “violent felony fugitives” such as registered sex offenders.35 It was a seemingly race- and gender-neutral federal policy intervention, which was framed as a response to the growing national panic surrounding disaster-recovery and safety after Hurricane Katrina. In the state of Louisiana at this time, however, people charged with CANS comprised nearly half of those required to register as sex offenders and nearly all of the people who had failed to do so. And so, CANS criminalization intensified after the storm. The NOPD used the resources of the Department of Justice and the brawn of the United States Marshal Service to track down and forcibly place so-called CANS “fugitives” on the state’s sex offender list, often with increased penalties for failure to register previously. By 2011, 97 percent of the women on New Orleans’ sex offender registry had a CANS conviction.36

Mapping the Everyday Terror of CANS Policing and Enforcement In the wake of the storm, the leaders of WWAV—Deon Haywood, her mother and cofounder Catherine Haywood, and cofounder Danita Muse—took to the streets to find the women for whom they had been the primary safety net for years.37 With the housing projects set to be demolished, the schools dismantled, and return still impossible for so many, their city was a shadow of its pre-Katrina self. Still, little could have prepared the WWAV foremothers for the first time one of their longtime participants showed them her new CANS driver’s license. In the bottom-right corner, immediately below her picture, the words “SEX OFFENDER” were stamped in block orange letters. It was in this moment that WWAV street outreach and drop-in hours shifted fully into a coordinated project of dark sousveillance. As more women were able to return to New Orleans, the role of these CANS licenses in facilitating near totalizing surveillance post-Katrina became clear; so too did the everyday network of agents who were implicated in this program of social control. Women shared stories of being called “rapist” when being carded to buy cigarettes or beer. If applying for jobs, they learned from experience to carry all of their court paperwork with them, so that they could prove when pressed (which they always were) that they had histories of drug addiction and sex work, not child molestation. In addition to the photo IDs they carried with them, women also had their pictures printed in a sex offender roundup in the local paper and were court-mandated to buy and mail postcards with their sex offender status to all of their neighbors. One woman explained that when her probation officer told her she had to pay $500 for postcards, she laughed in his face in disbelief: “Where am I supposed to get that kind of money when I just got out of jail? What are you telling me, I gotta go

“And Still We Rise”  283 38

turn tricks?” The leaders of WWAV were quickly learning how totalizing and debilitating CANS sex offender registration was: “It’s like the Scarlet Letter. I am trying to put that in my past—but it’s not gonna be in my past because it’s in my present, and it’s going to be my future for the next 13 years.”39 For the vast majority of women in WWAV’s network with CANS convictions, this modern-day “scarlet letter” was also but the latest in a long line of small and great injustices to be weathered. Most had been driven to street-based survival sex work by myriad structural forces that had already left them effectively excluded from society. More often than not, these women had been raised in multigenerational households that managed the reality of systemic economic inequality through decades-honed practices of mutual aid. Starting in the mid-1980s, however, their family units were being scattered across state and federal prison systems; already scarce family funds were diverted behind prison walls to support those serving decades-plus sentences. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act shook what semblance of a social safety net remained, and the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act the following year brought their already strained family units under constant punitive surveillance. In this climate of persistent economic hardship, many women had turned to street-based economies to make ends meet. The “SEX OFFENDER” label on their photo identification cards all but ensured that those streets would remain their only viable source of income. It also ensured that they would be effectively unable to parent their children for the duration of their sex offender registration periods––and possibly the rest of their lives, depending on the punitive whims of their Department of Human Services caseworkers.40 CANS, thus, was in effect a tool for forcibly expelling hundreds of Black cisgender and transgender women from society and for dismantling their families in the process.41

Speaking a Different Language of Resistance By 2008, the question was not if WWAV would take action against the CANS statute but how. WWAV had to decide how to address the moral panic now surrounding Black cisgender and transgender women’s free movement in the city, as well as the AIDS-era relic undergirding it.42 Furthermore, in messaging and strategy, WWAV now had to consider not only their own local New Orleans and Louisiana communities, but also the federal government and a whole host of disaster volunteers who had descended upon the city to administer rebuilding aid and policy advice.43 Thus, the challenge before WWAV leaders and members was to frame what a “morally appropriate social reaction” to Black women’s survival and mobility looked like, without letting this framing be coopted or rebuked by the myriad social and political forces that now had a stake in the creation of a new New Orleans.44

284  Laura McTighe Importantly, WWAV’s leaders and members were all clear that there is no way to “play nice” with a system of social purification when you are the dirt.45 To mount a challenge to the CANS statute, they believed they had to work holistically and collectively; they had to be in America but not of it, to paraphrase the Biblical edict in the Gospel of John.46 That lesson had been passed down through generations of Black organizers in the South who had carefully studied the contours of totalizing surveillance in the plantation economy turned Jim Crow state;47 it was the truth that spurred the founding of WWAV in 1989.48 In the early days of the organization’s work, the original WWAV team turned neighborhood bars into underground needle exchanges, so they could keep forgotten and dying Black addicts alive as the AIDS epidemic ravaged their community.49 Similarly, in 2008, the daughter of one of WWAV’s founders decided to make a home for hundreds of “sex offenders” who were effectively being disappeared, so that they could feel their power, stand together in friendship, and own that space as a site of creativity, resistance, and political organization. In both cases, the course of action was the same: stay put, take up space, and go about your business. 50 An appreciation of this continuity is important if we are not to mischaracterize WWAV’s dark sousveillance as predicated on the experience of “being a problem” in America. 51 Neither the barroom needle exchange nor the “sex offender” story circles were merely reactive.52 In both cases, WWAV leaders and members resisted in the midst of violent repression and imagined themselves into futures beyond it. 53 Turning their careful observations of post-Katrina surveillance and criminalization into resistance strategies unfolded in community. The very WWAV street outreach and drop-in hours that had been essential for mapping the quotidian terror of CANS enforcement became a vital time for crafting what would become the CANS campaign approach. A weekly core of five women would sometimes be joined by as many as 10–15 more. Together, WWAV members continued to share stories of the everyday violence of living with a CANS conviction, refining their analysis of the terrain and agents of post-Katrina enforcement. They also exchanged strategies for surviving the physical and emotional toll of being on the sex offender registry. In this constant community, WWAV members affirmed the immediate and tangible difference it would make if they could repeal the CANS statute and get themselves off the registry. But they also did not want to set a legalistic or legislative end for their work.54 Looking to the law for redress or recognition would mean affirming the power of the very police, court, and prison systems that had used the CANS statute to brand them as sex offenders: your oppressor cannot also be your savior. As women with CANS convictions saw it, there was “NO Justice” in New Orleans. Their words became the organizing call moving forward. Together, WWAV leaders and members decided that any challenge of the CANS statute should be one part of a comprehensive project to transform the web of injustices they moved through daily. To provide

“And Still We Rise”  285 some immediate relief, WWAV leaders started reaching out to local service providers and advocates in health, housing, and legal aid fields to build an awareness of CANS criminalization—and an emergency response and referral network. This lifeline gave women with CANS convictions the breathing room needed to strategize about more lasting transformation beyond their immediate survival. Sometimes just in fleeting street outreach exchanges and other times in the slow presence of afternoon office hours, WWAV leaders and members talked about expanding economic opportunities for themselves beyond street-based economies, about addressing disease disparities in their communities, and about centering their ongoing healing both individually and in community.55 In so doing, they began to articulate (and live into) the conditions and contours of a New Orleans otherwise, even while the direct pressures of surveillance made this future impossible to live fully and openly in the present.

