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Abstract
This article explores the role of widely circulated images of Afghan people in building public support for the 2001–2002 U.S. war with Afghanistan. Emphasizing images of women, I argue that these representations participate in the more general category of “the clash of civilizations,” which constitutes a verbal and a visual ideograph linked to the idea of the “white man's burden.” Through the construction of binary oppositions of self and Other, the evocation of a paternalistic stance toward the women of Afghanistan, and the figuration of modernity as liberation, these images participate in a set of justifications for war that contradicts the actual motives for the war. These contradictions have a number of implications for democratic deliberation and public life during wartime.
Notes
Dana L. Cloud is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas. She thanks Angela Aguayo and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights during revision. Correspondence to CMA 7.114, 1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712, U.S. Email: [email protected].
Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man's Burden,” McClure's Magazine 12 (February 1899). Available at Jim Zwick, “‘The White Man’s Burden and Its Critics,” http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/ and in Rudyard Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's Verse: The Definitive Edition (New York: Anchor, 1989), 321.
Sean Gonsalves, “War on Terrorism Has Oily Undercurrent.” Seattle Post‐Intelligencer, September 3, 2002, B5.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Raleigh‐Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
Spurr, 109–24.
Robert L. Ivie, “Images of Savagery in American Justifications for War,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980): 284.
About Kipling's poem, Jim Zwick writes, “Published in McClure's Magazine in February of 1899, Rudyard Kipling's poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden,' appeared at a critical moment in the debate about imperialism within the United States. The Philippine–American War began on February 4 and two days later the U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Spanish–American War, ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States, and placed Cuba under U.S. control. Although Kipling's poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States latched onto the phrase ‘white man’s burden' as a euphemism for imperialism that seemed to justify the policy as a noble enterprise.… The poem was not quickly forgotten.” “The ‘White Man’s Burden and Its Critics,” at http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/.
The predominance of images is not a new or “postmodern” feature of the rhetoric of identity and Otherness. Cartoon and photographic mages of white men literally carrying black people to schoolhouses characterized the rhetoric of the “white man's burden” through the 1890s. These images are available for viewing at http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/.
Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289–310.
John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1991).
Huntington, 110–120.
George W. Bush, “Transcript of President Bush's Address,” Washington Post, September 21, 2001, A24. In response to the question, “Why do they hate us?” Bush said, “These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.”
Huntington, 209.
Huntington, 212.
Michael Calvin McGee, “The Ideograph: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1–16.
Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo‐African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2.
Edwards and Winkler, 297.
Edwards and Winkler, 297–302.
See Nira Youval Davis, Nation and Gender (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997); Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, Social Text Collective, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
This is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's phrase, from “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams (New York: Columbia University Press): 66–111, cited material on 92.
For this reason, Rahul Mahajan argues that the Left should avoid appeals to innocent women and children in their opposition to war. See his Full Spectrum Dominance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Barbara Biesecker, “Rhetorical Ventriloquism: Fantasy and/as American National Identity,” in Argument in a Time of Change: Proceedings of the 10th NCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. James Klumpp (Annandale, VA: NCA 1998), 168–172; David S. Birdsell and Leo Groarke, eds., “Toward a Theory of Visual Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy [Special Issue on Visual Argument] 33 (1996): 1–10; Randall Lake and Barbara A. Pickering, “Argumentation, the Visual, and the Possibility of Refutation: An Exploration,” Argumentation 12 (1998): 79–93.
John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism, and Democratic Public Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (2001): 38.
Lucaites and Hariman, 40.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Girous, 1973), 17. Celeste M. Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990), 82. See also Barry Brummett, Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 27; Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 16–42; John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London: Methuen, 1978), 48–49; David D. Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Perlmutter acknowledges the emotional power of some images but rejects the idea that images override reason or drive policy.
Sontag, 5. See also Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, Post‐Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1996), 3; Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 58.
Emotionally powerful images, such as the photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War or the image of a starving Sudanese child under the watchful eye of a vulture, can evoke outrage, pride, pity, fear, and a host of other emotions. Huynh Cong Ut, “Naked Little Girl and Other Children Fleeing Napalm Strike” (1963); Kevin Carter, “Sudan, 1993,” first published in D. Lorch, “Sudan is Described as Trying to Placate the West,” New York Times, March 26, 1993, A3.
One could argue that these images become typical or iconic over time, training audiences in the appropriate responses. See Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising at Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 363–392; and “Public Identity and Collective Memory in Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm’,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30 (2003): 35–66. On the other hand, postmodernist scholars argue that the impact of most images in late capitalist culture is fleeting and potentially conducive of resistance. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Raleigh‐Durham, NC: Duke University, 1992); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (New York: Blackwell, 1990); Kevin DeLuca, Image Politics (New York: Guilford, 1999).
As Roland Barthes explains, there is “a reduction from the object and the image,” collapsing signifier and signified in such a way as to lead viewers to think that the image is the thing itself. Rather than distinguishing between metaphor and metonymy, he describes metonymy as a particular kind of metaphor that pretends to stand in for the thing represented (signifier). For Barthes, all images perform this metonymic function, simultaneously transposing reality to representation. See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 19, 51. Elsewhere, Barthes makes a distinction between metonymic images that reduce perspective (most news photographs; he also calls them “unary” images), and others that make incongruous and paradoxical perspectives possible. See Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 40–43.
