Introduction

Secularism, Multiculturalism, and the Racialization of Religion

Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States, now the only superpower, for the first time openly articulated its global interests as imperialist.4 Through developments in political, media, and juridical modes of racialization in the second half of the twentieth century, however, the nation continues to assert its exceptional status, this time as an empire. Jodi Melamed has usefully defined racialization as the “process that constitutes differential relations of human value and valuelessness” through distinct racial categorizations of bodies and spaces.5 Building on Melamed’s definition, this book connects the value and valuelessness of bodies to the value and valuelessness of belief systems and social worlds. Indeed, contemporary U.S. imperialism deploys military and juridical violence as twin mechanisms for converting individuals and supplanting ideological systems out of sync with liberal modernity. The formerly Communist subject can thus become a participant in neoliberal capitalism, the racist can come to embrace difference, and the Muslim can be a proper secular citizen. As the expression of America’s national, racial, and religious transcendence of its past of slavery, exclusion, and segregation, multiculturalism assumes that the United States has fulfilled the promise of universal inclusion through juridical rights (if not material equality) for its own citizens. Framed as an emancipatory ideology, multiculturalism is transnationalized through U.S. imperialist militarism in the rest of the world. The racial multiculturalism and religious multiculturalism that inform contemporary understandings of secularism and humanitarianism in the United States have produced a normative value system through which U.S. citizens, as subjects individuated through their differences, demonstrate their tolerance and ability to recognize landscapes of atrocity, intolerance, and homogeneity. In other words, U.S. citizens place their faith in multiculturalism as a mode of secular morality through which they apprehend what needs to happen in order for the rest of the world to be free.

Since the nation’s founding, conceptions of Americans’ access to rights and freedoms have been anchored in both religion and race. Talal Asad notes that the two origin narratives in American rights language are, first, “the Puritan escape to religious freedom from persecution in England; and second, the story of the constitution of thirteen American colonies in a new sovereign state, signifying a repudiation of English despotism.”6 Although, as Asad points out, the United States’ initial definition of humanity was based on the exclusion of English tyranny, Native American paganism, and African slaves’ subhumanity, America’s formative prophetic story of captivity and deliverance (of the Puritans and colonists from English despotism) “always demands the redemption of subjects if they are to vindicate their human status and join the universe of free, equal, and sovereign individuals.”7 Because of the histories of slavery and genocide, portraits of the United States as a beacon of freedom begin with accounts of religious rather than racial liberty. Moreover, that the advancement of the United States as a nation is now associated with the structures of secular citizenship and modern statecraft on a global scale speaks to the power of the origin story detailing how different religious groups escaping Old World discrimination came to live side by side, practicing their own faiths and allowing others to worship in their own way.8 In this sense, the ideal of religious freedom is the cornerstone for formulations of America’s “exceptional liberty.”9

The imbrication of race and religion in contemporary geopolitics represents the transnationalization of U.S. secular conceptions of liberty and rights.10 Yet the commonplace linking of America’s origins to the Puritans’ arrival and the nation’s subsequent progress toward democratic inclusivity depends on Protestant understandings of faith based in an individual relationship with God.11 Protestant notions of religious liberty, experienced as one’s own freedom of conscience leading to self-realization, cast tolerance for others’ personal convictions as paramount to secular development. Secularism, more than just the separation of church and state, is a framing device for the United States’ self-conception as a nation built on and productive of diverse faiths, cultures, and peoples. In short, secularism can be understood as an ideology of human difference and its transcendence in this world.12 Within the structures of liberal citizenship, the human rights regime, and international humanitarian law—the supposed guarantors of secular redemption—certain nations, such as the United States, are vested with the moral authority to recognize those spaces in need of emancipation. Although the very possibility of religious freedom in the United States clearly depended on a series of racial exclusions, it also laid the groundwork for the subsequent incorporation of bodily and normative religious difference into a national mythology of religious and racial advancement that redeems not just domestic but global humanity. This was evident even in older U.S. imperial formations, though it has come into crisis in present-day humanitarian imperialism.13

What the ideal of religious tolerance does to perpetuate the nationalist narrative of the United States as a unique nation in the colonial era, multicultural pluralism does in the current period. After the Second World War, liberal antiracism, adding to existing accounts of the United States as an exemplary incarnation of religious freedom, refigured human ethnoracial diversity as sacred in this world. After the juridical accomplishments of the civil rights movement, racial diversity now supplements religious multiplicity as a badge of American liberty, defining the United States as a secular racial democracy. The advent of de jure racial equality is considered the moment of national conversion from intolerance to tolerance, marking the nation’s transcendence of previous systems of racial and gender hierarchies and authorizing U.S. geopolitical ascendance in terms of its moral supremacy. Of course, though civil rights were granted to nonwhite Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. capitalism continued to depend on racialized labor, reproducing material inequalities. Remarkably, the fact that the United States could portray itself as a nation committed to racial democracy by the mid-twentieth century reveals the extent to which the chronicling of capitalist development buries the very injustices it produces.14

