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. Continue reading