Extraordinary Renditions

In August 2003, as the United States was ramping up the Global War on Terror, the Pentagon hosted a curious movie night for its intelligence and army personnel: Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece The Battle of Algiers (1966).1 Produced in the style of a documentary, the film tracks the rise of the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s and is renowned for its neorealism, its unflinching anticolonialism, its moving score. It is an homage to the crucial failures, and not the successes, of the Algerian revolution.

Why would the Pentagon host a film about anticolonial revolution in the middle of a Global War on Terror? The flier circulating the event announced:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.2

This paranoid representation departs so broadly from Pontecorvo's vision that it is hard not to marvel at the imperial contortions of this brief anecdote from the forever war.3 Popular on university campuses and among left movements in the 1960s and '70s, Pontecorvo's celebrated film was commissioned by the Algerian government to commemorate the country's independence. Ignoring its rich history within decolonization, an unnamed Pentagon official notes without irony that the film screening "was intended to prompt informative discussion of the challenges faced by the French." Unsurprising as the characterization is, it showcases the extent to which the Global War on Terror has precipitated a willful, ahistorical, and nationalist reading of a civilizational war between a US-centric West and a nebulous Islamic enemy. At the height of the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon equated anticolonial, revolutionary struggle with terrorism, creating a strategic parallel between colonial practices of suppressing revolt and post-9/11 tactical horizons of counterinsurgency.

Empires are eager to learn from and validate each other in unexpected ways. The US does not flinch from seeing itself as an empire, especially in a time of sovereign crisis. More surprising is that the Pentagon looked for lessons in representations of revolution alongside the traditional tools of military expertise and surveillance. Not unlike the Israeli army's use of Deleuze and Guattari or US counterintelligence's plagiarizing of Hayden White and other cultural historians, the Pentagon wrenched The Battle of Algiers from its context and intention, and refitted it into a framework of excessive force.4 For US intelligence, French imperial experience in The Battle of Algiers offers more than a comparative framework; it places US counterinsurgency efforts on a direct continuum with French, British, and other European imperialisms, and legitimizes the nation's extraterritorial ambitions.

Against the duplicitous narratives and fictitious justifications of empires past and present, this cluster — "Extraordinary Renditions" — tracks how Global South representations of 9/11 and the War on Terror have generated a proliferating counter-archive of insurgency and have mined a cultural zeitgeist toward literary and commercial markets, sometimes simultaneously. My interlocutors bracket the endlessly litigated question of US trauma to instead ask how representative strategies from different parts of the world reckon with the aftermath of 9/11 on non-US subjects, landscapes, literature, and art. In other words, this cluster asks whether it might be possible now, almost two decades later, to move away from the events of 9/11 to track its cultural effects on the globe.

And yet, to insist on the globality of 9/11 is perhaps redundant. After all, the event was primarily staged on world-historical battle lines — Saudi allies from the Cold War turning against and striking at the heart of US economic power. What does it mean then to invoke the global and 9/11 in the same breath, especially when the very notion of the global evokes a fraught, capitalist-imperial cartography? To go further, the global turn in literary studies is often a thinly-veiled, evasive maneuver to reinvent a well-greased wheel. Mindful of these sleights of hand, this forum queries the US-centrism of 9/11 discourse by assuming that the global (including its variants, Global Anglophone, Global South, and Third World) does not provide a stable descriptive category. What we are interested in, as a provisional collective, is that we undiscipline not just how 9/11 has been narrated but equally the dominant counter-narratives of empire studies and postcolonialism, both of which have often marginalized transnational Black and Muslim perspectives.5 How might we scramble the literary and political archive of what constitutes legitimate, institutionalized national and affective boundaries of 9/11? What happens if we treat 9/11 as a calamitous event not for US sovereignty but for the world, precisely because it unleashes the full, furious spectrum of racialized enslavement, manifest expansionism, Cold War innocence, and mass incarceration upon "failed" postcolonial states and Muslim as well as other minoritized peoples?6

This cluster's contributors examine the various colonial genealogies as well as representative strategies of postcolonial, Black, and Global South writers, poets, artists, intellectuals, and hijacktivists — from Iraq to Afghanistan to Palestine to the Caribbean and back to the US mainland — that have interrupted the larger narrative established not just by the US security state but by a robustly global security industrial complex.7 More so, this cluster also illustrates a resonance between representation and the now-ubiquitous language of "rendition," as both extraordinary legal prerogative and literary and cultural representation. As the contributors set out to answer a question about the possibility and perils of a global 9/11 cultural framework, they also began to reveal something, dare I say, extraordinary — that the phrase "extraordinary rendition," an extralegal measure that quickly became a mundane operation for the US security state as well as its allies, lackeys, and client states, must be understood in conjunction with its many representative genres. This development also describes an evolving method — formal, aesthetic, historiographic — for narrating the effects of the Global War on Terror on the world: narratives threaded together by torture and indefinite detentions, epidemiology and espionage, archival redactions, Black surveillance, Third World hijackings, and ignored universalisms. To narrate global 9/11 cultural production is to narrate what Laleh Khalili argues are the "illiberal practices" undergirding counterinsurgency: not temporary aberrations or exceptions but in fact "vital components [for]...the longer-term production of the liberal order when a state expands its reach beyond its own borders."8

Rendering Terror

I pause here to ruminate on the linguistic and conceptual possibilities opened up by rendition. The noun form is derived from the verb "to render," a verb that upon closer examination offers multiple and contradictory meanings. Derived from the French "rendre" and the Latin "reddere," to render is "to melt down" or "to give up or yield." Equally, it is a matter of restoring or delivering an abstraction, e.g. to "render justice." Then, there is the question of rendition as representation or depiction — to perform a rendition or to "reproduce" in a particular medium.9 Nicole Fleetwood gestures to the "polyvalent meanings" of the word and gathers a list of theoretical possibilities: "to give help; to translate; to deliver a verdict; to submit for consideration; to purify through extraction; to surrender something; to exchange or give something back" (Troubling Vision 7). For Fleetwood, such multiplicity occupies a distinct register of rendering the Black subject as a racialized object of scrutiny, meanings that "contribute to an understanding of the visual, visible, viewed and viewing Black subject."10 How might we learn from the paradigm of racialization that Fleetwood offers here? What forms of racialization are rendered visible in post-9/11 representational and political discourses that both acknowledge the fact of Black oppression and account for the expansion of a captivity paradigm to Muslims in the Global War on Terror?

It is by querying the racialized connotations of rendition that the legal connotations of "extraordinary rendition" begin to signal more than the state's exercise of extraterritorial power. The legal definition refers primarily to "the extrajudicial transfer of individuals from one state to another."11 It is a practice made infamous by the US as a mechanism for circumventing international conventions of torture by transferring individuals between countries that perpetrate torture and severe interrogation techniques. It is a practice that allows the US to extract former Guantánamo detainees like Mohamedou Slahi, Mansoor Adayfi, Sabri Mohammed Ibrahim al-Qurashi, Ammar Al-Baluchi, Moazzem Begg, and thousands of others from their home countries to send them on what Slahi calls an "endless world tour" of black sites and extralegal detention centers.12 As Yogita Goyal observes, Slahi strategically analogizes his predicament with the enslavement of the Middle Passage; he conjures a very specific image of "the US past, so that strategies of offshore detention, black sites, waterboarding, enhanced interrogation, kill lists, and extraordinary rendition that have characterized the War on Terror since 9/11 might be connected to the 'scenes of subjection' that birthed the nation as well as the engineering of 'social death.'"13

As Slahi's important Guantánamo Diary (2015/17) shows, "extraordinary rendition" is also accompanied by extraordinary measures of silencing that unleash Kafkaesque regimes of censorship and classification — the memoir is riddled with more than two thousand black bars. Legal renditions of the material body are often accompanied by an obliteration of the narrative body through textual redaction, leaving only half-traces and whole silences. How do we turn these dead ends of counterinsurgency into narratives of care and solidarity? "Extraordinary Renditions" attends to both the construction and the breakdown of the securitization of everyday life. The contributors meditate on the risks that writers, artists, and other non-state actors take in fashioning representational strategies of compassion, vulnerability, political stubbornness, and unflinching critique. The inaccessible, even as it precipitates crises, is rendered into a position of inquiry. This cluster presents an assortment of perspectives, from Black and Critical Race Studies to Middle Eastern and Postcolonial studies to the now-defunct question of Third Worldism, to ask that we think categorically about reshaping what we understand as the afterlives of 9/11 as well as what constitutes the fabric of the so-called global. Seven essays offer pathways, shifts, and possibilities in the narration of global terrorism by calling upon art, music, literature, reportage, theory, and more. They attest also to a proliferation of genres in the study of the Global War on Terror, one that can generate an exhaustive list comprising of documentaries, mini-series, art exhibitions, podcasts, and beyond.

The first essay opens with contemporary Iraqi music and fiction and renditions of Muslim racialization. From the cheeky set pieces of Narcy's "Phatwa" and I-NZ's "This is Iraq" to horrifying container stories of Hassan Blasim, Angela Naimou calls attention to the uncertain place of Iraq in what Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder call the "postcolonial contemporary." Caught between the past of British imperial policing and the endless present and future of US war-mongering, Iraq is a powerful cultural landscape that challenges the established centrality of 9/11. In the same vein, the second essay turns to another equally important post-9/11 warscape of Afghanistan to contextualize the "marginal sovereignty" of a nation that sits uncertainly in the area formation of South Asia. Drawing from her ongoing project on Victorian Afghanistan, Zarena Aslami highlights nineteenth century imperial anxiety against Russian invasion as a "quagmire" for colonial administration. Aslami tends to the gaps, fissures, and amputations caused by colonialism by connecting two very different novels, Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852-3) and Jamal Kochai's 99 Years of Logar (2019) to mark the continuing unsettlement and undoing of Afghani sovereignty. These portraits of two besieged nations are followed by an unlikely epidemiological covert operation in Pakistan, one that helped the US locate Osama bin Laden. Excerpted from her forthcoming book Epidemic Empire (2020), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb connects key developments in the War on Terror with two distinct paradigms, that of the nineteenth century cholera epidemic and the British Mutiny novel. Raza Kolb shows that the genealogies of the GWOT extend backwards to the nineteenth century: the relatively minor form of the Mutiny novel as well as the outsize influence of Rudyard Kipling share a distinct colonial, surprisingly literary counterfactual energy to the racialization of the Muslim as terrorist.

Turning to art and US empire studies, Ronak Kapadia continues from the theorization of an Insurgent Aesthetics (2019) to meditate on the optics of "transparency and opacity" in an art installation, The Afterlives of Black Sites. Created by South Asian American artist Chitra Ganesh and South Asian American and Arab artist Mariam Ghani, the installation introduces the viewer to the impossible and officially deniable geographies of black sites through lightboxes, watercolor portraits, short films, and neon signs that refuse to forget clandestine sites of imprisonment and torture. The artists render black sites visible by recreating an affective sensorium of frustration and veiled knowledge to understand "the [War on Terror's] discarded landscapes and built environments that are still hidden in plain view." Erica Edwards meditates on the ever-present concept of the emergency to query what it means to think about 9/11 in our current moment. Edwards argues that despite the efforts of US empire studies and postcolonial studies, Black feminist writing has continued to be marginalized in the category of 9/11 literature. Emphasizing the importance of "Black gender" and its forgotten encounters with securitization, she asks us to consider an important archive of writers like Gloria Naylor, Nikki Finney, or Shoshana Johnson who are intimately aware of the racialized renditions of state surveillance. Edwards notes that such writing from radical Black feminists resists the call for unguarded patriotism and instead testifies to an "intimacy with surveillance, policing, incarceration, and border security, where intimacy signifies a multiscalar, complex relation between military-industrial and personal-cultural forces" (emphasis in original).

