When will Western academics who write about our region start citing our work, us, the academics and public intellectuals OF the region, the one they are writing about and claim to be experts in and are awarded academic jobs accordingly? When will this Western orgiastic discourse about us stop? When will they consider our own writings about our own families, our own states and governments, our own cultural practices worthy of their consideration? When will this incestuous citation fest where Westerners cite other Westerners about the Arabs come to an end? When will this “anti-enlightenment patronizing bullshit stop? When will they think of us as intellectuals worthy of their consideration and not just Westernized dupes and they, the Westerners, know what is good for us better than we do? 

The crazy ass part about this is that those who write are constantly fretting about how our own “subjectivity” is not represented in this and that project and to establish the point they cite other Western academics! A western academic cites anther Western one about how the poor Arab is not represented!

I just finished reading a piece that describes itself as “critical anthropology” that criticizes anti FGM workshop trainers in Egypt for not talking about circumcised women’s agency (yawn). The piece doesn’t have a single cite from an Egyptian scholar, Egyptian feminist activist, Egyptian workshop activist, or circumcised Egyptian woman for that matter. 

They came, they took a picture of us,and they departed.

—Lama Abu-Odeh, 27 November 2018