Organizing to Win From this practiced space of dark sousveillance, WWAV leaders and members began the hard work of building community support for their work against CANS. To do so, they had to get people past the initial shock of hearing “Crime Against Nature” by rendering visible the everyday violence they were living through daily. 56 One of their core outreach tactics was to ask people to think about how many times people had to show their IDs in the course of a day. Then, they would show either a mock-up or an actual CANS license with the “SEX OFFENDER” label. With this everyday fact established, they could walk people through the stories of being denied jobs, being excluded from drug treatment, and being kicked out of emergency housing. They could explain what it felt like to have to describe the circumstances of their arrests to store clerks and housing agencies alike. It was a rare conversation that did not end in outrage. Whatever attitudes people in the community held about sex work, nearly all agreed that the sex offender registration was excessive and counterproductive. And that mattered to WWAV. In one of the most conservative states in the country, they were crafting a way of speaking about (while still speaking amid) unrelenting surveillance that could mobilize broad-based community support for striking down the CANS statute. Guided by this mounting community outrage, the WWAV team began to explore the viability of bringing a constitutional challenge against the CANS statute. They recruited and vetted multiple local and national attorneys, ultimately deciding on a consortium of Andrea J. Ritchie, Esq., the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic & Center for Social Justice at Loyola University New ­Orleans College of Law. 57 Andrea Ritchie was already well known to many in the WWAV network through her tireless work against gendered and

286  Laura McTighe racialized criminalization through INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. The CCR and Loyola University attorneys were selected because of their deep commitment to the practices of “social change lawyering,” in which lawyers take their direction from activists because they “start with the idea that history shows us that systemic social change comes not from the courts or heroic lawyers or law reform or impact litigation, but from social movements.”58 Based on WWAV’s success in building outrage around the everyday impacts of sex offender registration, the legal team proposed filing an Equal Protection Claim: had arrests for sex work been prosecuted under the state’s Prostitution statute, those convicted would not have been required to register as sex offenders. It was a legal argument that could be proven in court. More importantly, it was a strategy that would bolster, not detract from, WWAV’s dark sousveillance to posit the possibility of a New Orleans otherwise. On February 15, 2011, WWAV and the legal team filed a case in the Eastern District of Louisiana Court on behalf of nine of the nearly 900 people who had been forcibly placed on the sex offender registry because of CANS.59 The next day, WWAV was back on street outreach and strategy-­crafting during drop-in hours. Leaders and members agreed that if they were to have any hope of winning the CANS case and realizing the broader NO Justice Project goals, they would have to build a climate in which a judge would be able safely to rule against the state of Louisiana. They were also wary of putting all of their hope in the courts. Thus did the state legislature become the next target of advocacy efforts. Barely a month later, WWAV leaders and members in concert with the NO Justice legal team were able to persuade Rep. Charmaine Marchand-­ Stiaes—who represented the most flood-battered district in Louisiana, the New Orleans 9th Ward and Lower 9th Ward—to introduce a bill which would make CANS penalties equal to those for prostitution. On May 24, 2011, the Louisiana House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice unanimously approved HB 141 following testimony from the NO Justice team.60 One month later, the bill passed the House, the Senate, and the Governor’s desk. It was official. No one convicted of CANS would have to register as a sex offender again. However, Rep. Marchand-Stiaes’s bill was not retroactive. Nearly 900 people remained on the sex offender registry list. In the wake of incomplete challenge to CANS criminalization, WWAV leaders and members and the NO ­Justice legal team returned to the federal lawsuit with renewed vigor. They hoped that the new legislation would make a favorable ruling in the lawsuit seem obvious. If people did not have to register as sex offenders for new CANS convictions, why should anyone previously convicted remain on the registry? WWAV leaders and members again turned to their allies in New Orleans, across the Gulf South, and nationwide to rally support for declaring the CANS statute itself unconstitutional and removing every person from the state’s sex offender registry.

“And Still We Rise”  287

“Our Win” Nine months later, on March 28, 2012—before a courtroom filled with WWAV members, local community activists, New Orleans faith leaders, and legal allies from across the South—US District Judge Martin Feldman heard oral arguments in the case. The next day, he reviewed the state’s reasoning for the CANS/prostitution distinction. He concluded that Governor Bobby Jindal and his co-defendants “fail to credibly serve up even one unique legitimating governmental interest that can rationally explain the registration requirement imposed on those convicted of Crime Against Nature by Solicitation. The court is left with no other conclusion but that the relationship between the classification is so shallow as to render the distinction wholly arbitrary.”61 When Judge Feldman’s ruling was announced, the WWAV office was a mess of open eyes, tear-streaked eyes, and eyes that could not look up. Most women had not believed that they would see their sex offender registration periods end so abruptly. Indeed, many had never been to court and had a judge side with them.62 Ms. Michelle expressed what so many of the WWAV members with CANS convictions were feeling that day: “I can taste my FREEDOM!”63 All at WWAV were also clear, however, that this ruling was but one step in realizing the transformative healing they had envisioned through the NO Justice Project. They had been able  to mobilize their dark sousveillance of post-Katrina authority in order to resist targeted CANS criminalization. But they were only beginning to unravel the web of injustices they moved through daily. And so, they concluded, “Today we celebrate. And still we rise.”64 Over the coming days and weeks, WWAV leaders and members continued to come together on street outreach and during drop-in hours. Once pleasantries and harm reduction tools were exchanged, the question was always the same: How did we win? Some talked about what it felt like for the people most affected to speak their truths from their hearts. For others, what mattered most was that this was a fight for every person who had ever been criminalized: no one had been left out. Still others waxed prophetic, stitching WWAV’s work to the history of the long black freedom struggle in the South. And for others the proof was in their own hands: Black women coming together to get things done. As I have thought with WWAV about the how, I have also wondered what victory exactly was being claimed. Throughout the NO ­Justice Project, WWAV made a distinction between, on the one hand, the creative though nevertheless survival-oriented work of rendering CANS criminalization visible and, on the other, the long-term transformation of ending violence against Black women and realizing New Orleans otherwise. How was that distinction inflected differently after Judge Feldman’s ruling?

288  Laura McTighe The ruling in the CANS case was far from an unfettered pronouncement of equity. In the name of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, Judge Feldman limited the degree of criminalization that women arrested in Louisiana’s street-based sex trades could legally be subjected to: women had the “right” to be treated as no more (and no less) than prostitutes. It was significant, then, that WWAV claimed the NO Justice Project “was not a legal fight or a legislative fight;” it “was a fight for women’s lives and wellbeing.”65 WWAV leaders and members threw the whole of their lives up as the precondition for social change; they countered social death with a defiance of living.66 That decision had grown out of a wholesale rejection of both the logic of organized expulsion enacted through CANS and the strategies advocates typically used to effect piecemeal policy change. By refusing the terms of post-­ Katrina surveillance in body, mind, and spirit, WWAV leaders and members arrived at a novel strategy for challenging this purification policy. Their approach, with its own rich historical consciousness, had exposed and disrupted the logic of the post-Katrina moral panic. Moreover, it enabled WWAV to resist equating their victory with the legal inscription of their members’ contingent equality. While the federal ruling on CANS was a moment to be celebrated, it was also a moment that only made sense in community—in a process of becoming—through which women began to make sense, to heal, to rebuild, and to renew with one another. Slowing down into the intimacies of this work illuminated the ways in which what might appear to be small-scale edits on systems of surveillance could—through relationships, in time and space—actually open up horizons otherwise. WWAV had been able to render state violence against Black women legible while still resisting state recognition as a panacea. They did so artfully through sharing stories crafted in the recesses of WWAV’s office and community spaces. They did so by refusing to shoehorn their struggle into the neatness of individual rights claims. And even while they rendered themselves and the violence they were living through visible, they also kept carefully concealed the depth of their knowledge about the terrain and agents of post-Katrina surveillance. They also kept concealed the generations-honed dark sousveillance techniques through which their resistance strategies had been crafted. How did that victory become possible? As Deon Haywood explained, “We just stayed the course and fought the fight.”67

Like a Phoenix WWAV was never supposed to win a victory on this scale. According to the moral panic script, those afforded first-class citizenship were ­supposed to emerge as the saviors of the impure post-Katrina homeland, restoring it to order. Black women were supposed to fade into the

