ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace that we care for others unequally, in proportion to how much we think we know about them, how easily we can imagine ourselves to be in their plight, or how likely we judge it that we should nd ourselves in their situation. It is hard to empathize with people who seem Other, and it is hard to sympathize with those we cannot empathize with. It is even harder to empathize with people whose identity we do not even recognize, and to whom we do not ascribe an identity as worthy as our own. White explorers, exploiters, and colonizers called themselves “discoverers” of territories new to them because they could ignore the fact that the inhabitants they drove away, enslaved, or massacred were human. Soldiers and marines have long been encouraged and trained to regard enemy combatants as inhuman, dehumanizing them through euphemisms such as “so targets” or “collateral,” and to treat them not as selves, but as parts of a corporate homogeneous Other, or as “the enemy,” or as “abnormals” in Michel Foucault’s wider denition referred to here in chapter 1. A U.S. marine in e War Orphan says of his civilian casualties, “ey’re all gooks.… We have to give the colonel a body count” (R. Anderson 15). It is also too easy, and comfortable, to ignore victims of ird World wars, oppressions, droughts, or disasters, and treat them as mere statistics, if you are not such a victim, or never have been, or cannot feel you might be. In the contemporary world, host cultures like those of the West are oen presented with the physical presence of such victims, in the roles of refugees or asylum seekers, some of whom may be the unrecognized victims of the West’s exploitation. When the former periphery begins to fold back into the former center like this, people who are usually ignored impact physically on
those who would ignore them and destroy the boundaries between a national culture’s “inside” and “outside.” In the terminology of my rst chapter, the inadmissible boundaries encroach on the “normal” center. ose who were out of sight, out of mind, and out of conscience become at best a nuisance to the “host culture.” In e Colonial Present, Derek Gregory describes the way that victims of contemporary neoimperialism in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, civilians as well as military, are dehumanized in their oppressors’ perception and subsumed into physical concepts of the Other such as “targets” or “body counts,” or metaphysical concepts such as “Terror” (62-72). e deaths of civilian victims, for example, are uncounted and unrecorded. Despite protestations to the contrary under international law, seemingly little attempt is made to avoid them. ey are not described in the Western press, and they are neither grieved for nor celebrated. ey are not perceived in the way that the objects of ethnic hatred or nationalistic enmity are perceived: they are simply null, beyond even the interstitiality of a Michael Jackson or the liminality of “abnormals.” Taking a hint from Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998), Gregory compares the worthlessness of victims of neoimperialism to that of the homo sacer of Roman law, a being whom it is worth neither killing nor sparing-it simply does not matter.
