South Atlantic Quarterly: A Time to Kill: Third World Assassinations and the Anxiety of Domination

https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/123/3/463/389984/A-Time-to-Kill-Third-World-Assassinations-and-the





The decades between 1960s and 1980s were punctuated by intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles (Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, and Palestine, to name just a few), the rise of Third World internationalism (both in terms of formal and informal connections), and the articulation of viable economic alternatives to those imposed by the West, but also by a massive wave of counterrevolution with bloody coups, assassinations, and interventions. Symbolically, the long 1960s started with Patrice Lumumba's assassination and ended in 1980 with Walter Rodney's assassination and the defeat of the NIEO (New International Economic Order). While numerous analyses (Prashad 2007, 2020; Brittain 2006; Persaud 2016, 2019) have engaged with these assassinations as historical events, this article seeks to provide a theoretical engagement with the phenomenon of Third World assassinations. My engagement with this phenomenon aims to broaden the idea, put forth by Quynh Pham and Himadeep Muppidi (2012), of the “anxiety of domination.” Examining the psycho-affective mechanisms through which unfathomable violence and savagery was unleashed onto Vietnam and Afghanistan, Pham and Muppidi (2012: 106) wonder: “But what if the order of the other is uncontainable, was never really contained? What if their orders exceed the framers’ controlling grasp?”

Pham and Muppidi indicate that colonial anxiety emerges when the other (the dominated, the abused, the mutilated) does not provide the recognition and validation which colonial power so desperately needs and desires: that of its overwhelming and irresistible will to dominate. Drawing on Edward Said, James Baldwin, and Eqbal Ahmad, I seek to situate theoretically Third World assassinations within a larger paradigm of colonial/imperial anxiety: these acts of annihilation happened not simply because these individuals were on the opposite ideological divide, but because their political vision exceeded the grasp of domination and intelligibility of imperial/colonial power and challenged in fundamental ways the imperially sanctioned “epistemic conformity” (see Murrey 2019: 1326). While these assassinations took place during the Cold War, what this article explicitly avoids is framing them within a Cold War framework. To be sure, the Cold War dynamics were important and (even) crucial to understanding the mechanics behind these assassinations. However, I am inspired by recent arguments in the scholarship on the interaction between the Cold War and decolonization, which seek to articulate a “Cold War studies . . . [as] a subfield of colonial studies” (Munro 2018) (and not vice versa).1

The discussion frames the issue of Third World assassinations in two registers: the narcissism of origins emerges in the construction of the Western self as an obsession with its own purity and as the “will to dominate” all that is not same (see Asad 2015: 406); the second register is the material domination via a political economy of imperial/colonial exploitation, on the one hand, and the claim to sovereignty and self-determination by dissident anti-colonial voices, on the other.2 “Assassinating anti-imperial development options” (Murrey 2019: 1323) speaks then to the anxiety of the killers who see any serious contestation of their episteme of domination and exploitation as an existential threat. Said's lecture on “Freud and the Non-European” (one of his last pieces of writing)3 provides some of the parameters and lenses through which difference is engaged either as threat (“knowing” difference as the will to dominate) or as an enriching resource. It is not accidental that Said begins his lecture with both a contemporary definition of the non-European and with Frantz Fanon's (2004: 235) injunction, articulated in his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, to leave a Europe that “never stops talking about man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.” It is the contemporaneity of (post)colonial violence that both grounds and triggers his analysis of Sigmund Freud's reading of Moses as an Egyptian, and thus challenges the story of the (European/Western) self as beginning with itself. As the discussion clarifies, it is this narcissism of origins (of the European/Western self) that becomes an important pivot from which to understand Third World assassinations. I should clarify here that I understand the Western self as a “self-designation fabricated out of the anxiety to dominate when a coherent, monolithic entity of ‘the West’ as such did not/does not exist in the first place.”4

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