A Justice Site
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Created: November 3, 2001
Latest Update: November 3, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Speaking Out Against WarJournal entry by jeanne
Review and Essay by Jeanne Curran, Susan R. Takata, and Olivier Urbain
Copyright: Jeanne Curran, Susan R. Takata, and Olivier Urbain: October 2001.
and Individual Authors. "Fair Use" encouraged.
This essay is based on Arundhati Roy: An Indian Novelist Turns Her Wrath on the U.S. New York Times article by Celia Dugger, November 3, 2001, at p. A3. backupArundhati Roy's anger is drawn by US denial of the role its own foreign policy has played in the situation in Afgahnistan:
"She argues that Osama bin Laden is "America's family secret," the monstrous offspring of its support for the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 'He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America's foreign policy,' she writes. The bombs raining down now, she says, are 'blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury' and will inevitably spawn more terrorism."Concepts for Conceptual Linking:
- complicity through denial: The easy rejoinder that we have done nothing to bring on the disaster assumes that the Other, responsible for the disaster, had the agency to act on his own. But to the extent that we acknowledge the interdependency of agency and structural context, our interactions with the Other have influenced the outcome. To deny the responsibility of those interactions is to be complicit in the willingness to suppress and dominate the Other. This is what Edward Said is saying about Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. To deny the fact that Mansfield Park was supported by colonization and slavery is to be complicit in that colonization and imposition of slavery.
Discussion Topics:
- Question or topic - concepts and or theories to consider.
Related References:
- The algebra of infinite justice By Arundhati Roy. The Guardian (London). September 29, 2001. Reaction to September 11, 2001, The World Trade Center bombings.
- A Silver thimble in Her Fist May 25, 1997 book review of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Book Review by Alice Truax. backup
- The End of Imagination by Arundhati Roy. The Nation Website. 1998. On India's nuclear testing.