A. O. /
As I enter the third week of my internship, I cannot help but be preoccupied with Santos’ Epistemologies of the South. Working at a Paris-based think tank full of Middle Eastern scholars where meetings, briefings, and infographics are conducted and presented in three different languages has been nothing short of overwhelming and exciting. In turn, it has prompted me to reflect heavily on the way knowledge about the MENA region has been and continues to be produced.
As I introduced myself in Arabic during my first team meeting, I was struck by the irony of it being my first time speaking my native language in an academic or work setting, despite having lived in the Arab world my entire life. In so many ways, ARI is a response to the overwhelmingly outside-in nature of scholarship on the MENA. As part of my work, I have been extensively collating resources for ongoing projects. I am struck both by the preeminence of English, the language I am now using in this post, and the extent to which literature on key events, particularly the Arab Spring, is dominated by organizations such as the Congressional Library, which flatten stories and limit their analysis to their geopolitical concerns.
In summarizing Santos’ theory of abyssal thinking, Barreto writes:
Former colonial societies [continue] to be mere objects of analysis for the former Northern empires or neocolonial powers… [they] are assigned the role of passive spectators of events with hypothetical worldwide significance, as well as recipients of Western false universals. (404)
What is the value of research whose language is foreign to those who the research examines? Even though there is a great range of compelling and incisive literature by Arab scholars, almost all of it invariably exists in the diaspora. While I am certain that my Arabic proficiency prevents me from accessing a plethora of sources, there is still no denying the relative deficiency of the academy in the Arab world–the result of decades of disenfranchisement, first under colonization and now under authoritarianism. Those who research, speak, or write find themselves in the Global North before or after the fact.
How can one produce such work without becoming divorced from its subjects? To what extent can those living comfortably in the diaspora even be seen as the subjects of their own research? Lastly, when examining countries with tense and repressive political climates, how is one to advocate for social justice? How can you de-politicize the fundamentally political?
Reference:
Barreto, José-Manuel. “Epistemologies of the South and human rights: Santos and the quest for global and cognitive justice.” Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 21 (2014): 395.