The remembrance of a racist and unjust past, emphasized only to the extent that it reaffirms what we have overcome, was advanced and sustained by the official and institutional narrativizing of state-sanctioned antiracism in the United States throughout the Cold War period, and in opposition to other visions of human equality, particularly the socialist one. According to Mary Dudziak, at the height of anti-Communist sentiment, “in addressing civil rights reform from 1946 through the mid-1960s, the federal government engaged in a sustained effort to tell a particular story about race and American democracy: a story of progress, a story of the triumph of good over evil, a story of U.S. moral superiority.”15 Similarly, Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the American “civic mythology of racial progress” has been shaped by an abbreviated periodization of the civil rights era beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court desegregation decision and culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.16 Through this reperiodization and appropriation of civil rights history, “civic myths about the triumph over racial injustice have become central to the resuscitation of a vigorous and strident form of American exceptionalism—the idea of the United States as both a unique and universal nation.”17 The myth of racial progress, dependent as it was on the juridical humanization of the racial other, was consolidated not just through the civil rights history of black–white relations but, as Asian American scholars have argued, through the mobilization of the “model minority” discourse that emphasized ethnic minorities’ potential for assimilation and upward mobility in U.S. democracy after the lifting of the immigration exclusion acts.18 The advent of civil rights, representing more than the legal recognition of nonwhite Americans and women, stands for the redemption of the United States and its citizenry from its past of slavery, exclusion, and white supremacy. As accounts of racial progress produced nationally legitimated histories of racial forgetting, civil rights and multiculturalism became the foremost juridical and moral frames through which the United States described itself as the leader of the free world. Because individual and minority rights, enshrined in civil rights laws, are held up as the actualization of America’s anti-Communist, messianic promise of freeing the world from totalitarianism during the Cold War, the United States still positions itself as the protector and enforcer of rights, now on a global scale. In this sense, humanitarian militarism and recent developments in international law are coconstitutive.

The geopolitical reorganization that demanded and resulted in civil and political rights domestically in turn racialized intolerance, illiberalism, and homogeneity as inhuman states, obstructing the spread of democracy, individualism, free expression, and, importantly, free markets. While secular multiculturalism presumes that beliefs are something that each individual chooses, and that can therefore change, the racial and, to an extent, cultural differences into which one is born are increasingly singled out as needing special protection from the tyranny of monoculturalism. Like Melamed’s incisive genealogy of state-sanctioned antiracism in the United States in Represent and Destroy, this book is also interested in “how liberal terms of difference have depoliticized economic arrangements by decisively integrating the knowledge-architecture that has structured global capitalism’s postwar development . . . into what racial equality may signify or what may signify as racial equality.”19 The changes Melamed traces in multicultural modes of racialization through neoliberalism I route through the lens of postsocialism and the advent of humanitarian violence in the new world order. Whereas as an analytic, neoliberalism enables an exploration of liberalism’s historical formations and refigurations of racial capitalism in the contemporary period, a postsocialist analytic shifts the frame of inquiry to center on the social, political, and cultural legacies and displacements of socialism as an ethical limit to liberal capitalism as the only organizing principle of human good. Centering on socialism as a worldview that destabilized and denaturalized the association between capitalism and human emancipation, moreover, enables an analysis of why U.S. racial thinking needed to racialize beliefs and not just bodies. The U.S. Cold War conflation of socialism with false consciousness, or ideology, that demanded that the U.S. convert hearts and minds has in the present day been displaced onto emergent illiberal modes of existence, governance, and religiosity, which are figured as being in need of reform just as the Communist world had once been. These displacements authorize the United States’ violent disciplining of dissonant lives, aspirations, and temporalities as a humanitarian struggle for global racial, sexual, and religious rights.

Since 1989, the contrasting of the United States as a site of freedom with a growing number of geopolitical enemies who ostensibly require the nation’s ongoing vigilance has thus evolved through the imbrication of juridical technologies with the racializing technologies of perpetual warfare. U.S. military violence is repositioned as humanitarian against terrorism and religious fundamentalism. The emergence of the “new world order” that has rapidly taken shape through neoliberal restructuring is in many ways still entrenched in the Cold War racial narratives that divided and categorized the globe as being either free or unfree. Therefore, even as the racial and geopolitical ideologies associated with European imperialism, the Cold War era, and the postsocialist transition of Eastern European nations appear to be no longer relevant and bound to their distinct historical moments, emphasizing their cultural entanglements and ongoing legacies enables a relational and transnational theoretical frame through which to grasp emergent racial and imperial formations. Since 9/11, for instance, U.S. culture has homogenized Muslims as potential terrorists or as religious fanatics in spite of their national, racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. The current racialization of Muslims fits uneasily into the predominant racial analytics of American cultural studies that are largely based on domestic race relations and historically racialized groups, such as African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. It is not enough to simply posit that Muslims are a new racial group within the United States, since systems of belief and entire social worlds, rather than just individual bodies, are racialized to uphold U.S. militarism in the Middle East.

The routing of American morality through narratives of racial and religious transcendence and tolerance in the Cold War era and through militarized humanitarianism and multiculturalism in the 1990s laid the groundwork for the contemporary racialization of Islam. Islam is conceived of as a religion that is antithetical to U.S. principles because, like communism before it, it cannot accommodate difference and individuation.20 “The present discourse about the roots of ‘Islamic terrorism’ in Islamic text [assumes] . . . that the Qur’anic text will force Muslims to be guided by it.”21 The univocality presumed of Islam as a religious dogma racializes it as a mode of faith precluding free will or individual agency. Islam is positioned in opposition to U.S. faith in secular diversity and justified through racialized narratives of unfreedom that are already familiar. These available racial narratives were constructed and adjusted throughout the second half of the twentieth century in relation to communism, making homogenized depictions of Islamic intolerance recognizable as morally unacceptable and threatening to American humanitarian projects on behalf of global freedom and democracy.

The Imperial Technologies of Postsocialist Humanity

Contemporary notions of human rights, upheld through the technologies of perpetual warfare and an international juridical regime, what I am calling “postsocialist imperialism,” increasingly divide the world between locales in need of humanizing intervention and those that are morally empowered to enact the violent humanization of the other. Within postsocialist geopolitics, then, while some nations, such as the United States, come to exemplify universal humanity, having supposedly achieved the promise of racial and religious inclusion, other regions become sites of atrocity and terror that must be redeemed through the disciplining technologies of the United States’ humanitarianism. Although inhuman acts, such as ethnic cleansing, genocide, suicide bombing, and the like, are represented as exceptional, they are in fact woven into the everyday texture of how residents of the Global North experience their own transcendent universality in the new world order. Landscapes of atrocity and terror have become the paramount geographic and temporal fantasies through which the Global North knows and affirms its humanity. As one region defined by monstrous violence is replaced by the next in global imaginary—Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—media and political circuits produce a structure of crisis and resolution. Foregrounding the need for U.S.–Western moral condemnation and intervention, postsocialist visual rhetorics of inhumanity elide vast economic and material inequalities that are perpetuated by the enactment of constant humanitarian warfare. Killing because of religion, race, and ethnicity is considered an anachronistic remainder of previous social worlds, out of the frame of historical progress (thus the language of “ancient” or “primordial” ethnic, racial, and religious hatred is often used to characterize conflict in some parts of the world). North American and Western European nations, meanwhile, conceive of their own killing as necessary to advance liberal reform and rights (women’s rights, the rights of religious minorities, etc.). Fighting to bring inhuman geographies into the fold of historical progress, humanitarian wars against terror, or atrocity, are regarded as a sacrifice necessary to humanize the world.

