What is the Global South? Histories, Epistemologies, and Solidarities

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Sari Hanafi is currently a Professor of Sociology, Director of Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and Chair of the Islamic Studies program at the American University of Beirut. He is the President of the International Sociological Association. He is as well editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology. Among his recent co-authored books are The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East (with A. Salvatore and K. Obuse) and Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise (with R. Arvanitis) and The Rupture Between the Religious and Social sciences (Forthcoming in Oxford University Press). In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the National University of San Marcos and in 2022 he became lifetime corresponding fellow of the British Academy. (https://sites.aub.edu.lb/sarihanafi/).

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is Associate Professor at the Doha Institute. She studied philosophy at the American University of Beirut and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She taught in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut and Balamand University, and has been a Visiting Professor at a number of Universities in Europe and the US, including Bonn, Columbia, Yale, and Brown. She has been a Fulbright fellow at the New School University in NYC, a Research Fellow at the German Orient Institute in Beirut, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Universities of Bieleleld and Erfurt, at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies of the Free University of Berlin, at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities in

Bonn and the Marburg research network “Re-Configurations. History, Remembrance and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa” She has been a faculty member of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies since October 2016. Her research interests center on Western and post-colonial philosophies of culture, with a particular focus on contemporary Arab thought and philosophy. She has received the 2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Abu Dhabi in the category of “Contribution to the Development of Nations” for the Arabic version of her book Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia University Press, 2010). Her new book is entitled Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution. The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (Columbia University Press, 2019)

Anne Garland Mahler is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and author of From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke 2018). Mahler’s research examines the histories and artistic production of global radicalism with a focus on transnational solidarity movements in the Americas. She is the creator and director of the digital publication, Global South Studies, co-coordinator of the “Internationalism” project within the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory, and co-editor of the books The Comintern and the Global South (forthcoming with Routledge) and The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South (under contract). Her monograph in progress, South-South

Solidarities: Racial Capitalism and Political Community from the Americas to the Globe, was supported by a 2020-21 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.

Sami Hermez is Director of the Liberal Arts Program and Associate Professor in Residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His first book published with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence. His current project is a life story of a Palestinian family living through ongoing Israeli occupation and dispossession. His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World. He has held posts as Visiting

Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

Dean’s Global Forum

5:30 – 6:30 p.m.

Although Islamic activists historically have not engaged with the terminology of the “Global South,” this paper will explore the ways in which political Islam has engaged with some of its intended meanings and interpretations. Beginning in the post-colonial era and extending through the Cold War period that dominated most discussions around global politics in the second half of the 20th century, Islamist mobilization as expressed in the mission and activism of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond sought to distinguish between capitalist and communist worldviews. Although it was often depicted in the language of pan-Islamic solidarity, Islamist discourse appeared to distinguish strongly between industrial powers and colonial states on the one hand, and colonized and subject populations struggling for liberation and self-determination on the other. Relying on common faith-based bonds and shared historical experience as a marker of identity, this approach created new geographies but fell short in advancing an original approach to political, social, and economic organization within the boundaries it constructed.

Biography

The global South has been imagined in multiple ways – as a geopolitical region, a political economic formation, as a social movement cartography and as a network of distribution of subaltern subjects across nations and borders. In this presentation, I try to rethink the imaginary of the global South as a space of intellection and academic solidarity. I ask if we can imbue the concept of the global South with a temporal valence. Analogous to the conceptions of utopia and heterotopia but without the overwhelming spatial connotation of these terms, I propose that we think of the South as an encounter of multiple, heterogenous times which offer us resources in thinking aside of the hegemonic temporality of colonial modern historicality. I also suggest that the global South can be so reconvened after the global academy has passed through the moments of postcolonial and decolonial critique. We are now able to undertake the more positive and affirmative task of producing new perspectives and theories from out of multiple historical experiences in conversation with each other, an activity which must necessarily supplement the ongoing task of collective criticism. In that sense, I describe our temporal inhabitation of the global South as a mode of ‘thinking across traditions’ which can avoid false universalisms as well as puritanical claims of authenticity.

See Biography

Conceptualizing the extant identity narratives as discourses, I look at the dominant narrative (e.g., “Bangali Musolmaner Mon”) and present a discourse analysis of the canonical historical texts to understand the emergence and development of this historical narrative about Bangali Muslims. I recognize the original assumptions about Bangali Muslims in the writings of Bankimchandra Chatterji in the late-19th century. Using a framework based on Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge and Said’s orientalism, I offer a critical analysis of this narrative and discusses how it discursively constructs the Muslim (particularly, the peasants) population as backward-looking, reactive, and prone to violence and terrorism, and thereby, necessitating top-down governance and authoritarian rule on them. Then, I offer an alternative history of Bangali Muslims based on historical works by Asim Roy and Richard Eaton that remain marginal and overlooked. I use my findings to understand collective identity and national belonging in contemporary Bangladesh whereby the entire citizenry is divided primarily into the Muslim (constructed as outsiders) and the Hindu (as insider/natives) communities. I look further into the Muslim community and identify a fault-line along the elite/non-elite division causing more fractions within the citizenry. Finally, I conclude by highlighting theoretical as well as historical importance of the findings in understanding current political developments, racialized identity politics, and offering potentially effective insights to move towards peaceful co-existence of various communities in Bangladesh and beyond.

Hasan Mahmud is Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in global studies from Sophia University in Tokyo, and an MSS and a BSS in sociology from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. His teaching and research interests include sociological theories, globalization, international migration, development, race and racialization, identity politics, and global ethnography. His research has appeared in such publications as Current Sociology, Migration & Development, Contemporary Justice Review, and Journal of Socio-economic Research and Development. His Bangla book “Bangali Musolman Proshno (Bangali Muslim Question)” was published in the national book fair in Bangladesh last year and toped the best-selling book list for several weeks.

Banu Akdenizli is Associate Professor of Communication at Northwestern University in Qatar. She earned her PhD in media and communication from Temple University in Philadelphia. Prior to joining Northwestern University in Qatar, Akdenizli was an associate professor of communication at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey. She formerly worked as a methodologist and analyst for the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project in Washington, DC. She is the research fellow of University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Public Diplomacy Fellow from 2016-2018. She is the editor and contributor of Digital Transformations in Turkey: Current Perspectives in Communication Studies (2015), author of Toward a Healthier

Understanding of Internet Policy Development, The Case of Turkey (2007), co-author of Democracy in the Age of New Media: A Report on the Media and the Immigration Debate (2008). She has also authored book chapters and numerous periodical articles both in English and Turkish. She holds a BA in sociology and an MA in translation studies from Boğaziçi University, Turkey.

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Biography

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Biography

Marcela Pizarro is Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University Qatar. She worked as a journalist for Al Jazeera English since its launch in 2006. At the channel’s media critique show, The Listening Post, she made programs on the politics, history, and culture of media around the world. Her reports, documentaries, and animations incorporate cultural theory into her journalism. Her academic work focuses on the politics of media in the global south, Latin American cultural history, and south-south intellectual history. At NU-Q she lectures in broadcast journalism, international news and documentary with a special interest in bringing theories of race, gender and class into creative forms of journalistic practice. She was awarded the British Academy scholarship for her PhD in Latin American cultural history at the University of London.