Introduction

This paper grew out of a panel of three linked papers designed to address one of the four central themes of the First IASA Congress: where is here? From what position is here articulated? Focusing particularly on geographer Doreen Massey’s book Space, Place, and Gender, the panel collectively set out to suggest ways in which the concepts of ‘hereness’ and of place as they have been articulated in the theory and practice of social and critical geographers could be folded into work in American studies. Our various experiences on the ground at the IASA Congress confirmed for us our sense that the theoretical work of critical social and cultural geographers can make a vital contribution to the conceptualization of ‘international’ American studies itself, particularly to the critique and renegotiation of its normative terms and practices. In our panel, however, we focused on the usefulness of geographical theory for Americanists on a different scale, with each of the papers exploring the potential of geographical theory for American studies practice through case-study discussions of particular texts in US cinema or literature. While assuming a broadly geographical understanding of and approach to American studies itself, in other words, we concentrated on this occasion on a demonstration of some of the specific ways in which the terminology, concepts, and theories of contemporary critical geography can be used to frame textual analysis. In submitting these papers to the proceedings we decided to keep the three presentations in their original compressed conference format, presenting the joint work of the panel as a co-authored paper, not only because we want to highlight their interdependence but also in order to make a first and firmly collective argument for the usefulness and relevance of geographical theory to American studies in general.

Doreen Massey’s book Space, Place, and Gender, first published in 1994, has had a powerful impact on her own field as well as on many areas of the humanities, including American studies. Her work has allowed scholars across the disciplines to better theorize the centrality of space in the twentieth century, whether the frame of reference is postmodernism, transnationality, postcoloniality, or globalization. Across changes in scale, too, Massey’s work has helped to theorize the local as well as global, looking at the power relations in the home as well as in the workplace. Using concepts developed in Massey’s essays on space, place, globalization, gender, and home, our papers engage specifically with the power relations created by networks of US racial and ethnic identities. The first section takes up Massey’s fundamental redefinition of geographical place in order to rethink the relationship of ‘local’ to ‘national’ to ‘international’ in US literature, through a discussion of Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California. The second section then brings into play the concept of geographical scale, thus further complicating the concepts of place and scale in a close reading of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s short story “American History.” The third section focuses on Edward Zwick’s 1998 movie about Arab terrorism in the US, The Siege, taking the concept of place as the basis for a discussion of the film’s production of safe and unsafe cinematic spaces and its projection of a particular ideologically-loaded intepretation of time-space compression.

‘Here’ in Yokohama, California: Toshio Mori’s Place in American Literature
Yokohama, California is the title of a collection of short stories by the American writer Toshio Mori, published in 1949, forgotten for decades, and rediscovered in the 1970s . “Yokohama, California,” is also, of course, a place name. The title and the place name both position Mori’s stories in an American context. “Yokohama, California” is an American place like “Boston, Massachusetts.” “Yokohama, California” is an American book like Winesburg, Ohio. When the stories are put together and named, Mori’s text becomes a book, and his “Lil’ Yokohama” becomes a place. The stories have a strong sense of “here”–and as the geographer Michael Curry has pointed out, “hereness” provides a powerful frame for normativity. The normative idea that “that’s how we do things” is very often place-related: “that’s how we do things here.” But where is “here” in Yokohama, California? and who are “we?”

Because we are usually in more than one place at the same time, the normative “that’s how we do things here” effect generates ethical dilemmas, as Curry also points out. Here, for instance, we are in a public space, at an international meeting, in Leiden, in an English-speaking environment, in the Netherlands, in Europe, at an American studies conference. How do we figure out how we do things “here?” The characters (and the readers) who find themselves “here” in Yokohama, California have to negotiate similarly complex geographies. Yokohama, California is not only the name of a book and the name of a place; it is also, in fact, the names of two places, “Yokohama” and “California,” two names and two places separated and linked by a comma. Let’s say they are two American places: Lil’ Yokohama, the neighborhood, and California, the state. As there is no part of Yokohama that is not also California, and as all the stories take place in Yokohama, this means that all the stories happen in two places at the same time–or three, in fact, if we add the implied “America.”