The humanitarian gaze, through which U.S. audiences look upon the pain, suffering, brutality, and violence of the other, has led to the development of a humanitarian affect that aligns “our” feelings for the victims of illiberalism, monoculturalism, and intolerance with the military and juridical technologies working to save those subject to inhuman atrocities. Ironically, it was the U.S. military failure in Vietnam that became the occasion for humanitarianism to emerge as a global ethic. The public opposition to the war as an instance of U.S. imperialism in an era when the United States positioned itself as stridently anti-imperialist took shape as a humanitarian critique. Refusing to see the Vietnam War as a war against Soviet expansionism, through mass demonstrations and opposition to national policy U.S. citizens declared their humanity by their capacity to feel outrage on behalf of the Vietnamese. In spite of the viciousness of the war waged by their nation, photojournalistic images that captured the horrors of combat as experienced by the Vietnamese population made American violence appear transparent to U.S. audiences. In subsequent histories of the Vietnam War, the evolution and maturation of American humanity are told as a story of moral shock resulting from the televised and journalistic documentation of the war, which led to change. The rejection of the Cold War framing of U.S. interventionism, as well as the embracement of humanitarian affect, in some sense marks the Vietnam War as the first instance of postsocialist sentiment in the United States.

In spite of the revival of Cold War militarism in the 1980s, the United States’ covert support for the mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War consolidated the humanitarian framework that would become the condition of possibility for future wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent media coverage led to the shift in the United States’ geopolitical focus from racial to religious prejudice as the manifestation of intolerance and inhumanity that had to be defeated. The “godless” Communists’ suppression of Islam in Afghanistan constructed the mujahideen as worthy subjects of aid. The humanitarian imagery and language developed in the media during the Vietnam War and the Soviet–Afghan War merged in the postsocialist era through the conflation of ethnic and religious strife in portraits of the wars of secession that engulfed the former Yugoslavia. While the new media and military technologies of the 1990s figured U.S. humanitarianism and multiculturalism as forces of progress, technological premodernity was ascribed to ethnoreligious conflict in the Balkans. Furthermore, the unprecedented merging of media and military operations in the postsocialist period facilitates the association between humanitarian multicultural ethics and U.S. imperial sovereignty.22

Emergent political fantasies, constituted through innovations in visual and media technologies, define the scope of life/humanity after socialism by opposing the arbitrary violence of the other (atrocity) with the benevolent violence of “just” humanitarian militarism. With the collapsing of humanitarianism and warfare, notions of the human can emerge only through images and discourses about violence, degradation, and dehumanization. Wendy Hesford’s concept of the “human rights spectacle,” which refers to “the incorporation of subjects (individuals, communities, nations) through imaging technologies and discourses of vision and violation into the normative market of human rights internationalism,” is useful in this regard.23 Hesford argues that through human rights spectacles, which increasingly emphasize humanitarian and faith-based initiatives as opposed to international law, victims are integrated into “the global morality market that privileges Westerners as world citizens.”24 Thus human rights rhetorics produce a “moral vision” through which Western audiences emerge as properly moral subjects of sight. As the other is frozen in a media and political fantasy that reproduces the spectacular moment of death, devastation, and destruction, landscapes of atrocity become fossilized as geographies of inhumanity—reminders of what is good and what is evil. This fixing of atrocity and terror as permanent also becomes the permanent justification for military intervention.

Just as the terror of inhuman atrocity is removed from the temporal frame of the humanitarian present (racism, religious fundamentalism, and intolerance are viewed as out of our time), so too postsocialist imperialism distances itself from previous instances of imperial governance through narratives of multicultural inclusion. Defined temporally and spatially in relation to atrocity, postsocialist imperialism reaffirms the capacity for human progress through the incorporation and accommodation of normative human difference. Even as multicultural humanitarian ethics privilege human difference as the grounds for universality, they reaffirm secular and liberal conceptions of difference conducive to the operations of capital over other modes of inhabiting difference that could lead to a progressive politics of alliance. As Julietta Hua notes, the “paradoxical operation [of universality in human rights aspirations] is evident in claims to global diversity that desire to recognize and protect difference and particularity, even as they advocate that these particularities subordinate to a broader order of universality.”25 In fact, she argues, there is no end to the individual voices and experiences to be heard, accommodated, and accounted for within the frame of universal human rights. Thus certain voices and experiences become favored as representative or authentic.

