The Diamond Pipeline

Abstract

In the “Age of Terror,” blood diamonds have come to occupy a central place in the way the relationship between the Arab world and Africa is understood.1 While the connection between “terrorist networks” and diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone has brought attention to blood diamonds, journalistic and human rights reports have glibly narrativized Afro-Arab relations through the schema of terrorists, mercenaries, and rebels operating across diamond pipelines.2 This paper demonstrates (i) how the relationship between Africa and the Arab world is conceived through cultural productions, like newspaper articles and human rights reports, (ii) that the representation of this relationship through current cultural productions constitutes a body of work reinforcing the “War on Terror”, and (iii) how other cultural productions have worked to symbolize the national and global tensions between containment and interdependence through the symbol of the family, a microcosm of Afro-Arab relations wherein containment and its implications of purity, loyalty, and exclusion are explored in the arguably closed spaces of domesticity. In essence, home—the closed, isolated space par excellence—provides an ideal space for exploring Afro-Arab relations in terms of containment because of the way it draws boundaries between self and other in the most quotidian sense.