“And Still We Rise”  289 background, criminalized further as state capacity expanded. That, of course, is not what happened. That is, however, how the media chose to tell the story.68 In the hands of local reporters, the CANS statute was stripped of its gendered and racialized enforcement, and instead reframed as a legalistic threat to LGBTQ rights and equality. Judge Feldman was lauded as a champion; the attorneys of the NO Justice legal team were named as visionaries. The WWAV leaders and the Black cisgender and transgender women with whom they built the NO Justice Project’s analysis, strategy, and goals were not even mentioned. They were written out of the story of their own win, and so too were their practices of politics otherwise. Two months later, this narrative erasure turned physical. On May 24, 2012, as the clock approached midnight, WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed by unknown arsonists.69 First, the arsonists whittled the deadbolt off the backdoor to the office. Then they moved through the long hallway from back to front—setting small fires in the meditation alcove, singeing the faces off Black women in posters, and tossing WWAV’s NO Justice awards into the alleyway. Inside the outreach office at the front of the office, they stacked WWAV’s educational breast models three-high, covered them in accelerant, and ignited a blaze strong enough to melt the blades off the ceiling fan 15 feet overhead. Decades of client files, harm reduction supplies, and outreach materials were reduced to ashes, including all of the case files and testimonies that WWAV leaders and members gathered in the NO Justice Project. It was a vile act of hate intended not only to erase WWAV’s organizing work against CANS but also to exterminate the organization’s efforts to realize New Orleans otherwise once and for all. The pain of walking through the charred rubble left in the fire’s wake was gut-wrenching. No one, of course, was ever charged. Days later, at a local fundraiser, Deon Haywood publicly addressed WWAV’s allies and supporters for the first time. She affirmed that everyone at WWAV was deeply shaken but recovering. Most of all, she and the WWAV foremothers were worried about how they were going to provide for members during the rebuilding. WWAV was still so far from realizing the transformative healing that had been envisioned through the NO Justice Project. With the arson attack, they had lost more than a meeting space. They lost the intimacy and privacy of a home, filled with the seeds of the slow conversations and pained exchanges and joyful celebrations planted by women who had come together through grassroots organizing in the midst of near totalizing surveillance to change the conditions of their lives. The coming weeks would bring much uncertainty. And WWAV’s work would continue. “Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South,” Deon Haywood explained, “but it can also be a powerful force for rebirth.”

290  Laura McTighe

Acknowledgments Research for this chapter was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. I would like to thank Deon Haywood, Catherine Haywood, Danita Muse, and all of the people of the NO Justice Project who taught me what it means to imagine the world otherwise; every day working with you, I have seen this world take shape. I would also like to thank Panic editor Micol Seigel for not only making a home for this writing, but for also continually ensuring that the commitments and relationships that make it possible could take place and have a space.

Notes 1 WWAV, “OUR WIN.” 2 Audrey Doe, et al. v. Bobby Jindal, et al., “Order and Reasons,” 29. Please note that WWAV is not a membership-based organization; no one subscribes or pays dues to WWAV. Nonetheless, I use the term “member” here and throughout this chapter to signal the intimate, familial-like relationships that have been built between WWAV leaders and the people they support through decades of grassroots, community-based work. 3 WWAV, “OUR WIN.” 4 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 16–20; and Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 9; Chang, Threlkeld, and Smith, “Louisiana Incarcerated.” 5 Browne, Dark Matters, 21–24. In my larger work, I explore such independent modes of thinking and being amid constant surveillance and racialized terror through what the late Clyde Woods (1998) theorized as “blues epistemologies,” the late Cedric Robinson (1983) excavated historiographically as the Black Radical Tradition, and Katherine McKittrick (2006) spatialized as “demonic grounds.” 6 The politics and techniques of “rendering visible” have been essential to Black feminist organizing since the storm. See Bierria et al., “To Render Ourselves Visible.” 7 For a critique of “recognition” as I am using it here, see Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition. 8 See especially Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. 9 Blackstone, “Chapter the Fifteenth: Of Offences Against the Persons of Individuals.” 10 Hood, “The History and Development of the Louisiana Civil Code.” 11 1805 Louisiana Acts chap. I, § 2. LA. REV. STAT. § 788. 12 State v. Williams, 34 La. Ann. 87, 88 (1882). On the racialization of “crime,” “nature,” and “sex” in the plantation and post-emancipation South, see Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity and Evans, The Burden of Black Religion. 13 Acts of the State of Louisiana 1896, page 102, § 1, Act 69. 14 State v. Long, 133 La. 580 (1913). 15 Naquin, “Criminal Law – Miscegenation,” 700–705. 16 La. Crim. Stat. Ann. § 43:89 (1943). 17 Bennett, “The Louisiana Criminal Code,” 44, emphasis mine. 18 State of Louisiana v. Michael Smith, “Majority Opinion.”

“And Still We Rise”  291 19 See Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite, especially Chapter 4. 20 Cited in Patton, Sex and Germs, 85. 21 Georgia Attorney General Gary Bowers bolstered the state’s role in managing the country’s mounting fears when he appealed the Bowers v. Hardwick criminal sodomy case all the way to the US Supreme Court, insisting, “the law would help reduce the spread of AIDS.” Cited in Chateauvert Sex Workers Unite, 104, emphasis mine. 22 In “There Is NO Justice in Louisiana, which was published as part of the Souls Combahee at 40 collection, I (with Deon Haywood) explore how WWAV leveraged this history of analysis, both in the academy and on the ground, to organize against the CANS statute through a distinct Southern Black feminist tradition. 23 Jen Manion, Liberty’s Prisoners. 24 In the North, Black people were also incarcerated at disproportionate rates, though proportions would not reach Jim Crow-era racial disparities until the explosion of incarceration in the 1980s under the auspices of the War on Drugs. Still, in Illinois, between 1890 and 1930, African-American women averaged only 2.4 percent of the state’s female population, but they represented two-thirds of the daily population at Joliet women’s prison. See Dodge, “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind,” 72–73, 84. 25 Law, Resistance Behind Bars, 161–62. 26 Haley, “Like I Was a Man,” 55–56. See also Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 121, 115, 10. 27 Ibid. 28 To quote historian Mary Ellen Curtin, “The image of the fallen woman in the South had everything to do with race. Black women prisoners were seen as inherently immoral, while white women prisoners convicted of sex crimes lost their racial privilege.” In Black Prisoners and their World, 114–15. See also Simmons, Crescent City Girls, especially Chapter 5. 29 See Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, especially Part II on “Urban Reform and Criminal Justice.” 30 Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” 739–40. 31 See Richie, Arrested Justice, especially Chapter 5. 32 Quoted in Center for Constitutional Rights, “Just A Talking Crime.” 33 Creating such a database was a requirement of the federal Adam Walsh Act (AWA), passed in June 2006. On January 1, 2008, the same year WWAV saw a surge in participants being placed on the sex offender registry, the Louisiana legislature amended the state’s existing sex offender registration laws to bring them into conformity with the provisions of the AWA. The amendments mandated that a central registry of sex offenders be maintained by the Bureau. The Bureau is also mandated to participate in the National Sex Offender Registry. 34 Criminalization is only one site for producing this post-Katrina fiction of black womanhood. Education activist Ashana Bigard testified on July 18, 2015, at Breaking the Silence: A New Orleans Townhall Hearing on Women of Color that “To buy into the narrative of the [Charter school] experiment, you need to buy into the idea that black women are complicit in the under-education of black children.” 35 US Department of Justice, “Fact Sheet.” The DOJ is not responsible for NOPD arrest practices. However, I do think it is worth pondering why a local judicial system became the self-evident institution for investing federal rebuilding dollars in the wake of a catastrophic hurricane. This issue has been substantively engaged within the body of post-Katrina literature. See especially the 2009 special issue of American Quarterly edited by Clyde Woods, “In the Wake of Katrina.”

