The Brookfields Hotel (Freetown, Sierra Leone)
October 31, 1992. The front facade of the Hotel Turismo in the Angolan capital Luanda is blown away by grenade and machine-gun fire in an attack on UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) officials staying there during peace negotiations. The cease-fire is over, and the civil war resumes.
January 15, 2000. Leader of the Serbian “Tigers” paramilitary, head of the Obilic football club, and indicted war criminal Zeljko Raznatovic, aka “Arkan,” is shot in the head in the lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in Belgrade. According to the BBC, the assassination could be “politically or gangland related.”1
July 11, 2002. On a business trip to Tennessee, Bryan Brewer finds a surveillance camera hidden in the light fixture of the hotel bathroom. He files a $1.5 million lawsuit against the Knoxville Marriott. “In Mr. Brewer’s case,” says his lawyer, “he has become paranoid. . . . When he does travel, he spends a lot of time going over every inch of his hotel room to make sure it is safe.”2
October 26, 2003. The U.S. administration in Baghdad is located in a compound that includes the El-Rashid Hotel. At approximately 6 a.m., six to eight rockets are fired from a makeshift launcher into the west side of the building. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, regarded as a principal architect of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, is staying on the twelfth floor of the hotel but escapes injury.
Commerce and violence converge in the figure of the modern hotel, its genealogy stretching back to the garrison and the inn. Hotels are the creations of empires: mansionis housed the military delegates of Rome as they moved about their conquered territories; the corners of the thirteenth-century Mongol kingdom were connected through a postal service whose messengers lodged at relay houses; the American railroad instituted the block hotel for masses of travelers across the expanses of the nation. Now that global capital has entered its own imperial phase, the hotel space is where contests over the monopoly on legitimate violence enter the cash nexus of globalization.
The hotel is also the domicile of the nomad. It is a concrete yurt, a space of deterritorialization—understood not as the erasure of place but as one half of the process of decoding and recoding, fixing and unfixing, by which surpluses magically appear. The hotel generates surpluses through movements of bodies, commodities, imaginings, rumors—and their endless creative couplings. A bricolage space of “indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved.”3 A space of production without limits.
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Notes
For their generous input on various aspects of this project, I thank Anne Allison, Ralph Litzinger, Diane Nelson, Charles Piot, and Orin Starn. Research in Sierra Leone was supported by the Social Science Research Council through the Individual Dissertation Research Fellowship program and the Program on Global Security and Cooperation with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
- BBC News, “Arkan Murder ‘Prevents Justice,’ ” January 16, 2000, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ europe/605444.stm.
- “Knoxville Marriott Sued for $1.5M after Guest Finds Hidden Camera in Bathroom Light Fixture,” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, Tenn.), September 25, 2002, www.hotel-online.com/News/ PR2002_3rd/Sept02_HiddenCamera.html.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7.