October 31, 1992. The front facade of the Hotel Turismo in the Angolan capital Luanda is blown away by grenade and machine-gun �re in an attack on UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) of�cials staying there during peace negotiations. The cease-�re 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 �nds a surveillance camera hidden in the light �xture of the hotel bathroom. He �les 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 �red 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.
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Commerce and violence converge in the �gure 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, �xing and un�xing, by which surpluses magi- cally appear. The hotel generates surpluses through movements of bodies, com- modities, 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.
Along Africa’s West Coast, that stretch of beach and forest once known as the Slave Coast and the Gold Coast, there is an ongoing revolution in the means of production that makes the hotel’s organizational logic immanent to an entire region. (This shouldn’t surprise us; like modernity before it, postmodernity is born in the [post]colony, nurtured by the violent circulation of bodies.) Here we �nd the generation of surpluses through production without limits, through violence and movement that renders meaningless the line between war and peace. An entrepreneur from Tajikistan hires a South African pilot to fly his Russian plane to an unmarked landing strip in Liberia carrying Ukrainian �rearms left over from the war in Bosnia and purchased in Belgium. Diamonds make their way from the surface mines of Sierra Leone to a Lebanese merchant in Abidjan who sends them to Antwerp via Dubai for processing and shipment to the United States. And in West Africa, laboring bodies and the spaces they inhabit are deconstructed and recon�gured to meet the demands of this new economy. A transcontinental rhizome, a haeccity. Haeccities, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules and particles, capacities to affect and be affected.�4 They are assemblages of forces, less a collection of things or subjects than a con�guration of relationships and potencies working in concert. The haeccity that connects the diamond markets of Antwerp to the airport in Dubai to Victor Bout, entrepreneur, begins at the Brook�elds Hotel in downtown Freetown. It all starts in a clothes closet in room 121, where the weapons are stored.
