THE EFFACEMENT OF PLACE? US FOREIGN POLICY AND THE SPATIALITY OF THE GULF CRISIS

Abstract

ABSTRACTS The production of a “Gulf Crisis” out of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and the subsequent inscription and mediation of the conflict, created a spatiality that facilitated the pulverization of peoples and places in Iraq and Kuwait in early 1991. This paper attempts to open up this spatiality to empirical investigation and theoretical reflection. It addresses four issues: firstly, how the crisis came to be narrated as the “Gulf Crisis,” secondly, the official geographing of the crisis with particular sets of meanings and imaginary geographies by the Bush administration, thirdly, the role speed played in the crisis, and finally, the electronic, televisual spatiality of the conflict. How one describes the spatiality of the Gulf conflict poses a difficult theoretical question. One possibility is to geographicalize Levinas and Bauman's arguments concerning “the effacement of the face.” However, narratives of “the effacement of place” ultimately rest on an innocenting of place.

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