Hamid Dabashi misreads postcolonialism in Al-Jazeera article
In a recent article for Al-Jazeera, Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi €" an Iranian national living in the United States €" laid out why he believed that the €Arab Spring€ marked the end of €postcolonialism€ in the North Africa and Middle East region. According to Dabashi, €the postcolonial did not overcome the colonial; it exacerbated it by negation.€
Throughout his vitriol Dabashi attacks the Western world €" a term he finds discredited today, for some reason which he does not fully articulate €" for having formed a postcolonial Islamic world in an image of the former's choosing. Firstly, and most obviously, the major colonial power in the region for the last seven or so centuries was the Ottoman Empire, not the British, French or American.
This seems to have entirely escaped Dabashi. While it is true that the region was shaped by the European powers, Britain and France's tenure in the region was little more than a few decades, nowhere near long enough to have uprooted the foundations laid by Constantinople.
If €Europe colonised the Arab and Muslim world from one end to the other precisely according to the model of power by which it was itself being colonised by the self-fetishising logic of capital€, the Ottomans did so for far longer, and Uncle Sam has had a far stronger influence on the region since the end of the Second World War, than London or Paris did between the two World Wars.
According to Dabashi, €the Arab revolutions, each with a different momentum, are creating a new geography of liberation, which is no longer mapped on colonial or cast upon postcolonial structures of domination; this restructuring points to a far more radical emancipation, not only in these but, by extension, in adjacent societies and in an open-ended dynamic.€ Yet the very tools which the €Arab revolutionaries€ used were Western social media, while democracy and nationalism are European inventions.
While Dabashi said, that €these revolutions are not driven by the politics of replicating €the West€ €" rather, they are transcending it, and thus are as conceptually disturbing to the existing political order as to the r©gime du savoir around the globe,€ the real indigeneous challenge to Western norms in the Islamic world is Islamism, not the Western-style democracy campaigned for in Cairo and Tunis.
€The ground is shifting under the feet of what self-proclaimed superpowers thought was their globe,€ according to Dabashi, yet the ideology which really refutes Western conceptions of how a society should function is Islamism not what was seen in Tahrir Square.
One of the reasons why China will not revert to Western-style democracy and conceptions of how an economy should run, is because China is a Confucian communitarian society which prizes community over individual, and while taking the aspects of Western development which it wants, rejects those it feels are not compatible with its own culture.
While Dabashi's introversion and wound-licking is all very touching, using Uncle Sam's technology, wearing his jeans and shouting his slogans are not a repudiation, in any way, shape or form, of Western norms and values.
According to Debashi, €Postcolonialism was instrumental in conceptually fetishising colonialism as something other than the abuse of labour by capital writ large. It is not, and never has been.€ Presumably he would include the Islamic empires headquartered in Istanbul, Tabriz, Qazvin, Esfahan, Aghmat, Marrakech, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore and Delhi in this definition of colonialism.
Not only does Dabashi fail to acknowledge the Islamic empires which not only colonised the Islamic world but also white Europeans (think of Al-Andalus and the Balkans), but he does not even mention the quasi-colonial behaviour of China today or Russia during the Cold War.
As regards the idea that colonialism was nothing more €than the abuse of labour by capital writ large€, that is funny because that would presume there was total subjugation of people outside of Europe, and that they were ruled totally against their will by absolutist dictatorships imposed from London, Paris and Madrid.
The reality is that there were never enough maxim guns in the world for a few thousand Britons in India to rule that collection of municipalities through hard power alone. People were co-opted more than coerced, while much of the day-to-day governing and administration was behind the scenes.
The British in Africa and India often worked through local leaders. They also dispensed administrative positions in proportion to the demographics of a given society, such as in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). When the British left Ceylon a power vacuum ensued, closely followed by a civil war.
On the latter point, Dabashi fails to fully articulate the fact that, for the most part, power never really passed to the people of former French and British colonies. Generally speaking, it passed to kleptocrats, dynasties and gangsters who have pilfered and stolen their way to the top and created a culture of corruption which has filtered down to the humblest bureaucrat who relies upon bribery and money laundering as a means to supplement an otherwise meagre income.
Dabashi does not even leave the door open for the possibility that Britain could have developed a more horizontal partnership with its former colonies and protectorates, based on military alliances and administrative assistance.
He would presumably dismiss the Commonwealth's administrative assistance in Sierra Leone as nothing more than a vestige of Western supremacy even though it is a committed partnership which has seen Sierra Leone improve on all socio-economic indicators. Presumably Dabashi would prefer that Sierra Leoneon children were malnourished so long as the white man was nowhere to be seen.
Finally Dabashi lives in the United States, the very bastion of Western dominance which he seems to despise. People vote with their feet and actions speak louder than words. Had the British and French been the brutes which Dabashi portrayed, there is no way that millions of people from the developing world would have moved to the old mother countries. It would be foolish of them to do so. They did and continue to do so, because of a lack of economic and educational opportunities in developing countries due to the kleptocrats which rule them.
The economic development of Botswana and the Gulf would seem to refute Dabashi's thesis that all former Western colonies have been kept in a state of abject under-development. For Hong Kong and Singapore, Western administrative assistance was used where necessary (directly in the case of Hong Kong). What Dabashi ignores is that there comes a point when people no longer care who feeds them, clothes them and employs them. They just want to live. But then it is easy to say otherwise from the cloisters of a Western university.
