Copyright page

The right of Ghassan Hage to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9226-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9227-2 (pb)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hage, Ghassan, author.

Title: Is racism an environmental threat? / Ghassan Hage.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Series: Debating race | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Racism. | Environmental degradation. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations.

Classification: LCC HT1521 .H237 2017 (print) | LCC HT1521 (ebook) | DDC 305.8–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041398

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Preface

This book, as indicated by the title of the series it belongs to, is about “debating race.” It does so, however, in a slightly unusual way. It examines how racism is connected to the ecological crisis. This, I hope, will help us understand both better. Readers of my earlier works on racism will note that some of the book's key concepts, especially that of domestication, have been emerging in my work for many years now (see Hage 1996, 2000, 2003). I have aimed to develop them more fully here. Nonetheless, it should be clear that this book is neither a scholarly work that systematically interacts with existing literature in the fields of racism and environmental studies, nor is it an ethnographic work that can afford to dwell on a wealth of empirical data. There will be enough to direct readers who want either or both of the above. But the text itself is in the essay tradition. I weave together some theoretical and empirical material into what I trust are some coherent propositions about the way racial and ecological questions are related.

The principal proposition is that practices of racial and ecological domination have the same roots. They emanate from what is today the dominant mode of inhabiting and making ourselves viable in the world, what I call “generalized domestication.” This concept is central to the book. It is a concept that will, I hope, perform a critical function: it invites readers to start looking at common things slightly differently. It directs them toward an atypical way of experiencing the racial and the ecological domains. And perhaps, on an optimistic note, it might also point a way out of the racial and ecological impasse in which we find ourselves today.

There is a sense in the early twenty-first century that any twentieth-century problem that can be solved has been solved. We are left with spaces of intractable conflicts and impasses. Ireland is behind us and we're left with Israel/Palestine, so to speak. Not many people, then, are game to write about such enduring social problems with a claim to provide “solutions.” I certainly am not. The idea that one can have “a solution” to racism, or to the ecological crisis, borders on the ridiculous. But even if we agree with Bruno Latour that “we have never been modern,” we might also have to accept that we are incurably “modern enough” in that we cannot help but live in hope. I therefore write expecting that I can leave the reader with a perspective that allows for a richer way of confronting and negotiating those impasses.

There are many people I need to thank in the making of this book, not least the many cohorts of students who have listened to me and engaged with me on the topic of “domestication” since I began deploying it in the early nineties. I am also grateful to the groups of graduates and academics who, over the years, have either endured me because they had to, or generously invited me and offered me a space to develop my argument in Australia, Lebanon, Europe, and the United States. And I cannot but specifically mention all the organizers and participants in “the mother of all racism workshops,” the 2014 bus tour of South Africa.

Domestication was the central problematic of a large Australian Research Council grant. This allowed for many engaging discussions with John Cash, Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Michael Jackson, Geoffrey Mead, Gillian Tan, and Henrik Vigh. Special thanks to Geoffrey Mead who has helped with the editing and the referencing. Many other friends/colleagues who have been important either as people who listened to me, or people I have listened to, or both, need also to be thanked: Fadi Bardawil, Lauren Berlant, Niko Besnier, Peter Dwyer, Didier Fassin, Kelly Gillespie, David Theo Goldberg, Karim Makdisi, Saree Makdisi, Achille Mbembe, Monica Minnegal, Meaghan Morris, Stephen Muecke, Beth Povinelli, Francoise Verges, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bettina Stoetzer.

Finally, I want to ritualistically (since rituals are important), and non-ritualistically (to emphasize that I am not merely mouthing thanks in a routinized way), thank my family of women starting with my mother May and my sisters Nada and Amale. As always, Caroline Alcorso subjected my imaginative leaps to her healthy empiricism, which does not mean she always managed to curb them. Last but hardly least I want to thank my daughters Dominique and Aliya, who have offered me a gift I have often referred to in my work, and which is crucial to understand this book's conclusion: this is the gift of their mere presence in my life. Since this book is concerned with a future politics, I dedicate it to the two of them.

Introduction

To argue that a social phenomenon is related to the ecological crisis is not difficult today. It is the single most important crisis that has ever faced humanity. When a crisis is deemed “ecological” or “environmental” it is no longer a crisis in a specific relationship to x or y. It becomes a crisis of the very milieu in which we can have relationships to x or y. This was dramatically illustrated by a garbage crisis in Lebanon in 2015. It began as a breakdown in the garbage disposal system due to its complex entanglement with the logic of economic and political sectarian competition in the country. As people began to dispose of their rubbish anywhere they could, the garbage started fouling the already polluted environment. Soon the street smells, the ugly appearance of sea and mountain vistas, the contaminated rivers, permeated everything, causing inconveniences, discomfort and disease. “Garbage disposal” was no longer an unmanageable relation to garbage; it became constitutive of the entire social atmosphere. It affected the way people worked, their mood, where children played, what could be eaten and where one could eat, how and where one could exercise, and more…It is this all-encompassing quality that defines the “environmental crisis” we are facing globally today.

Because of the all-encompassing nature of the crisis exemplified above, not only is it always possible to demonstrate that any social phenomenon is related to the environmental crisis, it is also analytically and even ethically imperative to do so. The crisis makes of the planet a sinking ship. It becomes futile and even obscurantist to study anything aboard the ship on its own, as if the ship is not sinking. Likewise, it becomes equally imperative to show in what way what one is studying can help stop the sinking process. This book is written with these analytical, political, and ethical imperatives in mind. In doing so, I strive to consolidate a political claim that is already taking shape in many activist spaces, and which animal liberationists and eco-feminists began making many years ago, concerning the relation between speciesism and racism: one cannot be anti-racist without being an ecologist today, and vice versa.

