<i>Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times</i> by Jasbir K. Puar

Jasbir K. Puar , Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times . Durham , NC : Duke University Press , 2007 . ISBN 0-8223-4114-X ( paperback ). If you have ever thought that contemporary American warfare “abroad” was a separate concern from the trajectory of queer movements “at home”, you’ll wonder how after reading this book. If you were ever tempted to cordon off the politics of whiteness from “progressive” responses to the US violence at Abu Ghraib, you”ll question that prior vision. If you think it is possible to disentangle the organized and chaotic violence of imperial “freedom” from the reformulation of civilizational thinking, of “homonationalism” and patriotic racism, you must read this book. This is the power of Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times; it puts things together that should never have been thought apart and in doing so offers a dazzling critique of our present. Terrorist Assemblages is centrally concerned with the cultural politics of the “war on terror”. Centered firmly on the experience of the USA, Puar sees a resurgence of nationalism that draws strength from surprising groups and places. She argues that the US war machine is bolstered by its claims to progressive justice. Even LGBTIQ movements have been recruited to participate in patriotic practice and display. American leaders may lobby against basic rights for same sex couples, but nevertheless invoke an ideal of progressiveness and enlightenment as a rationale for the “justice” of US imperialism. She argues that the incorporation of queers into the national project is crucial not accidental; contemporary nationalism relies on the (unequal) inclusion of LGBTIQ citizens in the body politic. We have heard elements of this story before from feminist and critical race scholars who lambaste the use of “feminist” claims to back the deployment of military forces. But Puar's analysis is much more than a minor twist on established tales. With confidence and dexterity, this work traces the unexpected assemblage that places the claim to sexual progressiveness at the core of a persistently homophobic and homo-violent imperial citizenship. Puar is careful to point out the hypocrisy of these claims, noting, for instance that sodomy was officially illegal in many American states until as late as 2003, that the US military is still guided by its “don't ask, don't tell” policy when it comes to homosexuals in the service, and that factions within the US who have rallied around Iran's state homophobia are the same factions planning for invasion of that state. She might also have emphasized that the Iranian and American states have recently joined forces specifically to undermine gay and lesbian rights; in 2006, the Bush administration supported a motion introduced by Iran banning gay and lesbian rights groups from observer status at the UN. But, despite this hypocrisy, Puar nevertheless asserts that LGBTIQ movements are themselves implicated in nationalist discursive maneuvers. The rejuvenation of national sentiment and the rise of “homonormativity” are both defined by the pervasive seep of a reformed racism into political claims and identities. Homonormativity serves to rehabilitate national citizenship and gains coherence through an ascendant whiteness. Puar describes a changing trajectory of queer movements since 2001: the proliferation of American flags and other nationalist displays at pride events, the growing emphasis on claims to same sex marriage and other supposedly “normalizing” politics, and even explicit Orientalism in LGBITQ activist claims. While Puar acknowledges the possibility of patriotic performance as a defensive display in dangerous times, she rather attributes these shifts to “the racism of the global gay left and the wholesale acceptance of the Islamophobic rhetoric that fuels the war on terror …” (xi). Puar develops the term “homonationalism”—a geopolitical incarnation of Lisa Duggan's (2002) biopolitical conception of “homonormativity”—and argues that it is defined by its racialization. Racist civilizational discourses infuse gay, lesbian and queer movements and actively contribute to building the US war machine. While racialization is no doubt a central and defining feature of contemporary imperial citizenship and violence, the contours of whiteness and the connections to multiculturalism are complex and shifting. On the one hand, Puar looks at the ways in which whiteness dwells within multicultural discourse. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, she argues that “multiculturalism is the accomplice of white ascendancy” (27). Alongside this focus on the bio- and geo-political life of multiculturalism, Puar at times echoes pronouncements of its death. In these instances, the nuance and complexity on offer elsewhere is further from reach. In Chapter 3, she argues that (white) sexual subjects are “liberated” at the expense of racial subjects who are “imprisoned” by pivotal legal rulings like Lawrence-Garner, and the advent of homonationalism more broadly (120). No doubt, in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7, many “racial subjects” are literally imprisoned, and a number of nations have indeed rescinded any prior commitment to anything like a critical or even just official multiculturalism. The promise of multiculturalism for many European states in particular has been replaced by the supposed certitude of racialized bordering and militarization. The rising discourse of the “home grown terrorist” serves not only to criminalize citizens through their racialization, but is also a wedge for exceptional legal action. In a shocking and unprecedented move, Britain is developing legal mechanisms for revoking birthright citizenship of “Muslim fundamentalists” in response to this “threat of homegrown terror” (Macklin 2007). But is the North American context different with regards to the persistence of multicultural ideals? And furthermore, is the focus on whiteness and multiculturalism (dead or alive) enough, or do we also need to think through their complex intersections with citizenship, status, and nationality? When Jasmyne Cannick, an African American lesbian can write an article for a national gay and lesbian newsmagazine entitled “Gays First, Then Illegals”, imploring activists to place the political rights of deserving nationals before the claims of undocumented peoples, we need to take the politics of nationality vis à vis race and sexuality seriously. Certainly there was tremendous organized response to this article by LGBTIQ community leaders of colour, however the event still suggests that the question of nationality, sexuality, and citizenship status intersects with race in complicated ways that require a more explicit political-geographic theorization of identity and social ordering. Intellectually and politically inspiring sections of this book come when Puar looks to activist artists working on the politics of