This critique speaks not only to how very particular figurations of victimization and abuse form the basis of universalizing articulations of justice but also to how, for certain visions of universality to become dominant, others must give way. Analogous to how contemporary human rights and humanitarian projects have laid claim to universality, previous imperial projects did so as well through “civilizing” and “humanizing” missions in the colonies. Indeed, the contemporary collusion between postsocialist imperialism and human rights is not new. Whereas postsocialist imperialism is the contemporary condition of possibility for the consolidation of a new human rights regime enabled by humanitarian militarism, earlier articulations of human rights were an outgrowth of previous imperial modes of governance and rule. Randall Williams points out that “in order to gain an adequate account of what U.S. monopolistic military power means for international law, we have to shift our analytic perspective from one that assumes imperialism is a problem for international law, to one that grasps their mutually constitutive relationship.”26 He explains, from the inception and signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the international notion of human rights espoused an anti-anticolonialist stance. A new ideological iteration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration could not but reproduce “an already existing international division of humanity.”27 It did so, in part, through the displacement of “alternative forms of universality present at the moment of the inception of the UDHR. Counter and contrary to the lofty, abstract juridical ideals of international human rights, such alternative conceptions and practices of freedom were much more deeply rooted in the actualities of struggle.”28 Postsocialist imperialism, utilizing the aspirational notion of universal humanity enshrined in the Declaration, which already entailed a disarticulation of the notion of human rights from decolonizing visions of freedom, justice, and struggle, evolved through a further series of displacements.

Following the demise of most socialist nations, which during the Cold War insisted on the importance of social and economic rights as a counterpart to the civil and political rights championed by the U.S. state, a global human rights regime based in liberal law increasingly monopolized notions of justice and facilitated the spread of free-market economies. U.S. ideas about the good life are ascribed universal value, having supposedly demonstrated their superiority over Communist lifeworlds. As other visions of emancipation and virtue are consigned to the realm of historical failure, human rights appear as the only possible ethical politics in the world today. Meanwhile, the global postsocialist condition has been shaped by U.S. imperialism as the military muscle enforcing humanitarian justice. Contrary to earlier eras in U.S. history, including the Cold War era, when U.S. exceptionalism was conceived through the nation’s disavowal of its imperial ambitions, postsocialist imperialism is embraced as part of the United States’ universal promise of redeeming the world from conditions of racial and religious unfreedom.

Addressing the configurations of the contemporary U.S. empire, a number of excellent works have analyzed the post-9/11 state of exception in national politics and culture in relation to the older histories of American exceptionalism and imperialism.29 Most studies emphasize that U.S. militarism during the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq represents a new form of imperial domination.30 However, post-9/11 cultural and political justifications of U.S. imperialism are, I contend, connected to and have developed from the secular moral language underlying the racial, juridical, and military projects of late twentieth-century American multicultural humanitarianism. For instance, in a post-9/11 opinion piece in the New York Times Magazine, the political scientist and public intellectual Michael Ignatieff wrote about Thomas Jefferson’s “exceptional” dream of spreading self-government and freedom to the whole world as the “last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of national claims to universal significance.”31 While Ignatieff acknowledges that the American ideal of freedom was forged out of the contradiction that the United States “is the only modern democratic experiment that began in slavery,” he also argues that the “exceptional character of American liberty” proclaimed by every American president has inspired “Americans to do the hard work of reducing the gap between dream and reality. . . . First white working men, then women, then blacks, then the disabled, then gay Americans.”32 In his assessment that contemporary U.S. imperialism has the potential to bring democracy and self-rule, Ignatieff replicates the same developmental narrative he details in this brief history of the U.S. march toward granting universal rights. Ignatieff’s thoughts on U.S. imperialism are representative of how contemporary claims to U.S. imperial sovereignty are necessarily based in the U.S. narrative of racial and sexual progress, which is a story of redemption. This account of moral development allows Ignatieff and other proponents of U.S. imperialism to claim that the United States is the only nation “with the resourcefulness and the energy . . . for the task” of “encouraging freedom.”33 Only by continually retelling the domestic narrative of multicultural progress and thereby burying the origins of U.S. capitalist growth in slavery and racial exploitation can the new imperialists uphold the United States’ potential for universality, humanitarianism, and justice.

The Racial Reorientations of Cold War Geopolitics

Analytic modes required to grasp the racializing logics of contemporary empire necessitate an elaboration of the Cold War context and its relation to earlier racial categorizations. Notions of racial and religious difference that emphasize incorporation and inclusion into the U.S. national body as a way of concealing ongoing inequities and exclusions developed against the threat of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This history buttresses the current U.S. opposition to religious intolerance (imagined as “terrorism,” “antifeminism,” or theocracy) that has replaced the ideological evil embodied by the former Eastern Bloc as a foremost site of struggle for American democracy. With the end of the Second World War, communism was racialized as a homogenizing totalitarian ideology that destroys human difference and individualism. Linked through their opposition, communism and freedom became the two rival racialized ideologies dividing the world between morality and immorality, and good and evil. At the historical juncture when the United States superseded the Western European nations as the foremost world power, U.S. cultural works reconceptualized “freedom” to deemphasize histories of domestic racial unfreedom and Western European imperialism, both of which were foundational to the making of U.S. dominance. Meanwhile, ongoing U.S. racial troubles were displaced and projected onto Eastern Europe, associating the Communist “evil empire” with the legacy of European racial imperialism. Emphasizing domestic racial progress, U.S. militarism aligned itself with a defense of global postcoloniality and the “free world” against the specter of Communist terror. In the United States, communism was associated with terror because Communist difference was not visibly marked on the body. As FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warned in 1950, Communists “operate under a cloak of deceit,” making them “not always easy to identify.”34 Hoover’s cloak metaphor explained that Communists’ interiority and beliefs, rather than their exteriority and skin color, distinguished them from free, ideologically unburdened Americans. Reformulating older conceptions of threatening difference, American culture and politics conceived of Communist ideology as a perpetual threat because it was imperceptible, requiring ongoing national vigilance at home and abroad.