But yet another way to read the title and understand the “here” of the text appears when we imagine Yokohama and California as two places which exist in different locations, distinguished in this case not by scale but by distance. That version of the title of the book (and the name of Mori’s fictional community) juxtaposes the Yokohama of a remembered Japan and the California of a present America. When the comma separating and linking the two places represents an ocean, then we can see how the title, like the stories, generates a folded space of physical distance and relational proximity, and the geographical “here” of the text starts to look very complicated indeed.

So, Mori’s stories are about one specific place: Yokohama, California. They are about two American places of different relative sizes spatially co-present in one American location: Yokohama, and California. And they are about two places which despite being physically distant are nonetheless relationally co-present in a spatial network of journeys and communications and memories: Yokohama over there and Yokohama over here, Japan and America.

Mori’s title in this way not only presents the reader with a place (or places); it also raises the question of how place in general (and American place in particular) is defined. The stories of Yokohama, California are quite commonly read as descriptions of a unique, bordered community: an insular Japanese inside sharply defined by its difference from the surrounding American outside. But as the very title Yokohama, California suggests, and as Doreen Massey has clearly shown, it is not a comprehensive definition of ‘place’ to see it as a bordered space with a fixed and static location and a unitary identity, a simple inside with an outside, a center with a margin (Massey 155). As Massey and others have argued, there is nothing in the nature of place itself which means it has to be understood this way, as a self-evident and self-contained combination of community and location. Places can equally usefully be understood as “localized knots in wider webs of social practice,” (Gregory 321) and their specificity grasped as the result of the “juxtaposition and co-presence of . . . sets of social interrelations and by the effects which that juxtaposition and co-presence produce” (Massey 169). Places, in this geography, are not static, not possessed of any single, unique identity, not the products of an internalized history, and not defined by internal coherence. Instead, their “inside,” their uniqueness, is always the product of a combination of particular unfixed and dynamic connections to, and exchanges with, a variety of “outsides.”

Places cannot easily be purified of these links and exchanges and complex interactions, despite the fact that it’s relatively common to identify a place in a particular way and then ignore the aspects which do not appear to fit. I once read a book review, for example, which characterized a novel set in Japan as being “more a story of the English in Tokyo than of Tokyo itself.” This separation of the city “itself” from one type of resident seemed to me puzzling. Was it based on the assumption that “the English in Tokyo” were somehow not really a part of Tokyo “itself,” not really there?

Toshio Mori is best known today as a Japanese American writer, a pioneer in the writing of Japanese America. His books, we might say, are commonly read as records of the Japanese in America, not expressions of “America itself.” At the time of the book’s rediscovery, the first generation of self-consciously Asian American writers and critics read the book in this way, as a specifically Japanese American text, for good reason. They were looking for a forgotten tradition, and engaged in a collective and specifically Asian American “act of recovery” (Wong 12). Mori’s stories were so important to them because they “remain the only collection of Japanese American stories to faithfully describe the pre-World War II Japanese American community nestled in the East Bay Cities of Oakland and San Leandro” (Wong 11-12). For Lawson Fusao Inada, writing an introduction to the reprint edition of the newly rediscovered Yokohama, California in 1985, it was simply “the book” -- “the first real Japanese-American book” by “the first real Japanese-American writer.” It was the “legacy, tradition . . . the embodiment of a people.” “This is Japanese America,” he wrote (Mori v). Shawn Wong positioned the book similarly as a specifically Japanese American text about a Japanese American community, ascribing its relative lack of early success to the fact that in the post-war years when it was originally published “it was still the wrong time for a Japanese American to be the first of anything, including the first author to show how remarkable and unique Japanese American communities were in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay area” (Wong 75).

I read these stories at a different time, in a different place, from a different perspective. And my impression of the stories is quite different; to me, their point is not only that they show “how remarkable and unique” those Japanese American communities were at all, but also that they show how normal and ordinary they were. In this alternative reading, the stories are not only emphasizing the uniqueness, the Japanese-ness of this way of life, but also presenting it to the reader as an everyday American normality, a normative part of America itself.

