Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::November 26, 2001

Worth repeating

Neil Smith, professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, gave the first of this year’s geography department colloquia earlier this month. Some excerpts:
“The events of Sept. 11 were, for all of us, extremely destabilizing. . . . For those of us from New York, in the first instance, this was an extraordinarily local event. . . . I began to ask myself how it was that an event that to me, living in New York, was so extraordinarily local, was being recast to me over the news networks as an event of national significance,
a national tragedy. . . . This set me off on an attempt to understand the conflations of scale that were constructed in the minutes, hours, and days following this event and . . . the politics of scale. . . .
“I think the ideological hysteria and xenophobia that was whipped up in the hours and days after the initial event wasn’t simply an ideological event--there was a practical and geographical side as well. Within an hour of the attack, the geographical border between the United States and Mexico was closed. Very quickly the Canadian border was closed also. Incoming planes from all across the world were diverted to Canadian territory. Several days afterward, a homeland-security position was constructed, which connected the geographical closure of the country . . . to an ideological closure that was also being enacted. . . .
“How are we to explain the fact that the dominant discourse has been to send the
Sept. 11 events through a national sieve, invent a national scale of response? Historically nationalism is the discourse of war; the national scale is the scale at which wars are fought and defended. . . . So the invention of a national scale for this event had everything to do with the justification for a national war that would come two weeks later. . . .”

--Beth Roberts

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