But important as it may be to highlight, as I did above, how the ecological crisis affects racism, the book's central argument moves in the opposite causal direction. It aims to explore the way racism itself exacerbates the ecological crisis. This argument takes up a specific form of racism that is quite prevalent today: the anti-Muslim racism generally referred to as Islamophobia. I choose to concentrate on Islamophobia because it is a variant of what remains the most important form of racism pervading the world: the Western/white racism rooted in slavery and colonialism. To be clear, I know that racism is not a disease that only white people can contract. I have witnessed and written about nonwhite racism in a number of places. Nonetheless, if I am to rank various racisms in terms of global impact I have no problem saying that nonwhite racism is far less important than the racism I am examining here. This is true in terms of its empirical frequency, its impact on people, and in terms of its structural effects on and degree of infiltration of existing national and international institutions.

At least since the turn of the century, anti-Muslim practices and beliefs have come to the fore as one of the dominant forms of racism marking our contemporary era. This period saw a globalization of the “Islamic other” around the world. And like all forms of cultural globalization, it involved contradictory processes of homogenization and differentiation (Hannerz 1996). Thus, while an abstract “Islam” and an undifferentiated plural “Muslims” were becoming homogenized as a global threatening form of otherness, the categories that concretely embodied the Islamic threat differed from one country to another. The Muslim other started out by being “Asian” in Britain (there meaning Indians and Pakistanis), “Turkish” in Germany, “North African” in France, “Lebanese” in Australia, and a more vague “Arab” in the United States. But even at these national levels, the picture was rapidly getting more and more complicated during the first decade of the twenty-first century, with more Palestinians and Afghanis, and African Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, joining in almost everywhere. Today, Syrian and Iraqi nationals have also been added to the “Muslim otherly mix” as a result of the flow of refugees escaping the Syrian and Iraqi wars. What's more, the rise of first Al-Qaedah and then ISIS accelerated a global diffusion of transnational Muslim radicalism among immigrant and Western-born subjects of varied ethnic and national backgrounds, adding an “icing of otherness” on the racialized Muslim cake.

The racist practices that accompanied this globalization have been many and are increasing. Statistical and anecdotal data are abundant and can be obtained from many international and national organizations around the world monitoring the incidence of attacks against Muslims or people thought to be Muslim. There are many cases of Muslim women being shouted at and abused, or having their hijabs ripped off, in the streets or on public transport. These practices, which were already prevalent in the late twentieth century, well before 9/11, have become far more numerous throughout the Western world today. There are also increased reports of Muslim job-seekers being denied jobs the moment their Muslim background is suspected. Likewise Muslim workers are joked about, humiliated, and discriminated against at their workplaces. More publicly, Muslims have to contend with the refusal to respect their taboos in cases well-known internationally, such as the Muhammad cartoons or the attacks on halal meat. They are faced with the continual belittling of the loss of lives among them, whether in war zones such as Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or in Israel, or at sea among those seeking asylum. They are also faced with a Western electioneering culture where Muslim-bashing has become de rigueur and widely seen by politicians as a route to popular success. Every time Muslims turn on a television or read the newspaper they have to come to terms with the prejudice peddled by the media in all its diversity. At the same time, they have to live with a routinization of the spectacle of seeing themselves or their fellow Muslims behind barbed wire, either in jail or in refugee camps, waiting on one or another European border, or in detention centers such as those built by the Australian government in and outside of Australia. These scenes and practices come in addition to the more common and unspectacular everyday petty forms of racialization and marginalization that mark the phenomenon everywhere: interactions laced with avoidance, disapproval, aggression, or hatred. The totality of these images and practices creates an inescapable feeling among many that today “Muslim” is short for “the wretched of the earth.”

Despite all this, there are some analysts who want to differentiate Islamophobia from racism “proper.” They do so in the name of a tighter and more rigorous definition grounded in the history and logic of racism as it emerges in the early phases of modernity. According to such writers it is not useful to talk about race and racism unless we are dealing with a mode of thinking that espouses some form of biological conception of race. For the purposes of this work, such approaches have all the hallmarks of what Pierre Bourdieu critically identifies as a form of scholastic thought (Bourdieu 2000: 49). “Scholastic” here refers to a mode of thinking that detaches racism from its practical/usage context and conceives it as an academic exercise aimed at some kind of pure knowledge, a desire to classify for classification's sake.

This intellectualist tendency has had a limiting effect on both anti-racist analysis and anti-racist politics. Indeed, if we are to compare racism and anti-racism across history, we can say that racism has exhibited a far greater malleability than academic anti-racism. It has morphed, and shown a capacity to target a variety of people, sometimes many at the same time: blacks, Asians, Arabs, Jews, Roma, and Muslims. It has been deployed as part of a technology of segregation, of conditional integration, and, most dramatically, of extermination. It has efficiently constructed its object, successfully adapting to the dominant modes of classification of the time, be they phenotypical, biological, cultural, or a combination of these and more. Comparatively speaking, academic anti-racism has become conceptually somewhat ossified and is always trying to catch up with the racists' fluid mode of classification.

chapter onechapter twochapter three

Series page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction