The decolonial option

Ramon Grosfoguel is one of the most important decolonial thinkers in the world today. I recently went over one of his readings on modernity & the decolonial option, and wanted to share some of it with you.

Unlike other traditions of knowledge, the western is a point of view that does not assume itself as a point of view. In this way, it hides its epistemic location, paving the ground for its claims about universality, neutrality and objectivity. The decisive difference between this essay and neo-liberal, neo-marxist, marxist, weberian, wallersteinean or globalisation political-economist academic production is, then, that I am not hiding the epistemic location from where I am thinking.

 

Border thinking, one of the epistemic perspectives to be discussed in this article, is precisely a critical response to both hegemonic and marginal fundamentalisms.

 

Far from having overcome the linear evolutionist and paternalistic model of Europe being the developed and the rest being underdeveloped, academics continue labeling the conceptualizations of subaltern subjects as ideas that belong to the past, which, unsurprisingly, Europe has long-gone overcome.

 

We always speak from a particular location in the power structures. No one escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’.

 

In western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of western philosophy has always privileged the myth of a non-situated ego, ego meaning the conscious thinking subject. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful Universal knowledge that conceals who is speaking, as well as, obscuring the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks2.

 

Just because one is socially located on the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consists in making subjects that are socially located on the oppressed side of the colonial difference, think epistemically like the ones in the dominant positions.

 

Rene Descartes, the founder of modern western philosophy, inaugurates a key moment in the history of western thought in which he replaces God – as the foundation of knowledge in the theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages – with western man as the foundation of knowledge in European modernity.

 

We went from the 16th century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the 18th and 19th century characterization of ‘people without history,’ to the 20th century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early 21st century of ‘people without democracy’.

We went from the 16th century ‘rights of people’ (the Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate, in the school of Salamanca in the mid-16th century), to the 18th century ‘rights of man’ (the Enlightment philosophers), and to the late 20th century ‘human rights’. This changing nomenclature is part of global the strategies articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans.

 

The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources than the majority of men in the world (who are of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world’s population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral, entangled and constitutive part of the entangled whole European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world system.

 

The old national liberation and socialist strategies of taking power at the level of a nation-state are insufficient to the task because global coloniality is not reducible to the presence or absence of a colonial administration or to political/economic structures of power.

 

We continue to live within the same colonial power matrix. With juridical-political decolonization we moved from a period of global colonialism to the current period of global coloniality.’ Although colonial administrations have been almost entirely eradicated and the majority of the periphery is politically organized into independent states, non-European people are still living under crude European/Euro-American exploitation and domination. The old colonial stratifications of European versus non-Europeans remain in place and are entangled with ‘the international division of labor’ and accumulation of capital on a world-scale.

 

Herein lies the relevance of the distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Coloniality allows us to understand the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations; such domination is produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. Coloniality of power refers to a crucial structuring process in the modern/colonial world-system that articulates peripheral locations in the international division of labor with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy and third world migrants’ inscription in the racial/ethnic hierarchy of metropolitan global cities. Peripheral nation-states and non-European people live today under the regime of global coloniality imposed by the United States through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Pentagon and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (see for example Lander, this issue). Peripheral zones remain in a colonial situation even though are not any longer under any particular colonial administration.

 

The mythology of the decolonization of the world obscures the continuities between the colonial past and current global colonial/racial hierarchies and contributes to the invisibility of coloniality today.

 

The global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans and non-Europeans, is an integral part of the development of the capitalist world system’s international division of labor (Wallerstein, 1983; Quijano, 1993; Mignolo, 1995).

 

Nationalism provides Eurocentric solutions to a Eurocentric global problem as it reproduces an internal coloniality of power within each nation-state and reifies the nation-state as the privileged location of social change.

 

Struggles above and below the nation-state are not considered in nationalist political strategies.

 

On the one hand nationalism is complicit with Eurocentric thinking and political structures. On the other hand, third world fundamentalisms of different kinds respond with the rhetoric of an essentialist pure outside space or absolute exteriority to modernity. They are anti-modern modern forces that reproduce the binary oppositions of Eurocentric thinking. 

