Empire’s Children

Abstract

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once characterised the Bush administration’s attitude to empire as making a virtue of arrested development. ‘George W. Bush as boy-hero, speaking the language of hunting down his prey, Osama bin Laden as the named enemy’, Spivak remarked, ‘belongs to the semiotic field of the Wild West: “we’ll get him dead or alive”, or, as he said to the Congress on September 22, 2001: “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorist." The boy-hero can redefine democracy - predicated on the possibility of responsible opposition - as feudalism’ (Spivak, 2002: 62). The cowboy president who shoots first and considers the consequences later, if at all, behaves in colonial space as if on a frontier in which boy heroes act up, act out, and act at will without fear or responsibility.