The Racial Infrastructure of the Terror-Industrial Complex

Abstract

This essay draws on ethnographic research in a Pakistani neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, to illuminate how the concepts of becoming and infrastructure reveal insights into racialization and the workings of the counterterror state. I discuss the concepts of racial becoming and racial infrastructure in the context of the terror-industrial complex, which implements technologies of policing as part of the state and toward a range of community-based approaches in the nonprofit industry. By drawing attention to the concepts of racial becoming and racial infrastructure, this intervention asks what the assumptions are of the recent theorizations of becoming, potentials, infrastructure, and terror in relationship to racism and white supremacy. In considering terror as a racial formation of becoming and infrastructure, the author argues that much is to be gained in terms of theorizing power, hierarchy, domination, the potential of innovation in everyday life, and the possibility of collective struggle.

Suppressing transnationalism: bringing constraints into the study of transnational political action

“…The internationalized War on Terror, for instance, has given rise to a transnational system of oversight and repression that criminalizes Muslim communities and immigrants across the globe, particularly in non-Muslim majority countries (Rana, 2016;Tarrow, 2016). Widespread profiling and surveillance constrains their transnational engagement by actively hindering activists' abilities to mobilize on behalf of and transfer resources to their origin countries (Chaudhary, 2015; press; Moss, manuscript submitted for publication).…”

Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy

“…Taking what Karen and Barbara Fields () refer to as the concept of “racecraft,” I am interested in theorizing how Islam and Muslims, in particular, are conjured as an object of white supremacy. As an epistemological process of racialization that denotes the inexplicable and magical, and simultaneously a structure, system, and ideology, the racecraft that conjures anti‐Muslim racism appears on the scene, yet makes itself invisible (J. Rana ). Whether Mead meant this in her comment regarding the differences between Islam and Christianity is not exactly the issue.…”

“…Drawing on the notion of racecraft, I argue that Islam and Muslims are in a formation of racial becoming (J. Rana ) in which the system of white supremacy both imagines a racial object for domination while simultaneously denying racism exists against a religious group such as Muslims. What this example provides is a way to think of this process in multiple directions through ethnographies of everyday racialization, religion, and world making (Beliso‐De Jesús ; J. Jackson ; Pierre ) that are a subtle account of how white supremacy is a quotidian interaction and, importantly, a site of contestation, transformation, and reproduction.…”

“…As an epistemological process of racialization that denotes the inexplicable and magical, and simultaneously a structure, system, and ideology, the racecraft that conjures anti-Muslim racism appears on the scene, yet makes itself invisible (J. Rana 2016). Whether Mead meant this in her comment regarding the differences between Islam and Christianity is not exactly the issue.…”

“…Cainkar ). I have theorized this paradox of race and religion as Muslim racial becoming in which race is mobilized in increasingly flexible practices of racism and white supremacy (J. Rana ).…”