race, sexuality, and terror. A series of aggressively edgy, wonderfully clever, and often humorous images allow this critical work to also survey the complexities, ambivalences, and alternatives that abound. It is in these sections that Puar's sometimes heavy-handed critique instead showcases the abundant exceptions to the molar assemblages she traces. Through the survey of activist art the text pays tribute to longstanding work at the intersection of queers politics and anti-racist and anti-colonial practice, making visible the work of groups and actors who open up another way. Some highlights include Poulomi Desai's photograph, “I Am a Homosexual Also” in which the artist poses in “Osama Bin Laden drag” to disrupt the political work of civilizational discourses vis à vis sexuality (11). A series by the Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen and Aimara Lin entitled “From driving while black to flying while Brown” explores the changing forms of racism in the USA. Karthik Pandian's “SubText”—a translation of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority's “If you see something, say something” campaign into Arabic—throws the racialization of fear and practices of racial profiling into plain view (153). Puar also invokes the work of queer, feminist, and anti-racist theorists and movements in order to critique their troublesome trajectories. The vitality of this critique is itself a rare treat. At a time when so many “critical scholars” have perhaps ironically moved away from critique, Puar thunders forth. Terrorist Assemblages doesn't deny or avoid debates surrounding the politics of academic critique (cf Foucault 2007:2). And yet, this work reminds us that “we” cannot ever separate our voice or the academy from “the world”, even as we have to be careful and reflexive about how we understand this social location. But for all its gusto, Puar's emphasis on critique at times becomes a limitation. Despite the length of individual chapters and the depth of engagement with theoretical debates, Terrorist Assemblages is thinner on focused analysis. Much detail of events of the empirical world appears in footnotes, if at all, and Puar sometimes moves too quickly from concept to concept without thinking through their particular genealogies or developing their critical potential. For instance, early in the text, she argues that we need a new way of conceptualizing governmentality in terms of simultaneity rather than sequence—in other words, geographically. She proposes a “new” concept: environmentality. However intriguing, this concept is not entirely new (see Agrawal 2005), and Puar also neglects a large, vibrant literature on governmentality within the geography literature that has debated these questions for more than a decade. Puar hardly even returns to this concept of “environmentality” in the text, and indeed, such a provocative concept does not earn an entry in the index. This sort of thing happens repeatedly, often with regards to concepts that have salience in geographical debates, and could be a source of frustration for a geography readership. In Chapter 3, Puar endorses Mary Pat Brady's claim that “spatial analysis” has not “considered the degree to which the construction of race and sexuality” abets distinctions between public and private, or the way in which “the obverse operates as well, because spatial distinctions help to structure sexuality, race, and class”. She then addresses the constitution and ordering of overlapping identities in public and private space, and while she explores work by feminist theorists, feminist geography is absent without leave. This despite the author's own history in the discipline, and the fact that a large body of feminist geographical theory on this theme has been developed and debated for decades. The occasional sidelining of analysis is evident in the book's simultaneous mobilization and marginalization of the concept of “logistics”. The preface organizes the author's project according to the three arts of war, but unlike “strategy” and “tactics”, which are assigned rich and substantial theoretical discussions; the section devoted to “logistics” offers only a chapter overview. And yet, Manuel Delanda, who is quoted in the epigram, argues that logistics drives strategy and tactics. Logistics, the war machine's “digestive and circulatory system” leads rather than follows; the mechanics of supply govern the design of movement and method (Delanda 1991). The implications of this claim for theory more broadly are significant, and specifically for the question of analysis. Delanda argues that the detailed mechanics of how bodies and dollars circulate matters, that the way territory gets managed, ordered, and refigured counts. We might then expect more focus in this book on the nitty-gritty logistics of citizenship at this nexus of race, sexuality and violence, whether that means the details of military recruitment, deployment, and privatization, on expert knowledge of border control and biometrics, or on debates surrounding guest workers, social welfare policy, or same sex marriage. Spatial practice would also become a crucial rather than secondary object of analysis, particularly given the geopolitical questions at the core of this project. The changing geographies and logics of empire are key in understanding the shifting meaning and technologies of nationalism, but are hard to find a brief discussion of “imagined geographies”, or another quick reflection on urban security (which does not mobilize the geographical research underway on this topic). Finally, transformations in economic relations and spaces demand closer scrutiny. Beyond brief references to “global political economy” that aren't explored in connection to imperialism, or elsewhere passing references to “class” in discussions of “model minorities”, there is no sustained analysis of the integral role of economic relations in this racialized homonationalism. But can the question of social ordering, and comments like Jasmyne Cannick's be understood outside the competitive economic geographies of borders (national and internal) and cross-border traffic? Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a powerful, energetic, and highly insightful read. The book absorbs a surprising amount of intellectual, political, and emotional labour. Terrorist Assemblages is demanding because of the topic, and because of the author's sometimes dense theorizing and unforgiving pace, but also because of the discomfort it (perhaps deliberately) provokes. The impossibility of extracting oneself from the author's sharp and critical gaze means that the reader might squirm, even resist. But the energy invested is hardly wasted; readers can have that rare and golden experience of emerging from these pages transformed. Indeed, the demands that Puar places on her reader are substantial, but the rewards well worth it. Cutting, courageous, and prescient, Terrorist Assemblages is well worth the read.

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