292  Laura McTighe 36 Louisiana State Sex Offender and Child Predator Registry. Cited in Center for Constitutional Rights, “Just A Talking Crime.” 37 My attention to the everyday is informed by Das, Life and Words, especially Chapter 4. 38 Quoted in Center for Constitutional Rights, “Just A Talking Crime.” 39 Ibid. 40 In addition to actually losing custody of their children, women also reported that the sex offender registration requirements prevented them from effectively parenting their children as they were not able to walk their children to school, participate in parent-teacher meetings, or attend graduations. 41 Each day of fieldwork at WWAV has impressed upon me the deep and intimate shock of losing the people, places, and things making up one’s emotional ecosystem. My analysis is also informed by scholarship on a black sense of place, including McKittrick, “On plantations, prisons and a black sense of place,” and Fullilove, Root Shock, 11–17. 42 Interview with WWAV Executive Director Deon Haywood, August 2013; collective staff testimony on the methods WWAV pursued in the NO Justice project given during “Never Going Back,” a private community meeting for formerly incarcerated women in July 2013. 43 When WWAV launched the campaign against CANS, the Department of Justice was already investigating New Orleans policing practices. WWAV organized a series of community focus groups on the discriminatory policing practices that Black cisgender and transgender women are subject to. The DOJ report specifically mentions CANS, and notes that “community members told us they believe some officers equate being African American and transgendered with being a prostitute.” See US DOJ, “Investigation of the New Orleans Police Department.” 4 4 Garland, “On the concept of moral panic,” 26. In arguing for the possibility of a sociology of morals beyond deviant cases (e.g., “morally appropriate social reaction”), Garland points to Stanley Cohen’s consideration of the cultural politics that involve “stirring up ‘good’ moral panics,” and Emile Durkheim’s notion of righteous “moral outrage.” 45 Here, WWAV’s framing provides an important counterpoint to scholarly studies, which have traditionally analyzed systems of social purification from the vantage point of those setting the boundaries, not those who are expelled. See especially Emile Durkheim’s foundational contributions to the study of ritual life in Elementary Forms, Mary Douglas’s expansion on his theories in Purity and Danger, and Douglas’s further discussion of the problem of evil in Natural Symbols. 46 All WWAV leaders and members root themselves in different traditions. Deon Haywood, for example, carries her time with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party alongside her Yoruba practice. She explained the resistance of mind and spirit in the words of Sekou Touré: “Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution.” 47 I understand WWAV’s organizing history in the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition, as resurrected and analyzed by Robinson in Black Marxism, 167–71. 48 WWAV’s meticulous process of building and maintaining trust in the community was reiterated in nearly every interview I conducted. Founders Catherine Haywood and Danita Muse both underscored that they never intended to start a nonprofit. Their goal was to be present in the communities that were not being served and to meet people’s actual needs. It is because of this accountability to the community that WWAV started to hear stories about

“And Still We Rise”  293

49

50

51

52

53

54 55 56 57

58

59

CANS after Katrina. Theirs was one of the only drop-in/outreach projects to survive the storm. Interviews with WWAV cofounders Danita Muse and Catherine Haywood, and individuals who worked at WWAV in the organization’s early years, including Robert Ellis, Sharon Peterson, Angelita Bolden, and Oscar Salinas, July-August 2013. My interest in stitching the CANS fight to the work of WWAV’s foremothers—­ and both to the long history of poor Black women’s organizing in the Deep South—is informed, in part, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work to trace the development and movement of genealogical geographies of radicalism. In ­“Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference,” Gilmore discusses “mature women activists” whose “ideological and material agency moved in counterpurpose to ‘fatal couplings of power and difference’” and who “have become materially and discursively able to recognize each other across many contemporary divides.” See Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference,” 16. My thanks to Robin McGinty for introducing me to this article. In his seminal work on the two-ness, the double-consciousness, of being Black in America, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that “between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: … How does it feel to be a problem?” (emphasis mine). See Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The denial of coevalness is an old colonialist trick for constructing the “Other” as spatially and temporally different from themselves. We recognize this denial in the descriptions of peopled lands as “empty” and the minimization of indigenous work as “primitive.” The scripting of Black women’s resistance as always already reactive is a no less powerful way of naturalizing the time and space of white heteropatriarchy. See Fabian, Time and the Other, Chapter 2. Here, WWAV’s organizing strategy maps onto what social theorists have termed “prefigurative politics,” e.g., Graeber, “The New Anarchists.” It also clarifies the revolutionary feminist intervention Deborah A. Thomas makes in the “Coda” to Exceptional Violence, 230–31. See also James, ­Shadowboxing, 182–88. This collective agreement was reached during the 2009 founding NO Justice coalition meeting, which I facilitated. For WWAV’s public messaging of these projects, see “Join WWAV in Fighting Drug Testing for TANF Recipients” and “Micro-Enterprise, WWAV Style.” Bierria et al., “To Render Ourselves Visible.” After the CANS victory, the Center for Constitutional Rights built an online archive of the Crime Against Nature by Solicitation litigation, which includes a case timeline with links to the Doe v. Jindal complaint and the amicus brief filed in support of plaintiffs: www.ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/ our-cases/crimes-against-nature-solicitation-cans-litigation. Additionally, attorneys Alexis Agathocleous and Andrea Ritchie of CCR published analyses of the case through Loyola University. See Agathocleous, “When Power Yields to Justice” and Ritchie, “Crimes Against Nature.” Also see Agathocleous, “Building a Movement for Justice.” In our July 2013 interview, attorney William Quigley explained how his practice of “social change lawyering” is modeled on the principles of legal aid during the Black Freedom Struggle. See also Quigley, “Ten Questions for Social Change Lawyers.” Center for Constitutional Rights, “Doe v. Jindal complaint.”

294  Laura McTighe 60 In our interview, William Quigley described how he and Deon Haywood were asked to explain the sexual practices criminalized under the CANS statute in immense detail before the House Committee. He also remembered how, after the House Committee’s unanimous ruling, Deon Haywood turned to him and asked, “What do we do next?” Quigley replied, “I don’t know. We don’t usually win.” 61 Audrey Doe, et al. v. Bobby Jindal, et al., “Order and Reasons,” 29. ­Defendants included Governor Bobby Jindal; Attorney General James D. Buddy Caldwell; Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) James M. LeBlanc; Superintendent of the DPSC Colonel Michael D. Edmonson; Deputy Superintendent of the DPSC, Office of the State Police, Charles Dupuy; Director of the DPSC, Division of Probation and Parole, Eugenie C. Powers; Assistant Director of the DPSC, Division of Probation and Parole, Barry Matheny; Commissioner of the DPSC, Office of Motor Vehicles, Nick Gautreaux; and Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, Ronal W. Serpas. 62 This point was emphasized by Zina Mitchell in an interview I conducted with her on June 4, 2012. 63 Statement made to Deon Haywood in 2013, after the 2012 ruling was extended to all people with CANS convictions. 64 WWAV, “Victory at Last!” 65 WWAV, “OUR WIN.” 66 See Cacho, Social Death, 1–9; and Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 38–45. 67 WWAV, “OUR WIN.” 68 Kunzelman, “Louisiana sex law violates offenders’ rights, federal judge rules.” 69 WWAV, “Arson destroys Women With A Vision office.”

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“And Still We Rise”  295 Carby, Hazel V. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 738–55. Center for Constitutional Rights. “Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation Litigation.” www.ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/crimes-againstnature-solicitation-cans-litigation. ———. “Doe v. Jindal complaint.” www.ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/assets/ Complaint_1.pdf. ———. “Just A Talking Crime”: A Policy Brief in Support of the Repeal of Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) Statute. 2011. http:// wwav-no.org/wp-content/uploads/Final_PolicyBrief_TalkingCrime.pdf. Chang, Cindy, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith. “Louisiana Incarcerated: How we built the world’s prison capital—8-Part Series.” The Times Picayune, May 13–20, 2012. www.nola.com/prisons/. Chateauvert, Melinda. Sex Workers Unite: From Stonewall to Slutwalk. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Curtin, Mary Ellen. Black Prisoners and their World: Alabama, 1865–1900. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2000. Dodge, L. Mara. “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime and Prisons, 1835–2000. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. ———. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Boston: Bedford Books, [1903] 1997. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Evans, Curtis J. The Burden of Black Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fullilove, Mindy. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Garland, David. “On the concept of moral panic.” Crime Media Culture 4, no. 1 (2008): 9–30. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography.” The Professional Geographer 54 (2002): 15–24. Graeber, David. “The New Anarchists.” New Left Review 13, no. 6 (2002): 61–73. Haley, Sarah. “‘Like I was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 39, no. 1 (2013): 53–77. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: ­MacMillan, 1978. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Index

