The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. Hamid Dabashi.
Hamid Dabashi begins his work The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012) with the very familiar start of the Arab Spring narrative: with the “inconspicuous” self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 10th, 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. On January 17th, precisely a month after Bouazizi’s act, a 40-year old Egyptian also self-immolated; international media was “on alert” and there was a “synergy in the air… the world watched” (18).
The conscious symmetry between the two self-immolations is a fitting beginning to Dabashi’s more broad argument. Dabashi explores the transnational linkages within and outside the Arab revolts in order to explode the Spring’s familiar framing. For Dabashi, the Arab Spring marks the metaphorical and actual end of both the domestic nithaam and the foreign regime du savior – these revolutions are not motivated by replicating the “West” but instead transcend the very concept of the West. The Arab Spring thus demands new, radically different conceptual frames in order to capture both the revolutionaries’ motivations and the revolutions’ potential implications.
The story of the Arab Spring, of course, begins before Mohamed Bouazizi. Dabashi observes as much in his blunt picture of the world order, defined “not by pyramidal relations of power but an amorphous network of domination, benefiting the ruling regimes and disenfranchising the rest of the globe.” For Dabashi, the very concept of “the West” has become useless, with the effects of neoliberal disempowerment dispersed transnationally, within a “specific” yet “amorphous” system of capital flows. As capitalism’s logic is towards transnational and global domination, the appropriate mode of resistance to it will always be national and regional. The events of the Arab Spring are, consequently, something like the “Palestinian intifada going global,” a delayed defiance to global disempowerment which calls to mind the preamble of the Tunisian constitution: “supporting oppressed people everywhere,” in particular Palestinian liberation, the constitution asserts.
The transnational sentiment carried in the Tunisian constitution and elsewhere marks a “new language of revolt,” which Dabashi sees as “open-ended.” Dabashi extends Arendt’s On Revolution to make sense of this new revolutionary mentality. Arendt criticizes the French revolution for its insistence on “social matters” and prefers the American Revolution for its emphasis on “political issues,” thus positing the public domain as, in Dabashi’s reading of her work, “the space in which freedom from fear and the liberty to exercise democratic rights is realized” (245).
If Dabashi makes any recommendation throughout his book, it is an extension of Arendt’s thought: that the active formation of labor unions, women’s rights organizations, and student assemblies are a crucial buffer zone between the atomized individual citizen and the totalitarian tendencies of the state. The Arab Spring must realize their active formation to succeed, even if it has, in its force and tenor, already worn down conceptions of the “postcolonial.”
A critical and oft-neglected effect of the Arab Spring, for Dabashi, is not only postcolonialism’s exhaustion, but also the exhaustion of political Islam. Both post colonialism and political Islam, when pictured as a response to colonialism yet a participant in the colonial dichotomy still, are ended. The Arab Spring is what allows the subjects of both colonialism and postcolonial dictatorships, within the Arab World and outside it, to reassert their autonomous voice together, with collective cries of “al-sha’ab yurid isqaat an-nitham.”
There is an obvious danger in pronouncing all ideologies “exhausted” because of the Arab Spring when the Spring remains plainly unfinished. More than that, Dabashi often sidesteps specific context in favor of a transnational picture of uprising, including Iran’s Green Movement, Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring as related and comparable events that Dabashi argues can and should be analyzed as a collective whole. It is difficult to reconcile the “exhaustion” of political Islam, for example, with the emergence of Ennahada in Tunisian post-revolution politics, a specificity which Dabashi does not touch.
Dabashi’s argument is not, of course, that “Islam” or “Muslims” have lost political agency, but rather, that the ideological construction of “political Islam” must be formulated anew. Yet to call Islamism “exhausted” remains problematic — under Bourguiba and Ben Ali in Tunisia, Islamism was never given space to exist in the first place.
If the Arab Spring does mark the end of postcoloniality in a more broad way, this exhaustion mandates a new conceptual point of reference for academics: Dabashi names this a “liberation” geography, where the Middle East is no longer anyone’s “east,” but itself an independent reference point. Dabashi picks-apart, in great length, media and academic works on the Arab Spring, decrying the end of “Middle East Studies” as an academic endeavor. The frame is now wider than traditional, west-oriented “area studies” can encompass. As Dabashi calls for a new regime of “knowledge production,” his criticism of contemporary scholarship is an essential part of producing new knowledge. The Arab Spring is “not a fulfillment of ideologies… but an exhaustion of all ideology” – it is precisely through Dabashi’s presentation and takedown of assumptions about the uprisings that allows for the envisioning of new and alternative conceptual frameworks. For as Dabashi puts it, “interpreting the world” is indeed “a way of changing it.”