If Eurocentric thinking claims ‘democracy’ to be a western natural attribute, third world fundamentalisms accept this Eurocentric premise and claim that democracy has nothing to do with the non-west.

 

Critical border thinking is the epistemic response of the subaltern to the Eurocentric project of modernity. Instead of rejecting modernity to retreat into a fundamentalist absolutism, border epistemologies subsume/redefines the emancipatory rhetoric of modernity from the cosmologies and epistemologies of the subaltern, located in the oppressed and exploited side of the colonial difference, towards a decolonial liberation struggle for a world beyond eurocentered modernity. What border thinking produces is a redefinition/subsumption of citizenship, democracy, human rights, humanity, economic relations beyond the narrow definitions imposed by European modernity. Border thinking is not an anti-modern fundamentalism; it is a decolonial transmodern response of the subaltern to Eurocentric modernity.

 

We cannot assume a Habermasian consensus or an equal horizontal relationship among cultures and peoples globally divided between the two poles of the colonial difference.

 

 Instead of a single modernity centered in Europe and imposed as a global design to the rest of the world, Dussel argues for a multiplicity of decolonial critical responses to eurocenteric modernity from the subaltern cultures and epistemic location of colonized people around the world. In Mignolo’s interpretation of Dussel, transmodernity would be equivalent to ‘diversality as a universal project’ which is a result of ‘critical border thinking’ as an epistemic intervention from the diverse subalterns (Mignolo 2000).

 

Diverse forms of democracy, civil rights or women liberation can only come out of the creative responses of local subaltern epistemologies.

 

The international left never radically problematized the racial/ethnic hierarchies built during the European colonial expansion and still present within the world’s coloniality of power.

 

Liberal or radical democracy cannot be fully accomplished if the colonial/racist dynamics treat a large portion or, in some cases, the majority of the population, as second-class citizens.

 

Development projects that focus on policy changes at the level of the nation-state are obsolete in today’s world-economy and they lead to development illusions.

 

A system of domination and exploitation that operates on a world-scale, such as the capitalist world-system, cannot have a national solution, and inversely, a global problem cannot be solved at the nation-state level — it requires global decolonial solutions.

 

Thus, the decolonization of the political-economy of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system requires the eradication of the continuous transfer of wealth from south to north, and the institutionalization of the global redistribution and transfer of wealth from north to south. After centuries of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003), the north has a concentration of wealth and resources inaccessible to the south.

 

Pinkwashing Palestine

“Gays, like women, are becoming a readily deployable tool in service of geopolitical interests that are oppressive and anti-emancipatory. As people concerned with fighting all forms, and all networks of injustice, we must not allow that to happen.” (Mikdashi 2011)

Pinkwashing is “the attempt by a state or people to highlight its treatment of gays to show how progressive it is, in turn covering up human rights violations from which it wishes to detract attention.”[1] It has repeatedly been used by western powers, for example, as a way to construct themselves as “superior” or “advanced” because they support LGBTQ rights, and to construct the Other as “backwards” because they supposedly don’t support these rights. A person or institution is engaging in pinkwashing when their motives are not to help LGBTQs but rather to further a separate agenda.

In the recent past, Israel has perhaps been the most avid “pinkwasher” due to its repeated attempts to divert attention away from its brutal occupation of Palestine by constructing itself as the “only gay haven in an otherwise homophobic Middle East.” Israel has launched publicity campaigns that are aimed at constructing Israel as a safe space for Middle Eastern homosexuals. This campaign, which has included widespread advertising, is aimed at showing that Israel is the only homophobia-free country in the Middle East. This is specifically in contrast to Palestine, which is automatically cast as a dangerous and violent place for LGBTQs.