Beginning with the Cold War, the association between human diversity, freedom, and America’s moral obligation to military intervention was solidified. The map of the “free world,” whose contours were determined through U.S. politics, culture, and militarism, profoundly refigured the European imperial racial map of the globe. Whereas European imperialism anxiously emphasized the racial supremacy and whiteness of the imperial metropoles over the racialized space of the colonies, with the start of the Cold War the United States drew attention to its domestic racial diversity as a sign of the nation’s anti-imperialism and universality.35 Scholars of race and imperialism have emphasized the connection between race thinking and spatial orientations that molds geopolitical imaginaries.36 As Denise Ferreira da Silva has shown, in modernity, a “particular strategy of power—the analytics of raciality—has produced race difference as a category connecting place (continent) of ‘origin,’ bodies, and forms of consciousness. The primary effect of this mechanism has been to produce race difference as a strategy of engulfment . . . used in the mapping of modern global and social spaces.”37 In other words, with European modernity, race difference was apprehended in visual terms through bodies, and bodies were imagined to signify particular places of origin. This meant that both bodies and continents were racialized.38

In the second half of the twentieth century, the racial categorization of bodies and spaces consolidated through European modernity and imperialism persisted, even as the meaning and value assigned to these categories shifted in how the “free world” was mapped. Mary Dudziak, Thomas Borstelmann, and others have demonstrated that at the historical juncture when national liberation movements in the Third World began to successfully overthrow Western European colonial powers, institutionalized segregation and racism in the United States proved to be an insurmountable contradiction to the United States’ claims of being a true democracy.39 Racialized bodies, which had been distanced from the European and American nations’ self-conceptions, now became incorporated into national core ideals.40 Producing racial diversity as a sign of democracy, development, and modernization with the advent of the Cold War, the United States fashioned a racial mapping of the world that subsumed older racial imaginaries into a narrative of potential progress for the decolonizing nations in the so-called Third World through its leadership. The Three Worlds ideology through which knowledge about the globe was organized produced three domains: “a ‘free’ First World that is modern, scientific, [and] rational; . . . a ‘communist’ Second World controlled by ideology and propaganda; . . . and a Third World that is ‘traditional,’ irrational, overpopulated, religious, and economically backward.”41

While the obstacles that the Second and the Third Worlds had to overcome to become properly free differed in the U.S. geopolitical and cultural imaginary—with the Second World having to shed ideology and the Third World having to shed premodernity and tradition—the racialization of both “worlds” no longer solely emphasized bodily difference but, rather, ideological, cultural, and religious states of oppression. Justifying its militarism in the name of a democratic postsocialist future, the United States’ conceptions of the free world simultaneously used and disavowed older imperial and racial fantasies.42 Jodi Kim, Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, and others have elaborated on the reinterpretation of European Orientalism in U.S. Cold War culture. Their concern, however, has been primarily with the development of twentieth-century racial and imperial logics in the nonwhite Third World rather than in Eastern Europe.43 Studies that have focused on Eastern Europe, including Kate Baldwin’s and Penny Von Eschen’s, provide valuable insights into the relationship between domestic racial ideologies and nonwhite U.S. citizens who traveled to the Soviet Union.44 Thus far, however, scholarship in the field of American Studies has not connected an analysis of the transnational production of U.S. racial logics to Eastern Europe as the constitutive outside, through, and against which conceptions of difference and diversity were reformulated in the service of humanitarian militarism. While earlier research demonstrates that U.S. culture produced narratives about domestic racial pluralism to justify the nation’s geopolitical ambitions in the nonwhite world, foregrounding how Orientalist and imperial tropes were reworked vis-à-vis communism in Eastern Europe enables a retheorizing of racialization as a transnational process for the differential valuation of ideological formations and social worlds.

In contrast to American cultural perceptions of the Middle East and East Asia, in which U.S. military interventionism was represented as a benevolent defense of nonwhite natives against the terror of communism, the “Communist East” emerged as a racialized negative reflection onto which the nation could project imperialist tendencies and a racist past. Apprehending Eastern Europeans as white in the U.S. racial frame facilitated the movement in the modes of racialization that authorize contemporary U.S. imperial rule.45 Amid the shift in domestic racial formations, Communist systems (more so than Eastern European bodies) were racialized as nonmodern and unfree. Even though, as Jodi Kim has pointed out, early Cold War documents described the U.S.S.R. in Orientalizing terms as Asiatic, in the wake of the civil rights movement in the United States, Soviet global influence was associated with the maintenance of white supremacy.46 Soviet totalitarianism was described in racializing terms that U.S. citizens could recognize through allusions to America’s own record of racism. For instance, in the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. history of slavery was projected onto the U.S.S.R. A 1950 National Security Council document explained that “there is a basic conflict between the idea of freedom under a government of laws, and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.”47 In the United States, the process of “Sovietization” was perceived as “rigorous enough to threaten ‘an end to diversity.’”48 The racialized specter of Communist unfreedom became a repository for anxieties surrounding the limitations of liberal reforms to account for ongoing inequality in the nation.

The predominant characterization of Soviet communism as an anachronistic racial and political ideology that sought to end diversity was paramount for portrayals of the Soviet Union as a twentieth-century imperial power opposed by the United States. Hugh Seton-Watson’s 1961 book, The New Imperialism, proposed that even within the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union acted as an imperial force in the so-called satellite nations because the latter were subordinate, dependent, and unwilling conscripts to Soviet power.49 In this formulation, “the Soviet Bloc constituted the largest land empire in history.”50 Supporting the view that the Soviet Union was a manifestation of Russian imperialism, numerous scholars of postsocialist transition have argued that the economic and social changes in the aftermath of communism should be viewed as processes of decolonization.51 Yet, as Francine Hirsch notes, “in creating a postcolonial narrative, these leaders and scholars drew on Western works from the height of the Cold War that characterized the Soviet Union as a colonial empire and a ‘breaker of nations.’”52 Quite the opposite, the Soviet version of “empire,” as centralized rule, developed in contrast to European imperialism (which Soviet policy condemned).53

