Reconstruction 8.2 (2008)
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Terrorism, Media, Liberation. Edited with an introduction by J. David Slocum. Rutgers UP, 2005, 353pp, US$25 (paperback).
Terrorism is a timeless strategy of political violence, the origins of which were discussed in ancient Greece or Rome.
Bethami A. Dobkin
The challenge for the new Reagan administration was to organize a massive campaign to establish terrorism in the imaginations of Americans as the greatest and most overarching threat to their personal security. In short, the first item on the agenda was to terrorize the imaginations of Americans, and then to call forth an aggressive response to the crisis that would be called a "counterterrorism policy."
Robert Merrill
We have to ask why total war seems the only solution to a criminal act.
Rosalind Morris
<1> By historicizing the complex interplay of terrorist networks that rely on globalized technology, this collection of essays questions the nature of the mediation of terrorism "as a crisis of legitimation for statist approaches to social organization and models of war" (Slocum 9). The book provides a compelling and rich history of the classification and definitions of terrorist acts, from the demonization of the 19th-century anarchist's "propaganda by the deed" through the representations of 21st-century terrorism.
<2> The anthology boasts a wide range of international subject matter and perspectives. Richard Porton examines representations of anarchist protagonists in early and contemporary cinema. Susan Smith analogizes filmmaking and sabotage in an analysis of Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936). Susan Carruthers examines British colonial insurgencies in Malaya and Kenya through 1950's British films. Murray Smith's pre-9/11/2001 reading of Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) anticipates the Pentagon's interest in the film in the first year of the Iraq occupation. E. Ann Kaplan explores terrorism and feminism in New German cinema. Bethami A. Dobkin analyzes the evolution of international terrorism and its impact on US media coverage. Melani McCalister's examination of the Iran Hostage crisis contextualizes the politicized rise of the "terrorism expert" in foreign policy discourse. Robert Merrill explores the political marriage of narcotics and terrorism in the Reagan eighties. Brigitte L. Nacos discusses the rise of post-Cold War religious terrorism in the West. Martin McLoone details representations of Irish terrorists in English political cartoons and gangster movies. Sumita S. Chakravarty traces the cinematic mediation of the concept of "the nation" by its "fragments" in Indian film (236). Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg argues that torture and other abuses of human rights require a crisis of imagination, a refusal that the Other is human, through her reading of Lumumba: La Mort du Prophet (Peck, 2000). Allen Feldman considers the "genealogical linkage" of visual realism to imperialism (290). Rosalind C. Morris examines the nexus of history, religion, media, and terror at the heart of war. Finally, James Der Derian challenges the mediated formulation of the "exceptional ahistoricity" of 9/11 in the US.
<2> Whether focusing on Algiers, Anarchists, or the Iran hostage crisis, the essays collectively argue that mass forms of media guide their consumers toward enduring "bafflement" over the motivations of terrorists who wish to communicate highly visible messages through acts of violence. Media representations of terrorist acts repeatedly raise the question of the symbiosis between terrorist act and its visibility via media, i.e., the "contagion theory" of terrorism. As Melani McAlister details in this volume, rather than implicating the private spectator of terrorist acts into the alleged symbiosis via more sophisticated technology, however, "private" citizen has come to mean "innocent" citizen (154).
<3> Unlike many of the 9/11 anthologies currently on the market, this impressive collection delves into past terrorist events and "insurgencies" that provide much-needed context to complicate and challenge hegemonic discursive strategies that insist 9/11/2001 was an exceptional, ahistorical event that pits the innocent, civilized West against the evil, barbaric East. While 9/11/2001 inspired this book project, most of the essays do not explicitly seek to inform analyses of the hyper-mediated event and its subsequent reverberations in American culture and abroad. Instead, the book's contributors (of original and republished essays) historicize the ways in which media shape the meanings of terrorist spectacles in the age of "mass-mediated terrorism" by spreading them globally while remaining embedded in the values and beliefs of contemporary economic and political orders.
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