Kenneth Burke, “Identification,” in Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 19–28; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
I use the term “American” advisedly to refer not simply to U.S. citizens, but to the rhetorically constructed national identity that wins the identification of the majority of the people. As a fiction, American‐ness is constructed across many discourses including the photographs under consideration here.
http://www.time‐planner.com/planner/timecom/
http://www.time‐planner.com/planner/home.html
I cannot afford to purchase the rights to reproduce a large number of such images; however, to confirm their representativeness, I direct readers to the web sites and archives of Time and Newsweek, the two largest mass‐circulation newsmagazines published in the United States.
Although a photo essay traditionally is a series of still photographs accompanied by text in book or article form, Time calls these compilations photo essays. Although they more properly are described as image montages set to music, I will use their label advisedly.
Spurr, 71.
“From Shadow to Light” at http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020909/.
Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 109–159; Burke, 19‐28.
See Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Silver Linings, ed. G. Bridges and Rosalind Brunt (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), 28–52.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). I take issue with Hardt and Negri's claims that cultural racism is a new kind of racism. Indeed, the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩, inherently a culturalist rhetoric, has been a staple of wartime rhetoric since the turn of the 20th century.
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/afghanwomen/
Spurr, 33–60.
“In the Taliban's Heartland” [photo essay], http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/taliban/7.html.
For example, the Seattle Times ran an article on January 2, 2004, by a correspondent who had traveled to Iraq. The article emphasizes quotations from Iraqis who support the continuation of the occupation, even though most Iraqis are opposed to it. An Iraqi police official commented, “I prefer that the Americans stay here for many years so that democracy can stand up and be built stronger. If Americans leave soon, Iraq will be many pieces.” Hal Bernton, “Creating Order from Chaos is Half the Battle in Iraq,” Seattle Times, January 2, 2004, A1, http//www.lexisnexis.com.
Michael Ignatieff, “Nation‐Building Lite,” New York Times Magazine, July 28, 2002, 26. Notably, none of this discourse addresses U.S. police brutality, racial profiling, or war as chaotic acts of terrorism, although in terms of repressive consequences there is a possible analogy there.
Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 7 (1991): 5–32.
It is not necessarily the case that the images of oppressed women all came from the period before the U.S. intervention; however, all of the images of liberation were published after the war began.
I am including the United States in this category.
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/afghanwomen/
Terry McCarthy, “Parlika's Passion,” about Soraya Parlika and 200 women activists who gathered to remove their burqas as a political statement.
http://www.Time.com/time/photoessays/Afghanwomen/
It could be that images, as condensed rhetorical forms, are not well suited to the task of critical interrogation of ideologies. Scholarship and social movement discourse may unpack these complexities far more successfully. For example, feminist political theorist Nancy Hirschman has argued that veiling is not necessarily the oppressive sign that Western eyes interpret it to be. She writes, “Fueled by media reports of the oppressive practices of the Taliban in Afghanistan, anti‐American fury in Iran, and Saudis demanding restrictions on U.S. women soldiers, many Westerners tend to associate veiling with extreme gender oppression, even seeing the veil as the ultimate symbol of a unified, monolithic Islam. This belies a great diversity in the practice, however, and completely ignores the fact that many Muslim women not only participate voluntarily in veiling, but defend it as well, indeed claiming it as a mark of agency, cultural membership, and resistance.” Nancy Hirschman, “Western Feminism, Eastern Veiling, and the Question of Free Agency,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 5 (1998): 345–369.
See, for example, the work of photographer Alan Pogue, who travels to Afghanistan and Iraq to photograph the targets of war. His images, placed on Time.com, might very well unwittingly participate in the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩. See his work at http://www.austin360.com/aas/life/pogue/020302pogue.html.
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/afghanwomen/
“Afghanistan Begins Again,” USA Today, June 12, 2002, 12A, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
Joan Ryan, “Women Hold the Key to Future of Kabul,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2002, D3, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
See Hitchens' debate with Mark Danner at Salon.com, November 12, 2003, http://www.lexisnexis.com. Also “The War, the West, and Women's Rights,” Pittsburgh Post‐Gazette, December 16, 2001, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
Thompson, op. cit.
Ronald Walter Greene is a prominent representative of the relativist epistemology I describe: “The Aesthetic Turn and the Rhetorical Perspective on Argumentation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1998, 19–29); “Another Materialism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41. I have articulated counterarguments to this position in Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141–163.
Saudi women are required to cover themselves head to foot and are not permitted to drive cars or eat in public. They are allowed education only with their father's permission, yet the U.S. media have not systematically deployed images of these women to warrant the direction of foreign policy (including military intervention) because the Saudi government is a compliant U.S. ally. Donna Abu‐Nassar, “Women in Saudi Arabia Making Strides in Loosening Rules but They Still Have a Long Way to Go,” Associated Press Worldstream, May 8, 2002, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
RAWA's documents are available on the organization's web site, http://rawa. fancymarketing.net/. Similarly, although it is beyond the scope of this article, I could support the claim that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is unwelcome and damaging to the Iraqi people; the ongoing and increasingly organized resistance is testimony to the desire on the part of Iraqi people for self‐governance rather than U.S. profiteering.