Reading the stories in this way, the “here” of Yokohama, California functions on many layers at the same time: reading, we are here in Lil’ Yokohama, here in California, here in a web of networks linking Japan and the USA, here in America. And who are “we?” Critics writing about Mori’s work in the context of Asian American literature have sometimes implied that his natural readership, as well as his characters, is Japanese American. But I think it’s useful here to make a distinction between Mori’s apparently intended reader and his implied reader, because it seems clear that although the stories read as if their “here” is grounded firmly in the community of Lil’ Yokohama, Mori’s primary target audience was the broad American “white reading public” (Yamamoto 8; Kim 163). It is true that, as Stan Yogi has remarked, not only are all the characters in the stories Japanese American, but “the narrative voice speaks with confidence to a familiar community” (Yogi 131). And this means that, as Inada puts it, “the reader is allowed to experience the people and situations directly, immediately. In effect [Mori] allows each reader to be a Japanese American and to experience that life, from the inside out” (Mori xvii-xviii). But none of this means that Mori wrote the stories for Japanese Americans, or intended the textual “here” of the fictional Lil’ Yokohama to be inaccessible to readers who in real life inhabited different kinds of neighborhoods. For me, Mori’s stories put Yokohama firmly ‘here’ in America. “The people of Lil’ Yokohama are here,” Mori writes. “Here, here, they cry with their presence just as the youngsters when the teacher calls the roll” (Mori 71).
In fact, the way in which Mori puts the intended (distant) reader in the position of the implied (local) reader actually allows them to experience Yokohama, California as a part of the “we,” on the inside, as normal–even, indeed, as typical. Mori seems to make no concessions in creating this inclusive voice, writing as if everybody understands everything: the author, the narrator, the characters, and the reader are in positions of equal linguistic power and equal local knowledge. And he reinforces this sense of the local by the constant use of inclusive plural first-person pronouns–“we,” “our”, “us”–so that any reader is as a result included, is temporarily hailed as Japanese American. As Inada emphasizes, in Lil’ Yokohama, “the people do not define themselves as non-white,” and the fact that Ayako Saito, the “All-American Girl” of the story of the same name, is incidentally Japanese is not surprising at all but just “fitting and natural” (Inada xvii). In “The Woman Who Makes Swell Donuts,” the donut-making woman is known as “Mama.” Mori writes: “I suppose there is in every block of every city in America a woman who can be called Mama by her friends and the strangers meeting her.” Strangers and friends, we (readers) are both. In the same way that we read Mori’s stories, he eats Mama’s donuts: we “drop in and taste the flavor; her flavor, which is everyone’s and all flavor” (Mori 25). My point is that the normative “here” of Mori’s text is inclusive, not exclusive; the stories are set in a complex “here” that is at the same time and in the same place specific and generic, Yokohama, California, America, Japanese America, an old women’s Yokohama, a young man’s Yokohama, Yokohama’s baseball ground, baseball grounds in general.

What Mori has created, I think, is a collection of stories that present the Californian Yokohama as a place with a unique flavor, a specifically local flavor, but nonetheless a flavor that has been produced out of national and transnational connections. And I think it’s important to notice that although the flavor really is unique, the way in which the flavor is produced is not unique at all. The existence of a unique local flavor produced within the frame of national and transnational networks can be read, in fact, as typical not of Japanese American fiction, but of American fiction in general. When the narrator drops by to visit the woman he calls ‘Mama,’ to sit with her and taste the flavor of her donuts, he understands that even while she is, uniquely, the Mama of Yokohama, California, there is still “in every block of every city in America a woman who can be called Mama by her friends and the strangers meeting her” (23). She is both unique and typical, and, visiting her for both these reasons, he likes to “drop in and taste the flavor; her flavor, which is everyone’s and all flavor” (25). Yokohama’s Ayako Saito is both a particular girl and an “All-American Girl,” (91) just as “morning, noon, and night roll on regularly” in Yokohama both uniquely and just as they do “in Boston, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Emeryville” (71). Yokohama, too, has a flavor which is both its flavor and everyone’s flavor. So Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California is in this sense not only a unique American community but also a typical American community—typical, in fact, in its uniqueness, typical precisely in the way in which it comes uniquely into being at the meeting place of a complex interwoven set of spatial and social networks. Similarly, Mori’s Yokohama, California is both a unique text and yet a representative text, coming into being as a textual ‘here’ at a particular crosspoint in a complex interwoven set of networks of social and textual reference.

