Hey everyone, welcome back!

 Recently during our ASTU class, we talk about the term “general precariousness” argued by English scholar Judith Butler in her Frames of War. In the excerpt Survivability, VulnerabiIity, Affect, Butler notes many valuable arguments based on her definitions and analyses about the “body”, “interpretative frame” and “war”. The most amazing part, in my perspective, is the “lens” or “frame” that we use to interpret the world, and it is the “frame” that makes people form the position that “some lives are much worthy than others” (while in fact, it’s not the case).

    When Trump signed the American travel ban, aiming to ban people from Muslim countries enter the U.S., the meaning of “global citizen” seems to fall apart. Broadly, instead of viewing the ban just as an executive order, we can find that it’s actually an exclusion of certain people with “special” ethnic. In other words, the ban draws a clear line between “us” and “them” in order to protect “us” from “them”. “They” (as Trump refers to Muslims) are opposite to “us”; “they” are enemies, in this sense, the “body”, as Butler argues, of Muslims cannot be recognized as valuable and respectful ones as “ours” since they represent the sign of “threat” to Americans after 9/11, one of the most serious historical trauma planting an unpleasant seed in American’s heart, which keeps growing in the last sixteen years and waiting to break through the soil one day. To some extent, the one day has come. For some people who view the world from their glasses, made of fear, aggression, and egotism, Muslims are not qualified as lives enjoying the same status as “themselves”. The glasses or, the frames, prevent people from seeing what has never existed, what actually exists and what will exist in the near future. Hence, whenever some people from western countries hear about the news such as #Iraqis died during the war, they will, acting like Changez (the protagonist in The Reluctant Fundamentalist) watching the explosion of 9/11 on TV, feel pleasant and involuntarily smile. “That’s a victory”! But, is that a victory? When American soldiers stepped on the bodies of those innocent Muslims, the former also proclaim a sense of control, owning the right to kill people who are not recognized as “real people”, not to mention the human rights. The lack of human rights is just one of the “milestones” on the road towards the exclusion.

Furthermore, if the constitutions of the “frame” are fear, aggression, and war, as I mentioned above, what has contributed to these traits? In the excerpt, Butler gave us the answer: the power of media.

“The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The problem concerns the media…”

Most of the people, in fact, are “nurtured” by the dominant media. We are told what to believe and what should be believed, and people just follow the norms. Taking the Japanese exclusion mentioned in Obasan the last term as an example, we will find that the most powerful push of the trauma didn’t come from people but from the government and the related media. The “sin” of Japanese were recorded perfectly in documents by dominant media to convince the mass that there’s a need to split (Japanese) Canadians in order to protect and grab what should be “us” from “them”. To encounter the precarious life is not an accident that can be formulated in an instant. Conversely, people are educated with the “selectivity” as time goes by, and the more they are exposed to the visual pictures printed in a newspaper or posted on websites, the more likely their appreciation is formed as “cookie cutter”.

Judith Butler is right: the general precariousness of life actually exists. Americans are precarious, or they will not issue the American travel ban to protect themselves. On the other hand, Muslims are also precarious because of the alert of Americans, so do people from the rest of the world. There’s no fault to protect lives, but the point is how to handle the problem. To exclude people looking like “bad guys” from my homeland? Yes, It may help..for one day? a month? a year? The fact is that it definitely will not help forever. Here’s an analogy: when you enter a room and turn on the light, you see a snake. Then suddenly, you shout: “oh no! there’s a snake! turn off the light!”. It doesn’t mean that some people are “snakes”, instead, what I really want to make clear is that dodging will never be the best way to solve the issues in front of us, no matter how publicly official it could seem to be.

Thanks for reading 🙂