War
by
African American and diasporic discussions of war reveal how authoritative white, Western theorists have oversimplified the important role of “difference” in theorizing war, whether we are thinking of war as a practice or as a metaphor for social relations. A racially and historically inflected exploration of such complications is critical to a robust consideration of the myriad meanings war has accrued within an African American and black diasporic framework. The Prussian military strategist and former general Carl von Clausewitz famously conceptualized the structure of war in his influential treatise On War ([1832] 1997, 42): war is “nothing but a duel on a larger scale.” As he imagines it, war is akin to a contest between two people—a “self” and an “other”—but enlarged into a conflict between multiple “selves” (the same as you) and multiple “others” (different from you but indistinct from one another). Clausewitz’s representation of war as a simple dichotomy had a lasting influence on later cultural theorists’ interpretations of war. Analyzing the canon of British modernist writing of World War I, Paul Fussell has argued that the compulsion to identify with a “side” during a complex war involving multiple entities produced a “persisting imaginative habit” of “gross dichotomizing”...
This essay may be found on page 216 of the printed volume.