Casting Soviet expansionism as a form of domination that Western Europe gave up at midcentury and that the United States eschewed altogether, U.S. political and military interests in the Third World were, in contrast, represented as the anti-imperialist defense of non-Western nations’ independence from the encroachment of Soviet imperialist rule. Through the misperception that the Soviet Union was ethnically homogeneous, U.S. militarism itself functioned as a racializing technology, justifying the nation’s interventionism in the name of a global struggle against imperial racial domination. For example, in both the Korean and the Vietnamese civil wars, the United States characterized its warfare as a defense of nonwhite “native” democratic regimes in the face of Soviet “puppet” regimes. Since 1989, even as American political and cultural representations about postsocialism interpreted the demise of the Soviet “evil empire” as a victory for Western ideals of freedom based in democracy, pluralism, and free markets over totalitarianism and repression, intensifying nationalisms and violent conflict in the former Yugoslavia seemed to contradict the promises of tolerance and diversity envisioned in the spread of liberal capitalist democracy. However, the seeming incongruence between the postsocialist celebratory discourse of global redemption from Communist unfreedom and instances of ethnic conflict that resulted from the violent destruction of previous modes of governance was resolved in the emergence of a multiculturalist humanitarian ethic as the new rationalization of military interventionism and U.S. imperialism. The racial epistemes developed during the Cold War buttress contemporary acknowledgments that the United States is an imperial power, even as the nation maintains its distance and difference from European racial imperialism and Soviet imperialism. The by-now entrenched geopolitical figuration of U.S. militarism as antiracist facilitated an understanding of America’s postsocialist empire as the first moral empire founded on the belief in the sacredness of human diversity rather than on territorial or economic exploitative ambitions.

Postsocialist Conditions

To date, scholarship in the United States has primarily addressed postsocialism as a historically and regionally bound concept to describe the state of economic and political transition in nations that were formally socialist during the Cold War. As an analytic lens, postsocialism is thus only considered relevant to Eastern and Central Europe and, occasionally, to China and Vietnam. The premise of this book, however, is that postsocialism is a global condition that produces a social, economic, and cultural ethic that builds on and disavows previous racial and imperial formations.54 As a conceptual frame denoting the displacement as well as the ongoing significance of socialism, postsocialism indicates that the contemporary geopolitical formations, such as the perpetual war on terror, are best understood not by positing a historical break with the past but, rather, by exploring the ongoing inheritances of previous fantasies about the global good. I thus emphasize the imbrication of the European imperial legacy, as well as the legacy of the Cold War, in the postsocialist era.

Within the cultural, political, and academic tendency to showcase and grapple with the new, the past comes to be remembered as bound and fleeting, even though it continues to provide the foundation for the present. This perception of the past is especially evident in the dominant usage of twentieth-century temporal markers of transition in which the “post” of postcoloniality, postsocialism, and postmodernity is equated with the new. The “post” in this sense is meant to signal a transitional time period that constructs itself through an understanding of being unlike an earlier geopolitical or ideological formation. The notion of the postcolonial state, for instance, references imperial histories to understand national independence and development as moving out of and overcoming colonial histories.55 Meanwhile, the “post” in postsocialism references a bygone era of “unfreedom” under communism in order to describe Eastern European nations’ embracement of democracy and free-market capitalism. Still other theorizations of postsocialism focus on transition, which, as scholars have noted, freezes former Soviet Bloc nations between the past and the future rather than seeing them as integral to the development of contemporary modes of governance and personhood.56 Indeed, the self-proclaimed role of the United States as the protector and harbinger of freedom, helping nations through postcolonial and postsocialist transitions in the second half of the twentieth century, has also relegated European imperialism and communism to the past, thus framing U.S. liberal democracy and “protective” intervention as essential for future development.

In contrast, the postsocialist analytics that inform this book’s methodology do not conflate the “post” with the “after,” opening up a complex engagement with the temporal and spatial intersections and dissonances between past and current ideological and geopolitical formations that resist both the accounts of progress and redemption in the post–Cold War world. Conceiving of current U.S. imperialism as a postsocialist imperialism is not just about naming a form of domination that arose after the demise of the Eastern Bloc but also about the analytics of empire that are mindful of temporal and spatial relationality. Reconsidering racial and imperial formations relationally, across spatial and historical boundaries, this book traces the afterlife of the European imperial imaginary in the twentieth-century U.S. cultural tableau. I emphasize that one important cultural mode through which post–World War II U.S. imperial ambitions were obscured was the reworking of the very same nineteenth-century European texts that had unabashedly participated in promoting empire. By foregrounding the circulation of older Western European narratives and genres in U.S. culture, however, I do not mean to propose that they served to promote the same kind of imperial structures, what Edward Said calls “a unique coherence” between the British, French, and American experiences.57 Instead, I insist on the breaks that occurred through the repetition, in particular the resignification of race through multiculturalism, which enabled the expression of what I call a racial secular morality that has justified U.S. global violence since the end of World War II. To this end, chapters 1, 2, and 4 trace how U.S. media, political rhetoric, and creative works revisited Western European imperialist cultural tropes in order to constitute an exceptionalist narrative of U.S. power for the postsocialist era. Chapter 3 also addresses the recycling of previous tropes, though rather than turning to the recycling of European imperial culture I address how the 1980s U.S. support for the mujahideen was re-narrated in the post-9/11 period. Finally, chapter 5, through its focus on the ICTY, explores how warfare, once past, is remembered and normalized in institutional narratives producing authoritative historical and juridical accountings.