The geographer Marc Brosseau has called for a geographical approach to text that asks how it “generates norms, particular models of readability, that produce a particular type of geography” (Brosseau 349). In Brosseau’s terms, I think, Toshio Mori’s texts generate a normative geography in which relational proximity is as socially and spatially significant as physical distance. This is a geography so familiar when it links, for example, Boston with Rome, or New York and Chicago with Oxford and Montenegro, that it has often gone unmarked. Transatlantic Euro-American links have routinely been taken as so foundationally American as to not really seem transnational at all. But in our newly transnational American studies more and more networks are coming into view: neustro America, for example; the Black Atlantic. Read as a part of transnational America, and understood in terms of the geographical articulation of place offered by geographers like Doreen Massey, in other words, Yokohama, California becomes a typical as well as a unique American text. To be “here” in Yokohama, California, it turns out, is to be no further distant from the authentic center of American literature than to be “here” on Walden pond, “here” on Mango Street, or “here” in The House of the Seven Gables.

The Social Construction of Geographical Scale in “American History”
This section explores a method of reading literature that draws on theoretical work in cultural geography to show that the concept of geographical scale is useful in reading a short story, “American History” by Judith Ortiz Cofer. First, the term scale needs some explanation. In geography, scale refers to the level of analysis; for example, geographers might conduct their research at the regional scale, or the national scale. We probably all use the concept of scale without naming it, as in the global and the local. But as critical geographers are careful to remind us, there is nothing natural about the scales we are accustomed to in contemporary life. Indeed, although in recent history the nation-state has been a “powerful scale of social organization,” it wasn’t before the seventeenth century in Europe; then the city-state and regional scales were more relevant to political and economic systems (Smith 725). So one of the most important things to remember about scale is that there is nothing natural or inescapable about the division of scales into global and local, national and regional; rather scale, like place, is socially constructed through human interactions, movements, and relationships (Marston 220). And as with many products of social interaction, “scale-making is not only a rhetorical practice; its consequences are inscribed in, and are the outcome of, both everyday life and macro-level social structures” (Marston 221).

Recent discussions in geography have called attention to the way in which analyses that confine themselves to one scale can ignore the frequent interpenetration of scales, and to how often the bigger scales are more privileged (i.e., global as more important than local). Critical geographers today, for example, recognize a “loose hierarchy of geographical scales, from that of the body, the home and the community, through the local, regional, national and global” (Smith 725). For feminist geographers, as Robyn Longhurst argues, this hierarchy has meant that women’s experiences, traditionally lived at the scale of the home and community, have been deemed less important than events operating at the national and global scales, in which men are often the main actors.

But as Massey’s conception of ‘place’ points out, recognizing the uniqueness of a particular “local” place does not mean we must ignore social and political activity occurring at a national or global scale that has direct connections with that local place (Duncan 583). This key term, place, challenges any potential oversimplification in the hierarchy of scales. As Massey argues, place can be theorized as a web of interconnections that shifts over time and that complicates any effort to separate out social relations according to scales such as global and local. Her concept of place reveals the many links of identity and location, so that it is no longer possible to characterize places as homogeneous and fixed. Rather, “the geography of social relations forces us to recognize our interconnectedness, and underscores the fact that both personal identity and the identity of those envelopes of space-time in which and between which we live and move . . . are constructed precisely through that interconnectedness” (Massey 122). Even in extremes such as segregation or apartheid, places are generated and defined not only by the majority or the powerful, but also by the very maze of power relations that operate there, including forms of resistance and conflict. Like Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones,” places encompass both battles and alliances. Places are constituted by encounters at every imaginable scale, forming a kind of hub that stretches out beyond the local, folding various geographical locations into one place.

Thus, place is not confined by physical or cartographic boundaries; it also includes connections with “outside” places, at multiple scales, as for example in urban areas with immigrant populations (the setting of Ortiz Cofer’s story discussed below). Certainly the urban scale is important, yet the national and global scales are also factors in defining places such as, to take this story as an example, Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New Jersey cities. Geographer Neil Smith has written about what he calls “simultaneity of scales” in which the “interflow between bodily, global and intervening scales is neither smooth nor regular, and specific events may embody destructions and reconstructions of various scales at the same time” (726). In a similar vein, scholars in American studies and women studies have argued that the separation of public and private spheres, while initially a useful hermeneutic tool, can lead to the mistaken notion that the spheres ever really were separate (Kaplan 1998). I’m trying to argue here that like those inseparable separate spheres, scales are also a useful hermeneutic as long as we examine them in their place-based contexts in all their simultaneity.

The story “American History” by Judith Ortiz Cofer describes a New Jersey teenage girl’s crush on her neighbor and classmate, culminating in a visit to his house to study for an American history test on a cold November day in 1963. But the boy’s mother turns her away at the front door, trying to discourage a relationship that she disapproves of: her son Eugene is white and the narrator, Elena, is Puerto Rican. The story operates on several significant scales, each of which I’d like to examine in the process of explicating the spatial allegories and relations of power at work in the story. What follows is a brief gloss of the story, moving from the most intimate to the widest scale and then back again to argue that the story demonstrates that the scales cannot be successfully separated. In this sense, the story illustrates Massey’s notion of place, where there are multiple and contradictory relationships of power, scale, and identity.

The story’s most intimate scale is the family and community of an individual young woman in Paterson, New Jersey. From her window in a high-rise tenement, she observes the occupants of the only house on her block that has a yard, first an elderly Jewish couple and then a white family from the South. Elena badly wants to enter that family home as a partner to her classmate, Eugene: “to sit at the kitchen table with Eugene like two adults, like the old man and his wife had done, maybe drink some coffee and talk about books” (Ortiz Cofer 97). But her crush on Eugene is only the most recent reason she wants to go inside; before, when the older couple lived there, she had “become part of their family, without their knowing it, of course” and when they were gone, she “had to resist the temptation to climb down into the yard and water the flowers the old lady had taken such good care of” (94-5). In her relationship with her next-door neighbors, Elena experiences feelings of exclusion and longing that she directs toward both the space—the house itself—and its occupants, the older couple and then Eugene.

Zooming out slightly to the urban scale, the story narrates the transformations occurring in many US cities in the 1960s, for example, shifting urban populations and suburbanization. The history of American immigration is legible in Elena’s neighborhood geography: she describes how incongruous the little house and yard appear next to her home in the tenement, El Building. As she ponders how “Paterson, the inner core of the city, had no apparent logic to its architecture,” she realizes that “the little houses had been there first, then the immigrants had come in droves, and the monstrosities had been raised for them—the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, and now us, the Puerto Ricans, and the blacks” (101). The haphazard urban landscape of tenements and single-family homes is also heavily inflected by class and race: Eugene’s family, recently arrived from the South, insist that they “won’t be in this place much longer” (101) and El Building is occupied by working-class Puerto Rican families who dream of the suburbs, “where people mowed grass on Sundays in the summer and where children made snowmen in the winter from pure white snow, not like the gray slush of Paterson” (97). Despite similar strivings for middle-class suburban life, the neighbors are divided by racial and ethnic differences.

At the national scale, Elena’s position as outsider looking in on the family house can be read as a spatial allegory of segregation, a microcosm where the tenement and the little house represent both the geographical proximity and the social divisions between white Americans and people of color in the US. But it also, at the same time, echoes the international scale of migration and immigration, resembling successive generations of immigrants who preceded the Puerto Ricans in the urban enclave where Elena lives. The ugly El Building comes to stand for the “other” presence in Paterson, a place everyone dislikes and longs to leave behind. In this way the story illustrates the way in which there is no easy way to separate out one scale from another without losing something in the process.

Elena’s perspective, literally suspended, unnoticed, on the fire escape or gazing out the window into the house’s backyard and kitchen window, also reproduces on a smaller scale the geopolitical relations between the US and Puerto Rico. She has a kind of double consciousness, a privileged view into the lives of the “Americans” in the house, yet they seem not to notice her. Although Eugene’s house is next door to El Building, an invisible boundary separates them; although the teenagers may not notice it or choose to ignore it, both mothers know it exists. Elena’s mother sees her watching Eugene’s house from the window and warns her not to forget the way ethnicity limits social relationships: “You are forgetting who you are, Niña. . . . You are heading for humiliation and pain” (100). When Elena arrives to study American history with Eugene, his mother asks if she lives in El Building and turns her away at the door, explaining that they will be moving soon and her son won’t need help studying. “Run back home now,” she says (101).

