Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of War on Terror

In October of 2008, less than two weeks before what would turn out to be an historic presidential election, the former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced his support for then-senator Barack Obama’s candidacy, over that of the Republican candidate John McCain, on national television. Powell’s announcement received particular attention for several reasons, not least among them that this endorsement for a man poised to become the first African American president came from a man who, for many years, was considered the most likely candidate to be elected to that position, especially following his leadership during the first Gulf War.¹ Not surprisingly, Powell quickly dismissed any suggestion that racial solidarity was a factor or motivation for his endorsement. Despite Powell’s disavowal, his comments on race came to be noted as arguably the highlight of his endorsement. Among other criticisms, Powell reserves particularly strong words of reproach for the Republican party’s racist rhetoric:
 

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” [sic] This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

(“‘Meet the Press'”)

Powell goes on to explain that he “feel[s] strongly about this particular point” because of a photo that he saw showing a soldier’s mother leaning on a gravestone that “had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith.” The gravestone belongs to Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a corporal in the U.S. Army, whose biography is succinctly summarized thus by Powell: “[H]e was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.” While Powell does not elaborate further, his example—the figure of the dead Muslim American soldier—works to counter Republican rhetoric that situates Islam and Muslims as un-American. In other words, the figuration of Corporal Khan, his service in the army, and his death serves as the proof of national belonging. The moral weight of the story is further compounded by Powell’s praise for Obama’s “inclusive, broader reach . . . crossing lines—ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines” (“‘Meet the Press'”). Likewise, Powell himself has also been described as a figure who “transcends race: even as he addresses many blacks’ skepticism about the American Dream, many whites find Powell a reassuring symbol of the American meritocracy” (Lane). In other words, Powell’s (and Obama’s) bodies and stories provide the grounds through which to argue for and make legible the Muslim soldier’s body as an American one.

 
Powell powerfully reiterates the ideology of a multicultural nation of which all races and ethnicities should and could be a part, reanimating his role during the first Gulf War. In Powell’s figuration, Melani McAlister argues, the meaning for both the military and the nation converges as “open-minded, as multicultural, as pluralist, and thus as having already successfully achieved the aims that ‘p.c.’ college professors and their students were agitating for” (Epic Encounters 255). In reprising his role as a spokesperson for and embodiment of liberal multicultural America, Powell’s pointed question—”Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”—and its response reaffirm these values. And in doing so, Powell’s “nod to racial injustice,” as McAlister notes elsewhere, functions as both “inoculation . . . and proof of exemplary righteousness” for American power and global expansion (“Virtual Muslim” 225). In other words, his criticism of racism works to reassure us of our liberalism and tolerance while enabling imperialism and militarism. But in glossing over America’s ongoing wars and military occupations all over the world, Powell’s comments also mask the extent to which war, imperialism, and militarism have actively sustained and produced racism. Powell’s invocation of a Muslim American soldier to highlight and criticize anti-Muslim discourse in the wake of the “war on terror” is no accident; it is not only Powell’s own military background and therefore presumed affinity that inform his rhetorical decision, but also other powerful and long-standing links between the military, citizenship, and race.
 
The enlistment of volunteers for the U.S. military in the years since the Cold War and the Vietnam War has a particular relationship to the national body and racial ideology. As McAlister has shown, the post-Vietnam War U.S. military not only functions as a representative microcosm of a diverse and multi-racial nation, but also provides the justification for America’s imperial militarism while disavowing racism.² Thus, the citizen-soldiers of the modern U.S. military serve a dual purpose: to protect and defend the nation-state, but also to stand in for the national community they call upon to rally around the nation-state at war.³ The racialized soldier of the multicultural military is invoked in an appeal to the national community to see itself as pluralist, meritocratic, and multi-racial and simultaneously represents that national self-image. Because of the powerful link between the military and citizenship, which I will elaborate on later in the essay, the military continues to serve as the premier site through which race, racism, belonging, and citizenship are negotiated and resolved. But if it has historically functioned as such, the military has not, in fact, effectively resolved the contradictions of race and citizenship in national and political life. While the military has appeared to promote racial progress, its recruitment and integration of racial minorities in the U.S. reveal the opposite.⁴ The figure of the racialized soldier tasked with resolving these negotiations instead reveals the military’s complicity in the reproduction of conditions that compel racialized citizens and non-citizens to participate in militarism and warfare. By perpetuating and exploiting the narrative that these racialized subjects “loved their country so much . . . that they were able to look beyond the discrimination they experienced and in time overcame racism,” militarism and racism work hand in hand to sustain racial hierarchy and domination and exploit them for warfare (Fujitani 262).
 
