Cannibalizing iraq: Topos of a new orientalism

Abstract

In this chapter, I shall address the following questions: why has the foreign become associated with anxiety and devoid of the aesthetic fascination that marked its representation in nineteenth-century Orientalism? To what extent is the surge of an American Orientalist discourse intertwined with discursive violence against the Middle East? In what ways does this new Orientalist discourse on the Middle East reproduce the phantasm of cannibalism? In place of the nineteenthcentury discourses that saw the Orient as a source of aesthetic value, the foreign has now become a source of anxiety that provokes cannibalistic manifestations. I will also explain that the figuration of cannibalism is mostly generated by the war on terror as projected onto Iraq and argue that the radical transformation of certain images of the ethnic other after 9/11 epitomizes a new Orientalist discourse that is devoid of cultural aesthetics. The central section of this chapter, ‘Cannibalistic Spectacle,’ introduces the notion of cannibalism as it relates to the emergence of a new Orientalist discourse instigated by American neo-imperial violence, with reference to the photographic images of the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib prison. It also focuses on the disfiguration of the enemy and the ways in which torture tactics incorporate cultural, psychological and sexual appropriations, some of which are grounded in the earlier Orientalist framework. The final section of the chapter, ‘Cultural Cannibalism,’ reflects on the possibility of anti-cannibal ethics toward the other and a response to the new surge of Orientalism by drawing on Irigaray’s and Derrida’s arguments, specifically their investigation of the cultural and political modes of subjectivity that continually produce cannibalistic relations.