At the time of this writing, appointed Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just signed a new constitution for Afghanistan, one that ostensibly guarantees sexual/gender equality. Only time will tell whether everyday life will measure up to the stated values of the document.
Sharon Smith, “Using Women's Rights to Sell Washington's War,” International Socialist Review 21 (January–February 2002): 39–43. See also Nicholas Kristoff's account of the ongoing oppression of women there; “Afghan Women Still in Chains,” Milwaukee Journal‐Sentinel, February 17, 2004, 13A.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129‐11.html
Text of President Bush's State of the Union Address as released by the White House, Associated Press, January 21, 2004, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
Michael Elliot, “Special Report: The Secret History,” Time, August 12, 2002, 28–49.
Indeed, the Mujahedin, precursors of the Taliban, had the support of the United States during the Cold War for their opposition to the Soviet invasion. In 1997, the Wall Street Journal called the Taliban “the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.” Hugh Pope, “Afghani Rebels Win Gains Global Notice—Nation Attracts Formal Recognition, Oil Firms' Interest,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1997, A14. For the business press, the Taliban regime was crucial to secure Afghanistan as “a prime transshipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other national resources.” Unocal and Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil companies planned to use the Taliban control of Afghanistan to facilitate the building a 2.5 billion‐dollar pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian coast. A 1998 article heralds the Taliban, despite acknowledging its human rights abuses, as bringing the stability necessary to complete the pipeline deal. In 1998, this situation became untenable after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. It was clear that the Taliban were not going to be as cooperative as Unocal and others had hoped. Increasingly, the U.S. aligned with Russia against Afghanistan, and there is evidence that even in early 2001, plans were on the table to get rid of Osama bin Laden and re‐establish control of the country. In May 2001, an issue of Military Review prepared the U.S. military for possible intervention in Afghanistan on the basis of U.S. oil interests threatened by an increasingly unfriendly regime. See Gonsalves, B5; Ian Traynor, “The Unfinished War,” The Guardian [U.K], February 12, 2002, 4.
Lance Selfa, “A New Colonial Age of Empire?” International Socialist Review 23 (May–June 2002): 50–57.
In the wake of World War I, Russian socialist V. I. Lenin wrote that imperialism is the annexationist, predatory, and plunderous [sic] tendency of capitalism as a world system, in which a handful of “advanced” countries control the fates of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world. See his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939). Imperialism is marked by several characteristics: monopolization of capitalist enterprise internal to a nation‐state and internationally, the creation of an international financial elite, the export of capital (and not just commodities), and “the territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers” (89). These criteria still describe international relations today.
Sebastian Mallaby, “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire,” Foreign Affairs 81 (March/April 2002), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020301facomment7967/sebastian‐mallaby/the‐reluctant‐imperialist‐terrorism‐failed‐states‐and‐the‐case‐for‐american‐empire.html.
Huntington, 310.
Noam Chomsky, 9‐11 (New York: Seven Stories/Open Media, 2001), 79.
Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xii.
Said, xiii.
Said, xv.
“Poll Watch,” The White House Bulletin, March 26, 2002, http://www.lexisnexis.com. Approval for the war in Iraq was much lower overall, perhaps because the rationale there was the dubious claim that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Discourse emphasizing the oppression of his people was not central to the case. In addition, in 2003 the economy began to sag, resulting in questions about spending priorities.
Will Lester, “Bush Approval Numbers High, But Economy, Uncertainty, Tamp Down Re‐Election Support,” Associated Press Newswire, June 25, 2003, http://www.lexisnexis.com.
Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (New York: New Press, 2000).
In the bombing of Afghanistan, between 2,000 and 4,000 Afghan civilians were killed by U.S. forces. By many estimates, U.S. strikes killed more Afghani civilians than terrorists killed at the World Trade Center. See Traynor, 4. In Iraq, the death toll from the present war and occupation (at the time of this writing) includes more than 500 U.S. troops and between 8,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians, more than 1,500 in Baghdad alone; more than 20,000 have been injured (as reported at http://www.iraqbodycount.net/). Hundreds of thousands died in the first Gulf War from the war and from the punishing sanctions that lasted for 12 years.
DeLuca.
DeLuca, 17.
Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–151.
DeLuca and Peeples, 139.
The images released in May 2004 of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq have proved to be something of an exception: images so violent and violating of dominant understandings of civilization and barbarism as to cause public support of the Iraq war to plummet. These images disrupt enthymemes of the United States as rescuer of an inferior civilization and render U.S. agents as barbarous. Interestingly, the image of a hooded Iraqi standing on a crate, holding wires he was told would electrocute him if he fell, seem to mimic images of veiled women in Afghanistan. See Andrew Jacobs, “Shock Over Abuse, but Support for the Troops,” New York Times, May 2, 2004, “Week in Review,” http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html.