The Thingified subject's resistance in the Middle East

Colonization, I postulate, has a far more profound effect on the colonized than conceptualized in Aimé Césaire's postcolonial equation, colonization  =  thingification. Rather, here I put forward a new postcolonial equation for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of colonialism: Colonization  =  thingification + re-appropriation of subjectivity. I argue that Western imperial narratives and what Edward Said calls its 'evaluative judgment' and 'implicit program of action' also subjectify the thingified subject's Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I present this equation through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit program of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a manual 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, this genealogical exploration demonstrates that imperial enthusiasts, from Napoleon, Renan, Le Bon and Stoddard to Winston Churchill and David Petraeus, in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions — from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the 'Arab Spring' — draw on four Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thought, which, I argue, are responsible for interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance, and which I denominate as: Recrudescence of Fanaticism, Progress Fetishism, Outsourcing of Agency, and the bipolar cognitive device Revolutionary Narcissism-Red Peril.17 page(s

The Oriental Rebel in Western History

Edward Said's Orientalism through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge postulates that colonization for the colonized has a particular ontological finality, reification. I contend here that the process of subjection has a far more profound effect than merely reifying the colonized, to borrow from Anouar Abdel-Malek, as customary, passive, non-participating, and non-autonomous. Rather, Western imperial narratives and what Said calls its “evaluative judgments” and “program of actions” also come to interpellate the reified subject's cosmovision, agency, and its forms of resistance. Focusing on the Middle East, this study is a genealogy that exposes how techniques and technologies of imperial power have symbolically and materially produced the Oriental rebel in Western history. Through re-reading institutionalized knowledges and resurrecting a counter-history, this article reveals a hidden and buried discursive formation, one which I call counter-revolutionary discourse. I argue that this system of thought is built through dispersed and heterogeneous but power-laden statements from Aymeric and Comte de Volney to Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Renan, Gustave Le Bon, and Thomas Friedman.</jats:p

Regaining pre-colonial sovereignty : the case of Miskitu resistance

This article explores the politics, discursive utterances and postures of an under-studied indigenous autonomist movement whose anti-colonial and anti-Western project demands to be studied per se: the Council of Miskitu Elders of the Communitarian Nation Mosquitia in Nicaragua. As the epitome of what here is denominated revindicative autonomism, this movement presents an articulation of autonomy that not only deviates from but also challenges the current hegemonic model of liberal multiculturalism. Engaging in an anti-colonial struggle, the Council of Elders rearticulates autonomy firstly by bringing to the fore the territorial component of the nomos. Secondly, it does so by pushing for the outright rejection of the Western nation-state and its hierarchical multicultural models of governance. Drawing from an extensive and detailed examination of this movement's textual and rhetorical contrivances as well as field research conducted in the region, this work explores the rarely acknowledged bottom-up politics of autonomism and attempts to diversify the often reductionist theorisation of indigenous autonomist demands in Latin America.14 page(s

Power, Ideology, Politics and the Revolutionary Subject

The synthesis of different modalities of power and ideological frameworks has ensured an overpowering and suffocating interpellation of the subject. The state apparatus in conjunction with the capitalist dispositif dictates not only the ontological realities of the subject but also its social destiny, its subjective capabilities and degree of appearance in the world. In this paper, we examine and revisit Louis Althusser’s dual mode of politico-ontological subjectivity: the Good-Subject and the bad-subject. The former is the interpellated human-animal of the world of domestication which through erasing or denying revolutionary-truth comes to conceive politics merely as the art of being governed. This Good-Subject conceives political subjectivity as either an endeavour to return to an authentic originary past, an ad hominem identitarian logicality, or at best the amendment of the existing configuration of the system. On the other hand, the bad-subject is one that is obsessed with the question of how not to be governed by the existing capitalo-statist logic and order. We argue here that the bad-subject is a generic subjective-operator consisting of a set of critical procedures, radical ethos and praxical political steps that introduce a novel revolutionary-truth into the structured hierarchized capitalo-statist world.No Full Tex

Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Lessons from Chile and Mexico

Artificial intelligence is transforming higher education in Latin America, with Chile and Mexico leading in AI design and implementation. This article examines pioneering AI initiatives at two universities: the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. Their experiences offer valuable insights and frameworks for AI integration in higher education across the Global South and emerging economies

Epistemological blindness or violence : liberal multiculturalism and the indigenous quest for autonomy

From 1960s onwards, liberal multiculturalism – from Iris M. Young's notion of a 'differentiated citizenship' or what Rodolfo Stavenhagen terms 'internal self-determination' to Will Kymlicka's multicultural citizenship and federacy arrangements, Arendt Lijphart's consociationalism and Rainer Bauböck's pluralist federation – has played a fundamental role in the recognition of difference as well as questioning the configuration of the nation–state as racially homogenous and administratively unified. So far, these liberal approaches have successfully addressed and accommodated some of the core political and cultural demands of religious and ethnic minorities. Yet, drawing on field research conducted in Chile and Nicaragua as well as a critical examination of this liberal canon on multiculturalism, this paper theorises that in the case of indigenous quests for autonomy, these approaches exude nothing but epistemological blindness, ignoring or dismissing alterity. At worst, they function as an epistemic violence that silences, incorporates and decontests synchronic alternative autonomist indigenous articulations.18 page(s