Gregory Castle, Editor, Postcolonial discourses – An anthology, Blackwell, London (2001).David Goldberg and Ato Quayson, Editors, Relocating postcolonialism, Blackwell, London (2002) (original) (raw)

Gregory Castle,Editors, ,Postcolonial discourses – An anthology (2001) Blackwell,London

2006

failure. The future points to more complex Islamic identities, and that requires a leap of faith, but it does not mean the end of Muslim civilization'' (p. 209). In general, the author succeeds in his stated objectives, although themes such as the politics of paralysis may obscure the broader view he presents. The book provides a valuable synthesis of issues influencing the Middle East. Its best use may be as a supplemental text for graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses in Middle East studies and other thematic disciplines.

Postcolonialism and Islam:Theory, Literature, Culture, Society

Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society, Routledge, 2014

Postcolonialism and Islam are two terms that frequently appear in tandem. However,the relationship between the two and the question of their compatibility has not beenextensively investigated. The speed and intensity of the changes characteristic of latemodernity under the pressures of cultural and economic globalisation has traumatisedMuslims and non-Muslims alike. Hybrid identity formations, very often provisional,are generated in the articulations of difference marked by newly and re-imaginedrelations to faith, nation, class, gender, sexuality and language. At the same time, olddiscourses such as Orientalism are re-vamped and applied to the new configurations.Postcolonialism might seem to provide a framework for approaching the experiencesof not only formerly colonized subjects, but émigrés, exiles and expatriates and their host societies. However, intellectuals and writers, both non-Muslim and Muslim, havestruggled with postcolonial theory as an effective tool for analysing and accountingfor the experience of Muslims in the modern world. The purpose of this collection of essays is therefore to re-visit, probe and expand the applicability of these categoriesfrom a multi-sited and cross-disciplinary perspective, including the historicalexperience of Muslim migration to Britain, the discursive representation of Islam inthe West, and the theoretical critique of such discursive practices – including that of Postcolonialism itself - specifically in the areas of theory, literary, cultural, and filmstudies

Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past, and the Middle East Present

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2012

During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.

Reenvisioning the Question of Postcolonial Muslim Identity.pdf

In our contemporary era of transnationalism, the issue of identity has assume unprecedented significance and scope. In this paper, I intend to discuss the complexities and nuances of the Muslim identity in the postcolonial literary discourses. One of the basic contentions of the paper is to find some pattern in the transnational and transcultural diversity presently characterizing the Muslim identity discourses. Hence, this paper is a plea to discover some kind of literary and discursive sharedness in the contemporary postcolonial Muslim writings. It has been observed that at this point in time the Muslim identity in not only subject to myriad influences, it is also a topic of heated and passionate debates. In fiction, memoirs, travel writing, media and cultural narratives, the issue of Muslim identity is invested with all kinds of representations ranging from uncouth explosive-bearing terrorists to friendly and sociable people. It has also been shown that the Orientalist legacy, far from being dead, is being given new lease on life by the highly 'constructed' and 'worked over' images of Muslims in the Western media. The large Muslim diasporic populations settled in the European countries are specifically bearing the brunt of such stereotypical depictions built by media persons, political commentators, analysts and 'cultural experts'. Faced with this mighty discursive onslaught, the Muslim writers, novelists, poets, intellectuals have been responding variedly and with considerably mixed motives: acceptance, rejection, rectification, resistance, etc.

(2016) Thinking postcolonially about the Middle East: Two moments of anti-Eurocentric critique

Present day insecurities in the Middle East are invariably analysed in light of the colonial past. Yet, Eurocentrism, which is a by-product of the coloniser's orientalist gaze toward the non-European world, continues to shape our understanding of regional dynamics. This paper suggests that thinking postcolonially about the Middle East has two moments of anti-Eurocentric critique. Often-times, attempts at thinking postcolonially about the Middle East remain content with the first moment (admitting the ills of colonialism) and not realise the second moment (studying the Middle East as the 'constitutive outside' of 'Eu-rope', thereby acknowledging mutually constitutive relations). The first section of the paper introduces the notion of thinking postcolonially about the international. Next, I distinguish between what I term as 'two moments of anti-Eurocentric critique' and illustrate the difference by looking at the figures of the English traveller and author Gertrude Bell, a.k.a. 'the woman who made Iraq', and Iraqi architect Dame Zaha Hadid who embodied the Middle East as a 'constitutive outside' of Europe.

Beyond Edward Said: An Outlook on Postcolonialism and Middle Eastern Studies

Social Epistemology

At the forefront of critically examining the effects of colonization on the Middle East is Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In the broadest theoretical sense, Said’s work through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, presented an epistemologico-methodological equation expressed most lucidly by Aimé Césaire, colonization=thingification. Said, arguing against that archaic historicized discourse, Orientalism, was simply postulating that colonialism and its systems of knowledges signified the colonized, in Anouar Abdel-Malek’s words, as customary, passive, non-participating and non-autonomous. Nearly four decades later, Said’s contribution has become tamed and domesticated to an extent that most heterodoxic critical endeavours in the field have become clichéd premeditated anti-Orientalist tirades. At best, these critiques are stuck at analysing the impact of power at the macro-level, polemically regurgitating jargons like “hegemony”, “misrepresentation” and “Otherness”. At worst, they have become dogmatic or ethnocentric, closing space for scholarly debate through insipid cultural relativism, pathological religiosity or pernicious Occidentalism. I argue there is a need to go beyond that old postcolonial epistemological equation through examining the follow on effects of thingification on the thingified subject’s Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I aim to undertake this critical endeavour through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit programme of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a cognitive schema and a grammar of action that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, I demonstrate that imperial enthusiasts in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions, from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’, draw on a number of Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thoughts, which I argue are responsible for re-interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance. In the process, I put forward a new post-Saidian equation that not only transcends that tried and tested scholarly narrative, but a formula much better suited for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of neocolonial power that aims to negate the negating act: Colonization= thingification + re-interpellation of subjectivity.