It has been reiterated by numerous Palestinian LGBTQ groups that Israel is currently engaged in pinkwashing.  “In the last years Israel has been leading an international campaign that tries to present Israel as the “only democracy” and the “gay haven” in the Middle East, while ironically portraying Palestinians, who suffer every single day from Israel’s state racism and terrorism, as barbaric and homophobic” (Palestinian Queers for BDS, 2010).  Israel’s worsening image globally has led it to launch a pinkwashing campaign in which it portrays itself as the only homophobic-free democracy in the Middle East.  Stand With Us, a self-declared Zionist organization, were quoted as saying: “We decided to improve Israel’s image through the gay community in Israel” (Puar, 2010).  As Puar points out, the reason behind this is that “within global gay and lesbian organising circuits, to be gay friendly is to be modern, cosmopolitan, developed, first-world, global north, and, most significantly, democratic,” (Puar, 2010).

A useful way of describing pinkwashing is that it relies on the “ideological capital of tolerance” – in other words, at a time when gay rights are on the agenda of western liberals, Israel has seen the usefulness of portraying itself as a gay-friendly country. The special emphasis on sexuality is what makes Israel’s campaign a case of pinkwashing: by diverting attention away from its political role in occupying Palestine to its supposed role as a gay-friendly country, Israel is effectively attempting to re-brand itself.  An alternative definition of pinkwashing is the following: “Pinkwashing is the attempt to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine by portraying it as a progressive and democratic haven for LGBT individuals in direct contrast with the rest of the Middle East” (Sager 2011).  As argued by Puar, Israel’s pinkwashing campaign also aims at creating a certain image of itself: “Israeli pinkwashing is a potent method through which the terms of Israeli occupation of Palestine are reiterated – Israel is civilised, Palestinians are barbaric, homophobic, uncivilised, suicide-bombing fanatics” (Puar, 2010; italics mine).

An important aspect of pinkwashing is the idea that the Palestinian cause is unworthy and illegitimate because Palestinians are homophobic.  This carries two assumptions.  One, that homophobia only exists in certain places among certain peoples, when in fact it is universal and exists even in Israel.  Two, that the Palestinian cause should be discredited because Palestinians are homophobic, as though only “ideal” or ”perfect” peoples deserve to be free and govern themselves.

This campaign is problematic on several levels.  First, Israel is not free of homophobia and portraying itself that way is simplistic and misleading.  Second, Palestine, as well as other Middle Eastern countries, have vibrant LGBTQ scenes which include organizations, events, campaigns, and media promotions.  Third, it appears that Israel is attempting to divert attention away from the occupation of Palestine and the various crimes it repeatedly commits there by re-branding itself as a gay-friendly country and thus endearing itself to western democracies and human rights organizations.  Finally, Israel is using and reproducing old Orientalist assumptions many in the west have about the Middle East, particularly with regards to homosexuality.

Since the wave of uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, there have been repeated instances of pinkwashing emerging from the western mainstream media. In an excellent article, Maya Mikdashi and RM[2] argue:

The “gay issue” is becoming an increasingly hot topic in western media coverage of the Arab world. In fact, beginning with the spate of gay killings in US occupied Iraq, the status of non-normative sexualities has perhaps been enfolded within a discourse that highlights the plight of “women” in Arab/Muslim countries, and the ideological, material, and military mobilization that such a discourse licenses.

A critical reader might ask what lies behind this interest in gays? Where did it come from and what kinds of discourses and practices is it contributing to? What assumptions does this conversation make as to international practices of sexuality and politics, and what silences about other forms of oppression is this anxiety over the status of gay Arabs in Arab democracies implicated in?

This is not to say that homophobia does not exist in the Middle East. It does. It exists in every country in the world. However, the question here is: are these groups/governments legitimately and honestly concerned about LGBTQs in the Middle East, or are they simply using them and their struggles for their own ends, whether it is to show how much more advanced they are or to deflect attention away from their own homophobia/political problems? Does the Israeli government, for example, honestly want to help Palestinian LGBTQs, or is it simply using them to make a point about Israeli society being more advanced, and to whitewash its occupation? Indeed, if the Israeli government wanted to help Palestinian LGBTQs, wouldn’t removing an occupation be the first step?

Palestinian Queers for BDS write on their website[3]:

As an integral part of Palestinian society we believe that the struggle for sexual and gender diversity is interconnected with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

As Palestinian queers, our struggle is not only against social injustice and our rights as a queer minority in Palestinian society, but rather, our main struggle is one against Israel’s colonization, occupation and apartheid; a system that has oppressed us for the past 63 years. Violations of human rights and international law, suppression of basic rights and civil liberty, and discrimination are deeply rooted in Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, straight and gay alike.

