Sunera Thobani

RACIAL VIOLENCE AND THE POLITICS OF NATIONAL BELONGING: THE WISCONSIN SHOOTINGS, ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE WAR ON TERRORIZED BODIES

This paper argues that the Oak Creek Gurdwara shootings in Wisconsin, USA, cannot be understood outside the context of the history of racial violence in the US, nor that of the contemporary remaking of religio-racial politics in the global War on Terror. Critiquing liberalist framings of such violence as grounded in the personal biographies and inter-personal bigotry of individual perpetrators, I draw attention to the criticality of such violence in instantiating religio-racial difference. The paper ends with a discussion of how such violence remains deeply institutionalized within the structures of the nation-state and sustains the reproduction of white supremacy.

Reading TWAIL in the Canadian Context: Race, Gender and National Formation

This paper reads the TWAIL literature in the context of Canadian nation-building. Highlighting the intersection of race and gender in nation-building, I examine the historical relationship between law, immigration and citizenship.

The visuality of terror: gender, sex and desire in war

ABSTRACT The constitutive relation between visuality and terror has been underscored in the early twenty-first century, from the broadcast of the 9/11 attacks to the front page coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan, from the prime time bombing of Bagdad to the Abu Ghraib photographs. However, the global transmission of these images rendered invisible this mutuality by rupturing the link between the political and the cultural, the historical and the contemporary, the individual and the social, disciplining the viewing subject into the discourse of terror. This paper examines the visual strategies at work in western cinematic treatment of war and occupation in the Middle East, by way of a reading of two award-winning Canadian films, Incendies (2010) and Inch’Allah, (2013). Highlighting the treatment of violence in these texts, I show how their underlying gender/sexual and religio-racial politics link terror to sexuality; desire to innocence; and death to the Muslim body, female and male. In my reading of the visuality of these linkages, I show how a distinct kind of heroic subject, the globally mobile white feminist, becomes coded as innocent of, and vulnerable to, the horrors emanating from the diabolical Muslim body, in the west as in the Middle East, through her engagement with terror.