The military has an intimate connection to formal citizenship as well as to symbolic citizenship. Military service can expedite naturalization processes for both non-citizen green card holders/permanent residents and non-green card holding immigrants.⁵ According to the Department of Homeland Security, service in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces can also qualify service members for waivers of certain general naturalization requirements. During peacetime, one or more years of service counts as qualifying service, while during “Periods of Hostilities” any length of service qualifies, even for those who are not permanent residents. It is worthwhile noting that this provision—requiring no minimum period of service—was authorized after September 11, 2001, and that we have been in a “Period of Hostility” since that date.⁶ The Pentagon also announced in 2008 plans to begin recruiting immigrants with temporary visas, not just green card holders or permanent residents, for the military.⁷ While the initiative itself is not specifically geared towards racial and ethnic minorities, given the patterns of immigration to the U.S. in the past several decades, it would be safe to assume that this initiative has the potential to attract and increase the number of recruits from minority communities. Significantly, a New York Times article reporting on this initiative notes that the program specifically aims to attract and recruit native speakers, including Arabic-speaking immigrants, as language specialists (Preston).
 
The affinity of militarism, citizenship, and racism is also illuminated through the genealogy of power that Michel Foucault outlines in his 1976 lectures.⁸ The decline of sovereign power and its “right to take life or let live,” as Foucault argues here and elsewhere, came to be transformed into “the power to ‘make’ live and to ‘let’ die” (241). The difference between the two is, in short, power over death versus power over life. Under biopower and disciplinary power, management and regulation of life become the primary modes through which individual bodies and populations are governed. We might also understand citizenship as a technology or mechanism of regulatory State power. The nation, as Foucault theorizes, is not determined by its ability to exercise domination but by “its ability to administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and State power” (223). In other words, citizenship is one site or technology through which the State exercises biopower.
 
The military is a central apparatus for managing populations on the margins of the national community—that is to say, those whose citizenship, formal or otherwise, has always already been in question—and their relationship to the nation-state. The military, especially in times of war, has offered itself as a vehicle through which various communities from which it solicits manpower might gain the rights and benefits of citizenship. But if we understand that the military exists primarily to provide State security, we must understand that it operates in the interests of the nation-state.⁹ Citizenship, at its simplest, names a juridical status within a particular state, with attendant rights and benefits, yet its operation suggests much more. That various populations (including women and African Americans) with formal citizenship status within the nation have been consistently denied the rights and benefits that other citizens enjoy, while others (Asian Americans, Latina/o Americans) have consistently been seen and treated as foreigners and non-citizens regardless of formal citizenship status, speaks to the dynamic operations of citizenship and citizenry as technologies of State power for the management of people and populations. The history of the so-called second-class citizenry in the United States reveals the ideological and social domains of citizenship that have implications far beyond one’s legal status in the State. The promise or guarantee of citizenship is always and necessarily conditional. Especially in times of war and national crises, such promises are at once powerfully seductive and dangerous, revealing the precariousness of citizenship and belonging.
 