In the penultimate piece of the cluster, Joseph Slaughter asks us to consider a forgotten precedent to the ubiquitous GWOT: taking us back to the 1970s, Slaughter shows a surprising connection between hijacking and Third World "freedom fighters," a connection that is soon short-circuited in favor of the hijacker-as-terrorist. This transformation of the "hijacking imaginary" is leveraged, Slaughter argues, by a "neocolonial betrayal of postcolonial sovereignty and self-determination." The final essay offers an epilogue to the cluster by shifting the terrain of the forever war to the "space" of Afro-Arab encounters and the vexed question of the Third World. Sophia Azeb engages with the work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon to ask what it might mean for us to learn from Black diasporic universalisms. Azeb asks whether it is, in fact, possible to imagine the Afro-Arab in the post-Bandung, post-9/11 world and instead recommends that we sit with a kind of "creative anger," one that perhaps adequately gestures to the problem of anti-Blackness in our current moment. Azeb asks "what does it mean to be a Third Worldist in the midst of forever wars?"

The Limits of 9/11

A proliferation of legal and cultural terminology, then: rendered, surrendered, returned, deported, detained, extradited. These new vocabularies of human trafficking and legalistic chattel, these coercively-global migrants handcuffed not to history alone but to the black hole of excessive force. As a guard in Guantánamo Diary tells Slahi, "Just think of it as if you had cancer."14 It is a system set up to be invisible and lethal; these are the new global flows that cannot be celebrated or debated but endured and resisted. The cluster calls attention to both the excesses of the state tout court and the aesthetic, political, and material choices made by Global South forms and aesthetics in reshaping 9/11 discourse.

I conclude with a brief intervention of my own, that of the case of post-9/11 South Asia, to acknowledge the complex representational strategies around 9/11 as a historical and analytical framework. While South Asian nations were considered minor players in the Cold War, especially after the inauguration of the Non-Aligned Movement, the region has now seen both direct intervention (in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and indirect effects (Kashmir, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal): terrorism has emerged as a renewed paranoid preoccupation for the entire region. As Poulomi Saha argues, states like India have adopted US imperial domination into their "own local idiom" engendering "a new empire made of and for terror." 15

Complementary geopolitical and historical developments in the region — post-2000s neoliberalism, sanctioned and institutionalized Islamophobia, homegrown Hindutva, security paranoia, aspirations to global superpower status — have led to the evolution of a particular literary phenomenon, what I call the South Asian terror archive, that offers an entirely different tangent to the canonization of US 9/11 literature. In my own work, I think about how South Asian Anglophone and diasporic writers, poets, and graphic novelists draw extensively from the machinery of post-9/11 US empire to make analogous or occasionally contradictory claims about South Asian security theaters. While some of these texts continue to rely on familiar postcolonial concerns about national sovereignty and Cold War U.S. meddling — Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (2004) or Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009) — others have taken to examining the macabre paranoia of South Asian insecurity — Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2011) or Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know. Still others like Karan Mahajan's Association of Small Bombs and Megha Majumdar's A Burning (2020) invoke spectacular manifestations of terrorism, albeit ones where its "terrorist" Muslim protagonists are thinly-drawn figures meant less for political critique and more for an international literary marketplace.16 These divergent writers are often responding to the zeitgeist of a postcolonial security state that requires an engagement that must bring together frames of postcoloniality, US empire studies, and globalized publishing paradigms.