PQBDS show that the struggle for sexual rights cannot be separated from other political struggles, such as the one against Israeli occupation. They are interlinked, and should be fought together.

This focus on LGBTQ Middle Easterners is not new. It fits in with an Orientalist worldview in which Middle Eastern countries are seen as especially oppressive when it comes to minorities. Historically, these minorities have usually been religious minorities and women. More recently, however, there has been increased focus on LGBTQs as the most persecuted group in the Middle East. Again, this is not to say that LGBTQs do not face persecution in Middle Eastern countries: they do. My point is to ask why the west engages in pinkwashing, and why it repeatedly attempts to construct homophobia, sexism, and persecution of minorities in general as constantly happening in the Middle East, and never at home.

Similarly, focusing on LGBTQs in the Middle East fits into the framing of sexuality in Other societies that Orientalists usually engage in. Rather than focus on how specific histories of colonialism, imperialism, and western domination have led to certain types of homophobia in the modern Middle East, the focus is instead on how Islam, Arab culture, or other inherent traits are the reasons behind the homophobia in the Middle East.

In his monumental book, Desiring Arabs, Joseph Massad creates an intellectual history of how western scholars have tried to impose western categories of sexuality, namely the strict binary between heterosexual/homosexual, onto other cultures, and how this has led directly to specific forms of homophobia found in places such as the Middle East today:

The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating.

Moreover, Massad points out that it is necessary to look back to western history in order to understand how the categories of gay/lesbian were created for specific political and economic purposes:

We can say that homosexuals did not exist in Europe before the medical and juridical discourses of the second half of the nineteenth century invented them as subjects of medical and juridical intervention, and before capital created relations of production that made possible the development of new residential and migratory activities, and new kinship configurations within and without the biological family that led to the development of forms of sexual intimacy that would be linked to identity and community.

What Massad is essentially arguing is that while same-sex relationships and relations have existed in the Middle East as far back as can be accounted for, they were not understood or practiced in the forms that the west adopted in the late 18^th century, namely as strictly tied to identity or as strictly tied to the binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality. People in the Middle East did not identify themselves according to their sexual acts (and neither did people in the west, before the identity of homosexual, and later heterosexual, was created by the medical profession). This is not to say that people in the Middle East today should not identify as gay or lesbian or queer, as many do. It is to show the importance of going back in history in order to understand contemporary sexualities and sexual relations in the Middle East and to show how these evolved over time.

To return to the point of pinkwashing and the Arab uprisings, it is clear how LGBTQs are once again being used to prove a point about Middle Eastern culture. In her article on how the MENA uprisings have been framed, Maya Mikdashi makes the excellent point that the focus is almost always on issues of gender or sexuality:[4]

The legitimacy of a popular uprising and/or revolutionary struggle can be gauged by how it treats “their women” and “their gays.”

The act of pinkwashing in this instance, therefore, is to delegitimize the MENA uprisings because of their supposed lack of attention to LGBTQ and women’s rights. Rather than acknowledge the immense people power, creativity, bravery, and peacefulness of the millions of protesters that took to the streets in Tunis, Cairo, Damascus and Sanaa, the western mainstream media has chosen to divert attention to the ever-present Orientalist obsession: how minorities in the Middle East are (mis)treated.

As an Egyptian that has lived in Europe, it has become clear to me how essential pinkwashing is in the construction of the binary between the civilized “West” and the uncivilized “East.” It is difficult to get into a discussion with a Dutch person, for example, about Muslims without questions about Islam and women, Islam and homosexuality, and Islam and freedom dominating the conversation. Homosexuality is often used against Muslim “immigrants” (if you’re not white you’re forever an immigrant), rather than focusing on what Dutch society and government could be doing to help “integration” (which often means assimilation).