The racialized citizen-soldier exists at the uneasy intersection of biopower and disciplinary power, and consequently at the intersection of life and death. If, as Foucault suggests, racism is the limit of making, controlling, and managing life, if it is “the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed,” then the racialized soldier exemplifies the paradox of how technologies oriented toward making live also make die (256). Because of biopower’s commitment to life, only racism permits the State to kill, and racism makes it possible for subjects to be exposed not only to literal death but also to forms of social death such as rejection and expulsion (256). Racism here, as Foucault explains, has two functions: it allows for distinction, for “the break between what must live and what must die” (254). But it does not simply authorize death. Racism also enables war by authorizing the logic of biopower, which dictates that the destruction of one race is necessary for another race to live and regenerate itself (255). In other words, war is not simply waged to kill enemy races but also to continue and maintain one’s own race. War and racism are twin expressions of a murderous state that is otherwise obliged to preserve and guarantee life.
 
That is to say, war and racism are not defined by a causal relationship. Rather, if we follow Foucault and understand both as “basic mechanism[s] of power” of the modern state, we might also see war and militarism as racism and vice versa (254). And if war itself is an expression and function of racism that makes possible the operation of State power, the racialized soldier is positioned simultaneously as agent and object of racism. As members of the military responsible for State security and waging war who are at the same time targets of the State power to let die, racialized soldiers occupy a paradoxical and precarious position between life and death. To put it another way, the racialized soldier is a figure at once for citizen and enemy. Cynthia Enloe shows how soldiers from minority communities reveal the ways in which imperatives of State security come into conflict with those of national community. As Enloe’s study notes, their inclusion and participation in the military can lead to demands for equal standing and rewards befitting full members of the national community. While such demands have led to some shifts in policy and public opinion, the ethnic/minority soldiers’ status does not necessarily shift accordingly. The perils of embodying both citizen and enemy simultaneously are perhaps particularly hazardous for those who are perceived as threats to State security.
 
Like the Japanese in America during World War II, Muslim populations in America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror” became racialized as foreign, suspect, and threatening.¹⁰ Similarly, the objectives of both wars were (and continue to be) articulated in racial terms, even while racism was disavowed.¹¹ It is significant to note that in this rhetoric, the Japanese and Muslims do not merely represent enemy nations during wartime; instead, the enemy is turned into fungible racialized categories that encompass populations abroad and at home.¹² The consolidation of “Muslim” as a racial category, as Leti Volpp and Muneer Ahmad argue, is based on the interchangeability of members of certain racial, religious, and ethnic groups with those who committed acts of terrorist violence on 9/11. This logic, as both Volpp and Ahmad note, is also nothing new. It recalls and reanimates similar logic from the past, most notably the logic that led to the incarceration of the Japanese in America during World War II. ¹³ Thus, any persons who merely appear to be Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern are consolidated together as “Muslim-looking.” (Ahmad 104). The material effects of being categorized as “Muslim-looking” have been particularly hazardous: in addition to petty acts of harassment and racial profiling by the government and the general public, many have been physically assaulted, killed, detained, and deported. As Ahmad has noted, many people who are not in fact Muslim, but “who are, for lack of a better descriptor, merely brown-skinned” (105), have been subject to this violence.¹⁴ American Muslims share with Asian Americans the dubious distinction of being turned into an enemy race as a response to war. In conjunction with their shared status as outsiders in relation to the nation and its citizenry, both groups also share histories of violence in relation to the state. In the rest of this essay, I will examine figurations of Muslim and Asian American soldiers in the context of recent wars in the Middle East as intersecting racial projects.¹⁵
 
Because their particular relationship to the state makes them especially subject to State discipline, racialized soldiers highlight the exploitation of racialized citizen-subjects that is in fact intrinsic to negotiations of citizenship and national belonging. That is to say, if the figure of the racialized soldier is meant to provide the proof of the promise of inclusion, it is also at the same time a reminder of the unfulfilled and continuously deferred promise of the same, and it reveals the duplicitous role of the military in the reproduction and maintenance of racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchies. We should also consider that the crises and the violence of inclusion that are illuminated by war and militarism are not necessarily exceptional moments. Indeed, as America officially ends the war in and occupation of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan continues on, while the memories and narratives of earlier wars continue to be reanimated.¹⁶
 
