The Colonial Present: Afghanistan. Palestine. Iraq

by Derek Gregory

In this powerful and passionate critique of the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan and its extensions into Palestine and Iraq, Derek Gregory traces the long history of British and American involvements in the Middle East and shows how colonial power continues to cast long shadows over our own present.
Argues the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 activated a series of political and cultural responses that were profoundly colonial in nature. The first analysis of the "war on terror" to connect events in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Traces the connections between geopolitics and the lives of ordinary people. Richly illustrated and packed with empirical detail.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Geography, Middle East, Politics, World History, Sociology

400 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2004

Reviews

[Yonis Gure · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expanding on Edward Said’s rather recondite concept of “Imaginative Geographies” from his seminal work Orientalism, Derek Gregory’s book, The Colonial Present, is a lucid critique of Western policies in dealing with the conflicts in the ME from a geographical perspective. He places the events of 9/11 in it’s correct historical context by explaining the complex genealogy of the attacks that reach as far back into the colonial past and, equally, to show how those attacks were used by regimes in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv to advance a grisly colonial present in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. This book is groundbreaking, insightful and accessible. I'd pick it up.

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is so good that I created a file called "cites from Colonial Present." He connects what is happening in Afghanistan, to what is happening in Iraq and Palestine.

It is simultaneously a sophisticated theoretical treatment and excellent connective threading of detail. I thought, "maybe I could write something like this."

It is motivated by anger but tempered by a scholars patience. There was one thing I didn't like in it -- but I cannot recall what it is at the moment.

[KATEtheGREATESTBESTONE · Rating 5 out of 5]

while most of Gregory's arguments were not necessarily new or surprising to me (maybe having read his stuff on the ME elsewhere), i really appreciated his read on bringing together the histories of afghanistan, iraq, and palestine. and 'revisiting' Said.

(look, i'm not drunk this time!)

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading for our world. Absolutely.

[/d. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gregory does a great job of tracing the conflicts in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq to their historical origins and illustrates a number of themes that bind them together under the banner of Western imperialism. The book came out 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq. While opposition to the war did already exist back then, it was by no means as widespread and accepted as it is today and we did not know yet that the entire war had been built on lies - yes some people saw these things very early on, but the general media discourse certainly didn't.

Gregory is thorough and goes through the timelines of the three conflicts in great detail. Much of what he writes is, from today's perspective anyway, rather basic, but again it might be useful emphasizing that Gregory drew these parallels already when events were unfolding in real-time.

Nevertheless, I am confused who the intended audience of the book is. 90% of the book are written in a very accessible style and present rather basic information and theories about the conflicts in teh three countries, which makes me think that the book is supposed to function as an introductory read for anyone not familiar with the conflicts, their histories and their historical entanglements. The remaining 10% of the book, however, are written in a laughably cryptic style that is symptomatic for Western political science scholarship. Almost as if to fill some kind of quota, Gregory presents us once in a while with an entire page of obscure references in which he drops names of fellow political scientists along with a tiny snippet of their jargon-oversaturated commentary:

This was a territorial formation that Israel had explicitly rejected for itself because its boundaries would have been "twisted" and "broken" and many of its villages would have been separated from their fields. And yet he "peace process" produced exactly the same forsions and severations. It depended on what Israeli architect Eyal Weizmann calls "an Escher-like representation of space," a "politics of verticality" in which Palestine was to be splintered into a territorial hologram of six dimensions, "three Jewish and three Arab." Projecting this topological imaginary onto the ground, a baroque system of underpasses, overpasses, and even a viaduct from Gaza to the West Bank would make it possible to draw a continuous boundary between Israel and Palestine without dismantling the blocs of illegal settlements.

or

The use of the fictive "we" is deliberate; a vantage point was carefully constructed to both privilege and protect the (American) viewer through a fabrication of (American) innocence and the demonization of the (Iraqi) enemy. By conferring an instantaneous ubiquity upon the spectator, the circumference of this Americanocentric vision seemed to be projected from an Archimedean point in geosynchronous orbit above all partisan interests: a sort of universal projection. And, as Paul Virillo remarked, it also pulled off a God-trick. Proclamining "ubiquity, instantaneity, immediacy, omnipresence, omnivoyance" it transformed the spectator into "a divine being, at once here and there." From this position and perspective, war became "the remote controlled destruction of places whose only existence to military personnel was as electronic target coordinates on a screen," and O'Tuathail argues that the complicity between "the eye of the military's watching machine and the eye of the television camera" effaced both the materiality of places and the corporeality of bodies. What he calls this "electronic spatiality" presented the war to its audience "as live yet distant, as instantaneous yet remote, as dramatically real yet reassuringly televisual." As these vacillations suggest, voyeurism of this sort depends upon a peculiar torsion of time and space.

