Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa .”

Pertinent. “This re-barbarization of the outsider takes the form of liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of appropriating the anti-orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite implausibly, as postcolonial, in objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity, merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity; orientals are thus reorientalized in a traffic of mirror images between postmodernists and neo-orientalists speaking for difference, and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of authenticity, in a play of exoticism from outside and self-parody from the inside. I have shown this in various writings to be a species of false memory, of invented memory marketed like the retro features of the 1996 Vespa. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity – instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity – devolves into a post-1989 postul...

“Through an analysis of domestic factors, elements that are often presented as separate, or timeless, features of Middle Eastern politics, be they nationalism or religious fundamentalism, may turn out to be much more closely formed and transformed by their association with the state. Just as a more flexible and specific view of history has made historical analysis more effective, a more specific view of the state may, thereby, lead to a recognition of its greater influence.” The starting point is “the approach that is broadly derivative of historical sociology, and of the stronger insights of Marxism, and, by extension, of the international dimensions, at once of history as of contemporary politics and society, that historical sociology addresses. This perspective looks at the core components of a political and social order, the state, ideology and society, and focuses specifically on how institutions, be they of political or social/religious power, are established and maintained. It s...

On 1 January 1804, the Republic of Haiti declared independence. “Haiti offered asylum to enslaved people who could reach its shores. The Haitian Revolution inaugurated an independent Haitian trade, which sent free Haitians on business around the Caribbean and encouraged enslaved sailors to desert to freedom. Enslaved people also escaped to Haiti by other means. For example, in the Bahamas in 1822, slaveholders complained that more than 100 enslaved men and women from the island of Grand Caicos had overwhelmed their drivers and overseers, taken their children with them, and stolen open boats to flee to Haiti. Once on land in the Black republic, any person of African descent was free and eligible for citizenship. It was Haitian policy never to permit the re-enslavement of Haitian citizens or refugees. Robin Blackburn writes that ‘Haiti had saved the honor of the New World revolutions’, coming closer to realising the universal rights proclaimed by American revolutionaries than American fo...

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”  Fatma Aliye

Review of Scorched Earth

A French invention Une invention française اختراع استعماري فرنسي

  Ramadan Nights

Excerpts from Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East/Mashreq By Isam Al-Khafaji (I.B. Tauris 2004)

May Fourth, the Day That Changed China A liberal view

‘Why this race? Running forever behind development? Why don’t we think more about the very notion of developing? For whom, for what? For growth rates? What is development? What does it mean to develop a country by increasing the number of poor people?’  A very interesting interview with geographer Habib Ayeb. I cannot digest though his assertion that the solution would be a return to the agricultural economy and that small farmers could feed humanity. I find it weird. Food Sovereignty and the Environment

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh

Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam

Farewell Faleh Abdul-Jabbar

Restating Orientalism A Critique of Modern Knowledge

The Russian Revolution 100 years on Uneven and Combined Development (Part 1) The full analysis   (91 pages) My reading for this week-end 

The Metamorphosis at 100

Macron, or the coronation of America: A conversation with Régis Debray

It is probably the best introduction I have read about understanding the modern English society   (written in 1988)

"[W]ith  Macron the void is not in contradiction with fullness of content, even if at the present moment when he does have to show something to the outside world, the void is greatly preferable. For the substance is the oligarchy’s: this is the fullness of a class’s project to persevere, in the very moment that everything condemns it, testimony to an era that has perceptibly reached its tipping point. In these conditions, for the oligarchic substance to maintain itself in the face of — and against — everything else, it needed an empty candidate, a candidate who said nothing, for what truly had to be said would be too obscene to present openly: the rich want to remain rich, and the powerful to remain powerful. That is this class’s only project, and that is its candidate Macron’s  raison d’être . In this sense, he is the spasm of a system pushing back its own death. He is its final response, the only way of disguising a continuity that has become intolerable to the rest of soci...