In this powerful and passionate critique of the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, Derek Gregory traces the long history of British and American involvements in the Middle East. He argues that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 activated a series of political and cultural responses that mapped a profoundly colonial perimeter of power. The Colonial Present traces the connections between political, military, and economic power -- the grand strategies of geopolitics -- and the spatial stories told by the lives of ordinary people. It also shows the intimate connections between events in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Packed with empirical detail, and shot through with arresting arguments, The Colonial Present is indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand a world riven by a war on terror that is also a war of terror.

Part 1: The Colonial Present:

1.1 Foucault's Laughter
1.2 The Present Tense

Part 2: Architectures of Enmity:

2.1 Imaginative Geographies
2.2 "Why do they hate us?"
2.3 September 11

Part 3: The Land Where Red Tulips Grew:

3.1 Great Games
3.2 Uncivil Wars and Transnational Terrorism
3.3 The Sorcerer's Apprentices

Part 4 Civilization and Barbarism:

4.1 The Visible and the Invisible
4.2 Territorialization, Targets, and Technoculture
4.3 Deadly Messengers
4.4 Spaces of the Exception
4.5 Deconstructions

Part 5 Barbed Boundaries:

5.1 America's Israel
5.2 Diaspora, Dispossession, and Disaster
5.3 Occupation, Coercion, and Colonization
5.4 Camp David and Goliath Part 6: Defiled Cities:
6.1 Ground Zeros
6.2 Besieging Cartographies
6.3 Identities and Oppositions

Part 7: The Tyranny of Strangers:

7.1 "Not as conquerors or enemies..."
7.2 Coups and Conflicts
7.3 Desert Storms and Urban Nightmares

Part 8: Boundless War:

8.1 Black September
8.2 Killing Grounds
8.3 The Cutting-room War

Part 9: Gravity's Rainbows:

9.1 Connective Dissonance
9.2 The Colonial Present and Cultures of Travel
9.3 Pandora's Spaces Guide to Further Reading Index