I think overall it's clear what Gregory is getting at, but considering the overall tone of the book, I just for my life don't understand why he has to occasionally indulge in this fetishized academic jargon. If you write a book to general audience, you can paraphrase authors rather than quoting them, so that you ridiculous phrases such as "an Archimedean point in geosynchronous orbit" or "an Escher-like representation of space, a politics of verticality" (don't get me wrong, these are good points in themselves, but you just won't get them across this way). Because if anything, this constant shift in jargon speaks of Gregory's "vacillation," to use his own term.

All of that being said, the book presents us with a solid case of (and against) American imperialism, an argument from which so many political commentators are still shying away. It's an important read, and overall Gregory has done a great job putting together the relevant evidence.

[Christopher Potter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreasonably one-sided. The suffering of poor Muslims in these areas was and is tragic, but there's no attempt to assess how realistic it would have been to treat them with more care while also protecting Israelis threatened by terrorism based in Palestinian areas, and Westerners threatened by terrorism based in Afghanistan. The book is also thoroughly choked by pompous and ridiculous ivory tower buzzwords that aren't going to convince anybody of anything. In short, the book unwittingly serves more as an indictment of the far-left academic echo chamber from whence it came, rather serving as an effective indictment of any overreach by Western powers.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This is why an analysis of the production of imaginative geographies is so vitally important. As Stephen Holmes puts it in his review of Power's indictment of indifference (at best inattention) to so many of these contemporary genocides, the distinction between "us" and "them" has consistently overshadowed any distinction between "just" and "unjust." Gilbert Achcar describes this more generally as a "narcissistic compassion," rooted in a humanism that masks a naked ethnocentrism: a form of empathy "evoked much more by calamities striking "people like us,' much less by calamities affecting people unlike us"(Gregory 29).

[Amany Al Sayyed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Especially useful for people set on Academic journeys about the Middle East, this book is clever, the least pompous or pretentious out there by comparison in the field of Colonialism and identity politics .... my favorite thing about Gregory is his bright interest in art. In images and carto/photography ....

A

[Ayah-Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever and thought-provoking - gives you an interesting insight into America's war on terror, and how this links to Orientalism

[Rima · Rating 4 out of 5]

His concept of 'architectures of enmity' was highly interesting to uncover and apply to several discourses of racial relationships.

[Joeji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired by the late Edward Said, Derek Gregory investigates the imaginary geographies that fuel current conflicts in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. His argument is that colonialism is not dead, but is present in the conflicts after 9/11. This may seem like an obvious thesis, but Gregory's claims about colonialism may be what is newest to the reader. He succinctly places colonialism in a context of "us vs. them"; "we" are order and "they" are the jungle. He shows how this rhetoric and colonial logic was used (non-ironically) at all levels of American/British/Israeli decision making in three separate and intertwined conflicts post 9/11. The main thrust of his argument is that individuals in occupied lands become non-humans, or homo sacer, and this gray area allows western military logic to render them in a legalistic gray area that freezes them or erases them in time. This concern about space, and the folding of space into new and oppressive geographies is what mainly adds a new urgent criticism of US/UK/Israeli policies towards their colonial "others."

[Andrew]

Here's the thing: I am the choir to which Derek Gregory preaches. Nothing in this book especially surprised me. Of course the wars in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq are neo-colonial. I learned some new details about the events of those wars, but the overall thesis was neither especially shocking nor informative, but it was well-presented and there were lots of nifty maps. The one contribution I found was the notion of an "imaginary geography" that informs the colonial attitude-- this is something that I can work with, and hey, I gotta love a guy with a geography background.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating analysis of the history and present situation of some of the most contested colonial sites in the world. Beyond the spin of governments it presents a picture of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel that shows the effects on people caught up in conflicts beyond their control.

[Gada]

The continuation of colonialism as we witneesed

[Emily]

Amazing

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read if you're even remotely interested in the Middle East, Afgahnistan, and Iraq.