The social, economic, and ethical contours of postsocialism, in this sense, are much broader than what is encompassed by the governmental and structural reforms in formerly socialist nations that occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (that is, the “transition”). Rather, as I am suggesting, postsocialism has produced a distinct historical and aspirational narrative that builds on previous imperial formations and notions of humanity. A postsocialist analytic, referencing as it does previous ethical systems as well as other modes of geopolitical restructuring (for instance, postcolonialism), offers an opportunity for a historically and regionally relational critique that explodes the universalizing teleology of the U.S. progress narrative. Chad Thompson argues, for instance, that because the twin Enlightenment ideologies of capitalism and communism share a sense of colonized peoples as historically static, postsocialism, rather than signaling the end of history, is an opportunity to reconceptualize history as nonteleological.58 While Thompson takes the postsocialist era as a chance to rethink historical narratives, Shu-mei Shih writes that as a conceptual frame, postsocialism allows for a more complex engagement with time and space. She explains, “If we understand the ‘post’ in postsocialism in its polysemous implications not only of ‘after,’ ‘against,’ and ‘in reaction to’ but also of ‘ineluctably connected to’ and ‘as a consequence of,’ we approach a generally inclusive understanding of the post-socialist human.”59 For Shih, this multifaceted understanding of, and engagement with, postsocialism supports the study of “the relational and mutually constitutive dynamics of these [postsocialist, postcolonial, and posthumanist] ‘post’ conditions in different parts of the world.”60 For instance, while postcolonial studies have privileged the British and French Empires and their legacies, attention to postsocialism “demands the study of the Soviet Empire as well as other non-European empires and colonialisms.”61 Moreover, the “relationship between postcoloniality and postsocialism needs much greater unpacking,” for if “postsocialism is resoundingly not postcolonial,” it is necessary to ask whether the postsocialist moment is a post-postcolonial moment (and whether the two “posts” in post-postcolonial cancel each other out).62 Shih’s insights about the relationship between postsocialism and postcoloniality suggest not only the need to expand the analyses of previous imperial forms but also that the study of postsocialism is one of contemporary forms of colonialism and imperialism.

Arguing that the United States is a part of a postsocialist global condition particularizes and situates the universal claims of humanitarianism and human rights that morally underwrite U.S. global violence. Yet this opportunity is lost if postsocialism is relegated to periodizing a particular moment of regional transition that at once affirms the death of socialism and consigns it to an ideological formation representing distance from U.S. and Western modernity and universality. As Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery argue, the predominant usage of postsocialism as a temporal designation in the U.S. academe is quite different from understandings of postcoloniality that developed with the rise of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 1990s.63 While the gap between the height of the decolonizing movements and the theoretical writing on postcoloniality produced a critical reflection on colonialism’s ongoing legacies and the pitfalls of postcolonial nationalisms, because postsocialism is understood to describe a particular geopolitical transformation it has had no similar critical edge or traffic as an idea and a theory.64 In contrast, Chari and Verdery posit that thinking between postcolonialism and postsocialism, both of which, as analytics, theorize political change and the process of “becoming something other than,” allows for fresh perspectives on empire, Cold War knowledge formations, and state-sanctioned racism.65

Many of the theorizations of postsocialist change, to date, have utilized ethnography to assess the ways in which formerly socialist citizens have reinvented themselves as postsocialist subjects.66 Yet just as crucial as understanding the “becoming other than” through ethnography, postcolonialism and postsocialism invite analyses of the representational and juridical processes by which previous lifeworlds, systems of governance, and their notions of humanity, history, and the global good are displaced and made irrelevant. To grasp this latter shift, a cultural studies approach focusing on the intertextual and transnational imaginaries produced by new and old media, political rhetoric, academic and activist discourses, and literary and visual texts is needed.67 In this cultural assemblage, the past figures into new historical and redemptive narratives, and novel normative aspirations are articulated. Prevailing national and global notions of common humanity and morality are never unchallenged, and paying attention to how dominant historical and spatial narratives of good and evil are taking shape enables cultural critique to unearth and foreground those temporalities, spaces, and social worlds that have been displaced or suppressed.

If postsocialist imperialism produces a global ethic of humanitarianism that asserts its universality through a series of displacements (such as those of previous racial imperial forms and ethical systems), then a postsocialist analytic that hones in on those modes of living and ideologies that have been cast aside also provincializes contemporary visions of justice that are monopolizing. Foregrounding complex temporal and spatial nodes, a postsocialist analytic punctures the seamless narrative of historical progress evident in the culture and politics of postsocialist imperialism, which tells a linear story about the passing of European racial imperialism and communism in order to conceive of racial and religious redemption as the fulfillment of America’s global messianic promise. Moreover, in attending to the relationality of multiple imperialisms and geopolitical regimes, a postsocialist analytic attends to and refuses commonplace conflations (for instance, the conflation between communism and totalitarianism or between “illiberal” social worlds, such as communism and Islam).68 At the same time, it underscores the imbrications between, for instance, European racial imperialism and postsocialist imperialism or between communism and capitalism in the development of the contemporary global economy.69 Addressing change, becoming, and transition will thus necessitate foregrounding links, displacements, and inheritances. As this book maintains, to grasp the delinking of race, racism (or intolerance), and racialization in postsocialist imperial rule, including the racialization of religious difference, it is crucial to dwell on the relationship of current racial logics to those of the Cold War era and the moment of European imperialism.

Chapters

Humanitarian Violence addresses the historical, political, and cultural field in which the consolidation of a multiculturalist humanitarian ethic—the moral condition of possibility for the enactment of postsocialist imperialism—took shape. Each chapter foregrounds the racialization and displacement of socialist and Communist social worlds and the recuperation and reformulation of European imperial racial logics and representational frames taking place in late twentieth-century U.S. culture. To contextualize the advent of postsocialist imperialism, chapter 1 engages the dual racial temporalities framing the geopolitical reorganization of the 1990s: the racial progress narrative of multiculturalism, on the one hand, and the cyclical violence narrative framing ethnoreligious conflicts, on the other. Charting the relationship between the U.S. post–civil rights racial ideology of color blindness, which quickly gave way to liberal multiculturalism, and the postsocialist-era racialization of religious difference that was enabled through the multicultural normalizing of racial difference, this chapter analyzes the temporalizing fictions of spatial and ideological distance popularized by contemporary travelogues about Central and Eastern Europe. As an imperial, visual, and narrative technology, U.S. late Cold War and post–Cold War travelogues can be read as perpetuating the afterlife of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European imperial culture, engendering the landscape of late twentieth-century U.S. humanitarian dominance. Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal (1981), Yelena Khanga’s Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family, 1865–1992 (1992), and Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts (1993) exemplify the evolution of the postsocialist geopolitical imaginary from the 1970s to the 1990s, through which it is possible to trace how notions of U.S. racial progress depended on portraits of Eastern European anachronism.

