Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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and other are contrapuntal figures and their relational trajectories play out side by side, intertwine, merge, and separate in complex ways. Indeed, the securitizing notion that titles this book could be written as “home|grown” to illustrate that it marks not simply the combination of foreign seed and native soil but an attempt to keep them separate through their conjunction. This relation is staged in popular fictional portrayals. In the widely popular series Homeland, the homegrown terrorist is a white Marine named Nicholas Brody who returns home after eight years in captivity. Yet, Brody’s crisis of identity and involvement in a terror plot are closely tied to Abu Nazir, a prototypical bin Laden figure (i.e., bearded, turbaned, Arab, and Muslim), with whom he developed a complex relationship through the latter’s son (who was killed in a US drone strike). The program, in which a military hero “turns,” plays out America’s contemporary fears of homegrown terrorism. It is a phenomenon also visible in the before-and-after images that accompany news accounts of Americans who have tried to join ISIS.
Here, assertions that contemporary security positions the citizen as simultaneously suspect and spy must be tempered by the fact that this position is not equally distributed. That is, some are more suspect than others (Brody’s radicalization is tied to, though not strictly at the hands of, the prototypical other). And while there have been recent cases of informant-led operations preventing violence against Muslim Americans, the rhetoric (and effort) of government officials illustrates that the practice is largely focused on America’s mosques.78 Moreover, the invocation of the Double is (an attempt at the) postracial in that it facilitates the distancing, at least rhetorically (through representations of terror via the white body), of the official government position from strategies of profiling, even as government agencies undertake such measures. Last, the brown-Arab-Muslim-other is irrevocably tied to the development and conjuring of the Double in contemporary security discourse (Chapter 1 dives deeper into the complex work carried out in marking an influence for political violence as “foreign”). Together, the Double and the other create a productive tension of deferral and closure, disruption and suture. The two figures are deeply imbricated, and the Double is often a figure deployed strategically to uncover the potential other hiding within the populace. Nevertheless, the distinction between the other and the Double is crucial because, as I have outlined here, the Double exhibits significantly different forms of representation, fulfills a unique function, and signals distinctive relations of enmity and power. While the Double is by no means an equal opportunity concept, always inflected with the identity of whomever it is placed over, it captures the ambivalent play of otherness and likeness in discourses that warn of a threat that can mutate and materialize, a phenomenon somewhere in between infiltration and emergence, in the homeland.
Chapter Overview
The remainder of the book takes its cue from the genealogy presented here. I have attempted, however briefly, to retrace how the purview of counterterrorism in the United States has been (re)defined over time (historically) in a way that affects its spatiality and how the Double reemerges in discourses of security in this context. The following chapters are organized along these dimensions of homegrown terrorism/counterterrorism: definitional, historical, and spatial. These are not the only possible gateways for thinking through homegrown terrorism and counterterrorism, but they are tied to significant questions or problems concerning these phenomena. Discuss terrorism long enough and questions about its definition will arise. A constant issue in security, academic, and popular circles, the addition of “homegrown” into the mix only further complicates the matter. Also, terrorism is often invoked in an ahistorical tonality or has a way of obscuring important pasts. Thus, a history of anxieties of infiltration holds promise for making sense of the phenomena under the umbrella of terrorism in a more critical light. Last, in the late war on terror, anxieties concerning the collapse of spatial divides are increasingly visible in, for example, the construction of border walls.79 Yet, boundary making in this environment is not limited to the border. Rather, it permeates social, cultural, and political relations, and, thus, examining the spaces of counterterrorism within (rather than at) US borders is a crucial aspect of understanding homegrown terrorism.
The three dimensions of homegrown (counter)terrorism that structure this book reveal more than just insights to the questions or anxieties from which they emerge. Each provides an entry point into further developing the figure of the Double and its place in security discourse. It is a potential I exploit by pairing the definitional, historical, and spatial with issues of identity, media, and citizenship, respectively. Certainly, these issues and the dimensions to which they are tied are intricately cross-stitched and overlapping; thus, the chapters are meant to be iterative in that respect. In other words, the pairings (definitional/identity, historical/media, spatial/citizenship) are intervals that cadence and cascade, and it is from the subsequent intersections and interstices that the Double emerges in all its complexity. The book is replete with doubles: shadows, split personalities, clones, imposters, and doppelgängers. The Double as a heuristic construct here is not intended to reduce these manifestations into mere synonyms or different representations of a unified phenomenon. Rather, the Double ties these together in shifting ways that reveal the intricacies of today’s anxieties, discourses of security, and modalities of conflict as well as how they come to bear on articulations and experiences of citizenship.
Chapter 1, “Identity and Incidence: Defining Terror,” is concerned not with the formulation of a universally accepted definition of terrorism but with examining how three very different men and their violent acts were coded as terrorist: Daniel McGowan (ecoterrorist), Wade Michael Page (domestic terrorist), and Nidal Malik Hasan (homegrown terrorist). The chapter is structured along two definitional axes. The first is nominal (and suggestively ordinal) and examines the way identity constructs are deployed in efforts to mark an actor and his action as an existential threat, as “foreign.” It is a maneuver performed through the super- or sub-imposition of the brown-Arab-Muslim-other atop or beneath the familiar—be they the white faces of environmentalists and racists or a US military uniform. For a threat to be existential it must also be reoccurring and persistent. Thus, the second axis is temporal and examines how each actor/action was constituted as an incidence rather than a mere incident. In this effort, I detail how each man was paired with a past doppelgänger—McGowan/Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Page/McVeigh (who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing), Hasan/al-Hazmi (one of the 9/11 hijackers)—and characterized as a rematerialization of a ghost that promises subsequent, cyclical, and perhaps even more destructive returns. Together, the two axes illustrate the complex interplay of constructs of familiarity and difference as well as temporality in recoding violence as terror. Therein, I illustrate how the Double, a figure positioned in the past and future, but never present—one deployed strategically by various actors—is the operational figure of anticipatory or preemptive politics, the failure of which only reinforces its necessity.
“Informants and Other Media: Networking the Double” places contemporary fears of radicalization in a productive comparison with Cold War fears of infiltration. By focusing on media, writ broadly, I show how these anxieties are both, at their base and despite their differences, fears of connectivity. Furthermore, they are made sense of—and simultaneously exacerbated and alleviated—through the lens of conspiracy. Thus, Chapter 2 is situated in two courtrooms over sixty years apart: the 1949 Foley Square trial in which eleven leaders of the Communist Party of the United States of America were found guilty of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the US government; and the 2008 trial of the Fort Dix Five, New Jersey men convicted of conspiring to kill US military personnel. I remap how an old surveillance medium, the paid informant, fostered, facilitated, and elicited social, technological, and ideological links between those accused and broader enemy networks (Communism and global jihad, respectively) in a manner that made conspiracy legible to publics and juries. Here, the Double is found in the network; neither here nor there, but always circulating. As such, the Double is epistemologically inseparable from the media implicated in the enemy network by the informant—books, videos, etc.—and the informant himself (as a surveillance technology). Here connectivity is simultaneously ill and remedy and the informant is a securitizing-Double, the enemy-Double’s inverse, a conspiratorial figure that exploits connectivity