In conclusion, it is crucial to note that LGBTQs in the Middle East cannot be separated from the societies they are in, as Mikdashi points out:

Gay Arabs cannot be cut out of the fabric of their societies; they are Arab, they are Muslim, Christian, conservative and progressive, soldiers and civilians, communists and capitalists, sexist and feminist, classist and revolutionary, and both oppressors and the oppressed. Islamist discourses are not ossified and stuck in the 16th century, as most Western commentators assume. They are plural, responsive, dynamic, and they represent the point of view of a large and diverse public.

It is extremely problematic that queers in the Middle East are being used by western Orientalists in their constructions of themselves as superior and more civilized. Queers are being used as tools to delegitimize the tremendously important uprisings that are happening across the Middle East. People that are both queer and Middle Eastern recognize the intersectionality of these different identities, and therefore continue to fight both homophobia at home and racism, imperialism, and Orientalism, abroad.

Originally published here: http://w3.unisa.edu.au/muslim-understanding/documents/salem-pinkwashing.pdf

Sources:

Mikdashi, M. (2011). Gays, Islamists and the Arab Spring: What Would a Revolutionary Do? [Online]. June 11. Available from: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1836/gays-islamists-and-the-arab-spring_what-would-a-re

Palestinian Queers for BDS. (2010). Palestinian Queers for BDS Call upon all Queer groups, organizations and individuals around the world to Boycott the Apartheid State of Israel. [Online]. 28^th June 2010. Available from –    http://pqbds.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/palestinian-queers-for-bds-call-upon-all-queer-groups-organizations-and-individuals-around-the-world-to-boycott-the-apartheid-state-of-israel/

Puar, J (2010). Israel’s Gay Propaganda War. Pinkwatching Israel. [Online]. July 1. Available from – http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/israels-gay-propaganda-war/

Sager, Maggie. (2011). Palestinian queer activists challenge the ‘pinkwashing’ of the Israeli occupation. [Online]. February 16, 2011. Available from – http://mondoweiss.net/2011/02/palestinian-queer-activists-challenge-the-pinkwashing-of-the-israeli-occupation.html

Sites with more information:

http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/

http://www.pqbds.com/

http://www.aswatgroup.org/

http://www.queersagainstisraeliapartheid.blogspot.com/

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[1] http://room410.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/would-you-want-israel-at-your-gay-wedding-3/

[2] http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1836/gays-islamists-and-the-arab-spring_what-would-a-re

[3] http://www.pqbds.com/about/

[4] http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4506/the-uprisings-will-be-gendered

Femen’s Neocolonial Feminism

Hi everyone!

Just wanted to let you know about a piece I published yesterday

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/femens-neocolonial-feminism-when-nudity-becomes-uniform

Would love to hear feedback!

Dialogue and social change: is it possible?

(Disclaimer: the Dutch people I’m talking about in this post are real-life Dutch people who I’ve interacted with while living in Holland and who have said these things to me. I’m not saying *all* Dutch people think this way. At times I do use general discourses prevalent in Dutch society and the media to make a point, such as the presence of Islamophobia – again, this is not to say that every single Dutch person is Islamophobic, but that it is a mainstream discourse present in Holland right now.)

I’ve been thinking a lot the past 2 weeks about the possibility of dialogue, and at a broader level, of social change. We constantly hear things like “oh just talk to each other and you’ll be able to resolve your differences” or “ignorance is the problem, if people heard the other side of the story they’d change their minds.” But is that true?

The past 2 weeks I’ve spoken to quite a few Dutch people about the events in Gaza. I recognize that I come from a specific positionality: I’m half-Egyptian, lived in Egypt, and so Palestine means something very different to me than it does to most Dutch people. At the same time, my support for Palestinians is not based on my “Egyptianness” but on my belief that what Israel is doing is unjust. So while my connection to Egypt has made it easier for me to see that, it is not solely because of that connection that I am pro-Palestine. In Holland, people may not have connections like that and so the only way to find out about the “conflict” is through the media.

Now, I won’t say much about the Dutch media other than that it is far from neutral. Its coverage of the Gaza events in particular has been disappointing and damaging to the Palestinian cause. The events were consistently framed as an attack started by Hamas when they launched a few rockets at Israel, despite the fact that these rockets were a response to Israel’s assassination of Jabari, Hamas’ military commander. Technically, therefore, Israel began this conflict. Moreover, the Israelis tended to be humanized much more often on Dutch news programs, as opposed to the Palestinians who were either portrayed as being responsible for rocket-launching (collectively, apparently) or as a mass of nameless and faceless victims.