9/11 attacks 153–54, 203 9/11 Commission Report 144 abolitionism 49–50, 108; see also humanitarianism; slavery Acaye, Jacob 51–52 Acholi 47 activism: clicktivism 2–3, 61n20; see also Kony 2012 campaign; consumer 244, 249–53, 259; by people of color 235, 275–77, 282–89, 293n48, 293n50; see also Women With A Vision; sousveillance as tactic and strategy 277, 282–90 adoption 138–39 affect 1–16; see also desire; love; panics, moral Africa: (post)colonialism and 9, 12, 14; missionary activity in 48–49, 49–50, 61n14, 67; stereotypes of 45–46, 60n10, 70–71; see also bushmeat African-Americans see Black people Africans, Black see Black people Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) 205–6 alienation 266–67; see also desire; love Amar, Paul 169–70 American Seamen’s Friend Society (ASFS) 179–87, 189–93 American Tract Society 187–88, 194n36 Anti-Coolie Act (1862) 110–11 anti-prostitution campaigns see also sex work: as control of women 223–25, 232–37; see also Crime Against Nature by Solicitation; in Zimbabwe 223–25, 232–37

anti-trafficking campaigns 122; see also trafficking; Blue Campaign of the DHS 268–70; as bolstering state power over migrants 132, 270–72; critiques of 3–5, 111; ostensible feminism of 272; privileging of sex trafficking in 264; PSAs from 268–72; racial coding in 269–70; Slaveryfootprint. org 244, 249–53, 259; state power and 17n5, 111, 132, 270–72; use of melodrama in 123n2; use of slavery analogies in 244–45, 247, 248–50, 258–60 Apple 256, 258; see also Foxconn Technology Group Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) 58 arrastões (crowds of muggers) 163–64 arrows, red 14, 98–101, 99, 100, 151, 152 ASFS see American Seamen’s Friend Society Atanasoski, Neda 245, 251–52 Australia 122 Avery, Henry 27–29, 42n4 BEIC see British East India Company benevolence see humanitarianism; missionaries; reformers benevolence (term) 194n2 Benevolent Empire 181 Benjamin, Walter 209–10 Black men see also Black people; people of color: criminalization of 159–64, 160, 166–67, 170–71, 173n48, 281, 291n24; missionary efforts directed at 179–87, 189–93; sailors 179–93; as threats 180–81, 190–92; see also rolezinho; threats;

300 Index violence directed against 159–60, 160, 162, 168 Black people see also Black men; Black women; people of color; slavery: erasure of 288–89; incarceration rates of 279–80, 291n24; middle-class 189–90; mutual aid networks of 189–90, 192; religion and 191–93; sexualization of 173n56; as targets for police violence 159–60, 160, 162, 173n48, 281, 284; as threats see Black men; Black women; rolezinho; threats Blackstone, Sir William 277–78 Black women see also Black people; women; women of color: activism by 235, 275–77, 282–89, 293n48, 293n50; see also Women With A Vision; criminalization of 279–80, 291n34; parenting by 283, 291n34, 292n40; see also mothers; as threats 223–25, 232–38, 238n8, 275, 276, 280, 291n28; see also threats; visibility of 288–89, 290n6 “Blonde Angel,” 131–34, 132, 139 Blue Campaign 268–70; see also antitrafficking campaigns; Department of Homeland Security borders 6, 12–13, 80; see also immigrants; migrants; nation Brazil: race and class in 158–59, 167–68, 172n28, 173n56 Breaking Bad (television series) 149 Brennan, Denise 120 Bridge the Gulf (online media project) 90–91, 102–4 Briggs, Laura 139 British East India Company (BEIC) 27–28, 31 Bush, George W. 149–50, 199 bushmeat 70–71 Butler, Judith 270 Cacho, Lisa 200, 204 CANS see Crime Against Nature by Solicitation capitalism: celebrations of 169, 265–66; feminist critiques of 5; logics of 4, 9, 11–14, 40, 264–73; rhetoric of 3 Captain Phillips (film 2013) 33–34

captivity narratives see narratives and stories Caribbean 30–31 cartels, drug 147 Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) 285–86 the child (concept) 10–11, 18n11, 48, 50, 53, 283 childhood 52, 60n7 children see also Convention on the Rights of the Child; the child (concept): as abductees 131–40; see also trafficking: human; agency of 8, 46, 48, 51–52; human rights of 54–55, 58, 60n2, 61n29; militarization of 47, 54–59, 203, 206–7; as refugees and migrants 120–21; as sex workers 46; as soldiers 45–46, 47, 51–52, 54–55, 60n2, 61n12, 61n29; as threatened by state actions taken against their parents 283 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 109 Chinese people 109–11, 112–14, 115, 118; see also people of color Christianity 179–93; see also American Seamen’s Friend Society; missionaries; reformers Cidade Jardim Shopping Mall 161–62; see also shopping malls circulation see movement citizenship 201–4, 210, 231, 233–35 clicktivism see activism climate change 95–96 climate change refugees see refugees Climate Refugees (film 2010) 90–102, 91, 99, 100 cocaine 148; see also drugs Cohen, Stanley 3, 28, 88–89, 167 Cole, Teju 53, 60n5 colonialism: climate change and 87, 90–102; humanitarianism and 92, 93–95, 110, 112–14, 245, 247–48, 250, 251–53; see also humanitarianism; persistence of 17n10, 87–88, 90–102, 271 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act (2005) 147, 149–50 commodification 9, 79–80, 173n56, 264–73 commodities 245 commodity chains 244, 246, 249–51, 252, 256–60

Index  301 consumers 244, 249–53, 256, 258, 259, 265, 273n3; see also activism; consumer Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 54–55, 60n2, 61n29 coolie (term) 110, 123n7 coolie labor see labor: coolie counterinsurgency 201, 205–6, 215n52; see also narcoterror; War on… counter-piracy see piracy coyotes 121 CRC see Convention on the Rights of the Child Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) law 275–79, 281–83, 286–88, 294n60 criminalization: of Black men 159–64, 160, 166–67, 170–71, 173n48, 281, 291n24; of Black women 225, 233–38, 279–80, 291n24; of gay men 278–79; of LGBTQ people 48–49, 61n14, 236–37, 240n70, 247–48, 277–79; of migrants 109–11, 120–23, 155n20, 199, 200–201, 204, 209; see also gangs; narcoterror; of oral and anal sex 277–79; of pirates 30–34; of protesters 228–29; of sex workers 275–79, 281–83, 288 Cuba 77, 110–12, 114–17 Cuba Commission 114–16 Cultural Studies 2–3, 7–8 DEA see Drug Enforcement Agency Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 144, 201, 268–71 deportation 120–21, 135, 200–201, 209–10, 214n21 desire 9, 264–73, 273n10 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) 202–3 DHS see Department of Homeland Security Dibrani, Leonarda 135 Dimopoulou, Eleftheria 132–34 discourse 7; see also narratives and stories disease see Ebola; health, global; HIV and AIDS disorder 227–31; see also order Doctors Without Borders see Médecins Sans Frontières Don Juan (ship) 116–17

Drake, Sir Francis 30 DREAM Act see Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 145, 152–53; see also narcoterror drugs 146, 147–48; see also narcoterror Duggan, Lisa 167 Earthrise (photograph, 1968) 92 Ebola: case 72–74; Ebola virus disease (EVD) 71–72; hemorrhagic fever 71; outbreak 67–68, 69–70, 71–72, 76–77, 80; virus 74, 79–80; visualization of 74–75 economy, informal 8, 226–27; see also sex work Eldorado Shopping Center 162; see also shopping malls El Salvador 199–212, 212n1 empire see imperialism Enlightenment 5, 247, 260n13, 271 epidemiologic risk factors 73–74 EU-NAVFOR see European Union Naval Force for Somalia European Union Naval Force for Somalia (EU-NAVFOR) 36–37 evangelical organizations 48–49; see also missionaries EVD see Ebola the family (concept) 11, 170, 267–68, 273n10, 283; see also the child (concept) Fanon, Frantz 166 Farmer, Paul 80 Fassin, Didier 68 FBI see Federal Bureau of Investigation fear see panics, moral; threats Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 204 Feldman, Martin 275, 287, 288; see also Crime Against Nature by Solicitation Ferguson, James 237 Fish Story (book) 39 Foran Act (1885) 111 Foucault, Michel 37 Foxconn Technology Group 246, 256–59 France 135 Francis, Melissa 40

