An Imperialist Love Story

Desert Romances and the War on Terror

Amira Jarmakani

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479810659
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria gótica, romántica y de terror

A curious figure stalks the pages of a distinct subset of mass-market romance novels, aptly called “desert romances.” Animalistic yet sensitive, dark and attractive, the desert prince or sheikh emanates manliness and raw, sexual power. In the years since September 11, 2001, the sheikh character has steadily risen in popularity in romance novels, even while depictions of Arab masculinity as backward and violent in nature have dominated the cultural landscape. An Imperialist Love Story contributes to the broader conversation about the legacy of orientalist representations of Arabs in Western popular culture. Combining close readings of novels, discursive analysis of blogs and forums, and interviews with authors, Jarmakani explores popular investments in the war on terror by examining the collisions between fantasy and reality in desert romances. Focusing on issues of security, freedom, and liberal multiculturalism, she foregrounds the role that desire plays in contemporary formations of U.S. imperialism. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and cultural studies, An Imperialist Love Story offers a radical reinterpretation of the war on terror, demonstrating romance to be a powerful framework for understanding how it works, and how it perseveres.

1

“To Catch a Sheikh” in the War on Terror

Remember that monsters have the same root as to demonstrate; monsters signify.

—Donna Haraway

“They were building something new in the history of the world: not an empire made for plundering by the intruding power, but a modern nation in which American and Arab could work out fair contracts, produce in partnership, and profit mutually by their association.”

—Wallace Stegner, quoted in America’s Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis, 87

Capitalism is defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 373

Contemporary desert romances offer a distinct interpretation of the famous oil-sheikh caricature that emerged out of the 1970s oil crises.1 While many popular characterizations of the oil sheikh cast him as greedy and lascivious, desert romances capitalize on his riches to cast him as a desirable and debonair prince. As one of the desert romance novelists, Dana Marton, puts it: “The world was full of beautiful women and there was no shortage of sexy bodies happy to press up against a sheik who owned a couple of oil wells.”2 As we will see with other stereotypes of Arab and Muslim masculinity, this characterization doesn’t mean that desert romances categorically dispel the traditional image of the Arab oil sheikh, but rather that they intentionally craft their sheikh-heroes as exemplary figures who responsibly use their country’s resources for the greater good.

In my sample of contemporary desert romances, fifteen of them (37.5 percent) mention oil as the primary economy of the sheikh’s country. As a significant trope in contemporary desert romances, then, oil provides a sedimented metaphor for the way that security operates as a contemporary technology of imperialism. Not surprisingly, the contemporary desert romances that introduce oil as a key trope follow the mainstream narrative about oil’s role in the Middle East as well as in configuring the U.S. relationship to the Middle East. Mimicking the “discovery doctrine” of U.S. settler colonialism, which cast the Americas as a discovered land, oil fields in the Middle East are similarly described as objects of triumphant discovery.3 In both narratives, the inhabitants of the land are alternately figured as ignorant (if noble) subjects in need of the beneficent help and technology of the discoverer-usurpers or as irrationally violent figures who must be subdued. As evinced by Wallace Stegner’s popular account, Discovery!, the discovery doctrine as applied to the new oil frontier of the Middle East builds on the basic logic of settler colonialism, though it shifts from expropriating land (outright) to expropriating oil resources.4

Desert romances provide some useful examples of the way the logic of the discovery doctrine plays out in popular understandings of the history of oil. In Sharon Kendrick’s Monarch of the Sands, readers are treated to a classic rendition of the benevolence of discovery. We learn that the heroine is drawn to Arabiastan because of her “brilliant and eccentric geologist father. It had been his unexpected discovery of oil which had lifted Khayarzah out of the crippling debts caused by decades of warfare—and changed its whole future.”5 Here, the discovery is benign not only because it ends “decades of warfare” (presumed to be inherent to a backward Arabiastani country, which hadn’t capitalized on its own resources), but also because it is accidental. In other words, outside intervention comes from an altruistic (if eccentric) geologist, not an imperialist state. Though the example is extreme in that it doesn’t mention any presence of an outside state, it is nevertheless true to the discovery doctrine, which figures the discovery of oil by U.S.-Anglo powers mostly as a kind of gift to the countries that host it.6 Parallel to a white-man’s-burden logic, the discovery consequently comes with a responsibility, as the story goes, to protect the oil-producing state from would-be plunderers. Crafted in the early days of oil prospecting in the Middle East—then the Ottoman Empire—this way of conceiving of Arab and Iranian states demonstrated a transitional form of colonialism, which manifested itself in the “mandate” and “protectorate” states of Britain and France.7 Having dispensed with the quasi-colonial labels for these states, the narrative of protection was nevertheless still deployed to explain the 1991 Gulf Storm attack on Iraq by U.S. forces, for example. As indicated by these examples, the logical conclusion to the narrative of discovery casts the U.S.-Anglo power as the responsible protector of the Arabiastani state; however, the narrative also exploits the idea of cooperation, as indicated by the Stegner epigraph to this chapter.