So it’s no surprise that almost every Dutch person I spoke to about this conflict has a response along the lines of: “Well, I think both sides are wrong” if I was lucky, or “Israel needs to defend itself. Hamas is a terrorist organization that keeps attacking innocent Israeli civilians” if I was unlucky. Not once did I encounter someone talking about Israeli occupation, apartheid, or the blockade on Gaza.

What is especially interesting is that many Dutch people managed to imagine themselves in the place of Israelis – but not in the place of Palestinians. They could empathize with Israeli victims of rockets and bomb sirens, but not with Palestinian victims of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and constant bombardment. That’s something that really amazed me.

So what does this mean? What does it mean when dialogue is not enough? What are the chances that Dutch people can be convinced to see the role of Israel and the EU (and Holland) in perpetuating a 2012 case of apartheid and colonization? When the conversation becomes so circular that there really isn’t a point anymore, what do you do? Should we even bother trying to reach out and talk to people who don’t want to see an alternative reality? Plus how do we deal with the fact that Holland’s view of Israel is closely linked to their memories of the Holocaust and rampant Islamophobia? Is this Islamophobia the reason the Dutch people I’ve met can’t seem to identify with Palestinians?

Over and over I’ve asked myself: am I wrong? I keep saying I’m trying to show Dutch people the Palestinian side, but if so many people here believe that Israel is right, then am I the one that’s wrong? But I can’t seem to convince myself of that either. It seems obvious to me, and to many other non-Arab pro-Palestinian people that what Israel is doing is unjust, and that to frame what Palestinians do as anything but resistance is dangerous.

I guess my answer is that I don’t know what the chances of social change in Holland are. People keep saying that things are changing slowly. That bit by bit Dutch people will become less Islamophobic, that slowly the Zwarte Piet (blackface) tradition will die out, that eventually Dutch people will start seeing Palestinians as human beings who are being colonized (partly) with Dutch money. But seriously – how much time do you need?

Gaza

The last few days have seen an escalation in the Israeli occupation and bombardment of Gaza, a place that has been described as an open-air prison by many who have been there. Part of me isn’t surprised that Israel has, yet again, managed to kill so many innocent civilians (while claiming to target militants), but another part of me is sad that this continues to happen, and that people’s reactions continue to be this predictable: outrage from Arabs and some people in the west; silence or pro-Israel rhetoric from many people in the west, Arab governments, and western governments.

I know the western media is biased. We get that. But seriously people, THINK. Or do some kind of independent research! When I watched the Dutch news last night, the whole narrative was based on blaming Palestinians for this conflict because of the rockets they shot at Israel. I’m just gonna go ahead and say right now: if I were living in an open-air prison, in which limited supplies of food and medicine are allowed in, in a situation where I have to cross a million Israeli check points to get anywhere, in a situation where Israel is MILITARILY OCCUPYING what USED TO BE MY COUNTRY…

I would launch rockets too.

Anyway, I wrote an article for Muftah. Would love to hear feedback

http://muftah.org/the-israeli-raid-on-gaza-the-forgotten-context/#.UKY9jDPfRws.twitter

Voting and the question of meaningful change

Just now I was browsing through my favourite news site (commondreams.org) and I realized most of the pieces are on the US election. Commondreams is a more leftist site, and so most of these articles tend to be pro-Obama. It got me thinking, for the millionth time, why so many American progressives/leftists are ignoring all of Obama’s faults in a series of desperate bids to win him this election? We get it: Romney would be worse. But Obama is far from what these leftists/progressives stand for. To many outsiders, it seems like the US system just keeps reproducing itself with a new face every 4-8 years. Whether that’s Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Romney, it’s likely that the US will continue to be a negative force in the global geopolitical arena, with wars, drones, and continued economic dominance over other countries.