Throughout his vitriol Dabashi attacks the Western world €" a term he finds discredited today, for some reason which he does not fully articulate €" for having formed a postcolonial Islamic world in an image of the former's choosing. Firstly, and most obviously, the major colonial power in the region for the last seven or so centuries was the Ottoman Empire, not the British, French or American.
This seems to have entirely escaped Dabashi. While it is true that the region was shaped by the European powers, Britain and France's tenure in the region was little more than a few decades, nowhere near long enough to have uprooted the foundations laid by Constantinople.
If €Europe colonised the Arab and Muslim world from one end to the other precisely according to the model of power by which it was itself being colonised by the self-fetishising logic of capital€, the Ottomans did so for far longer, and Uncle Sam has had a far stronger influence on the region since the end of the Second World War, than London or Paris did between the two World Wars.
According to Dabashi, €the Arab revolutions, each with a different momentum, are creating a new geography of liberation, which is no longer mapped on colonial or cast upon postcolonial structures of domination; this restructuring points to a far more radical emancipation, not only in these but, by extension, in adjacent societies and in an open-ended dynamic.€ Yet the very tools which the €Arab revolutionaries€ used were Western social media, while democracy and nationalism are European inventions.
While Dabashi said, that €these revolutions are not driven by the politics of replicating €the West€ €" rather, they are transcending it, and thus are as conceptually disturbing to the existing political order as to the r©gime du savoir around the globe,€ the real indigeneous challenge to Western norms in the Islamic world is Islamism, not the Western-style democracy campaigned for in Cairo and Tunis.
€The ground is shifting under the feet of what self-proclaimed superpowers thought was their globe,€ according to Dabashi, yet the ideology which really refutes Western conceptions of how a society should function is Islamism not what was seen in Tahrir Square.
One of the reasons why China will not revert to Western-style democracy and conceptions of how an economy should run, is because China is a Confucian communitarian society which prizes community over individual, and while taking the aspects of Western development which it wants, rejects those it feels are not compatible with its own culture.
While Dabashi's introversion and wound-licking is all very touching, using Uncle Sam's technology, wearing his jeans and shouting his slogans are not a repudiation, in any way, shape or form, of Western norms and values.
According to Debashi, €Postcolonialism was instrumental in conceptually fetishising colonialism as something other than the abuse of labour by capital writ large. It is not, and never has been.€ Presumably he would include the Islamic empires headquartered in Istanbul, Tabriz, Qazvin, Esfahan, Aghmat, Marrakech, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore and Delhi in this definition of colonialism.
Not only does Dabashi fail to acknowledge the Islamic empires which not only colonised the Islamic world but also white Europeans (think of Al-Andalus and the Balkans), but he does not even mention the quasi-colonial behaviour of China today or Russia during the Cold War.
As regards the idea that colonialism was nothing more €than the abuse of labour by capital writ large€, that is funny because that would presume there was total subjugation of people outside of Europe, and that they were ruled totally against their will by absolutist dictatorships imposed from London, Paris and Madrid.
The reality is that there were never enough maxim guns in the world for a few thousand Britons in India to rule that collection of municipalities through hard power alone. People were co-opted more than coerced, while much of the day-to-day governing and administration was behind the scenes.
The British in Africa and India often worked through local leaders. They also dispensed administrative positions in proportion to the demographics of a given society, such as in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). When the British left Ceylon a power vacuum ensued, closely followed by a civil war.
On the latter point, Dabashi fails to fully articulate the fact that, for the most part, power never really passed to the people of former French and British colonies. Generally speaking, it passed to kleptocrats, dynasties and gangsters who have pilfered and stolen their way to the top and created a culture of corruption which has filtered down to the humblest bureaucrat who relies upon bribery and money laundering as a means to supplement an otherwise meagre income.
Dabashi does not even leave the door open for the possibility that Britain could have developed a more horizontal partnership with its former colonies and protectorates, based on military alliances and administrative assistance.
He would presumably dismiss the Commonwealth's administrative assistance in Sierra Leone as nothing more than a vestige of Western supremacy even though it is a committed partnership which has seen Sierra Leone improve on all socio-economic indicators. Presumably Dabashi would prefer that Sierra Leoneon children were malnourished so long as the white man was nowhere to be seen.
Finally Dabashi lives in the United States, the very bastion of Western dominance which he seems to despise. People vote with their feet and actions speak louder than words. Had the British and French been the brutes which Dabashi portrayed, there is no way that millions of people from the developing world would have moved to the old mother countries. It would be foolish of them to do so. They did and continue to do so, because of a lack of economic and educational opportunities in developing countries due to the kleptocrats which rule them.
The economic development of Botswana and the Gulf would seem to refute Dabashi's thesis that all former Western colonies have been kept in a state of abject under-development. For Hong Kong and Singapore, Western administrative assistance was used where necessary (directly in the case of Hong Kong). What Dabashi ignores is that there comes a point when people no longer care who feeds them, clothes them and employs them. They just want to live. But then it is easy to say otherwise from the cloisters of a Western university.
