Monday, July 04, 2011

Abstract(s) of the week!

For this Independence Day, a leftist patriotism edition.

Remember Michael Yellow Bird? He's the brainiac who said, at the trial of Wart Churchill's suit against CU in 2009, that it was common for historians to lie, and that that was okay, because such fabrications promote the truth.

Here he is around the same time, "defying the lies" of others.

Canadian Review of American Studies

Michael Yellow Bird

What Is the Highest Form of Patriotism?: I Say Acknowledging Our Addiction to Patriotism

Abstract:
Since the United States’s illegal invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq on 20 March 2003, I have published papers that critically interrogate the participation of the “sovereign” US Indigenous nations in this unjust, illegal, imperialistic war. Due to my writings, on 24 June 2007, I was invited to make a presentation at a peace vigil and rally focusing on “What Is the Highest Form of Patriotism?” The speech that I gave is provided in full text in this article, where I probe the United States of America’s addiction to patriotism by interrogating and “defying the lies” of some of US patriotism’s most cherished ideas, documents, leaders, and slogans. I end with a slight twist of the words of the third Buddhist noble truth, freedom from the addiction to patriotism is possible in this lifetime.
God, he loves himself.

Social Text

(Good ol' Social Text.)

Puar, Jasbir K., 1967-
Rai, Amit, 1968-

Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots
How are gender and sexuality central to the current "war on terrorism"? This question opens on to others: How are the technologies that are being developed to combat "terrorism" departures from or transformations of older technologies of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and nationalism? In what way do contemporary counterterrorism practices deploy these technologies, and how do these practices and technologies become the quotidian framework through which we are obliged to struggle, survive, and resist? Sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism, specifically that branch of strategic analysis that has entered the academic mainstream as "terrorism studies." This knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, the construction of the pathologized psyche of the terrorist-monster enables the practices of normalization, which in today's context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism. As opposed to initial post-September 11 reactions, which focused narrowly on "the disappearance of women," we consider the...
Rhetoric and Public Affairs

Roger Stahl

Why We "Support the Troops": Rhetorical Evolutions

Abstract:
This essay tracks the genealogy of the contemporary call to "support the troops," a rhetoric that includes but goes beyond the strategic and argumentative use of the phrase itself. Support-the-troops rhetoric has two major functions: deflection and dissociation. Deflection involves discursive trends in play since Vietnam that have redefined war as a fight to save our own soldiers—especially the captive soldier—rather than as a struggle for policy goals external to the military. As such, this discourse directs civic attention away from the question of whether the particular war policy is just. The essay explicates these trends through an examination of the POW/MIA, war film, and the symbol of the yellow ribbon. The second trope, dissociation, quarantines the citizen from questions of military action by manufacturing distance between citizen and soldier. Dissociation often goes further to define civic deliberation and dissent as an attack on the soldier body and thus an ultimate immoral act. This essay explores this trope through executive rhetoric, an analysis of the particular phrase "support the troops," metaphor for war, and John Kerry's run for the presidency in 2004. Both deflection and dissociation work to discipline and mute public deliberation in matters of war. The essay concludes by considering strategies for reopening spaces for democratic deliberation.

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