Yet, it must necessarily be acknowledged that representations of terrorism in the Anglophone market are outpaced by the intrepid work of Kashmiri writers, poets, journalists, artists, and cartoonists who have been thinking about the excesses of the postcolonial security state from, at the very least, 1989, a moment when Kashmiri rebellion and so-called militancy enters a new phase of state violence. Poets like Agha Shahid Ali as well as journalists and novelists like Basharat Peer and Mirza Waheed have been demonstrating how Kashmir has been under siege from a rapacious Indian state that sees in the region vast opportunities to unfurl its militarized, nationalist development agenda. More to the point, Kashmiri writers and artists exhibit an intimate understanding of the aesthetics of containment and the brutality of counterinsurgency operations. The contemporary poet Uzma Falak illustrates the intimate nexus between Indian carcerality and Kashmiri struggle in an illustrative poem "the smallest unit in time in Kashmir is a siege." Not unlike Solmaz Sharif's celebrated use of military handbook terminology or diasporic Afghan poet Aria Aber's use of covert operation codenames, Falak deploys the vocabulary of bureaucratic militarization and incarceration by interspersing text from a prison manual with second-person lyric address as well as the names of Kashmiri civilians killed in altercations with legally nebulous variations of Indian armed forces.

Falak's poem organizes detention time in calendrical form but also in constricted black bars that resemble a jail cell. Text in black imports language from the manual — about "History Tickets," watch towers, birth of children in prison — while text in white asks searing questions about the time of occupation: "If you wear a dead man's watch, what would you say if someone casually asks you — what is the time by your watch?" (italics in original). The language of the manual interrupts and fragments the lyric address, reducing units of time into units of violence — "siege to siege," "massacre to massacre to massacre." As Falak and others suggest, Kashmir has turned into a vast graveyard with epitaphs for poems even as a robust freedom struggle is underway.17 In the last year alone, the region has experienced the full legislative maliciousness of the Indian nation-state in the form of an accelerated occupation. Poets like Falak signal that the securitization of the nation-state is not the epiphanic outcome of the security discourse of 9/11. Rather, it is a normalization of excess and the deadly persecution of minorities, where terrorism is but a pretext for the abrogation of power and the cloak screen of fascism-as-sovereign-will. This is the legacy of 9/11 for South Asia.

As we began thinking about this project together, the pandemic, the revolutionary feeling kindled by Black Lives Matter, and the current US government's malicious policies against minorities have all forced us to reckon with new meanings and resonances of 9/11. We must decenter what Angela Naimou so eloquently calls "perpetual year zero for the political imagination," even as we contend with its prehistories and its aftermath. At the same time, we do not make any claims to comprehensive coverage of the global. There is still so much to be said about the operations of US security theater and militarization across Africa and Latin America, for instance. Rather, we see this as an invitation to think about a shared aesthetic preoccupation with proliferating forms of empire.

We need to place Kashmir and Guantánamo and Ferguson and Xinjiang and Manus Island on a continuum that deterritorializes and provincializes the centrality of 9/11 as a fundamentally US specific and exceptional event. While this might call for drawing more speculative and extraordinary connections across national traditions, it will allow us to build a robust discourse of the post-9/11, one that does not marginalize Aimé Césaire or Toni Cade Bambara or Ghassan Kanafani for their participation in adjacent battles against colonialism, white supremacy, and occupation. A shift towards the normalization of counterinsurgent detainment has given rise to a securitized cordon sanitaire that has only escalated in the year of the pandemic. The contributors to this forum are united in their desire to interrogate the usefulness of 9/11 as a continuing world historical marker and to scramble the geographies of the comfortably global. We must, as Erica Edwards exhorts us, think about the normalization of emergency as a condition of life in the twenty-first century. We must, as Sophia Azeb says of Fanon, "draw the links between parallel struggles in order to live." Even as states and individuals are buffeted by the now-invisible, now-imperial hand of global securitization, it is time for us to insist on the vibrant, heterogenous, and competing Global South resonances of this opacity called 9/11.

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Kalyan Nadiminti is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University, where they teach and write on postcolonial and global anglophone literatures, terror and human rights, and the contemporary creative economy. Their book project puts literary genealogies of political violence in South Asia in dialogue with diasporic and detainee writing from Guantánamo to rethink postcoloniality in the wake of US empire.

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