The friendship with Eugene complicates Elena’s own sense of place as she identifies both with her tenement and with the home she yearns for: she sees the world not only from her own perspective, peering down from the fire escape into the windows of the house, but she also realizes the impact El Building has on the lives of the family who live in the house: “It was not until Eugene moved into that house that I noticed that El Building blocked most of the sun” (96). After befriending him, she is able to perceive not only the enviable advantages of living in the house, but also the drawbacks that result from its proximity to her own building. Her identification with El Building conflicts with her sympathy and desire for the house-dwellers: “El Building blocked the sun to such an extent that they had to turn lights on in the middle of the day. I felt ashamed about it” (100).

One of the most striking ways in which the story exemplifies the simultaneity of scales, the interweaving of personal, neighborhood events with events of national and global significance, is the fact that it takes place on November 23, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. This day is usually recounted in literature and memoirs as a traumatic national event that was experienced as a personal loss by millions of individual Americans. Narrated through Elena’s eyes, the assassination is a vague, disturbing event that causes shocking emotional behavior in all the adults she encounters. She recognizes the pain in her community, where her parents “talk sadly about the young widow and her two children, as if they were family” (102). But for her, the trauma of that day is more immediately personal: she is refused entry into a house she has wanted for years to see, and refused friendship with Eugene on the basis of her ethnicity. The irony isn’t lost on her: she lies crying in bed, “trying to feel the right thing for our dead president. But the tears that came up from a deep source inside me were strictly for me” (102). Although she recognizes that today the national scale “should” take precedence over the personal, Elena cannot adjust her sense of loss and realizes that for her, on this day, Kennedy’s death was overshadowed by her own traumatic experiences.

To conclude, this story illustrates the kind of interconnection of scales that defines a place in Doreen Massey’s conception of the term. Even a quick gloss of the story such as this shows the usefulness of geographical theory to Americanists interested in power, identity, and space. The “American History” of the story’s title is ironic in its multiple and contradictory meanings: a high school class to study for, the assassination of a US president, the layers of urban history of Paterson, and the long history in the US of spatialized power relations.

Locating Terrorism: Safe and Unsafe Space in The Siege
In this section I want to analyze the cinematic representation of space in Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998), a film that deals with terrorism in New York City. The story involves Arab Muslims who blow up buses and buildings in the city thereby generating fear among the citizens. The FBI team headed by Anthony Hubbard, played by Denzel Washington, takes up the role of tracking down the terrorists and restoring peace and security to the city. The movie’s plot is about an enemy who is an insider and lives in the midst of New York, so first I consider why it has the title of The Siege, a concept that implies a bounded area, such as a fortress, which identifies the outsiders and enemies as those people living outside its boundaries. The siege recalls medieval imagery of wars and invasions and evokes a nostalgic yearning for "the old days" when it was possible to set up spatial barriers to prevent somebody from entering one’s space. At another level, in Hollywood cinema the imagery of the siege has become a stable topos in American Western, where the scene of the besieged wagon train or fort has provided the justification for the annihilation of Native Americans in the course of fulfilling teleological notions of national progress and manifest destiny. Now looking at the title of Zwick’s film, the question that comes to mind is “who is besieging whom?” And since the film narrative shows that it is the Arab Muslims who are laying siege to the public space of New York, then what facets of manifest-destiny agenda are involved here? And since The Siege seeks to justify the expulsion of Arab Muslims from the US, how can that be possible in a time of globalization and a new and violent phase of “time-space compression?” (Massey 157).

Yet, as Massey rightly points out time-space compression is not a recent phenomenon, one of the outcomes of our era of globalization. Indeed, colonialism, as Massey and a lot of other post-colonial critics argue, was a form of time-space compression in which the colonized people’s lives were disrupted by a colonizer who brought not only its/ his civilization but also his short-term project of turning the colony to a supplier of natural resources and/or markets to his products. Yet, as she writes, “[t]hose who today worry about a sense of disorientation and a loss of control must once have felt they knew exactly where they were, and that they had control. For who is it in these times who feels dislocated/placeless/invaded? To what extent . . . is this a predominantly white/First World take on things?” (165). Given the visibility of the conflict over geography, space, and identity within the film’s narrative, I propose to work with Massey’s idea as related to the eurocentricity involved in the belief of time-space compression as a threat.