Then I started thinking about Egypt’s last presidential election, between Ahmed Shafiq and Mohamed Morsi. And realized I was kind of being a hypocrite. During that election, which many Egyptians saw as having to choose between two horrible candidates, it was traumatic to have to support either the Muslim Brotherhood or the regime the 2011 revolution tried to bring down. And the question that kept coming up was: WHY? Why are we in this position, one year after having a revolution? Why do we have to choose between these two candidates when we know Egypt has so much more to offer?

The answer is that the system is too strong. In the US and in Egypt, widespread discontent with policies are not enough to bring about change. In Egypt even a revolution wasn’t enough to ensure that we could choose between more than just two Mubarak-era figures. The US seems to be in a similar situation, where the system is proving to be much stronger than the people. In the end, we are left with these ‘choices’ that are supposed to convince us that we live in a ‘democracy.’ But really, what’s the difference? Is Shafiq that different from Morsi? Were either of them actually going to bring about social justice, dignity, bread and freedom – the main demands of the revolution? Are either Romney or Obama going to create an economic system in the US that is fair and just? Are they going to end discrimination? Are they going to prevent the US from continuing to be an imperialist force int he world that brings death and destruction to countless people? Or are the institutions and class interests too strong to be influenced by the people through a system of voting?

In the words of Jean Paul Sartre,

When I vote, I abdicate my power — that is, the possibility everyone has of joining others to form a sovereign group, which would have no need of representatives. By voting I confirm the fact that we, the voters, are always other than ourselves and that none of us can ever desert the seriality in favor of the group, except through intermediaries. For the serialized citizen, to vote is undoubtedly to give his support to a party. But it is even more to vote for voting, as Kravetz says; that is, to vote for the political institution that keeps us in a state of powerless serialization.

Since by voting I affirm my institutionalized powerlessness, the established majority does not hesitate to cut, trim, and manipulate the electoral body in favor of the countryside and the cities that “vote the right way” — at the expense of the suburbs and outlying districts that “vote the wrong way.”

I’ve heard countless people say “Not voting means giving up your power.” Really? What power, exactly? Can’t the act of voting itself be seen as giving up one’s power?

I remember myself clearly telling people that Morsi was horrible, but he was better than Shafiq. It was better to have someone like him than to bring the regime back to power. And I guess that’s what many American leftists are doing by supporting Obama: pointing out that while Obama has faults, Romney would be much worse.

But is this it? Is this just the reality of politics? We accept the fact that we actually don’t have power, and that decisions are made behind closed doors? Accept the fact that even revolutions aren’t always powerful enough to change things?

Why am I going to vote? Because I have been persuaded that the only political act in my life consists of depositing my ballot in the box once every four years? But that is the very opposite of an act. I am only revealing my powerlessness and obeying the power of a party. Furthermore, the value of my vote varies according to whether I obey one party or another.

Actually, everything is quite clear if one thinks it over and reaches the conclusion that indirect democracy is a hoax. To vote or not to vote is all the same. To abstain is in effect to confirm the new majority, whatever it may be. Whatever we may do about it, we will have done nothing if we do not fight at the same time — and that means starting today — against the system of indirect democracy which deliberately reduces us to powerlessness. We must try, each according to his own resources, to organize the vast anti-hierarchic movement which fights institutions everywhere.

Women, the Arab Revolutions, and Dabashi

A few days ago I began reading Hamid Dabashi’s new book: The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. Dabashi essentially proposes a new paradigm of understanding geopolitics today, namely that the colonial/postcolonial ideologies have run their course, and that the Arab Uprisings were a new way of understanding the world. In the last part of the book, he speaks a bit about gender and the uprisings.

He begins by reminding us of the image of Arab women before the uprisings: passive, docile, incarcerated inside a repressive religion, denied a public presence: “they were invariably portrayed in cages, desperately peering out through the bars – and this by women’s studies scholars and publishers and the publishers of fake memoirs of Arab princes and honour killings alike” (p. 183). He goes on to say:

Even when they were coming out in their millions in Iran to participate in public rallies, there were still some among the Arab, Iranian and North American ‘left’ who ridiculed their dresses, sunglasses or scarves – not having an inkling that their sisters were about to join them from one end of the Arab and Muslim world to the other (p. 183).

