The
editors start with the premise that the social explosions, otherwise dubbed the
Arab Spring, cannot be explained by postcolonial or nationalistic theories. The
latter are anachronistic and unhelpful. The uprisings, they add, far supersede
the capacity of a single idea or approach to account for the ideological,
cultural, historical, or economic realities "that have unsettled the power
structures of state formations and processes of subjectivation…" (p. 1).
It is not difficult to note that the book's core question veers into an
identity quest imagined to require assimilation to European multiculturalism,
or so the material advances of Europe are supposed to be premised. For purposes
of lending that quest a heavy and serious endeavour, the book hinges its
rationale on "…the deeper reality [that is supposed to have fueled the uprisings,
precisely those] …collective modes of knowing, and of knowing collectively,
beyond institutional politics, national and postcolonial histories, and the
established discursive modes of expert sciences and intellectual discourses."
(p. 2) Hence, the preaching of transcultural is almost in tandem with the
reigning neoliberal order, which seeks to simultaneously resolve two
contradictions: the fall in the rate of profits and the squashing of the class
struggle through banalising immigrants and immigration as a free and
conscientious choice. With one contribution, Katie Logan, one cannot overlook in
her reading of Etel Adnan's 1993 novel, Paris, When It's Naked, an
infantile admiration of the European Union and an evocation of reproducing the 'melting
pot' in the Arab World.
Western discourses
of social mobilisations, the editors trust, cannot account for the recent
changes taking place in the MENA region. Social movements such as the ones that
spearheaded the studied uprisings are presumed to have become governed by new
modes of social mobilisation, namely the internet. Hence, there is little, if
at all, historical continuity between past and present struggles in the Arab
World. The book lies in four parts, comprising twelve chapters: four in the
first and third and two in the second and the fourth. They are contributions by
scholars of social and human sciences.
The
first part trusts that the Arab Spring marks the emergence of a multiplicity:
ideological, cultural, religious, educational, class-based, and gender-based. It
claims to find and marshal a methodology rooted in the dynamics of the Arab
Spring. A methodology that breaks away with the old norms of study "…sublimation
of the Other—and especially of the United States as pervasive—has built an idea
of fragile Arab communities… [together with] the emergence of the digital
citizen opens ways for conceiving oneself differently from decades--, if not
centuries—old narratives." (p. 23) Through shuttling back and forth from
the mother countries to the hosting places, Diaspora communities are deemed to
facilitate the perceived need for change. Thus, the transcultural reality
fueled exasperation with the likes of Mubarek and Ghaddafi, and triggered a new
mode of digital citizenship that undid censorship and broke rigid borders.
Caroline Rooney, in her contribution, proposes that even old enmities (Jewish
and Arab) are no longer operative, and the new generations are receptive to the
undoing of political manoeuvrings and discourses.
Part II
investigates a culture's diversifying and assimilative practices that help to
re-narrate identity after traumas. At stake in this is a rethinking of the idea
of inclusiveness." (p. 5) Negotiating a new, universal identity wherein Facebook
plays a key role is what Ben Driss notices in the poetry of Sghair Ouled Ahmed
(201). This poet used to write with a universal audience in mind for which he
sought not only solidarity but the need to register a different hypothesis or
vocabulary with which he, the poet, "…rectif[ies] the Western grammar of
revolution." (p. 84) In the name of reclaiming one's history and saving it
from the falsifications by victors, Jeanna Altomonte finds the Iraqi artist,
Adel Abidin's 2007 interactive installation, Abidin Travels: Welcome to
Baghdad a recreation of Iraq and Baghdad's millennial history in Western
capitals. With its subversive character to neo-Oriental tropes pushed by heavy
Western media, Adidin's installation is supposed to "…promote social and
political change in regions affected by war." (p. 102). The logic of the
essay goes assumes that the simple fact of living outside Iraq (in diaspora)
facilitates new esteem for the Iraqi as a productive and respectable
subject.
