Empire’s Children

Abstract

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once characterised the Bush administration’s attitude to empire as making a virtue of arrested development. ‘George W. Bush as boy-hero, speaking the language of hunting down his prey, Osama bin Laden as the named enemy’, Spivak remarked, ‘belongs to the semiotic field of the Wild West: “we’ll get him dead or alive”, or, as he said to the Congress on September 22, 2001: “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorist." The boy-hero can redefine democracy - predicated on the possibility of responsible opposition - as feudalism’ (Spivak, 2002: 62). The cowboy president who shoots first and considers the consequences later, if at all, behaves in colonial space as if on a frontier in which boy heroes act up, act out, and act at will without fear or responsibility.

The time has come to set aside childish things.

Barack Obama, ‘Inaugural Address’, January 2009

When I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child; but when I became a man,

I put away childish things.

I Corinthians, 13:11, King James Bible

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Have done with childish days—

The lightly offered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers!

Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’