Abstract
The next rhetorical cartography that Hayes performs turns its attention to another resistive space of subjectivity, Tahrir Square in January 2011 during the uprisings now commonly known as “the Arab Spring.” The chapter first maps substantial presidential discourses from both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and argues these discourses function to sustain a binary distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims within the terror wars. Hayes then discusses the concept of delinking as a way for resistive subjects to (re)generate their ability to move within the larger conjuncture of the terror wars. In turning specifically to the moment of resistance in Tahrir Square in January 2011, Hayes explores ways that discourses from the “hacktivists” of Anonymous, alongside rhetorics of early resistive leaders against Mubarak, demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the January 2011 moment in Tahrir for Muslim subjects living in the terror wars.
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Notes
- 1.
“Anonymous Official Press Release on #OpEgypt,” Anon Relations re-release, February 4, 2013, http://anonrelations.net/opegypt-official-press-release-1057/.
- 2.
“HomoCarnula,” We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. Directed by Brian Knappenberger. Amazon Prime DVD. Los Angeles: Luminant Pictures, 2012.
- 3.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Terrorist Attacks,” September 11, 2001, Public Papers of the United States Presidency. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-2001-book2/pdf/PPP-2001-book2-doc-pg1098-2.pdf.
- 4.
Carol K. Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post- World War II Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 159.
- 5.
These include the September 11, 2001 speech on the attacks as well as the September 12, 2001 Cabinet Room remarks.
- 6.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington,” September 17, 2001, Public Papers of the US Presidency. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-2001- book2/pdf/PPP-2001-book2-doc-pg1121.pdf.
- 7.
George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001, Public Papers of the US Presidency. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-2001-book2/pdf/PPP-2001- book2-doc-pg1140.pdf.
- 8.
Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism, 182.
- 9.
Steve Benan, “McCain Tries to Contain the Fire He Started,” Washington Monthly, October 11, 2008, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_10/015131.php.
- 10.
“Obama’s Speech in Cairo: Getting the Right Audience,” The Guardian, May 31, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/01/editorial-obama-speech-cairo.
- 11.
“Obama’s Speech in Cairo: Getting the Right Audience.”
- 12.
Leonard Doyle, “President Barack Obama Will Try to Win Over Muslims on Trip to Egypt,” British Telegraph, May 30, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5413790/President- Barack-Obama-will-try-to-win-over-Muslims-on-trip-to-Egypt.html.
- 13.
Quotes from President Obama’s Cairo address are cited from the printed transcript available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09. Paragraph and page numbers follow as such, according to this copy.
- 14.
In Arabic, السلام عليكم. The phrase is most often translated as “And upon you may be peace” and is used as a universal greeting in Muslim conversational exchange. The textual reference here is directly from the speech transcript published by the White House and cited above.
- 15.
Tony Karon, “Why Obama’s Mideast Speech is for Domestic, not Arab Consumption,” Time Magazine, World, May 18, 2001, http://world.time.com/2011/05/18/why-obamas-mideast-speech-is-for-domestic-not-arab- consumption/#ixzz2MzLLDZE7.
- 16.
Robert Singh, Barack Obama’s Post-American Foreign Policy: The Limits of Engagement (London; Bloomsbury Academic/Bloombury Publishing, 2012), 123.
- 17.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, declarations (Self published as a Kindle book available at amazon.com, 2012), 6-7.
- 18.
Michael Hardt and Hegri, declarations, 6.
- 19.
Although this chapter will further explore the nature of Surin’s claims with regard to delinking and subjectivity, its primary role is neither to field challenges to his assessment of the financial capitalist sub-regime nor to interrogate his discussion of the post-political moment. A number of other scholars discuss the nature of the post-political (e.g. Colin Crouch in 2004’s Post Democracy). This chapter rather takes Surin’s assumption as a foundation to explore the viability of suggested alternatives (via Samir Amin’s delinking) in light of the events of Tahrir Square.
- 20.
Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 125-140 and 265-284.
- 21.
Kurt Andersen, “Person of the Year, 2011: The Protester,” Time Magazine, December 14, 2011.
- 22.
“Egypt Election: Hosni Mubarak’s NDP Sweeps Second Round”, BBC News, Middle East, December 7, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11935368. See also “Annual Report, 2011: Egypt,” Amnesty International Human Rights by Region (January 2012). http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/egypt/report-2011.
- 23.
Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2006), 42.
- 24.
Mike Hammer, “Statement on Egypt’s Elections,” published in USA Today, November 30, 2010, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/11/obama-team-is-disappointed-in-egypt-elections/1#.UTzABxlAvBM. Mike Hammer was the National Security Council Spokesperson for the Obama administration in November of 2010.
- 25.
Susan Buck-Morss, “Interview with Chris Mansour,” The Platypus Review, April 2, 2011, http://platypus1917.org/2011/04/02/postcolonialism-or-postmodernism-an-interview- with-susan-buck-morss/.
- 26.
Buck-Morss, “Interview.”