Now consider the pictures of these women defying the odds, domestic and foreign, defying tyranny, homegrown and imposed; look at them closely. Half of them would be denied the dignity of choosing their own clothes from one end of Europe to the other – particularly those who choose the veil in France, Germany or the Netherlands, upsetting the racist sensibilities of European mass murderers like Anders Breivik. These women would be denied full citizenship in Europe and yet they are at the forefront of a world-historic succession of revolutions in the Arab and Muslim world. That alone should tell us where the world is today (p. 183).

At the time of the Egyptian revolution, I was in the process of doing my second MA, and instantly thought of doing it on “women and the revolution” (how naive I was). Following the revolution in the media made it seem as though gender was THE defining issue. Channel after channel, article after article asked “where are the women?” This question continuously confused me, since the pictures, videos, live-streams and tweets repeatedly and clearly showed that there were women everywhere: from the front lines to the make-shift hospitals; from the activists to the organizers. This did not seem like a gendered revolution in the sense of men being in public while the women stayed at home (it’s amazing how durable this orientalist clichés are).

I went to Cairo for several months to do my fieldwork and, of course, every single protester I interviewed had no idea why I was asking questions about gender. “Of course women were part of the revolution” was pretty much the answer I got every single time. When I would ask if they were surprised that women participated, I would again get strange looks. “Why would that be surprising?” was the standard response. This was a wake-up call for me, as I realized the extent to which I had internalized western media representations of the Arab uprisings. To the people I know in Cairo, it was not at all shocking to see women there – they had expected that. It was more shocking for them to see different social classes. Yet this wasn’t the picture I got living in Holland and watching the revolutions unfold on multiple media platforms.

Dabashi continues:

These women did not appear out of nowhere. That ‘the war on terror,’ predicated on a whole history of Orietalism, had manufactured a docile image of Arab and Muslim women, waiting to be ‘liberated’ by the US army, the way they were liberated in Afghanistan and Iraq, was not their problem. This was the treachery of a propaganda machine fed by native informers and career oppurtunists. Arabs and Muslims were now risking their lives for their collective liberties in a manner that the world (awash with Islamophobic and Orientalist nonsense) was unprepared to witness (p. 185).

My question is the following: since this is not the first time that Arab and Muslim women have participated in social movements, why did Dabashi expect the Arab uprisings to change the Orientalist and Islamophobic images of Arab and Muslim women all over the globe? He almost seems to be suggesting that the uprisings changed these views of Arab and Muslim women; but did they?

Dabashi does later on clarify that Arab and Muslim women did not suddenly become active during the uprisings:

We should not disregard the reality that successive generations of women’s rights pioneers, social historians, imaginative theorists, community organizers, public educators, political activists, revolutionary leaders, poets, filmmakers and artists have paved the way for their daughters in Tahrir and Azadi Square. Generation after generation – in both colonial and postcolonial eras- women have entered the public space and changed it; in so doing assigned gender roles have been consistently challenged.

This is an extremely important (and refreshing) point. Arab and Muslim women didn’t suddenly come out of nowhere, just as the revolutions didn’t suddenly come out of nowhere. Both were the result of accumulating and built-up discourses and actions within Arab societies that eventually allowed for the high level of participation that was seen on the part of women.

Linking the role of women in these uprisings to previous activism and feminist organizing in Egypt is very important, and provides essential context to understand the situation of women in Egypt. It seems that more work like this needs to be done, from both a feminist perspective as well as a political, economic and sociological perspective. While women did participate extensively in the uprisings, it is clear that feminist activism has now taken a back-seat in Egypt. This seems to be a process that happens repeatedly in post-revolutionary nations: women participate and are then side-lined when they begin to articulate their own demands during the process of state-building. How to move past this? What kind of solutions are there to these issues? Do we keep delaying the ‘feminist project’ until the new government is solidified? My answer would be NO. The feminist project should not be de-linked from the phase of rebuilding the nation and institutions after a revolutionary process. The two must go together, otherwise women will, yet again, be told to go home after the post-revolutionary euphoria dies down.