HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMof territorialism has been that of (regulated) crisis. There has, of course, been a crucial
conjunction between territorialism and capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century, in-
sofar as each complexly obstructs as well as enables the other. I can’t delve into this here,
though we might say in brief that the intent of territorialization is that of fixing location
and identity (ever anew), while that of capitalism is dislocation, a universal uprooting and
co-option of the local, the eccentric, the self-conscious, and the self-constraining in the
interests of capital itself. But the point that I do want to make is that the persistence of
these modes of organizing modern life, each of them disruptive of established social rela-
tions even as it imposes others, has depended on their adaptability, their ability to recu-
perate precisely what challenges them. If, as Simon Critchley rightly argues, ‘‘rather than
evolving toward a revolution that would take us beyond it, one might say thatcapitalism
capitalizes itself... it simply produces more capitalism,’’ then so too territorialism territo-
rializes itself, it simply produces more territorialism.^11 That is, the crises generated
through these respective socio-political and socio-economic systems—by the resistant,
the avant-garde, the radical—are time and again defused and redirected in the interests
of the system itself.^12 In territorialism as much as capitalism, structural contradiction is as
likely to fuel as to disrupt such powerful systems, more likely to nurture inventive art
than to instigate the final rupture.
In the case of Western European colonialism, by the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries this logic was being extended to the colonial domains themselves. Like the
European nation’s internal peripheries (urban as well as rural), these external peripheries
were decreasingly seen as simply the sites of raw resources, supply posts, and markets,
but instead as jurisdictions to be ‘‘transformed into cloned territories offshore that must
themselves be clearly bounded,’’^13 the stronger the work of territoriality in the nation-
state, the stronger the conviction that the colony too was to be integrated and reformed
into the image and the extension of the national self, the center. This, for example, was
the argument so fervently made by the influential Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje in
hisNederland en de Islaˆm(The Netherlands and Islam; 1911/1915). Hurgronje’s most
responsive audience, however, remained not the government but the missionaries, who
shared his territorial intentions of reforming the Dutch East Indies to the point that the
differences between the Eastern and Western halves of the empire would disappear. Even
in the case of such ‘‘successful’’ empires as Britain, the problem in practice was how to
balance the intention to integrate the other with the equally necessary one of separation
and hierarchy, which made colonialism possible in the first place. And the answer was to
continue to assume—and assure—that the colonial lay far from the center, peripheral not
only in place but in time and culture.^14 Some day they would be like us, it was said, but
not now. The duty of the colonized, as of all marginals, was to take their place in the
waiting room of history; ours to bear the heavy burden of transforming and reshaping
them.^15
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