The Spinning Head

On the one hand, the humanitarian sustains a self-­ narration as a benevolent political subject working to amend the damages of oppressive regimes. On the other hand, this subject disavows its material and ideological entanglements with neocolonial power. – Julietta Singh US journalists have increasingly hitched rides on NGO SUVs and found a bed for…

Baudrillard once said, when speaking about the WTC attacks on 9/11, that. The hatred of non-Western people [for the West] is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them…[but]…on the fact that they received everything but were never allowed to give anything back [Jean Baudrillard, “Violence of the Global,” Ctheory.net, May…

US media’s practice of manufacturing difference is almost always about constructing and reinforcing the myth of a liberal West as a place beyond patriarchy, misogyny, inequality, despotism, exploitation, racism, and violence. To do this, American journalists outsource pathologies and social ills that affect their societies to the Other, where the issues are presented as culturally,…

US media will, based on the demands of US imperial and political interests, transform heroes into monsters and vice versa. The Pathan in Afghanistan and Pakistan know this habit well. Celebrated as freedom fighters and heroes when they aligned with US Cold War priorities, they were later quickly condemned as reprobates and “terrorists” when the…

There is no better region for manufacturing differences than the Middle East. There is no greater antithesis to the liberal, tolerant West than the Muslim. US journalists working in the area or covering anything to do with Muslims seem to be at a loss of common sense and self-reflection. There is a long history of…

Operating outside their social, cultural, and political comfort zones, US journalists struggle to come “to grips with a social reality that is systematically different from one’s own, and to explain its specific logic and momentum are most difficult conceptual and pedagogical tasks.” [Jayant Lele, “Orientalism and the Social Sciences,” In Carol A. Breckenridge & Peter…

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicization of power…For conscripts of Western civilization, this transformations implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated…and others put in their place. – Talal Asad The world outside the West is filled with strange…

Colonial feminism–one of colonialism’s earliest obsessions and justifications–reared its head in the nineteenth century. It achieves widespread resonance in the Western imagination because of the West’s inherent sense of its cultural and intellectual superiority–what Edward W. Said labeled “Orientalism.” It was one of several justifications for an empire to help veil its instrumental and political…

The Middle East has long been US journalism’s Achilles heel. Faced with the scale of the US imperial footprint in the region and the violence required to establish it, they have to perform some incredible feats of language and narrative to veil US responsibility for so much of what cripples democratic and social development in…

Journalists have come up with various tactics to either justify or veil US imperialism’s destructive footprint. Whether this is done intentionally or inadvertently isn’t relevant. One of the most common tactics used by reporters, particularly foreign correspondents, is to use what Mary Pratt has called an “anti-conquest” stance. [Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing…