2
Open Secrets and Imagined Terrorisms
If civilization may be measured by the tolerance of unintelligibility, its capacities are weakened by monopolies of knowledge built up in the same political area using the same language. … Monopolies are subject to competition by new media.
Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (1950)
In early 2001, the Village Voice published a short interview with Zoe Schonfeld, daughter of the Schonfelds who own Village Copier, a longstanding copy shop on the border of the New York University campus. Schonfeld, at the time a law student at NYU, was not being interviewed about her family’s copy shop but rather about the fact that she was living above the shop in New York’s West Village rent-free. While she admitted to being born under a lucky star (what student wouldn’t want to live for free, especially above a copy shop?), it’s the Village Voice reporter Toni Schlesinger who ultimately conveys the wonders of living in such close proximity to a xerographic center. “Twenty-four-hour copy shops are like casinos or newspaper offices,” writes Schlesinger, “They never stop, never shut you out, no isolation. How fortunate to live above perpetual replication. It’s like a hatchery or something.”1
Like the New York Times article about the Kinko’s on Madison Avenue cited in the introduction, the Village Voice article posits the copy shop as a sort of all-night party with a bit of utility thrown in for good measure. In short, the reader is left with the impression that copy shops are a space of work, fun, and freedom, and why not? Copy shops have long been places where we are all free to break the law often, openly and usually with no fear of prosecution. Copy shops invite us to transgress, and not under a veil of darkness.
That most copying has always been and remains illegal is arguably the world’s biggest open secret. Despite ominous signs reminding customers that copying more than 10 percent of any book is a criminal offense, there has always been a high, even unprecedented degree of tolerance for the illegal activities carried out in copy shops. Of course this is neither entirely surprising nor does it necessarily point to a case of negligence. After all, it hardly seems a valuable use of public resources to crack down on undergraduates making photocopies of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Unlike with home grow-ops or exotic animal collections, one is permitted to be more or less open about one’s illegal copying, because most illegal copying is at least implicitly understood to serve rather than undermine the public good. While it would be easy to blame the flagrant violation of copyright laws on the owners of copy shops or on the people who frequent these shops, such illegal activities have also historically benefited from the tacit support of public institutions, especially colleges and universities.
Notwithstanding the considerable efforts colleges and universities make to adhere to copyright laws (e.g., officially requiring faculty to use university libraries and bookstores for the reproduction of course-related materials), they also support illegal copying and the existence of private copy shops by routinely relying on them to create an entire range of inexpensive documents related to teaching and research, from the production of course kits and conference guides to copies of theses and dissertations. As Marcus Boon observes, “Simply put: there is no university without copying, since the university’s mandate is itself disseminative mimesis.”2 So copy shops have thrived as an exception—a place where everyone is permitted to be a criminal and to be one openly—in part because it is understood that copyright laws would prohibit pursuits that ultimately serve the public good.
For all the exceptionalism afforded to copy shops, they have by no means entirely escaped policing. While students and educators reproducing articles and even entire books appear to be free to go about their business with little interference, copy shops have occasionally been targeted as sites of criminal activity—activity that allegedly threatens not just copyright laws but the security of the state itself.
Although the link between copy shops and terrorist activities is speculative at best, as I discuss in this chapter, because many copy shops located in urban centers are owned and operated by recent immigrants, house equipment that is used in the illegal reproduction of documents, and frequently do offer authorized services related to travel and immigration (e.g., passport photography), they have at times come under suspicion. Still, for copy shops to become targets of criminal investigation, other exceptional conditions need to be in place. In the weeks following the attacks on the World Trade Center, these conditions emerged. Copy shops, copy shop owners, their employees, and even xerography itself fell under heightened suspicion. As I discuss later in this chapter, in this paranoid climate the copy shop came to be seen as a space where knowledge is reproduced and where certain knowledges—the illicit knowledges connected to terrorist plots—could easily be imagined to take hold and proliferate. As I argue in this chapter, if printing technologies were integral to the rise of nationalisms in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, xerography has at times been held in suspicion because it creates real and imagined ways to undermine print capitalism and nationalism, opening up the possibility of a form of perpetual replication that exists within but not necessarily fully under the watchful eye of the nation and its laws. To understand how copy shops (and more generally xerography) have at times been construed in opposition to the state, one must first consider the relationship between established forms of printing and nationalism.
Print, Xerography, and Nationalism
That printing technologies had a profound impact on the rise of nationalism has now more or less come to be taken for granted by book historians and media theorists alike. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson maintains that the spread of printing technologies in the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries not only facilitated the mass reproduction of books in Europe but more importantly made books a marketable commodity. Before the book industry could fully capitalize on Gutenberg’s invention, however, language itself needed to undergo a series of rapid and profound changes. As Anderson emphasizes, “In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that had print capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions.” Fortunately, these idiolects were capable of being assembled into larger groupings. The result, he maintains, was a dramatic restructuring of language usage in the sixteenth century, which “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.”3
Anderson highlights three central intersections between the spread of print from the late fifteenth century onward and the subsequent emergence of nationalism. First, with print Latin waned, but so too did the importance of localized spoken vernaculars. The common languages developed through the spread of vernacular languages created textual communities that connected “speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation.” People previously living in relative isolation soon came to appreciate that they were part of something larger: “They gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.” This, Anderson insists, formed “the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”4 Print languages were also shaped by the fact that with printing, conventions of spelling and grammar, which were once the prerogative of individual scribes, became increasingly standardized, eventually leading to the development of dictionaries and grammar books.5 At the same time, printing resulted in the introduction of myriad new conventions, including typographical ones, which in turn further standardized the written word. For this reason, it became increasingly possible to read a text over time (e.g., to read a book published decades and even centuries earlier) and across space (e.g., to read a book published by a writer living in another region or even another country). Finally, and perhaps most notably, Anderson argues that print capitalism created new “languages-of-power” that were distinctly different from older administrative vernaculars. The result was a transformed field of cultural production—one where linguistic capital became increasingly important. In short, with print capitalism, the more one’s dialect resembled the established print language, the more likely one was to have one’s words put into print and to enjoy the privileges and power of being part of a print culture.
In many respects, Anderson’s argument concerning print capitalism and the rise of nationalism simply extended a thesis that had been put into circulation by an earlier generation of communication theorists and book historians. Indeed, in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein suggests (as if giving direct advice to future historians), “Studies of dynastic consolidation and/or of nationalism might well devote more space to the advent of printing.” She summarizes the effects of printing on language and its subsequent link to the rise of nationalism in terms that are echoed in Anderson’s argument. Specifically, she argues that “typography arrested linguistic drift, enriched as well as standardized vernaculars, and paved the way for a more deliberate purification and codification of all major European languages.”6 On a somewhat different but by no means contradictory track, Marshall McLuhan argues that print leads to nationalism both by enabling the visual apprehension of one’s mother tongue and, with the subsequent production of maps, by enabling the visual apprehension of the nation itself (one could now visualize the borders that contained the other speakers/readers with whom one felt a growing sense of community).7
One of the earliest and most elaborate articulations of the relationship between print culture and the rise of nationalisms is found in Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications (1950) and its follow-up, The Bias of Communication (1951). While Innis understands printing more as a culmination of earlier developments in communication than as a radical break with them, he argues that with print, vernacular languages gained increased status and subsequently created new types of empires and nations across vast stretches of space. But here what is most relevant to the discussion is Innis’s theorizing of the “bias” of media of communication. He writes:
Concentration on a medium of communication implies a bias in the cultural development of the civilization concerned either towards an emphasis on space and political organization, or towards an emphasis on time and religious organization. Introduction of a second medium tends to check the bias of the first and to create conditions suited to the growth of empire.8
Parchment, clay, and stone, for example, hold a bias toward time but do not have the potential to reach large groups of people simultaneously. Their strength lies in their ability to carry stories from generation to generation. By contrast, print and other modern forms of mass media are more ephemeral but hold the potential to reach large groups of people simultaneously across vast distances. Innis also maintains that the rise and fall of empires and later of nations happens at moments when old and new media overlap—when the bias of an established medium is “checked” by a new medium. For example, he suggests that “with printing, paper facilitated an effective development of the vernaculars and gave expression to their vitality in the growth of nationalism. The adaptability of the alphabet to large-scale machine industry became the basis of literacy, advertising, and trade. The book as a specialized product of printing and, in turn, the newspaper strengthened the position of language as a basis of nationalism.”9 Did xerography, then, do anything to check the bias of print, and if it did, what were the consequences?
Print, Innis insists, privileges space over time. Print is light, ephemeral, secular, and mobile. In this sense, xerography, which may easily be characterized by the same features, simply extends print’s reach. But according to Innis, print is also associated with the consolidation of empires and monopolies of knowledge, and in this respect the comparison begins to break down. Is xerography, then, a time- or a space-biased medium?
While it may be a stretch to situate xerography as a time-biased medium, it does share at least something with earlier time-biased modes of communication, such as speech. After all, in contrast to print, xerography is frequently deployed to communicate locally, not nationally or globally. It’s synonymous with the small print run, the micro press, and even the restricted production of four or five posters made to publicize an event or concern to one’s immediate neighbors. In short, its uses are localized in a way that shares more with time-biased than with space-biased media. Xerography has also at times been adopted to circulate the very forms of literature associated with oral cultures, including tales and legends (as demonstrated in the case of xeroxlore). So just as xerography troubles McLuhan’s binary theory of hot versus cool media, it cannot be easily accounted for in Innis’s equally binary time- versus space-biased theory of media. Attempts to make sense of xerography in the context of these theories at the very least expose the profound ways in which xerography fails to operate as a mere extension of print. This, however, eludes my original question: Did xerography do anything to check the bias of print, and if so, what were the consequences?
As Innis emphasizes, the introduction of “a second medium tends to check the bias of the first and to create conditions suited to the growth of empire.”10 In other words, political consolidation—be it in the form of imperial conquest (British imperialism in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) or a solidification of nationalist sentiments (America in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries or Germany in the early to mid twentieth century)—is facilitated by the convergence of old and new developments in communication. On the one hand, there are considerable grounds on which to argue that xerography did bolster the nationalisms established under the reign of print. Indeed, government offices were among the earliest adopters of xerography and helped to drive the technology’s development throughout the 1950s and 1960s, most notably in the United States. To the extent that xerography facilitated the reproduction of documents (and xerographic applications to microfilm opened up new possibilities for their storage and retrieval), in the mid twentieth century xerography also played a significant role in both documenting and archiving the lives of subjects gathered together under many of the nation-states that had solidified as a consequence of print capitalism and the spread of print languages four hundred years earlier.11 Yet xerography also opened up opportunities to weaken print culture’s monopolies of knowledge and eventually even put the reproduction of documents into the hands of people questioning these monopolies.12 In this sense, one might conclude that xerography offered the equilibrium between time- and space-biased media that Innis felt was needed but sorely lacking in the mid twentieth century, when his most influential works were published.
Again, as Anderson emphasizes, to capitalize on print required consolidating languages to create an increasingly coherent market. Xerographic reproduction, by contrast, rarely if ever aims to reach a specific market. Xerographic reproductions are typically produced with no intention of being publicly disseminated (e.g., they are intended to serve administrative or bureaucratic functions) or conversely are produced to be distributed at low cost or for free. As a result, if spoken vernaculars became ever more standardized under the reign of print, with xerography minority languages and dialects and even the vernaculars associated with specific scenes and subcultures (e.g., the vernaculars connected to punk) eventually gained strength and visibility as they found their way to the page. Anderson further argues that with print, people previously living in relative isolation came to appreciate that they were part of something bigger—in short, they came to recognize themselves as connected in some way to the millions of other people who shared their language. With xerography, people also came to see themselves as connected to others, but in this case the medium lent itself to the development of microcommunities—for example, the textual communities and networks that exist in parasitic relationship to the larger imagined community of the nation, such as those fostered by the production and circulation of zines, mail art, and other printed ephemera.13 Third, if print resulted in an increased standardization of language (e.g., uniform spelling and grammar) and of texts (e.g., the entrenchment of typographic conventions, from page numbers to paragraph indentation), xerography opened up opportunities for publishers to ignore such conventions. With xerography, renegade authors and publishers were free to distribute texts using nonstandardized spellings, unconventional grammar, and with or without regard for the paratextual conventions that had come to define printed works. Finally, with xerography, the need to reproduce “languages of power” weakened as the ability to reproduce documents and distribute them both locally and across vast distances did not depend on whether or not official languages were being replicated. In this sense, one might conclude that the apparent stability and uniformity of print cultures were effectively interrupted by the heterogeneity fostered by xerography.
For all these reasons, xerography might be construed as a medium that weakened the nationalisms originally bolstered by print. The persistent ban on xerography in Soviet-occupied countries throughout the Cold War appears to further support this claim.14 To appreciate xerography’s position more fully, however, one must also take into account the complex relationship and marginal status of copy shops, their owners, and their employees vis-à-vis present-day monopolies of knowledge. To bring these relationships into relief, I begin the following section by examining accounts of a government raid on a popular Toronto copy shop in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
Best Copy: From Public Good to Public Enemy
In the early years of the new millennium, a multicolored business card for Best Copy was tacked to the bulletin board in my office at Ryerson University. I had received the business card from a student whose family ran the shop—the card came with the promise of a discount and free delivery. If the name of the shop sounds familiar, it is because Best Copy is likely one of the world’s most notorious copy shops, although its infamy is only partially connected to the services it once offered. In September 2001, Best Copy was the scene of a midnight raid by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers equipped with machine guns, dogs, and battering rams.
During the raid, part of Project O Canada, a post-9/11 Canadian antiterrorist campaign, several computers and dozens of boxes of documents were seized from the premises. A year later, the Toronto Star summarized the raid in the following account:
A simple, two-page letter signed by a Brampton judge was all that Ahmad Shehab was given when police raided his Charles St. store, Best Copy, just two weeks after the World Trade Center buildings collapsed upon being struck by two hijacked planes. Shehab was never named in the warrant. Aside from the judge and the RCMP officer who oversaw the operation, the only other name on the search warrant was that of his nephew, Nabil al-Marabh. At that point, al-Marabh was already behind bars in Chicago. According to the terrified clerk behind the copy-shop counter that night, 40 or 50 officers, some wearing masks and brandishing machine guns, burst into the store at closing time. They tore the place apart, seized computers and printing equipment, and then left. The search warrant mentions police were looking for evidence of forging equipment, special paper used to make passports, and anything belonging to al-Marabh. Shehab said they kept his equipment for three months, which has resulted in huge financial losses—a situation that continues to this day. “Every time I look at the equipment in my store it reminds me of that night,” Shehab said.15
As emphasized in this report, it was not Best Copy’s owner, a local Muslim cleric, who was under investigation, but rather his nephew, Nabil al-Marabh, who once worked for his uncle at the shop. Arrested in a Chicago suburb in late September 2001, al-Marabh was brought to a Brooklyn detention center where he was held without specific charges for several months. Although al-Marabh had worked as a taxi driver and held a variety of other part-time and temporary jobs, his link to Best Copy proved to be a key factor in constructing his profile as a terrorist with direct connections to the 9/11 attacks. On September 28, 2001, an article in the Globe and Mail introduced al-Marabh as a “34-year-old Syrian” who “worked behind the counter of a small downtown Toronto photocopy shop.” The article went on to describe the circumstances of the raid on Best Copy, noting that the shop would have housed “sophisticated lamination and printing equipment.”16
Figure 2.1
Best Copy in Toronto in 2005. Photograph by author.
Less than a month later, the case against al-Marabh was mounting, and his connection to Best Copy had emerged as a key piece of incriminating evidence. The initial case against al-Marabh focused on his Syrian citizenship and the fact that he had once shared a Chicago-area apartment with two other suspects who were found to be in possession of airport employee badges. By late October, al-Marabh’s association with the Chicago suspects had been eclipsed by his connection to Best Copy (at least in the Canadian media). On October 23, 2001, the Globe and Mail reported that “investigators allege [al-Marabh] produced forged documents for the terrorist network” while working at Best Copy.17 One week later, Best Copy appeared in another article’s lead: “In downtown Toronto, the photocopying shop where Nabil al-Marabh once worked has been closed until further notice, its sidewalk sign blown over by the wind.”18 By this point, the closure of Best Copy had become a chilling reminder that Muslim communities in Canada were not immune to the heightened surveillance and erosion of human rights being experienced by their counterparts in the United States following September 11.
By the end of October, Best Copy’s owner was also coming under media scrutiny. Newspaper reports emphasized that the owner had once posted bail for al-Marabh when he was detained in an attempt to cross the border on an illegal passport. Reports also emphasized that he was the vice-principal of a local Islamic school founded by Mahmoud Jaballah, who had been put on trial on two previous occasions for his alleged connection to terrorist organizations.19 By November 2001, connections to Best Copy had become commonplace in articles about suspected Canadian terrorists. Hassan Almrei, a Syrian refugee claimant, was described by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as involved with bin Laden and connected to a “forgery ring with international connections that produces false documents.”20 Evidence supporting Almrei’s detainment and the Canadian government’s decision to sign a certificate declaring him a security threat included his possession of a false passport, his relationship with al-Marabh, and, as reported in the Globe and Mail, the fact that he was known to have “frequented the Best Copy Printing shop.”21
Neither Almrei nor al-Marabh, who was at one time described by US intelligence as a lieutenant in Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network,22 were charged with terrorist activities. Best Copy’s owner eventually reopened his popular copy shop and for some time continued to cater to the copying needs of students and researchers from the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. My former student, a part-time employee at his family’s copy shop, was evidently still working hard to compensate for the loss of business suffered in the aftermath of the post-9/11 raid when he passed along the family’s business card and the promise of a discount and free delivery in 2005. Ultimately, however, Shehab closed his shop, never fully recovering from the business lost as a result of the RCMP raid and subsequent negative publicity. Well over a decade after Project O Canada, Best Copy’s former location was transformed into a burger restaurant—under new ownership.23
How did Shehab’s copy shop so quickly become the scapegoat for post 9/11 anxieties about terrorism? How was this small shop, primarily serving faculty and students from two local universities, transformed overnight from an inexpensive place to do one’s copying to a believable terrorist enclave? What was it about the copy shop that enabled it to be so quickly and effectively taken up by the nation’s post-9/11 imagination as a potential threat—to the point where simply frequenting the shop was eventually posited as potential evidence of a terrorist link?
The Copy District as Abject Zone
If you’ve ever taken time to talk to the people who facilitate your illegal copying, you’ll know that copy shops, at least in urban centers, are often run by new immigrants, and that the people who run these shops frequently have academic and professional credentials that extend well beyond the ability to operate and fix copy machines.
For several years, I did my copying at U of T Copy (in no way officially connected to the University of Toronto). The first time I visited U of T Copy, I was illegally copying several out-of-print books borrowed from the University of Toronto library. After commenting on the source of my books and asking about my affiliation with the university, the owner of U of T Copy boasted about the other academics who frequent his shop for the same reason. As he surveyed my books, I surveyed the row of diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall above the self-serve copy machines. The documents offered a familiar narrative of immigration, education, and employment and a possible explanation for the copy shop’s out-of-place name (it was located several miles away from any university campus). Diplomas for two bachelor of science degrees and a master of science degree hung next to a certificate verifying the owner’s ability to fix copy machines. On subsequent visits, the owner completed the narrative implied by his diplomas, which he dismissively described as “just paper.” I was not surprised to learn that he had also completed four years of doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of Toronto before he was forced to abandon his studies due to financial and familial responsibilities in Canada and Vietnam. What was clear to me was that the name of U of T Copy was never intended to tell customers where they are, but rather to tell them where the proprietor ought to be.
Like so many copy shop owners, the owner of U of T Copy was evidently welcome to serve his adopted nation’s monopolies of knowledge (e.g., by providing inexpensive copying services to members of the university community) but was relegated to these monopolies’ margins. This shop may have been especially marginalized, since it was distant from any university campus. The highest concentration of copy shops in Toronto exists along the border of the city’s two downtown campuses. To the west the copy district borders the University of Toronto campus, and to the east it borders the Ryerson University campus. Best Copy ideally was situated between the two campuses, and thus was well positioned to serve both campus communities.
Copy districts, which are visible along the borders of university campuses across North America, operate as visible buffers between the university and the city. Pedestrian zones inhabited by students, academics, and other university workers, copy districts cater to the needs of the university and its members and are dependent on the university community for survival, but despite such interdependence they belong to the city, not the university. This marginal status is essential, since they are not only known sites of illegal activity (unauthorized copying) but also are sometimes associated with the reproduction of other types of documents used to aid people’s movement across borders, such as those required to apply for passports and visas (birth certificates and photo IDs) and those required to move across institutional thresholds (resumes, reference letters, and transcripts). Indeed, in sharp contrast to the conditions under which copy shops were operated in the manuscript cultures of the Middle Ages, when copyists worked for the university (which coincidentally controlled the trade in parchment),24 few contemporary copy shop owners have any official connection to the university communities they serve. If the copy district is a site where certain members of the university community and certain modes of production integral to scholarly work are managed, it is the absence rather than the presence of university regulations and recognition that makes this possible. Although copy shops are obligated to post notices about the consequences of breaking copyright law, breach of copyright in copy shops is inevitable and tolerated. People who open copy shops presumably do so on the assumption that such breaches can and will occur without significant legal or financial consequences. Faculty and student complicity in the illegal goings-on at copy shops have been integral to ensuring this remains the case. After all, everyone knows that illegal copying is an essential part of scholarly life for students and faculty; privately run copy shops located just off university property enable this illegal activity to be carried as a convenience but without implicating the university itself.
It is important to emphasize here that the visible expansion of copy districts in cities across North American in the late twentieth century was the result of more than the growing accessibility of xerography. These districts grew as the need for xerographic reproduction expanded, and this need has everything to do with the restructuring of the book industry in the 1980s to 1990s and the changing demographics of the university itself. A survey of annual business directories for the City of Toronto reveals that in 1980 there were no businesses on the border of the University of Toronto’s downtown campus that exclusively offered photocopying services; by 1985 at least six shops dedicated to copying had opened on the edge of the campus. Between the mid 1980s and the early 2000s, the number of copy shops in the district spiked, with dozens of new shops, including Best Copy, opening in the span of a decade. While the affordability of photocopying technologies was undoubtedly a factor in the growth of Toronto’s copy district (and others like it across North America), other factors need to be taken into account. Throughout this period, the cost of books increased and so did tuition fees at universities across North America. During the same period, enrollment at universities steadily increased along with the proportion of students from working-class families. Combined, these factors meant that by the mid 1990s there were more students than ever for whom buying books was truly a luxury, making necessary the availability of inexpensive photocopied materials in the form of pirated course readers and textbooks. Finally, but not insignificantly, as the student body changed, so too did the profile of university faculty. It’s a much-contested but well-known reality that since the late 1980s the number of courses taught by adjunct faculty has skyrocketed at universities across North America.25 Although most adjunct faculty officially do have access to photocopying services on campus, their access is often severely limited. Adjunct faculty, who frequently teach early in the morning, late in the evening, or on weekends, may only have access to on-campus copying services during regular business hours, when they are not on campus. In short, their working conditions make them more likely to rely on the services offered at copy shops, where they are typically left to reproduce course materials at their own expense.26 For this reason, copy districts in cities across North American have been disproportionately populated by both immigrant small business owners (whose degrees and credentials are often not recognized in North America) and a growing itinerant academic workforce—two groups that exist on the margins of the university and of the monopolies of knowledge the university represents.
In an earlier article I argued that the copy districts that cling to the edges of the urban university campus represent “abject zones,”27 a term I borrow from Anne McClintock who uses it to describe sites that are invariably part of society but are inhabited by people and practices that society at large must repudiate.28 Although McClintock’s discussion concerns abject zones in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism, there is no doubt that they also serve an important role in contemporary processes of globalization. Like the Victorian era’s slums and brothels, twenty-first-century refugee camps and, less visibly, First World ghettos inhabited by Third World professionals are sites where the erosion of national boundaries is both most apparent and most vigorously policed. In my reading of the interrelations between the academy, the city, and copy districts, the copy districts that border urban university campuses are spaces inhabited by everything the university must reject yet cannot live without, including the unauthorized reproduction of texts and the labor of a skilled but underrecognized workforce comprised of marginal laborers. Thus, copy districts arguably sustain the status and legacy of universities by creating a convenient annex where illegal practices can take place without directly implicating the university, and where highly educated minorities can work for the university without being admitted as full-fledged members or being afforded the privileges and support that come with such recognition.
If Best Copy was an easy target for the RCMP in the weeks and months following the attacks on the World Trade Center, then, it is not only because xerographic reproduction holds the potential to weaken the nationalist sentiments entrenched by print but also because copy shops are frequently run by people who either are or can be read as “foreigners,” and because these shops are already known sites of illegal activity. This is why al-Marabh’s status as a copy shop clerk or Almrei’s status as someone who simply frequented a copy shop were so easily circulated as key pieces of incriminating evidence in their construction as potential terrorist suspects. This is also why the raid on Best Copy, which was not the only target of post-9/11 antiterrorist initiatives in Canada, quickly became the most widely publicized and remembered post-9/11 raid to take place on Canadian soil. Once again, the raid was ultimately never about a desire to capture al-Marabh, who was already being detained in the US, nor even to interrogate Shehab about al-Marabh, but rather to quickly and effectively send a message to Canadians and to allies south of the border that Canada was not the “soft” nation29 it was assumed to be and was just as able and willing to purge itself of terrorists as its southern neighbor. In a sense, the real suspect was the copy shop itself.
Figure 2.2
In 2005, a Toronto copy shop’s broken sign appeared to offer customers passports while they waited rather than passport photos while they waited. Photograph by author.
Although the RCMP’s interest in Best Copy was officially dropped by February 2002, for many Canadians the shop’s alleged link to al-Qaeda persisted. While writing this chapter over a decade later, I still discovered relatively recent blog posts about the copy shop and its apparent terrorist links. One 2011 post, by a blogger who had frequented the shop in the 1990s and described it as “run by Middle Eastern men in their 30s and 40s” who “couldn’t care less” about illegal reproduction, begins: “They were always polite and would copy anything we wanted, including jackets for sexually explicit Eurotrash. They were happy to take our money and get us out of there as quickly as possible so they could get back to their work.”30 Later in the same post, the blogger retells the story of the midnight raid on Best Copy with all the embellishments one would expect to find in a bona fide urban legend:
Not long after the attacks Canadian links to the terrorist cell that brought down the Twin Towers made the news. Best Copy Printing was apparently connected to Islamic extremists and Al-Qaeda itself. An RCMP investigation dubbed “Project O Canada” discovered Best Copy had been churning out fake IDs and Canadian immigration forms. Paper stock, ink and laminates left behind by the nineteen 9/11 hijackers closely matched the supplies the busy bodies at Best Copy were using. According to witnesses, ringleader Mohammed Atta frequented, and even worked at Best Copy in the spring of 2001. … As many in the world wait for a photo confirming the terrorist mastermind’s death, a foggy image of an Osama bin Laden portrait on the walls of Best Copy (later found by authorities) comes to mind. But I can’t be sure.31
The post, with all its erroneous claims, suggests that for the general public, the idea that a Muslim-owned and operated copy shop could have a connection to an international terrorist organization was not only believable but persuasive enough to remain embedded in the public’s imagination over time. The raid on Best Copy remains an absurd manifestation of post-9/11 Islamophobia. The fact that accounts of the raid circulated as widely as they did in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks (including in Canada’s national newspaper), and continued to circulate in increasingly exaggerated form over the next decade, also reveals something about xerography’s place in the national imaginary. In short, while xerography and copy shops are part of the public imagination, they are not necessarily part of the public’s imagined national community.32 As I discuss in the following chapters, however, xerography is a medium implicated in the formation of communities, publics, and counterpublics.