Dabashi’s work is finally an “act of solidarity,” breathlessly optimistic for change following the Arab Spring. It makes a sweeping argument that moves seamlessly between Al Jazeera reportage, Egypt’s foremost semioticians, Arendt, Focault, Derrida and on. This is an admirable work of unapologetic partisan scholarship, something too rare in all fields of study, uniquely open about its inspirations, honest about its aspirations. To interpret the world is to change it, and for Dabashi, “this book, from beginning to end, is my way of joining Egyptians and other Arabs from Morocco to Syria, from Bahrain to Yemen, crying out loud (with my pronouncedly Persian accent): al-Sha’b Yurid Isqat al-Nizam” — a cry which ripples on down to Dabashi’s readership, said in our own respective accents (235).
Chapter Summaries:
Chapter 1: “Decentering the World: How the Arab Spring Unfolded”
Dabashi presents a colored chronology of the Arab Spring’s unfolding, starting from Bouazizi and moving through NATO’s intervention in Libya, arguing that precisely because we cannot fathom the consequences of the Spring, it is wrong to name it a specifically “Arab” or “Muslim” event. Relatedly, Dabashi moves through a critique of Hardt and Negri’s book named Empire, presenting the domination of neoliberalism and its devastating hold on the world.
Quote: “Appealing to the amorphous multitude is not where resistance to ‘the West’ (that is to say globalized capitalism) lies, but in specific worlds and national and transnational alliances that this very multitude can and will generate and sustain” (p. 37).
Chapter 2: “Towards a Liberation Geography”
Expanding on the book’s first chapter, Dabashi argues that because the Spring is inherently transnational – linked to Occupy Wall Street, Spain, Greece, Pakistan and onwards – it also requires rethinking and rewriting our constructed geography of the world. Dabashi tears apart National Geographic’s project of “manufacturing the non-west,” which he sees as the evil necessary to sustain the West in the first place. The “mirroring” of East and West in colonialism and then postcolonialism is undone by the chants of contemporary revolutionaries, allowing us to “embrace emerging worlds.”
Quote: “Palestinians — all of them, along with all the other Arabs, other Muslims, the rest of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the entire world outside the exclusive category of ‘the West’ — are not worlded. Rather, they are other-worlded — the geography of their hinterland the subterranean fear of ‘the Western world.’ If these children were allowed to come up to breathe, to be counted as human, something terrible would happen: ‘the West’ would disappear. It would no longer be. Such children and their parents must remain subhuman in order that humanity (which is always ‘Western,’ particularly when it goes ‘universal’) survive. These children — their being, breathing, demanding, and exacting their liberties — are the undoing of ‘the West’” (43).
Chapter 3: “A New Language of Revolt”
The chapter opens with an assessment of Arendt’s On Revolution, evaluating Arendt’s argument that the American Revolution succeeded where the French Revolution failed because of the former’s emphasis on “politics” rather than “social” needs to assess the Arab Spring. Dabashi moves through problematic media assumptions and attempts to move away from questions like “Can East and West meet?” and “does the subaltern speak?” – the subaltern is crying outloud, Dabashi argues, and effective resistance movements cannot originate within the West, they must overcome it, they must envision other worlds.
Quote: “As a term or even an ideal, ‘democracy’ should not be fetishized. It is a political medium for instituting a larger public good, which cannot, by definition, exclude economic justice” (64).
Chapter 4: “Discovering a New World”
If the West has been overcome, so too has the concept of the Arab World, which Dabashi sees as a world which came “out of a collective memory of fighting against European colonialism and American imperialism” (90). Pan-arabism is, for Dabashi, not just a reaction to European colonialism, but also its reproduction: the imaginative geography of the Arab World must either reconfigure itself or collapse under its own “postcolonial paradoxes.”
“Spring. It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for the unfolding revolutions in the Arab world than people knocking at the door of power but not storming the gate of tyrants.”
Chapter 5: “From the Green Movement to the Jasmine Revolution”
Much of Dabashi’s argument has attempted to centralize the idea of shared, world solidarity rather than the chopped-up, power imbalances implied in repeating “the West and Rest” ideology. In Chapter 5, Dabashi makes linkages between contemporary resistance movements more explicit, using the Green Movement as a case study of other ‘decades-long struggles between neoliberalism and welfare-state economics around the globe.”
Quote: The true revolution is to make the marketplace the servant of humanity’s dreams, rather than their master. This is the cause that Mohamed Bouazizi sacrificed his life for. It is the reason that his spirit lives, not just in Tunisia, but also across the Arab world and around the entire globe — even in Madison, Wisconsin. For Mohamed Bouazizi to remain the martyred witness of a revolution that will not replace one dictator with another, one false prophecy of freedom with another, there is only one logical and lasting measure: the people. As long as Tahrir Square remains open and clear for revolt, that revolution remains open-ended.
Chapter 6: “The Center Cannot Hold”
Wherein Dabashi examines the “exhaustion of Political Islam” in greater detail, arguing that from Tehran to Tunis, innate cosmopolitan cultures which were hidden under colonialism are being discovered anew. Central to his critique is the model established by the Iranian Islamic Republic, which Dabashi argues is a “militant clergy hiacking a revolution and turning it into a vindictive and vicious theocracy” (150).
Chapter 7: “The End of Postcolonialism”
Dabashi takes the core arguments of his book, tracing them from Mannheim through Marx to Said and into today’s condition, where historical terms like the “west” have become “epistemologically exhausted.” Thus, postcoloniality for Dabashi, is the end of colonialism as a condition of knowledge production, in the sense that all previous overriding ideologies were themselves a response to colonialism, and thus themselves ideologies which participate in the colonizer/colonized framework. “Al-Sha’b Yurid Isqat an-Nizam” is a sign which belongs to an entirely different system of semiotics; it is postcolonial.
“the center of the [West-dominant] imaginative geography and the matrix of the ideology and production it had occasioned cannot hold anymore, but instead of mere anarchy there has been a retrieval of the multiple worlds that existed before the insatiable abstraction that was ‘the West’ consumed them under the binary opposition of ‘the West and the rest’” (159).
Chapter 8: Race, Gender, and Class in Transnational Revolutions
Particularly labor migrations, Dabashi says, raise questions of class, and with it issues of race and gender – we must broaden the frame of reference in order to see underneath “inherited geographies” of the Muslim world, like the binary secular/Islam divide. Dabashi moves through a number of examples of “travelling metaphors of racialized and gendered profiles of violence,” including the “African” mercenaries Gaddafi sent to crush the revolution, how the “feminized fantasy” of a “weak” Iran was propagated throughout Arab nationalisms, picturing Iranians as too bourgeois for a revolution without help from a superpower. The “racializing elements of pan-Arab, pan-Iranian, and other frames” are now subsumed into the new language of the Arab spring: a language of transnational solidary which sustains the uprisings.
Note: On class, Dabashi uses Tunisia as a way to expose the intercontinental crossover of a “racialized geography”: “‘In a bilateral agreement with Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali,’ Yaghmaian reports, ‘Italy pledged financial support in exchange for help in preventing African transit immigrants and Tunisians from leaving for Europe. Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali’s fall ended the agreement. Border control collapsed in Tunisia and 5000 Tunisians arrived in the Italian port of Lampedusa.’ This phenomenon is not limited to Tunisia.” (197).
Chapter 9: “Libya: The Crucible and the Politics of Space”
NATO’s involvement in Libya and the Mediterranean basin in general has deeply problematic implications, demonstrating as this involvement does NATO’s want to control the radical implications of the revolutions as well as “their demographic and economic (especially labor migration) implications.” The US has no semblance of moral authority in any of these uprisings. The revolutions must not be reduced by their agency (and thus legitimacy) under the muscle of the military powers which try to either embrace or repress them.
Quote: “In other words, the US and its NATO allies are not just destroying the military equipment that they sold to Libya in the first place; they are also challenging the very logic of military intervention in a democratic uprising — by virtue of its being defined by non-violent acts of civil disobedience” (206).
Chapter 10: Delayed Defiance
The conclusion of Dabashi’s work is a gesture towards its “open-ended” nature: the revolts are an “open work” and the conjugation of a new revolutionary language and practice. Naming the revolts a “delayed defiance” is to encapsulate much of Dabashi’s arguments throughout the book: that these revolutions are a rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment shared across boarders. As Dabashi says, “as-sha’ab yurid isqat an-nithaam” is an “atemporal” expression which will remain open-endedly valid into the future.