Although the objects of my inquiry here are Muslim and Asian American soldiers, the figuration of Colin Powell himself as a racialized citizen-soldier is not unrelated. If African Americans have not historically been perceived as perpetually foreign or as enemy combatants in the way that Muslims and Asian Americans have been, African American soldiers have nevertheless borne similar burdens of contradiction, ambiguity, and precariousness.¹⁷ In other words, even as the symbolic narrative that Colin Powell embodies does a great deal of work to fix meaning for both himself and Kareem Khan, that work in itself is incomplete. The photo— which Powell describes in his interview—does the other part of this work. The photo appears as part of an online portfolio titled “Service” for The New Yorker magazine by photographer Platon. The series depicts members of U.S. military at various stages of their service, from graduating from West Point to lying under gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. In keeping with the logic of military multiculturalism that McAlister argues for, the series represents men and women of various races and ethnicities. What makes the portrait of Corporal Khan (which is more literally a portrait of his mother and gravestone) especially legible in the context of the series is, as Powell points out, the crescent and the star that symbolizes Islam and that marks the gravestone. Khan’s mother, Elsheba Khan, who sits behind and carefully frames the stone with her arms and head, provides an additional cue for Khan’s Muslim-ness as non-white. This framing places the gravestone at the center of the photograph, where the light is fixed on the stone and its inscriptions, which include Khan’s name, rank, dates, and medals.
 
The photo is made legible largely through two connected and overlapping discourses: the myth-making work of what historian George Mosse terms the “cult of the fallen soldier” and the iconography of the pietà. Instead of cradling the actual body of her dead son, the mother mourns by cradling the gravestone. And like the figuration of the Virgin Mary in classic pietàs, Elsheba Khan’s face appears “beautifully serene,” signifying “the transcendent purpose of maternal sacrifice” and “marking the magnitude and purpose of this death and the certainty of future life precisely in and through the face of her loss” (Tapia 16). Ruby Tapia suggests that “the essential constituent of the pietà’s timeless function as a fleshed-out screen is . . . the maternal body and its inextricable relationship to the threat of death and the promise of resurrection” (18). In this sense, the mother of the dead soldier is one of the most affective figures in times of war because she embodies most closely the meanings of the maternal in the pietà. Like the Virgin Mary of the original pietà, she sacrifices her son without protest, calmly accepting her role in the larger narrative of collective national suffering and the redemptive figure (the son/soldier) who would die in the place of others so that they would be saved.
 
Like the pietà the photograph reflects and recalls, the image invokes another powerful symbol, which also has roots in Christian iconography. The “cult of the fallen soldier,” which emerged during and after World War I, similarly relies on and reflects Christian themes of redemption and resurrection through death. Closely tied to the “myth of the war experience,” which rearticulates war experience and memory as a way to “transcend the horror of war and at the same time supported the utopia which nationalism sought to project,” the fallen soldier serves as symbolic martyr for the regeneration of the nation and calls on others to participate in this project (106). As a central motif to this figuration, youth mythologizes death “as not death at all but sacrifice and resurrection” (73). So while its work may be quite similar to that of the pietà (many images and depictions of the fallen soldier are, in fact, versions of the pietà), the cult of the fallen soldier, Mosse argues, is central to the glorification of war and by extension, the nation. But if the myth of the fallen dissipated by the time of World War II in Europe, as Mosse concludes, its power to evoke nationalist sentiment remains. Mosse suggests that the scale of death and violence that World War II wrought meant that war and its brutalities could no longer be mythologized in the ways they had been previously. However, the realities of war that European nations and people faced during World War II were very different from the realities that America and most of its citizens faced during two of the longest running wars in modern American history.¹⁸ Fought by strategically smaller armed forces made up of volunteers in lands many could not locate on maps, America’s military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan created burdens that were more or less borne solely by those in the military and their families. The wars in and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan still have a vexed relationship with the images of their casualties, however.¹⁹
 
