Donald Trump’s position statement last week excluding Muslims from entering the United States generated a round of bipartisan condemnation, as the White House spokesperson asserted that the statement disqualified Trump from the Presidency and Dick Cheney, among others, argued that the position “goes against everything we stand for and believe in.” While I certainly agree that Trump’s discriminatory approach should be rejected, the effort to exclude the excluder invites reflection on acts of identification. Continue reading “Fighting Exclusion with Exclusion”
Wax On, Wax Off
I was having lunch the other day, facing a salad bar, and it occurred to me that here we have a wonderful example of what it means to study signification. Continue reading “Wax On, Wax Off”
Expanding the Terrorist Label
Robert Dear’s attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs just over a week ago and the shooting in San Bernardino last week have brought the question of who is identified as a terrorist back into the limelight. Lots of people have highlighted how the ethnicity or religious identification of the attacker has often influenced whether the attacker is identified as a terrorist or a mentally disturbed individual in a lone wolf attack. The Daily News cover following the San Bernardino shootings (4 December 2015, pictured above) illustrated this critique by identifying Ronald Dear, Dylan Roof, Adam Lanza, and James Holmes as terrorists, as well as the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre. In this cover and statements from figures like Mike Huckabee (calling Dear’s actions “domestic terrorism”), the critiques of the reluctance to apply the terrorist label to white Christian attackers have won a victory, of sorts. Continue reading “Expanding the Terrorist Label”
#YouAintNoMuslimBruv
Are you following the reactions online to the knife attack on the London Tube (now classed by authorities there as a terrorist attack)? Specially this part:
@idendefying you’re tracking this trending #YouAintNoMuslimBruv story? https://t.co/iej91pKS8d
— Matthew Baldwin (@mcbalz) December 6, 2015
As Baldwin phrases it in a series of tweets, the reaction demonstrates “the power of operational acts of identification,” inasmuch as “it defines Islam, defines London, defines Britons… draws a multi-dimensional line.”
Indeed — after all, interpellation presupposes exterpellation, doesn’t it? For to be hailed in some fashions amounts to being cast out. As is happening here.
Take Baldwin’s advice and follow the hashtag to see the debate as it unfolds.
Innumerable Shades of Grey
Yes — about a week ago there was yet another mass shooting in the US, this time at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, CO. (I won’t go into the even more recent mass shootings in Georgia or California yesterday.)
There’s not too many details in the public domain yet (at least when I wrote this post), but we know that a middle-aged, white male suspect was apprehended after a stand-off with police (pictured above), that three people (including a cop) were killed, and that several more wounded. Continue reading “Innumerable Shades of Grey”
The Reality of the Civil War
Sitting in a hotel meeting room in downtown Atlanta the weekend before Thanksgiving, I watched a professor ask one of my colleagues if the Civil War really happened. This question reflected an effort to challenge the approach that sees scholars and language creating the world. (For an example of this approach to history, see Vaia Touna’s posts here and here.) The questioner here also emphasized a distinction between history (stuff that really happened in the past) and historiography (the writing about the stuff that happened), suggesting that a focus on analyzing historiography ignores the reality of the events themselves. Continue reading “The Reality of the Civil War”