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Why are people discouraging politicians and journalists for comparing what happened at the Capitol to riots in the “Global South” or “developing countries,” or using regions like the Middle East and Latin America as false equivalencies? A thread: 1/
First this language does not acknowledge the role of colonialism in constructing categories like “First World” v “Third World” or “developed” v “developing.” Imperialism was a violent project of enslavement, exploitation & extraction. 2/
This exploitation & extraction was premised on the language of “salvation through modernization & Christianization,” framing colonies as places of chaos (see Mbembe). The language of violence & unruly populace was explicitly used during colonialism to justify colonial presence.3/
Colonialism benefitted the West, to gain political power & economic currency, social capital. The signifiers we associate with “developing countries” (poor infrastructure, poverty) did not happen by accident. Western wealth & stability came at great cost to colonies. 4/
In the postcolonial turn, however, Western countries used the same methods employed during colonialism, this time under the guise of spreading democracy & freedom. Orientalist narratives were used to frame certain systems of gov & customary law as untenable & “Unmodern.” 5/
We know that the US helped to back military coups, again using a paternalistic discourse of salvation. Democracy was often used as a cover for other aims, like access to natural resources, military control of regions, economic support from foreign investors. Colonialism 2.0. 6/
Nor should we forget that international development is essentially an extension of the project of colonialism, just framed in a different way but absent a sufficient accounting of the ongoing & lingering violences & effects precipitated by colonialism in former colonies. 7/
How so? How do we frame development problems? How often do we see democratic instability as a dev issue? Women become dev objects as “untapped economic resources.” Dev claims to introduce stability & governance, as if we don’t benefit hugely from aid. 8/
We constructed an idea of the Global South to create the Global North & the fantasy of American exceptionalism. These categories then allow us to artificially separate what happens in the “West” and what happens to “the rest” because we have constructed geopolitical borders. 9/
These borders matter in how we learn about the creation of America & the notion of a “benevolent” Global North providing aid & assistance to the “foundering” Global South. We do not interrogate the US military’s use of “normative violence” abroad due to these categories. 10/
These ideologies of North v South, modern v unruly, help us to understand violent institutions like Guantanamo Bay, the prison industrial complex, detaining migrants at the border. We are “justified” in using violence because the threat is “external” (read “UnAmerican”). 11/
Such that when resistance to the military, the state, the police occurs by minoritarian actors-those who’ve identified the profound unfreedoms of American democracy-these protests are again read as ulterior to the imaginary America constructed by notions like exceptionalism. 12/
So comparing the insurrection yesterday to racist tropes of the violent & unstable “Other” represents a profound misreading of history & blindness of the ways that America has constructed these subaltern threats to justify its presence abroad & violence domestically. 13/
Some scholars embedded in this thread: Judith Butler, Chandran Reddy, Sadiya Hartman (Scenes of Subjection), Gilbert Rist, James Ferguson, James Scott, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhanbha, many others.