302 Index Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) 207–8 Friedman, Milton 266, 268 Frontex 122 FSLN see Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional Fukuyama, Francis 266 funk music see music, funk gangs 150–53, 152, 199, 200–201, 204, 209–12; see also cartels; narcoterror Ganj-i-Sawai (ship) 27–29, 31 gender: as crucial organizing category 15; effeminacy 112–14; humanitarianism and 246, 247–49, 254; masculinity 92–94, 112, 182–83, 210, 211; nationalism and 213n15 Glissant, Édouard 89–90 global (term) 5–7; see also transnational globalization 38–41, 213n11; see also capitalism; colonialism; imperialism; neoliberalism global north 93–93, 97–98; see also imperialism global south 6, 50, 88–90, 97–102, 122–23, 146–47, 271, 273n3; see also migrants; narcoterror; refugees; trafficking; victims global warming see climate change Google 74, 250–51 Great Britain: empire of 30–32, 115, 118–19; indentured labor and 109–10, 111–12; opposition to coolie trade of 109–10, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118–19; piracy and 27–29, 30–32 Greece 131–34, 138 Guarulhos Shopping Center 160; see also rolezinho; shopping malls guestworkers see workers Guinea 77 Gulf Coast region 102–3 Gutiérrez, José Antonio 203, 205 “Gypsies” see Roma Haiti 87, 104n3, 190–91 Haley, Sarah 280 Hall, Stuart 3, 88, 167 Hammonds, Evelynn 248 Hartman, Saidiya 89

Haywood, Deon 275, 276, 282, 289, 292n46; see also Women With A Vision health (concept) 11, 67 health, global 67–69, 72, 74–77, 80, 82n25; see also Ebola; public health emergency of international concern health care 185 health diplomacy 77 HIV and AIDS 276, 278–79, 284; see also Women With A Vision homonationalism 213n15, 247–48, 273n10; see also gender; nation homophobia 247–48, 276, 278–79; see also LGBTQ people housing, shared 186–87, 189–90, 257–58 Hua, Julietta 90, 94, 271; see also essay in this collection humanitarianism see also antitrafficking campaigns; NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs): capitalist logics of 76–77; see also capitalism; colonial logics of 92, 93–95, 110, 112–14, 245, 247–48, 250–53; see also colonialism; critiques of 69; gender and 246, 247–49, 254; see also gender; militarization and 82n25; see also militarization; military intervention and 49–51, 122–23; see also military; responses to coolie labor 108–11, 118–19; responses to global health 68; responses to slavery 89; security and 75, 170; see also security; state power and 111, 119; structural violence and 244–46, 249–56, 259 human rights see rights, human Hurricane Katrina 275–76, 281 IC see Invisible Children ideology 4–5, 6–7, 11, 111, 148–49, 183–84, 211, 244–45; see also antitrafficking campaigns; capitalism; colonialism; gender; health; humanitarianism; imperialism; labor; love; narcoterror; panics, moral; rights, human; War on… imaginaries 145–49 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigrants 155n20, 199, 200–204, 207–9, 210–12; see also migrants

Index  303 immigration see also movement; regulation of and restrictions on 109–11, 120–23 imperialism see also Africa; colonialism; global north; global south; Great Britain; Haiti; humanitarianism; Latin America; United States: coolie trade and 108–19; see also labor; effects on Africa 47; effects on Latin America 120–21, 205–12, 212n1, 212n2, 212n4, 215n52, 215n71; function of moral panics within 6, 88; humanitarianism and 118–19, 122–23; movement of people shaped by 6, 14; piracy as facilitating 29–32; social hierarchies of 93, 202; see also gender indentured servitude 109, 111; see also labor; labor: coolie India 27–29, 40, 41, 99, 99, 111, 112, 114, 118 Indian Ocean 27–29, 31–32, 31–38, 34–38 inequality 3–5, 8–14, 168, 213n19, 251, 270–71, 283; see also capitalism; globalization; humanitarianism; imperialism; order Interlagos Shopping Center 160; see also rolezinho; shopping malls International Classification of Diseases (ICD) manual 72 International Maritime Organization (IMO) 38 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 249 International Organization for Migration 122 intersectionality 240n70, 247–48, 260n11 Invisible Children (IC) 46, 47–54 Iraq 199, 200, 203, 205–9, 2112n2 Iraq Veterans Against the War 208 Ireland 133, 138 Irwin, Lisa 136–37 Itaquera Mall 160, 172n24; see also rolezinho; shopping malls Jamison, Mary 137 JCC see Junior Cadet Corps Jim Crow 280

Journey to Planet Earth (documentary) 87 JROTC see Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps Junior Cadet Corps (JCC) 56 Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) 55–56, 58, 203 jus gentium (law of nations) 119 kafala system 119–20 Kidd, William 28, 31, 32 kidnapping 41, 114, 131–34, 136–37, 138–39; see also trafficking: human “King of Pirates” see Avery, Henry Kony, Joseph 46, 47–48, 50–51 Kony 2012 (film) 47–48, 51–53 Kony 2012 campaign 46, 47–54, 60n9, 60n11, 61n20 labor see also sailors; sex work; workers: convict lease system 280; coolie 108–19; see also trafficking: human; domestic servitude 280; free/coerced 5, 108–9, 110–11, 114–18, 119–20; guest worker programs 109; invisibility of 38–39; kafala system 119–20; maritime 13, 15, 38–41, 179–93, 195n39; see also sailors; patients as performing 79–80; as punishment 280 Latin America see also Brazil; Mexico: migrants from 120–21; military service and 205–9, 210; relations with United States 120–21, 205–12, 212n1, 212n2, 212n4, 215n52, 215n71; as source of drugs 146–49; see also narcoterror; as source of gangs 150–53, 152, 199, 200–201, 204, 209–12; see also narcoterror letters of marque 30; see also piracy; privateering LGBTQ people: campaigns against 48–49, 61n14, 236, 237, 247–48, 276–79; of color 240n70, 247–48, 260n11, 292n43; lesbians 240n70; transgender people 275, 276; as unnatural 277–79 Liberia 61n12, 77 Louisiana 275–90 love 9, 264–73, 273n10

304 Index Madagascar 31 Madeline and the Gypsies (book 1959) 131 maps 14, 38, 74–75, 98–101, 99, 100, 151, 152 Maria. see “Blonde Angel” masculinity. see gender Mbembe, Achille 227 McCann, Madeleine 135–36 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/ Doctors Without Borders 67 media 45–46, 54–55, 120, 131–37, 147, 159–64, 166–67, 288–89; see also media, social media, social 2–3, 48, 67–68, 69 Mejía, Camilio 207–9, 210 melodrama 96, 123n2 Méndez Ramos, Natividad de Jesús, 205 men of color see also Black men; people of color: missionary efforts directed at 179–87, 189–93; as threats 11, 163–64, 166–67, 170–71, 180–81, 190–92, 200–201, 213n6; see also pirates; rolezinho; violence directed against 159–60, 160, 162, 168 methamphetamine 8–9, 145–49, 154 methodology 7–8, 165 Mexico 146–49 Middle East 151–52, 199, 200, 203, 205–9, 212n2, 212n4, 215n52 Middle Passage 112 migrants: agency of 114–18; deaths of 122; as illegitimate 231; as threats 15, 109, 231; see also threats; as victims 14, 109–11, 120–21; see also victims migration 8, 115, 118; see also movement militarization 47, 54–59, 62n55, 82n25, 206–7 military 49–51, 55–59, 105n32, 199, 200–204, 207–9, 210–12, 213n15, 214n19; see also children: as soldiers missionaries 49–50, 67, 113–14, 183–84; see also Christianity; evangelical organizations mobility 227, 232–38, 238n5, 238n8, 265, 281; see also migration; movement modeling 77–79

moral panics see panics, moral Morgan, Henry 30 mothers 131–34, 132, 135, 137–38, 139, 283, 291n34, 292n40 movement 1, 6–7, 37–38, 134, ­226–27; see also migration; mobility; trafficking MSF see Médecins Sans Frontières Muse, Danita see Women With A Vision music, funk 159–60, 164, 169, 171n3, 173n52 mutinies 116–17, 118–19 mutual aid societies 189–90, 192 MV Iceberg 1 (ship) 40–41, 43n34 MV Sirius Star (ship) 35 narcoterror 145, 149–53, 152; see also War on… narratives and stories: about children 10–11, 18n11, 48, 50, 53, 131–38, 139–40; about disease 69–70, 276, 278–79; see also Ebola outbreak; about human trafficking 268–72; about love and family 11, 170, 267–68; about saviors, victims and villains 2–5, 288–89; see also saviors; victims; villains; captivity narratives 131–38, 139–40, 141n24; moral panics and, 8–9, 9–14 Nash, Michael 92–93 nation see also borders; citizenship; deportation; nationalism: function of moral panics within 6, 9; “grotesque nationalism,” 224; as organizing principle see order; porosity of borders 6; refugees as threat to 12, 87–89, 98–101, 99, 100, 151; see also refugees; relationship to humanitarianism 253–54; see also humanitarianism; role of gender in 93–94, 112, ­170–71, 211, 213n15; see also gender; role of race in 170–71; see also race; racism; sailors as threat to 186–87; see also sailors; stories and allegories about see narratives and stories; as vulnerable to disease and corrupting influences 80, 231–36; see also disorder; health (concept) nationalism 1–16, 224, 230, 237; see also nation

Index  305 National Middle School Cadet Corps (NMSCC) 56 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2014) 147–48 naturalization. see citizenship Neocleous, Mark 144 neoliberalism 3, 213n11, 265–66; see also capitalism; globalization New Orleans 275–90 New York 179–93, 194n6 NGOs. see Non-Governmental Organizations Nigeria 236 NMSCC see National Middle School Cadet Corps No Child Left Behind Act 57 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) 245, 253–56; see also humanitarianism Nouvelle Pénelopé (ship) 118–19 Obama, Barrack 67, 78–79 obscurity, right to 89–91; see also opacity; transparency OECD see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development opacity 89–91, 102–4; see also obscurity, right to; transparency Operation Clean Up 233–34 Operation Murambatsvina 223–24, 225, 229–32, 236, 238n5 OPS. see US Office of Public Safety order 11–14; see also disorder Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 39 outbreak maps see maps panics, moral 2–5, 8–14, 144, 167, 211–12; see also specific panics patients 72–74, 76–77, 79–80, 82n16 Patriot Act 147 people of color see also Black men; Black people; Black women; Chinese people; men of color; women of color: activism by 235, 275–77, 282–89, 293n48, 293n50; see also mutual aid societies; Women With A Vision; adoption of 137–39; containment of 13; erasure of 288–89; as feminized 112–14; LGBTQ people 247–48, 260n11; see also LGBTQ people;

as manifestations of backwardness 248; police violence directed against 173n48; sexualization of 173n56; as threats 8–9, 12, 159–63, 160, 163–64, 166–67, 170–71, 200–201; see also Mexico; rolezinho; as victims 2, 4, 95–97, 112–14; women see Black women; women; women of color performance 158–59, 164–65, 165–66 personal protective equipment (PPE) 75 PHEIC see public health emergency of international concern piracy 27–29, 31–32, 33–34, 35–36, 37–38, 42n5 pirates 31–32, 33–34 police: control of space by 159–60, 160, 163–64, 223–25, 228–31; Department of Homeland Security and 201; military and 205, 207; racial violence of 159–60, 160, 162, 173n48, 281, 284; role in addressing drug trafficking 147, 149, 150 Policing the Crisis (book 1978) 3, 88–89, 144 the poor 181 Portugal 135, 138 POSA 6, 224, 225–26, 228–38; see also Public Order and Security Act postcolonial see also colonialism; neoliberalism poverty 181, 194n7 Powell, William P. 189–90 power 1–16, 70–71, 137, 139, 150, 204, 252–54; see also humanitarianism; panics, moral; of the state 1–16, 108–11, 132–33, 144–45, 204, 209–12, 223–38, 284; see also military; police; state prescription drugs 148; see also drugs prison systems 279–80, 283, 284, 291n24 privateering 30–31; see also piracy prostitution see sex work prostitution (concept) 267 public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) 67, 81n1 Public Order and Security Act (POSA) 228–29 public space see space, public

306 Index Quedagh Merchant (ship) 28, 31 queerness 113, 213n15, 240n70, 248, 260; see also LGBTQ people queer people see LGBTQ people race 15, 93, 95, 97, 166–67, 170–71, 172n28, 269–70; see also Black people; people of color; racism the racial (concept) 260n13 racism 159–60, 160, 162, 170–71 rape 113, 282; see also trafficking reformers 112–14, 179–87, 189–93, 194n8, 194n9; see also humanitarianism refugees: climate change refugees 12, 87–101, 91, 99, 100; narco-refugees 151; as threats 87–89, 98–101, 99, 100, 121–23, 151; as victims 89–98, 91, 121–23 religion. see Christianity; evangelical organizations; missionaries rescue 9–10, 13–14, 17n5; see also saviors resource wars 98 restrictionism 109 rhetoric 7 rights, human 54–55, 58, 60n2, 61n29, 94–95, 245, 271; see also Convention on the Rights of the Child; Universal Declaration of Human Rights rights, human (concept) 11, 94–95 ritual. see performance Road from Ar Ramadi (memoir 2007) 207–9 rolezinho 158–71, 160 Roma 9, 13–15, 131–39, 132, 140n2 rumors 230 Rumsfeld, Donald 153–54 Russell, Jason 48, 52 sailors 13, 15, 40, 41, 179–93, 195n39; see also labor; pirates; shipping The Sailor’s Magazine 179, 183, 184–85, 191–92 Sandinistas see Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional saviors 2–3, 45–46, 50–51, 137–38, 264, 269–70, 271–72; see also narratives and stories; rescue; victims; villains School of the Americas 205

School Recruit Program 56–57 schools 54–59, 203 security see also military; narcoterror; police; War on…: global health and 75, 77, 80; humanitarianism and 75, 77, 170; as institutionalized moral panic 144, 153–54; Michel Foucault on 37; narratives of 36, 170; see also narratives and stories; private security companies 206; regimes 36, 170, 201–2; “securityscape” defined 213n11; as unevenly applied 40–41 separate spheres 183–84 sex 167, 277–79, 291n21 sexuality 15, 257–58 sex work see also labor; trafficking: sex: anti-prostitution campaigns see anti-prostitution campaigns; capitalism and 267–68; by children 46; by Chinese immigrants 113–14; criminalization of 277–79 (see also Crime Against Nature by Solicitation); as focus of antitrafficking campaigns 264; see also anti-trafficking campaigns; versus “prostitution,” 238n2; as survival technique 283 sex workers. see also workers: criminalization of 275–79, 281–83, 288, 291n28; see also Crime Against Nature by Solicitation; as filth 223, 225, 232, 234; mobility of 232–33, 240n55, 240n69; as sex offenders 279, 281, 282–83, 285, 291n33; see also Crime Against Nature by Solicitation; as threats 9, 15, 181, 182, 223, 225, 232–37; see also threats; as victims 4, 15, 113–14, 181, 182; see also trafficking: sex; victims shipping 38–41; see also commodity chains; trade, global ships 39–41; see also mutinies; piracy; pirates; sailors; individual ships shopping malls 159–63, 160; see also rolezinho Sierra Leone 61n12, 77 da Silva, Denise Ferreira 103, 248 slavery 89, 192–93, 244–45, 247, 248–50, 258–60; see also abolitionism Slaveryfootprint.org 244, 249–53, 259