Exemplified in narratives about the relationship of the U.S. to Saudi Arabia, the basic idea is articulated well by Jarek, the sheikh-hero of Captive of the Desert King: “Most of the equipment and materials you see were provided by the United States after we made our tentative agreement to do business with them. Now that we’ve started production they receive the majority of our crude oil. In return, they give us money and access to certain technology your government is developing.”8 Jarek’s use of the vague term “technology” to describe what the U.S. provides in return for access to his country’s crude oil implies that the technology has to do with oil production. It therefore replicates mainstream narratives about the benevolence of U.S. involvement in oil-producing states, which tend to gloss over the key form that technological “aid” usually takes—military protection and arms sales. In terms of what it both does and does not explicitly name, Jarek’s reference to technological aid exemplifies the centrality of security to the partnership between the U.S. and Arabiastan vis- à-vis oil. Exploring the ideas of cooperation and mutual benefit, this chapter elucidates how security operates as a contemporary technology of imperialism.

As an increasingly important natural resource especially after World War II, oil plays a key role in shaping the strategic importance of the Middle East for global superpowers. The usual narrative describes this importance in terms of national security and specifically in terms of the violent threats actors in the Middle East could pose to the United States and its allies. In its most simplistic form, this violence is portrayed as a natural characteristic of Arab and Muslim peoples, and in its slightly more complicated form, it is portrayed as a consequence of rogue attempts to take over energy supplies or develop nuclear weapons.9

A clear focus on the mechanics of oil in terms of capital interests, however, helps to clarify the contradictions underlying the way security operates as a technology of imperialism. U.S. interests in Middle Eastern oil reserves have always been linked to the militarization of these states, but not always for the presumed reasons. As Timothy Mitchell suggests, the arming of Middle Eastern rentier states also originally functioned as a way of recycling petrodollars back to the U.S., and, in fact, officials sought to augment the narrative of the threat these nations faced to encourage an unprecedented scale of arms sales to the region. In other words, the relationship between oil and the doctrine of security began early, but not only because of needing to secure the oil supply. In fact, oil companies at the time were more interested in restricting oil supply (by leaving some oil fields undeveloped) to maintain stable pricing. The point is not that these countries faced no threat to their resources whatsoever, but that the amount and types of arms sold to them did not and could not actually respond to such a threat. Arms sales, then, were “useful for their uselessness,” and the “rhetoric of insecurity” about oil-rich regions was produced as a way of justifying the arms sales that ultimately served to return U.S. dollars back to the United States.10

While contemporary forms of imperialism share many basic characteristics with earlier colonialist forms of power, then, the example of oil demonstrates some of its novelties. The rhetoric of security uses the tropes of protection and defense as a means of justifying military presence. Moreover, the rhetoric casts this presence as a necessary form of cooperation and mutual benefit. It uses the corporate logic of the win-win situation to move forward with expropriation, described by David Harvey as “accumulation through dispossession.”11 Recast as cooperation, imperialist operations such as manipulating and monopolizing access to crucial natural resources and imposing a strict military presence come to be organized around the anticipation of threat, both to the oil-producing country and to the hegemonic power “protecting” it. In short, security operates as a technology of imperialism by training resources away from basic needs (food, shelter, etc.) and toward the defense industry (at all levels—from gated communities to the military). Further, the emphasis on the necessity of defense obscures its uselessness, recalling Eisenhower’s famous critique of the military-industrial complex. At best, the defense industry emerges as an engine of capitalist expansion.12 At worst, military expansion produces the conditions for expanded warfare, as is the case with the Middle East, which was heavily militarized as a result of the politics of oil.13 Either way, the framework of defense displaces the violence of neoliberal capitalism (dispossession) and imperialism (militarized defense) onto racialized others—in this case, the specter of the terrorist.

An important by-product of security as a technology of imperialism, then, is its refiguring of subjectivity. Out of sociopolitical opposition (terrorism), the technology of security creates the categorical construction of personhood—the terrorist—as a reservoir of perpetual threat. From this well of presumed perpetual threat, security as a technology of imperialism feeds. The figure of the terrorist, however, is not the only category of personhood constructed to uphold the rhetoric of security. It also needs a figure of rapprochement—the cooperative sheikh. As we are told in the desert romance Sheik Seduction, “they needed someone to take over the company, someone who knew how to lead a large company in the Western way.”14 Though the terrorist certainly exists in desert romances, it is the latter figure on which these novels focus.

