American public, Holder and Napolitano were concerned with neither the activist left nor the racist right. Rather, in both instances they were referring to jihadists.
There have certainly been incidents of jihadist violence in addition to the Boston Marathon bombing that have perplexed commonplace war on terror stereotypes. In 2011, Daniel Patrick Boyd, a former high school football star and small business owner from North Carolina, plead guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. As did a New Jersey woman, Colleen LaRose (aka Jihad Jane), that same year in an unrelated case. In 2015, a Protestant-raised Oregon man turned al-Qaeda operative named Adam Gadahn was killed in a drone strike. A federal grand jury indicted him for treason nine years earlier. All three homegrown jihadists are Caucasian. More recently, sympathizers and recruits of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) have left pundits similarly perplexed (such as the case of a nineteen-year-old white woman, Shannon Maureen Conley, from Colorado who was arrested by federal agents as she was about to board an Istanbul-bound flight, her first and last stop before heading to Syria). But, as this book will show, invocations of likeness in the context of terrorist threat, like those found in the statements of Holder and Napolitano, are not limited to those who are white. In this effort, here I depart from the Tsarnaev case and return to it in the conclusion.
In this book, I am not interested in adjudicating whether or not, or how much, an individual (threat, enemy, or foe) is “like us.” This is often the work of rabid nationalists, though hardly exclusive to them. Rather, I approach claims of likeness from a more oblique angle. The original valence of Polish poet Stanisław Lec’s aphorism in the epigraph is ethical and unhinging.7 It draws attention to how a collective can take on the monstrous qualities it projects onto its adversary in times of war. The moment he describes is not one of identification, nor is it simply a matter of role reversal. It is a fundamentally disruptive experience of asymmetrical refraction in which identification itself is put into doubt. Holder and Napolitano’s statements, however, are best read as instrumentalizing Lec’s aphorism, in what I call the discourse of the Double. What terrifies both Holder and Napolitano is not the simultaneous yet disjointed and disjointing realization of one’s own brutality and one’s adversary’s humanity, but an enemy that blends into the crowd. Certainly, their conjuring of the Double is also disruptive, but is enacted through a governmental modality that services contemporary securitization. When Žižek illustrates that the work of identifying the enemy through markers of difference is never factual, but rather a laborious constructive process sometimes intricate sometimes crude, he risks naturalizing likeness, stating, “[the enemy] cannot be directly recognized because it looks like one of us.” Here, without naturalizing the expressions of difference often used in producing images of the enemy, I seek to investigate the work of constructing likeness in the realm of security. This book focuses on the functionalities of making the claim that a terrorist is “like us” in a variety of respects, the historical and media backdrop against which this claim is and can be made, and the political repercussions of doing so.
America’s anxieties concerning traitors and turncoats are hardly new. The Oath of Allegiance conscripts new Americans into the service of defending the nation “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” In the same vein, one need only think of the Cold War cries of “Reds under the bed.” Thus, this book falls within a well-tread interdisciplinary nexus that grapples with the relationship between identity, media, and citizenship in times of conflict. However, within this tradition, homegrown terrorism in its specificity has received little attention. Terrorism as an idea has had several lives, but only recently has security discourse sprouted the concept of homegrown terrorism, generating a unique context within which the spectral or phantom enemy materializes in the communication of threat.8 Moreover, while the Double resurfaces in various historical moments, albeit in period-specific articulations, it has not been deployed as a heuristic through which to make sense of identity in and for war. The academic tradition that has examined the ways in which an adversary is imagined as or made identifiable and knowable has largely rested on notions of the other. American World War II propaganda exemplifies the use of stereotyped images—of the Japanese, for example—to mark threat, as do the many fictional portrayals both pre- and post-9/11 that the face of Osama bin Laden has come to represent. While the histories to which these examples are tied belie assertions that conflict is ever so neatly bounded, the question remains: how does the formulation of a threat as one that explicitly blurs the boundaries of representation in and for security, those thought so crucial for waging a successful campaign, affect the rhythms played on the drums of war?
This book breaks down this question into component parts in order to adequately address the issues of identity, media, belonging, and citizenship it raises. How is difference—racial, ethnic, classed, and religious—communicated within articulations of a threat that is said to be indistinguishable from the citizen (distinct from those in response to a lost enemy)? How is likeness injected into visual and textual representations of the homegrown threat? How do media practices (digital and analog) of terrorist groups, citizens, and counterterrorism efforts inform and structure invocations of the Double? What does the conjuring of the Double reveal about contemporary modalities of enmity and power? How are citizenship and belonging reimagined through the Double? What is the relationship of the Double to the other, to boundaries of inclusion and exclusion? What securitizing practices does the Double accompany and facilitate?
An adequate footing from which to address these questions requires a genealogy of homegrown terrorism, one that addresses the discourses, representations, conceptualizations, practices, and strategies of communicating threat found in both popular culture and official government matters. Too often the concept of terrorism is applied retroactively ignoring the conditions that facilitate its resonance and historical particularity. In contrast, here I situate homegrown terrorism in (and as arising out of) the past forty years or so of security discourse in the context of US politics. While history is surely replete with terror and doubles, the genealogy mapped in this introduction is intended to reveal the historical conditions and theoretical maneuvers that underwrite the concept of homegrown terrorism as it emerged during the Obama administration (a period accompanied by premature and politically motivated assertions of postraciality) and provide a base from which to theorize its accompanying figure, the Double.
The historical ground out of which homegrown terrorism and the Double arise is multilayered. Making sense of it involves retracing the transformation of terrorism from a vilifying term used in piecemeal fashion into a concept around which contemporary conflict is organized. Also required are surveys of the increased racialization of Arabs and Muslims coalescing in the brown-Arab-Muslim-other as well as the depoliticization of particular modes of violence; both are internal to the organization of actionable knowledge on and about terrorism. Together, these three intertwined histories illustrate how the Double takes its shape in the confounded boundaries of conflict, acquires its existentially threatening quality, and is formulated as a figure that inversely mirrors the citizen, respectively. In short, this genealogical triad forms the complex harmony over which the dissonant melody of the Double is played.
Terrorism: From Epithet to Refrain
International-Domestic-Homegrown
The word “terror” was introduced into European languages in the writings of the Benedictine monk Bersuire in the fourteenth century. It was not until another half millennium had passed that, in the wake of the French Revolution, “terrorism” entered popular parlance and, soon after, the Oxford English Dictionary: “a government policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted.”9 Over the following century, terrorism would be divorced from the state and become “associated with anti-state violence under the impact of the Russian terrorists of the 1880s and the anarchists of the 1890s.”10 Out of the transformation from state to non-state violence arose the central conundrum of terrorism: one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
In the United States terrorism has long been a label used to vilify non-state actors. The pages of the New York Times provide a glimpse into this practice. The term first appeared in the newspaper in the 1850s, in column inches allocated to stories concerning