Central to Tapia’s reading of the pietà in American culture is the argument for its work conjoining race, death, and the maternal in the project to resurrect the nation and national subject(s) at particular moments of rupture. As Tapia notes, these differentiated maternal bodies mean that “the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for (the) dead” (24). That the maternal or the mother is always already a raced figure can help us to see how the differentiated maternal bodies are deployed through visual culture to reproduce and resurrect the national body and the citizen-subject. The Khan photo by itself does not have the power to resurrect the national body through the raced body of the Muslim mother (although it is no coincidence that the actual body of the soldier is invisible in the image). Powell’s invocation of the soldier, the image, and his unequivocal American-ness does the supplemental work of securing the meaning of the photograph.
 
In the remainder of this essay, I want to turn to another figure who, like Khan, is an American Muslim soldier who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Unlike Khan, James Yee, the former Muslim chaplain assigned to U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, is not racially or ethnically Arab or “Muslim-looking,” to borrow Ahmad’s phrase. Unlike Khan’s, Yee’s story would end neither with praise for his honor and courage nor affirmation of national belonging from the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If Khan’s story and the context through which his story is made legible to us obscure this relationship between war, militarism and race, Yee’s story provides the necessary supplement to our understanding and reminds us of the precarity of the status of racialized soldiers. That Yee’s race is not one often associated with Muslims further highlights the shared racialization of Muslim and Asian Americans in the history of U.S. wars throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries.
 
In 2003, U.S. Army Chaplain Captain James Yee was taken into military custody and detained on charges of sedition, espionage, aiding the enemy, and failure to obey a general order following 11 months of service as the Muslim chaplain at Camp Delta, the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.²⁰ A third-generation Chinese American and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Yee converted to Islam shortly before the first Gulf War and pursued further study of Islam with the specific goal of becoming and serving as a chaplain in the Army. Yee was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington in 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred. In response, Yee embraced his new role not simply as a chaplain but as a spokesperson for Islam, who could educate the military as well as the general public about Islam and diffuse rising hostility and antagonism against Muslims. In fall of 2002, Yee was assigned to Camp Delta. In addition to the usual duties of an army chaplain, his duties included meeting the prisoners’ religious needs as well as advising other staff about the prisoners’ religion and culture. He was also frequently called on to speak to visiting media, fulfilling his role as “the U.S. military’s poster child of a good Muslim—a devout chaplain who comfortably served both God and country” (Yee 40).
 
Yet he would come under increasing suspicion from the camp’s security officer and staff for what they perceived as Yee’s undue sympathy for the detainees. Some of the suspicious evidence against Yee included his ridiculing a psychological operations poster with a detainee (overheard by one of the base’s Arabic translators) and his use of a security clearance stamp to circulate materials from the prison’s library. Compounded by suspicions of his close association with other Muslim personnel, a group dubbed by others as a “Muslim clique,” camp security and counterintelligence opened an investigation on Yee and others in the “clique” (including Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, a translator) in the spring of 2003.²¹ The mounting investigation eventually culminated in Yee’s arrest at Jacksonville Naval Air Station on September 10, 2003, as he prepared to board a flight to Seattle, where he was going to spend his leave with his family. Yee was placed in solitary confinement at the U.S. Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he remained for 76 days. Eventually, the cases against both Yee and Al Halabi collapsed as a result of insufficient and irrelevant evidence, mistranslations, and mishandling and misunderstanding of what constituted classified documents, among other irregularities. As the case for espionage and aiding the enemy began to crumble, all criminal charges against Yee were dropped, and he was charged instead with adultery and downloading pornography—charges which were also later dismissed. Yee was eventually able to leave the army with an honorable discharge. As Al Halabi’s lawyer put it: “The U.S. . . . oversold, overcharged, and overreacted” (Rivera).
 