At first glance, New York City in The Siege appears to be a place with a multicultural identity; yet, as I will prove, the film insidiously locates the presence of the Arab Muslim community as a source of deadly threat. And as Doreen Massey argues: “When time-space compression is seen as disorienting, and as threatening to fracture personal identities (as well as those of place) then a recourse to place as a source of authenticity and stability may be one of the responses” (122). Certainly the film’s movement from the desert somewhere in the Middle East to a mosque in a Brooklyn street then to the FBI headquarters in New York folds together different spaces that produce a frightening sense of fragmentation. Later in the film, Brooklyn’s multicultural communities will be in danger because they include this other place/culture/identity which is marked as exclusively Middle Eastern and Islamic. The film’s narrative then enlists these several “minor” and “major” communities, represented by no less than the multicultural FBI team, in the crusade to purge their city of the enemy whose identity is conveniently established in an Arab street in Brooklyn. So in a sense The Siege's liberal gesture in foregrounding the multiethnicity of contemporary New York becomes all the more mischievous, because the Arab American community, which should have been considered as one, certainly heterogeneous, element of the several minoritarian cultures in New York, is cast out as evil. Arabs, precisely male Middle-Easterners, are the only deadly threat which will destroy the happily-living-together communities. In this regard, terrorism, which understandably raises fear and anxiety in the people afflicted by it, provides the justification for lumping all Arab Muslims together into stereotypes as intruders in and destroyers of an idealized space of New York City.

In The Siege, the pre-credit sequence resorts to stock footage showing the explosion of the US military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, onto which it juxtaposes the voices of well-known American news announcers whose comments serve to introduce the alleged terrorist Sheikh Ahmed Bin Talal, a clearly fictionalized version of Bin Laden. Right after this, we are given a scene that shows the Sheik roaming freely in the desert; yet, his hiding in what he thought as his impenetrable space, as highlighted by his satisfactory grin, will be only short-lived. Indeed, the shots of President Clinton’s condemnation of the terrorist act and his promise of punishment are instantly gratified via a cut-away scene to CIA agents and/or Israelis whom we will see laying a trap for the Sheik and then successfully capturing their “package.”

This sequence, actually, contains time-space compression par excellence, for the US military presence in Dhahran, as such, is there not only to secure the flow of the oil with all the neocolonial implications of that mission but also to maintain control over global energy supplies. Here the US, via its oil multinationals and military bases in Dhahran, represents, what Massey terms “the power geometry of time-space compression.... [which is] about power in relation to the flows and the movement . . . . [which involves] the groups who are really in charge of time-space compression, who can really use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases” (149). Significantly, too, this opening sequence portrays the presence of the US mainstream media in close connection with US global hegemony/control over oil, reflecting the US media’s power as a tool that reinforces and is reinforced by US economic and military dominance over time-space compression.

Yet, the pre-credit sequence in the film narrative does not explain and contextualize how the differential mobility and control of time-space compression by the US oil multinationals supported by the US government as well as the Saudi oligarchy severely undermine the powers of the others. Instead, the sequence creates a dichotomous relation in space that honors the long perpetuated binary images of “their” barbarism and “our” burden to defend the world. This simplistic construct echoes the concept of the title with its insiders/outsiders as mutually exclusive. This is why in the texture of the film, the bearded and robed Sheikh Ahmed bin Talal makes an appearance only after the blast, is approached by a camera that catches his profile a la police photography, and is ushered into a US prison without ever being given the chance to reveal his perspective on the attacks on the US military in Dhahran.

Accordingly, the pre-credit sequence, instead of showing Dhahran as a product of the complex interrelationships between the US and the Saudi royal family, and among military, oil, and media interests, simply establishes the enemy as an evil Arab Muslim man. In my view, this sequence exercises what Stuart Hall terms “symbolic violence” in the way it relentlessly perpetuates a eurocentric view that recognizes threat only if “our” mobility is at stake and “our” control of time-space compression is under attack (Hall 259). The devastating effects of “our” political and economic power on weak nations or oppressed people is elided in exchange for a simpler good/evil binary represented by the long-established Orientalist construct of a degenerate and fanatic Muslim mentality. In this scheme only the threat lurking for the US oil giant industries and USAF is recognized; there is no space for recognizing how these giants' mobility and power undermines the freedom and well-being of other groups.

