Title: The colonial present : Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq /
Authors: Gregory, Derek, 1951-
Publisher: Blackwell Pub.,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Imperialism.; War on Terrorism, 2001-2009; Iraq War, 2003-2011.; Arab-Israeli conflict.; Middle East Relations United States.; United States Relations Middle East.; Middle East Relations Great Britain.; Great Britain Relations Middle East.
Abstract: "In this critique of the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, Derek Gregory traces the long history of British and American involvements in the Middle East. He argues that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 activated a series of political and cultural responses that mapped a profoundly colonial perimeter of power. The Colonial Present traces the connections between political, military, and economic power - the grand strategies of geopolitics - and the spatial stories told by the lives of ordinary people. It also shows the intimate connections between events in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq."--Jacket.
Contents: The colonial present -- Foucault's laughter -- The present tense -- Architectures of enmity -- Imaginative geographies -- 'Why do they hate us?' -- September 11 -- The land where red tulips grew -- Great games -- Uncivil wars and transnational terrorism -- The sorcerer's apprentices -- Civilization and barbarism -- The visible and the invisible -- Territorialization, targets and technoculture -- Deadly messengers -- Spaces of the exception -- Deconstructions -- Barbed boundaries -- America's Israel -- Diaspora, dispossession and disaster -- Occupation, coercion and colonization -- Compliant cartographies -- Camp David and Goliath -- Defiled cities -- Ground zeros -- Besieging cartographies -- Identities and oppositions -- The Tyranny of strangers -- 'Not as conquerors or enemies ... ' -- Coups and conflicts -- Desert storms and urban nightmares -- Boundless war -- Black september -- Killing grounds -- The cutting-room war -- Gravity's rainbows -- Connective dissonance -- The colonial present and cultures of travel -- Pandora's spaces.