Part III
highlights how migration enforces the sociopolitical collision around issues of
cultural identity. As Melissa Finn and Bessma Momani argue, Settling in Canada surveys
over 860 Canadian-Arab youth to explore the possibility of a transnational
outlook on oneself and others through metissage. Differently put, in
being a hybrid, that is, both Arab and Canadian, one leaves the parochial and ravishes
inclusive, "…demarcating the inside and outside of cultural boundaries,
and choosing positions on an issue-by-issue basis." (p. 121)
Part IV
stands apart from the other three sections in how it claims that "…identity
is a false problematic." (p. 7) and where the staging of the
revolutionary/protest act in the artistic work cannot be taken for granted. The
Houthi sarkha (scream) is found to be a self-contradiction in movement
in the sense that it "serves the Houthi's solidification of power but not
without rendering the sarkha's context of the struggle against
violations of Yemen's sovereignty meaningless." (p. 206) Embraced as an
identity, the chapter finds that sarkha's capacity for galvanising the
struggle for life in dignity is a false radicalism because it reduces complex
history and culture into a follower of either the Sunni brand of Islam
or Zaydi Shia. Hamid Dabashi's essay on the art of protest carries out this
section's investigation of falsehood. He finds that radical art is precisely
the one that cannot be recuperated and championed by museums and art galleries
because that radical art lies at the interstitial and transitory, "specific
to the moment of their staging" (p. 236). The 'interstitial' is his term
for the truly subversive art as it haunts counterrevolutionary forces, the ones
that have feasted on the Arab Spring's propulsion for emancipation.
In
asking what is about the self-immolation of a single man in Tunisia that
sparkled the revolution in Egypt and elsewhere, the first section finds that
the answer lies with the emergent trans-cultural identities in the Arab World
and beyond. What an elusive approximation to a point-black question! Instead of
discussing the dictatorial orders as the latter unflinchingly pursued the extraction
of surplus value/profit, thus stifling the possibility of mere survival, the
contributions in the section project their own biases and jumpstart singing the
song of capital, rendering the incendiary radicalism a quest for a
transcultural identity and self-referentiality. The fluidity of movements is
supposed to combat "the essentialism, ghettoisation and fundamentalism."
(p. 14) Any objective reader cannot miss the insult to the sacrifices of the
activists who paraded the squares and streets of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain,
Libya, Yemen, and Syria. It is fallacious to assume that technology (social
media) galvanises the rebellious subject. Rather, the burdensome thresholds of
exploitation and grab cancelled the possibility of decent living and triggered
the way for a social explosion.
Resisting
the tendency to represent and reproduce the revolutionary act, as with the
fourth section, sound like a promising venue to embrace the universal. In
practice, though, the area veers into the irreproducibility of the revolutionary
act, less to give people the opportunity to register the
act and more to fetishise it. The alleged distinction between the act and the
reporting of the act reads as infinite masturbation with words. Indeed, how can
one celebrate the photo of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh's last breath or the one picturing
Kurdish women of Kobani standing up to ISIS as the most radical with the same
zeal as the nude photos of Alaa Elmahdy or Goldshifteh Farahani's? Dabashi
overlooks how the radicality in each contradicts the other in balancing the two
as even remotely comparable. al-Sabbagh's paves the road for the incendiary. At
the same time, Elmahdy veers into voyeuristic and spectacle hence, how an
authentic work of art has to reproduce the emergency, not just the emergence, of
the revolutionary act.
Overall, the transnational and transhistorical
as championed in this book seek to dispose of the incendiary content of the
uprisings surgically. In making the uprisings look like an orgy for metissage,
historical and intergenerational continuity is the target since only the one
who embraces their history can convincingly shout 'no' to the neoliberal order.
One cannot possibly develop the same stance toward their two histories—even if
awareness is possible, acting and standing for the two roots is impossible. Sometimes,
if not often, the two roots are mutually exclusive. That
explains why metissage, transhistorical, and transcultural are the
darling ideologies of the current neoliberal and counterrevolutionary orders
Fouad Mami
Université
d’Adrar (Algeria)
ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1590-8524
