Visuality, politics, and histories in the remaking of Iraq

This dissertation examines the politics of visuality surrounding one of the key events of the Iraq war -- the Abu Ghraib tortures. In opposition to the dominant framing of Iraq as a "failed state," the first half of this dissertation argues that the American intervention in Iraq recalls an earlier colonial endeavor, the 1920s and 30s British Mandate for Iraq. The American and British militarized state-building enterprises both attempt to shore up legitimate states out of "failed states." Both belong to a common statist nomos that seeks to defend the state against the imagined threat of the return to a Hobbesean "state of nature." These projects of state securitization have, in historically distinct ways, relied on the proper visualization, segmentation, and disciplining of the future nation-state's subjects. In the 1920s and 30s, racial configurations and tribal alliances in Iraq were established with the help of the anthropometric visual typologies of Iraqis gathered by the American anthropologist Henry Field in 1927 and 1935, and the visual tableaux of photographs collected by the British administrator for Iraq Cecil Edmonds. Orientalist photography and visual typologies premised on anthropometric and biometric studies both enabled, and legitimized, American and British disciplinary projects by providing tools for the recognition and thus differentiation of foe and friend within the state. Such processes of distinguishing legitimate states and peoples, however, were not implemented only in Iraq. Media coverage of the 2003 traumatic tortures at Abu Ghraib prompted profound redefinitions of American identity, which are explored in the second half of the dissertation. In an effort to reaffirm the status of the United States as a benevolent nation, the official discourse as well as popular media portrayed the tortures as isolated acts of a group of deviant and unfit citizen-subjects---the so called "Hillbillies" exemplified by Lynndie England. In 2005, the cultural stereotype of the "Hillbilly" was remediated in an Internet-based global phenomenon called "Doing a Lynndie," in which bloggers posted snapshots drawn from everyday life that parodied England's iconic gestures in the Abu Ghraib photographs. "Doing a Lynndie" attests to the power of popular media to legitimate and further propagate state-sponsored mechanisms of social exclusion. While Lynndie England became the hypervisible icon of the tortures, the sexually abused and tortured female detainees from Abu Ghraib remained almost completely invisible in the popular media landscape. The media hypovisiblity of these Iraqi women signals the important role popular media plays in legitimating certain imaginaries of the political community by providing a powerful framework for the circulation of ideas and images. In sum, the dissertation analyzes the impact of visuality on remembering and forgetting traumatic historical events and in shaping legitimate political communities and common national imaginaries.