While Yee’s race and ethnicity were not foregrounded in the case or in media coverage of the case the way his religion was, they were conjoined with religion in an anonymous military official’s reference to Yee as “that Chinese Taliban.”²² No longer the poster child for the liberal and pluralist nation, Yee as “Chinese Taliban” poses an external threat to the national body and the nation-state through his race and religion. Despite the “terribly American” markers of Yee’s biography—third-generation American, model citizen, graduate of West Point, etc.—the ease with which his race and religion became legible as external and threatening is a reflection of the racialization of both Asian Americans and Muslims (Yee 13). If Muslim and “Muslim-looking” people are racialized as terrorists who stand outside of citizenship and construct the citizen as its opposite, Asians and Asian Americans, too, have long been figured as outsiders to the nation. From the exclusionary laws that barred would-be Asian immigrants from entering the U.S. to the long history of America’s wars in and against Asian nations, Asian Americans have been “defined antithetically against those who enjoy citizenship,” regardless of their formal citizenship status (Volpp, “Obnoxious” 57).²³ The Asian American, at once perpetual immigrant and always already foreign to America, “remains the symbolic ‘alien,’ the metonym for Asia who by definition cannot be imagined as sharing in America” (Lowe 6). Yee’s Muslim-ness and his Asian-ness thus work to doubly mark him as a suspect and a threat. The precariousness of Yee’s racial identity in relation to the war on terror and to the nation-state is thus informed by his status as an Asian American Muslim and also as a citizen-soldier representing the multicultural military and nation. In fact, what marks Yee as “the U.S. military’s poster child” is the very same condition which marks him as a potential terrorist, and vice versa.
 
In this sense, the predicament of the racialized soldier is not unlike that of the translator or interpreter. Much of James Yee’s work in the army, like that of Arabic interpreters, involved serving as a cultural intermediary between the US military and the general public, and between the military command and the Muslim and Arab detainees. One of the commanding officers describes Yee’s predicament at Camp Delta as an “awkward position. . . . Because of his unique background, the scarcity of that religion in the chaplain’s service, we relied on him to do things, and actually put him in the middle of that.”²⁴ Acts of translation in wartime are, as Vicente Rafael eloquently explains, “weaponized for the sake of projecting American power abroad while ensuring security at home” (3). Those who possess strategic foreign language skills necessary for warfare abroad are called upon to serve as both linguistic and cultural interpreters and mediators; it is in that capacity that translators become the most suspect and vulnerable.²⁵ Accounts of events that led to Yee’s arrest show that initial suspicions emerged from the cultural briefings that Yee routinely provided the soldiers—that he, “in the subtle nuances in the way he was crafting things,” appeared unduly sympathetic to the detainees, speaking as if he were justifying terrorist acts in his explanation of cultures and worldviews of Islam.²⁶ Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of the predicament of the translator substantiates this dynamic:
 

When relations are adversarial, the people assigned to mediate become suspect because the adversaries cohabit in them. The knowledge that enables them to do their work makes them dangerous, because what it takes to become a linguistic and cultural mediator are long-standing, varied, nonadversarial relations with the enemy culture.

(1527)

But Pratt’s point offers only a partial explanation for Yee’s situation. While his religious commitment as well as his affinity with other Muslims and Islamic culture were central to the case against him, the prevailing racial ideologies that have long genealogies in American culture and its imperial wars have done just as much work to mark him as suspicious and vulnerable. So Yee (as well as Khan) is both like and unlike a translator in that sense: if the position of the Iraqi interpreter is rendered ambiguous because of his or her presumed belonging and loyalty to another nation-state (not the U.S.), the racialized soldier’s race marks the precarity of his or her position. Racialized soldiers in the U.S. military are tasked with an impossible contradiction. They are called upon to stand as proofs of the nation and empire’s capacity for tolerance and inclusivity precisely because they are always already suspects and enemies. But their labor, like that of the Iraqi interpreters, is vital for military and imperial campaigns. This inherent contradiction in the figure of the racialized soldier makes its meanings and positions radically unstable. And this is why so much work goes into representing the racialized soldier as either the unquestionable patriot and citizen (as in the case of Khan) or as the treasonous other, the enemy (as in the case of Yee and Al Halabi) with virtually no room in between for other possibilities.²⁷ They remain in some ways, to borrow from Rafael, untranslatable:

[T]ranslation is incapable of fixing meaning across languages. . . . Hence it is impossible for imperialists as well as those who oppose them to fully control its workings, much less recuperate them. The treachery and treason inherent in translation in a time of war are the insistent counter-points to the American notion of translation as monolingual assimilation, with its promise of democratic communication and the just exchange of meanings. In the body of the interpreter, translation reaches its limits.