Index  307 sodomy see sex soldiers: children as 45–46, 47, 51–52, 54–55, 60n2, 61n12, 61n29 Somalia 33–38 sousveillance 277, 282–90; see also surveillance space, public 159–68, 160, 169–71, 223–25, 228–31; see also shopping malls the state 1–16; see also nation; anthropomorphization of 113, 211; categorization by 72; function of race within see race; inadvertent encouragement of trafficking by 272; see also anti-trafficking campaigns; trafficking; interactions with humanitarian organizations 111; see also humanitarianism; interactions with NGOs 245–46, 253–56; moral panics as bolstering the power of see panics, moral; power; order and disorder in 223–38; see also disorder; order; sex work as threat to 267; see also sex work; sex workers; surveillance by 37, 38, 189, 232, 249, 257–58, 268–72 state power see power state violence see military; police; security; War on… Stern, Philip 32 Strategic Partnership Plan (2002– 2007) 203 Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic & Center for Social Justice 285–86 suicides 108, 116, 246, 256–58, 261n49 surveillance 37, 38, 189, 232, 249, 257–58, 268–72; see also sousveillance terrorism see narcoterror the terrorist (concept) 200–201; see also narcoterror Texas 151 The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery (book 1709) 28; see also Avery, Henry Third World. see global south threats. see also villains: Black men as 180–81, 190–92; see also Black men; rolezinho; Black women as 223–25, 232–38, 238n8, 275–76, 279–80, 291n28; see also Black

women; climate change refugees as 12, 87–89, 98–101, 99, 100; deportation wielded as 120–21, 135; Ebola as 67–68, 80; gangs as 150–53, 152, 199, 200–201, 204, 209–12; Gypsies as 131–34, 136–37, 138–39; indeterminately dependent people as 182; see also sailors; sex workers; LGBTQ people as 275–76, 278–79; (im)migrants as 15, 109, 155n20, 231; movement as 1, 6–7, 134; patients as 72–74, 80, 82n16; people of color as 8–9, 11, 13, 15; see also people of color; women of color; pirates and piracy as 27–29, 31; poor as 181; red arrows representing 14, 98–101, 99, 100, 151, 152; refugees as 12, 87–89, 98–101, 99, 100, 121–23, 151; sailors as 180–81, 190–92; sex workers as 9, 15, 181, 182, 223, 225, 232–37, 278–79; Universal Adversary as 144; young people as 159–63, 160, 163–64; see also rolezinho Thurmond, Strom 146 Tidwell, Mike 87 trade, global 38–41, 183–85, 194n6; see also commodity chains; piracy trafficking see also anti-trafficking campaigns; drug 145; see also narcoterror; human 2–5, 133, 134–35, 136–37, 258, 264–65, 268–73; sex 4, 96, 264, 268; structural conditions facilitating 111, 120–23, 264–68, 271–72 Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) 271 Transnational see also borders; global (term); movement; nation; trafficking: Black people as see Black men; Black people; Black women; climate change as: unequal relationships of 92; commodities as see commodity chains; gangs as see gangs; versus global 6; insecurities regarding movement and circulation 138–40, 170–71; intersections with the colonial 236–38; see also colonialism; labor as see labor; migrants as see migrants; narcoterror as 145, 148–53, 152; as quality of moral panics 6–7, 276,

308 Index 288–89; see also panics, moral; sailors as see sailors; soldiers as see military; trafficking as see trafficking transparency 88–91; see also obscurity, right to; opacity Triple Canopy see security: private security companies Troops to Teachers (TTT) 203 TTT see Troops to Teachers TVPA see Trafficking Victims Protection Act Uganda 48–49, 61n14, 237 Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF) 61n27 United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child 58 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 122 United Nations Resolution 1816, 35 United Nations Security Council 122 United States; see also War on…: Asian (im)migrants and 109–11, 113–14; see also labor: coolie; Christianity and see evangelical organizations; missionaries; reformers; citizenship in see citizenship; discussion of climate change in see climate change; humanitarian activities of 46, 49, 67, 77; see also anti-trafficking campaigns; umanitarianism); labor conditions in 251; see also labor; workers; militarization of children in 47, 54–59, 61n29, 203, 206–7; see also children; militarization; relations with African nations 50–51, 54, 67–68, 70–71, 77, 78–79; relations with Latin America 120–21, 205–12, 212n1, 212n2, 215n52, 215n71; see also Mexico; narcoterror; relations with the Middle East 151–52, 199, 200, 203, 205–9, 212n2, 212n4, 215n52; response to Ebola outbreak 67–68, 70–71, 77, 78–79; as threatened by narcoterror see methamphetamine; narcoterror Universal Adversary Program 144; see also Department of Homeland Security; threats Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 94, 253; see also rights, human

The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld (documentary 2013) 153–54 US Office of Public Safety (OPS) 205 Vance, Carole 96, 123n2, 272 victims 2–5, 88–89, 90–91; see also narratives and stories; saviors; villains; abducted children as 131–40; child soldiers as 45–46, 47, 51–52, 54–55; climate change refugees as 89–93, 91, 95–98; coolie laborers as 108, 109–10, 112–14; migrants as 14, 109–11, 120–21; refugees as 121–22; sex workers as 4, 15, 113–14, 181, 182; trafficked humans as 89, 271; women as 2, 4, 89, 113–14, 248–49, 264; women of color as 248–49 video games 57 villains 2–5; see also narratives and stories; saviors; threats; victims; coolie traders as 108, 110, 114; coyotes as 121; gang members as 150–53, 152, 199, 200–201, 204, 209–12; Mexican drug cartels as 147; narco-terrorists as 149–53; traffickers as 271; Universal Adversary as 144; warlords as 45 violence: directed against Black men 159–60, 160, 162, 168; directed against women 237–38, 248–49, 264; by police 159–60, 160, 162, 173n48; see also police Vitoria Shopping Mall 159–60, 160; see also rolezinho; shopping malls warlords 45 War on…: Crime 199, 200–201, 204, 209–12; Drugs 145, 148–50; see also narcoterror; Terror 145, 149–50, 199, 200–209, 211–12, 247–48; see also narcoterror WHO see World Health Organization women: activism of 235, 275–77, 282–89, 293n48, 293n50; agency of 8, 118; of color see Black people; Black women; people of color; women of color; criminalization of 279–80; mobility of 232–38, 238n5, 240n55, 240n69; see also mobility; as parents see mothers; representation in NGOs 254; sexuality of 223–25, 232–37; as

Index  309 social disorder/corruption 9, 15, 141n24, 223–25, 232–38, 280; as threats see threats; as victims see victims; violence directed against 237–38, 248–49, 264 women (concept) 11 women of color see also Black people; Black women; people of color; women: activism of 235, 275–77, 282–89, 293n48, 293n50; see also Women With A Vision; anti-prostitution campaigns directed against 223–25, 232–37; criminalization of 279–80; erasure of 288–89; as interchangeable 248– 49, 264; parenting by 131–34, 132, 135, 137–38, 139, 283, 291n34, 292n40; see also mothers; as social disorder/corruption 13, 223–25, 232–38, 280; as threats 9, 13, 15, 223–25, 232–38, 280; see also threats; as victims 2, 4, 113–14, 248–49, 264; see also victims Women With A Vision (WWAV) 275–77, 282–89, 290n2, 293n48

workers see also labor; slavery; trafficking: bodies of 245–46, 257–59; guest workers 109; as interchangeable 249; maritime laborers 13, 15, 40, 41, 179–93, 195n39; see also sailors; sex workers see sex workers; suicides of 246, 256–58, 261n49; “touts,” 240n62; as victims see victims World Bank 249 World Health Organization (WHO) 67, 71–72, 81n1 WWAV see Women With A Vision Wynter, Sylvia 93 xenophobia see also racism; threats: of migrants 15, 109–11, 120–23; of refugees 12, 87–89, 98–101, 99, 100, 121–23, 151; of Roma 131–34, 136–37, 138–39 Young Marines 56 Zimbabwe 223–38, 239n9

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