Since the pre-credit sequence pursues an essentialist encoding of the innocent, righteous “us” vs. the irrational, criminal “them,” the siege as a medieval strategy to keep out and eliminate the undesirable community will prove to be feasible even in a global city like New York, one of the centers of the world economy. In fact, from the very beginning of the film, our recognition of New York will be welded with our apprehension of the lurking threat embodied in the presence of the Arab Muslims via the minaret shot, as I will explain below.. I argue that the film succeeds in achieving this effect by manipulating safe/unsafe technique. Richard Maltby explains that classical Hollywood cinema, which sought to engage the viewers’ emotions, paid special attention to the camera’s movements. Hence, movies tend to begin with an establishing long shot and move smoothly to a medium shot after which it might move to a close up creating thereby what Maltby designates as a safe space inside which “we [the audience] can direct our attention to engaging emotionally with the characters, confident that the movie’s image stream will avoid any sudden shocks that may abruptly disrupt our involvement in the action” (204-06).

Dealing with “their” terrorism (equated with Islam and Arabs) and “our” forced response to punish, as foreshadowed by the pre-credit sequence. The Siege consciously produces two different kinds of cinematic space. On the one hand, the unsafe space created by abrupt cuts and swift changes in camera movement and placement flings at us images of a Muezzin in a minaret, and people praying in a mosque and another group praying at home. More importantly when the camera starts tracking out of the mosque and we start realizing that the mosque in question is in New York, twilight-like colors fall upon the screen and an ominous non-diegetic music blends into the Muezzin’s call, all of which serve to trigger a feeling of uneasiness, a foreboding of coming threat. Certainly the mise-en-scéne at that level seeks to convey a cacophonous taste in the juxtaposition of the mosque and the New York skylines. Right after that the camera reverts to the safe space technique and comfortable measured editing for the introduction of the FBI agent Anthony Hubbard and his multicultural team.

Unsurprisingly the first battle that will take place between the “evil” Arab Muslims and the “good” FBI will take us back to the same street where we spotted the mosque before. This Arab street, which is in Brooklyn, also provides the background for a chase scene between an Arab suspect and the FBI. That Brooklyn or an Arab street should harbor an Arab terrorist is not the issue I am contesting here but the fact that The Siege insists on building up a space of terrorism that is exclusively Arab and Muslim. In deed, the following violent scenes that show us the terrorists in action juxtapose the Arab Muslims as faceless hijackers of the city’s public spaces with fear-stricken people who are fleeing for their lives. Significantly we are directed to identify some of these attacked people as particular minorities, such as Jewish Orthodox men. By cynically pitting New York’s diverse communities against the Arabs, The Siege does not allow these latter to be seen as simply inhabiting the domestic space of their unthreatening daily lives, or for that matter as also being threatened by the terrorists' actions.

Indeed, the film makes the city derives its specificity in its obsession to ostracize the aberrant street in Brooklyn. Yet, as Massey argues “what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus... the specificity of place... derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations...." (154-56). Yet, via its manipulation of the safe/unsafe space technique, the film succeeds in collapsing the Arab Muslims into a dangerous community which is bent on destroying New York and by extension American civilization. The film achieves this effect because it is only after the elimination of the Arabs from the space of New York. And only by portraying "them" as members of a foreign culture that brings terrorism to the US home can the film justify that “they” pose an apocalyptic threat and thereby deserve death. Indeed, the Arab characters reinforce the film’s spatial representation, for they are enlisted to plead guilty and support the decontextualization and political disinformation the film pursues.

If we turn again to the title and look at it in relation to the film’s plot, it seems that The Siege is actually about the fantasy of creating a purified space where the siege, or secure divisions of space along patterns of medieval times, would be possible. At the same time, The Siege’s narrative is encoded around the siege as a cinematic trope that perpetuates the myth of the innocent American under attack.

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