- 27.
Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the PEUPLE QUÉBÉCOIS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73, No. 2 (1987), 133-151.
- 28.
Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: The Rhetorical Subject and the General Intellect,” 44.
- 29.
Ibid., 45.
- 30.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971), selection from Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 45.
- 31.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge Press, 1997).
- 32.
Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism,” 49.
- 33.
Walter Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007), 453.
- 34.
Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London/New Jersey: Zed Books, 1990), 12.
- 35.
Amin, Delinking, 55.
- 36.
Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Race, Coloniality, and Geo-Body Politics: The Garden as Latin@ Vernacular Discourse,” Environmental Communication, 5, no. 3 (2011), 364.
- 37.
Michael Calvin McGee, “The Ideograph: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66, no. 1 (1980), 15.
- 38.
Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Decolonializing Imaginaries: Rethinking “the People” in the Young Lords Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 98, no. 1 (2012), 16.
- 39.
Surin, Freedom Not Yet, 126.
- 40.
Ibid., 285.
- 41.
Ibid., 291.
- 42.
Barack H. Obama, “Remarks on Egypt,” White House Video and Audio Collection, February 11, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2011/02/11/president-obama-historic-day-egypt#transcript.
- 43.
Samuel P. Jacobs, “Gene Sharp, the 83-Year-Old Who Toppled Egypt,” The Daily Beast, February 14, 2011, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/14/gene-sharp-the-egyptian-revolts-prophet-of-nonviolence.html.
- 44.
Andy Khouri, “Egyptian Activists Inspired by Forgotten Martin Luther King, Jr. Comic,” Comics Alliance, February 11, 2011, http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/02/11/martin-luther-king-comic-egypt/. Images included at this location.
- 45.
Comrades from Cairo, “To the Occupy Movement: The Occupiers of Tahrir Square are With You,” The Guardian, October 25, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-movement-tahrir-square- cairo.
- 46.
Alexei Oreskovic, “Facebook ’09 Revenue Neared $800 Million,” Reuters US, June 18, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/18/us-facebook- idUSTRE65H01W20100618.
- 47.
Wael Ghonim, quoted in a February 11, 2011 interview with CNN’s Wolff Blitzer last retrieved August 3, 2015 at http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/11/cnn-interviews-wael-ghonim-following-mubarak-resignation/.
- 48.
Alfred Hermida, “Some Thoughts on Social Media and the Protests in Egypt,” Reportr.net, January 28, 2011, http://www.reportr.net/2011/01/28/thoughts-social-media-protests- egypt/.
- 49.
Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
- 50.
For a discussion of social media and Egypt’s government control, see Jillian York for Al Jazeera, “The future of Egypt’s Internet,” February 1, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112174317974677.html.
- 51.
Omar al-Saleh, “Report from Egypt, Tahrir,” Al Jazeera footage last retrieved August 3, 2015 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgilxYA1rME.
- 52.
“Tahrir Square: ميدان التحرير” Community Facebook page, accessed March 8, 2013 at https://www.facebook.com/midan.alta7rir?fref=ts. As the completion of this manuscript, the page is reported as “broken” or “possibly removed.” The page does seem to have perhaps moved here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/ميدان-التحرير-tahrir-square/188629931158568, though I cannot account for historical preservation of the original 2011 messages shared in this space.
- 53.
The graph, widely distributed across media outlets throughout January and February of 2011, can be cited through, and found at, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/28/this-is-what-egypts-cutoff-from-the-net- looks-like_n_815335.html.
- 54.
Christopher Williams, “How Egypt Shut Down the Internet,” The Telegraph UK, January 28, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8288163/How- Egypt-shut-down-the-internet.html.
- 55.
Mercedes Haefer, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. Amazon Prime DVD edition. Directed by Brian Knappenberger. Los Angeles: Luminant Media, 2012.
- 56.
“Anon2world,” We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. Amazon Prime DVD edition. Directed by Brian Knappenberger. Los Angeles: Luminant Media, 2012.
- 57.
Peter Fein, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. Amazon Prime DVD edition. Directed by Brian Knappenberger. Los Angeles: Luminant Media, 2012.
- 58.
We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. Amazon Prime DVD edition. Directed by Brian Knappenberger. Los Angeles: Luminant Media, 2012.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Steven A. Cook, “Foreign Policy: US Can’t Hijack Egypt’s Revolution,” NPR News, March 10, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134417495/foreign-policy-us-cant-hijack- egypts-revolution.
- 61.
One such example of a comprehensive discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood with regard to Egypt before the revolution of 2011 is Sana Abed-Kotob, “The Accomodationists Speak: Goals and Strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 3 (2009), 321-339. Look also to Buck Morss’s full text, Thinking Past Terror, cited perviously in this book.
- 62.
Steven A. Cook, “Foreign Policy: The US Can’t Hijack Egypt’s Revolution.”
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Hayes, H.A. (2016). Occupying Tahrir: Resistance, Violence, and Political Change. In: Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars. Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48099-6_7
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