ABSTRACT
In his chapter,Arvind Rajagopal addresses the transformations of questions of community, boundary and identity wrought within the USA by the events of 11 September 2001 in New York and the role of the media (and especially channels such as Fox News) in that process. Here we see the necessity, globalisation notwithstanding, for a continuing consideration of the role of national media and their articulation with questions of international politics and communications. If euphoric arguments were dominant only until recently, in which we were assured that peace and prosperity would result from globalisation, today terrorism and the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism signal a new era of US foreign policy unilateralism. This also portends diminished domestic civil liberties, which we see reflected in demands for a ‘strong state’, and suspicion, not affirmation, of cosmopolitanism. Rajagopal argues that if world-wide communication was never more intensive, the gulfs in understanding have seldom appeared so deep. He further argues that our understanding of the links between culture, politics and technology remain too limited – not least in assuming that free and easy social interchange will emerge spontaneously from new communication networks across a borderless world. The September 11 attacks, staged as a media spectacle, place a question mark against all such utopias, and their troubling aftermath thus provides for Rajagopal an opportunity to re-examine these optimistic preconceptions. The chapter focuses particularly on how the USA’s internal Others become central to such an inquiry, as racial or national ‘outsiders’ whose presence (and status) within the borders of the USA now comes, increasingly, to be seen as problematic by the guardians of Homeland Security. Here, like Phil Cole (1998) in the UK, Rajagopal rightly insists on the linkages between foreign and domestic policies, and on their complex ramifications for questions of citizenship, race relations and immigration policy – matters that are highlighted by his account of the racist forms of abuse and harassment that he and many non-white Others have experienced in the period following the attacks on New York.