(17-8)

 
Rafael’s analysis of the interpreter offers a way to think about the contradiction of the racialized soldier. Because the soldier’s meaning must be fixed in particular ways, it is, as Rafael writes, “impossible for imperialists as well as those who oppose them to fully control its workings, much less recuperate them.” The state cannot quite grasp or control the final meaning(s) of the racialized soldier. Kareem Khan’s story, as narrated by Colin Powell and memorialized in the photograph in The New Yorker, insists upon his loyalty to his country even unto death as the ultimate proof of his patriotism and belonging. It thus seeks to mask the threat of treachery that plays out in the case against James Yee. That the two Gulf Wars produced radically different narratives for Powell, Khan, and Yee reveals the precarity of these claims and identifications. Even as the two subject positions appear to be irreconcilable opposites, Khan’s and Yee’s stories reveal how they are not merely interchangeable but constituted together as part and parcel of the same racial project of war.
 
War is a crisis of citizenship because even as the line between citizen-subject and terrorist gets fortified, these terms are made tenuous.²⁸ Such racial projects of war and militarism do not only affect specifically targeted populations (in the case of present war, those identified as Muslim). Tram Nguyen’s aptly titled We Are All Suspects Now collects narratives that reveal how multiple immigrant and ethnic minority communities have been impacted by post-9/11 policy changes. Judith Butler argues that in the face of state-sanctioned violence that targets and differentiates particular communities, we need to “understand precariousness as a shared condition” and, in doing so, recognize all forms and conditions of life as precarious, challenging hierarchies of violence and grief (Frames 28). What Butler urges here is not quite so simple: for it is not that we should cease to recognize specific and differentiated precariousness, but that we should recognize and oppose “state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purpose of profit and territorial defense” (Frames 32). Ahmad raises similar concerns when he points out the “inadequate levels of grief” for the victims of post-9/11 hate crimes and violence in contrast to the outpouring of mourning and grief for the victims of the 9/11 attacks themselves (107). The consequences of uneven hierarchies of grief do not merely demonstrate lack of empathy or collective emotional shortcomings; they demonstrate and perpetuate the otherness of racial others that casts their lives as unworthy of grieving, as un-grievable, to borrow again from Butler.²⁹ That such lives are and have not been regarded as human, and are “derealized,” as Butler explains, is not merely an abstract idea: “their dehumanization . . . gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture” (Precarious Life 34).
 
To be clear, here Butler is speaking specifically about the unnamed and ungrieved civilian and other non-American casualties of America’s wars in the Middle East. By virtue of their status as soldiers in the U.S. military, American Muslims and other racialized soldiers are, of course, made available for mourning in ways that Iraqi and Afghani civilians are not. But acknowledging one kind of death or violence should not necessarily preclude the mourning of another. In fact, Butler’s point speaks to the ways in which the conditions of life and death are shared. Military service has a long history of negotiating the price for immigrants and other minorities to enter into the nation-state. But the price it exacts—the state’s right to exploit and to kill for its benefit—is, and should be, repugnant, not just to racial minorities but to all. To recall Foucault again, the generalization of biopower as part of state function and power also means the generalization of the “sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people” (260). The recuperation of Kareem Khan as the loyal American Muslim soldier and the indictment of James Yee as the treacherous “Chinese Taliban” must both be understood as forms and results of state and imperial violence. One dead, one alive: it is no wonder that only the dead soldier is bestowed with the power to resurrect. But the power to resurrect and to recuperate only masks the very real violence that continues to make life precarious, not only for Muslims and Asian Americans but also for all others.