Desert romances are full of good sheikhs—those who seek benevolent cooperation with the U.S.-Anglo powers in order to bring their countries into the global economy or, in other words, to catch up. Through the romantic narrative, the sheikh-hero also valorizes hetero-bourgeois companionate marriage and even comes to appreciate liberal notions of gender equality. In short, he embodies liberal humanist forms of subjectivity; he becomes a rational-economic man and affirms the progress narrative. In so doing, he loses the ability to critique the violence of the accumulation-by-dispossession model, and he helps to reify the figure of the terrorist as an irrational, backward, and unintelligible other who serves as the perfect symbol onto which to displace the violence of contemporary neoliberal imperialism. Indeed, in their elaboration of this crucial figure of the good sheikh, desert romances are a most useful set of materials; they subtly demonstrate the way the rhetoric of security demands the formulation of a good sheikh. As is the case with Efraim, the sheikh-hero of Seized by the Sheikh, the role of the good sheikh is to “usher his country into the modern age. And part of the pact among the island nations would help develop the infrastructure for such an endeavor, financed by profits from the oil leases off their shores.”15

No matter which desert romance we consider, the sheikh-heroes usually serve as agents of a particular narrative of globalization, one that disavows the kind of state violence necessary to uphold the economic and social realities (especially the increasing inequalities) that neoliberalism installs. There is the character David Rashid, who wants to bring his (fictional) country Azar into the “global economy,” or Xander, who “works tirelessly to promote better relations between his country and the rest of the world.”16 Then there is Sultan Malik Roman Nuri, who needs the white heroine to “teach their sons and daughters to set goals, to dream big, [and] to fight for what one believes,” or Zageo, who knows his country must “keep investing to consolidate the wealth we have, ensuring that the future will have no backward steps.”17 In fact, as the above passages demonstrate, desert romance novels combine neoliberal themes of freedom and progress through the means of global free trade and investment with the theme of rapprochement between East and West through heteronormative union. Whether through oil riches or other means, sheikh-heroes are exceptional leaders of exceptional states, and as such, they belie the spirit of cooperative imperialism as a project of scattered hegemonies.

States of Exception

Some of the most crucial work that the rhetoric of security does on behalf of imperialism is precisely the shoring up of particular kinds of personhood—it makes coherent and stable categories out of unruly and chaotic subjectivities. In terms of the terrorist, the rhetoric seeks to consolidate vast and varied forms of violent protest and resistance into one coherent enemy, against whom the wide-ranging war on terror can be fought. The romantic oil sheikhs of desert romances, on the other hand, offer a narrative representation of the cooperative leader, and in so doing, they consolidate complicated and problematic diplomatic relationships with oppressive rulers in the Middle East into the coherent image of the good sheikh.

While the sheikh-heroes of desert romances are clearly fictional, their characterization nevertheless replicates the fantasies of cooperation and humanitarianism—fantasies that implicitly structure the way that security operates as a technology of imperialism. In this scenario, the technology of security protects a particularly exceptional form of imperialism—that of a benevolent U.S. power. It does so, further, by extending the logic of exceptionality to its newly protected, but independent, state. Desert romances make vague references to the kind of partnership the sheikh-heroes seek with the U.S.-Anglo powers. The references are vague so that they do not distract from the romantic plot narrative with an excess of politics; nevertheless, they speak volumes about the kinds of partnership they seek with U.S.-Anglo powers. Sheikh Jarek, for example, explains to the heroine that “we want to be with the U.S. in the forefront of new energy technology. . . . We could not do that with ties to OPEC.”18 His rejection of alliances with other Arabiastani oil-producing countries in favor of an alliance with the U.S. is, of course, quite significant. Under the rubric of progress and advancement, Jarek implies that he wants to collaborate with the U.S. for the greater good of his country and, ultimately, the world. The reference to OPEC serves also to cite the 1973 “oil embargo” to suggest that an alliance of Arabiastani countries would only lead to world economic chaos because it would be led by the greedy capitalist interests of oil-producing nations at the expense of the world economy.19

The general sentiment of mistrust regarding a horizontal, democratic alliance with other Arabiastani states is echoed by Sheik Kadir in The Sheik and I. Sheik Kadir seeks alliance with the fictional Anglo country of Silvershire (which is, interestingly, a monarchy) to move his country, Kahani, “into the twenty-first century with dignity and strength.”20 We later learn that he therefore opposes affiliation with the (Arabiastani) Union for Democracy because “he could not condone that organization and still ask for an alliance with the monarchy of Silvershire. Besides, there were well substantiated rumors that some factions within the ...