The next three chapters focus on distinct cultural dynamics undergirding postsocialist imperialism and humanitarianism in instances of U.S. militarism. Chapter 2 analyzes the visual dynamics of imperial critique in photojournalistic and documentary representations of the U.S. military defeat in the Vietnam War (1954–1975). Arguing that cultural criticisms of imperial brutality and excess are not distinct from but, rather, foundational to future imperial projects, I examine the discourses surrounding transparency, visuality, and the Vietnam War as central to the late Cold War emergence of humanitarian feeling as a moral mode of framing wartime violence. Locating the materialization of humanitarian affect in a moment of loss in U.S. Cold War history, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902) as a delimiting narrative for portraits of U.S. atrocities committed during the war. Rather than looking to post-Vietnam adaptations of Heart of Darkness, this chapter studies Conrad’s narrative more broadly as the imperial referent for a domestic critique of imperial violence.70 I argue that the racial contradictions and imperial “horror” that structured Conrad’s rendering of atrocity and humanity in Heart of Darkness resurfaced after the war in cultural works that sought to ethically represent U.S. brutality in Vietnam. The chapter foregrounds the irony that humanitarian feeling emerged as the moral victory of a military defeat, an irony that would eventually underlie conceptions of humanitarianism as the justification for war in the postsocialist period.

The third chapter continues to develop the relationship between moral shock and humanitarian feeling by assessing the U.S. political and media exposés of the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989). Exploring the dynamic of imperial projection, I argue that the roots of the contemporary racialization of religious difference in the United States lie in the merging of moralizing and humanitarian languages framing that war. The Reagan Doctrine encouraged covert military aid to guerilla fighters opposing the Soviet “evil empire” as part of the nation’s divinely ordained duty. Accounts of the mujahideen fighters’ piousness and stubborn opposition to atheistic communism in 1980s political rhetoric and news stories represented a nascent articulation of humanitarian militarism that reflected a religious reordering of the U.S. worldview. Chronicles of Soviet human rights abuses in Afghanistan, which were contrasted with the mujahideens’ enduring faith in God, called for Americans to revive their own faith in the morality of U.S. militarism enacted on behalf of freedom and democracy, ideals that had come into question with the Vietnam War. However, unlike early Cold War ideology that proposed saving the racial other from Communist imperialism, in Afghanistan the victim of religious persecution became the foremost figure around which the call to intercede on another’s behalf was organized. Political and media investment in the Soviet–Afghan War thus laid the groundwork for postsocialist notions of religious persecution justifying military intervention.

Chapter 4 addresses the merging of humanitarian militarism and postsocialist imperialism during the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, Operation Allied Force. With Operation Allied Force, new media and military technologies worked in tandem to refigure the Balkans as a region whose ethnoreligious barbarity could be redeemed through developments in U.S. weapons technologies and new systems of communication, such as twenty-four-hour news coverage and the Internet. Resolving the contradictions inherent in humanitarian warfare, postsocialist imperial notions of U.S. racial progress worked alongside visual and rhetorical emphases on Balkan religious and ethnic premodernity to contrast human and inhuman forms of violence. As I argue, America’s humanitarian duty to end religious and ethnic strife in 1999 resuscitated a Gothic frame to apprehend “undead” ethnoreligious conflict, authorizing postsocialist modes of imperialism, and to contrast postsocialist humanity from ongoing states of inhumanity. However, the Gothic appropriations in U.S. political rhetoric, televised news formats, and the Internet also revealed ongoing anxieties about undead racial troubles in the United States, even as they continued to perpetuate the late twentieth-century racialization of Eastern Europe.

The final chapter turns from an analysis of imperial warfare to imperial juridical redemption. Building on the previous chapters’ elaboration of the production of postsocialist humanitarian imperialism and the racialization of religious difference since the end of the Cold War, I investigate the gendered discourses surrounding secular redemption and human rights. Since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, which ended a three-year war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Bosnia” has become a conceptual referent for a global feminist ethics, anchored in Euro-American principles of multicultural tolerance and human rights, that has redefined the boundaries of the free world. Utilizing the adjudication of rape warfare as a site of feminist jurisprudence in the ICTY, the chapter assesses the interconnection between the progress narrative of Euro-American feminism concerned with human rights and the discursive production of faith and redemption in international institutions of justice. I argue that in the postsocialist world, institutional sites (such as the ICTY) that administer and produce humanitarian law demand faith in a notion of common humanity that is based on ideas of tolerance and justice founded in the law. The ongoing production of bodies and landscapes of devastation, dehumanization, and death, like that of Bosnia and its inhabitants, is necessary insofar as it authorizes unequal sovereignties through the institutionalization of human rights regimes.

In the contemporary moment, as the religious intolerance attributed to atheistic communism is projected onto fundamentalist Islam, what counts as a human rights abuse against which the United States is morally compelled to act has shifted. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the cultural memory of U.S. aid to the mujahideen and Bosnian Muslim victims of Serbian aggression suggested that the failure of previous instances of humanitarian aid to “discipline” Islam justified a larger-scale U.S. military intervention in the Middle East in the present. After nearly a decade of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, humanitarianism is again being conjured up, this time as an impossible undertaking, butting heads with an Islamic people hopelessly steeped in religious and ideological backwardness. Throughout the book, I stress the need to historicize the contemporary conflation of ethnic, racial, and religious intransigence that authorizes U.S. warfare. Even though post-9/11 U.S. interventionism no longer conceals its imperial intentions as it did during the Cold War, the racial discourses about “freedom” developed in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century continue to inform the racialization of religious difference against which American democracy is figured.