Mission Statement Responses

Arjun Appadurai, Lara Deeb, Jessica Winegar, Thomas R. Trautmann, Shamil Jeppie, Tani Barlow, Faisal Devji, Deniz Kandiyoti, Steven Pierce, Udaya Kumar, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, James De Lorenzi, Leela Gandhi, Peter van der Veer

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 33, Number 2, 2013, pp. 137-139 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v033/33.2.appadurai.html

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see this new phase in the history of a well-established scholarly journal as offering a major opportunity. That opportunity needs to be placed in a context. There are three key elements to this context, from the point of view of the American research university and the geographies of the rest of the world. IFirst, globalization has encouraged greater traffic among disciplines, regions, and institutions based primarily on growing access to information, knowledge, and methodology through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Second, and in roughly the same period, the humanities have become increasingly marginalized as a result of the rise of vocational, professional, and skill-based knowledge throughout the world. This has been tied to a deepening crisis of the research university, which has lost any clear sense of its distinctive mission. Third, there is growing tension everywhere between the claims of heritage, identity, and religion and the claims of free expression, opinion, and debate. Each of these contextual factors, and their joint force, requires renewed attention to what I see as the critical humanities. Under this rubric, I assemble the traditional humanities (from linguistics and literature to history and philosophy), the newer brands of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, and the softer social sciences, especially anthropology. This is the space that I see as the anchor for CSSAAME.

Challenges I see four known challenges requiring continued engagement and fresh ideas. First, the tension between Western theories and local or non-Western archives remains unresolved. Discussions about this particular challenge continue to emerge, most recently in John and Jean Comaroff’s book Theory from the South. While there has been much effort to disturb the somewhat static earlier geographic underpin- nings of this debate — on the grounds that the North within the South has further blurred the problem of the West within the East, both as regards geopolitics and academic knowledge — the effort to build knowledge of and across areas without privileging some as superior guides to method or theory has not had much success. My own view, outlined in my recent book The Future as Cultural Fact, stresses that an important basis for progress here must be the effort to enable research to be a better distributed capacity across regions, classes, and disciplines. As far as CSSAAME is concerned, I think it would be useful for the journal to monitor, encourage, and publicize efforts anywhere in the world that have the democratization of research as a primary goal. Second, we need to continue to engage the hoary issue of “text” and “context” that has historically been, inter alia, a proxy for the distinction between the humanities and the social sciences. It is clear that

there has been considerable progress on the “text” fields as diverse as censorship, travel, iconoclasm, side of this binary, in linguistic, literary, and philo- and journalism. These developments need to be logical developments in the era after structuralism harnessed to reexamine classical problems of lan- held sway. There has been comparatively slight guage, translation, and interpretation. progress in the study of “context.” Apart from a Second, it is time for the critical humani- handful of linguists and philosophers, the prob- ties to cease to consign the study of such topics lem of context remains part of the inert language as hunger, energy, climate, planning, and war to of the social sciences and the humanities, and it the political and social sciences. Each of these is a ripe subject for a deep investigation based on topics raises important questions about epistemol- case materials as well as revisitations of our concep- ogy, comparison, history, and archive, which have tual languages. What defines a context? How do rarely been taken seriously by the harder human we handle the problem that all contexts also have sciences. It is now vital to engage them critically, their own contexts? Can there be a method for the in the manner, for example, that Timothy Mitch- study of intercontextuality? Are all contexts, such ell has addressed the category of the “economy” in as temporal, spatial, regional, and disciplinary the modern Western academy. contexts, similar in their structure or form? If not, Third, insofar as contributions to CSSAAME what does this mean for our scholarly practices? involve regions and sources that are not domi- Third, these considerations, if properly pur- nated by English, it will be important to insist that sued, surely have implications for the study of the authors be as explicit as possible about their ap- relationship between written media and all other proach to non-English sources, philologies, and media, including visual, electronic, and digital, archival practices. This should replace the older all of which now play a crucial role in the critical philological obsession with etymologies and roots humanities. Regional and areal histories affect the with a dynamic understanding of how linguistic form and force of each of these media and thus traditions influence how traces are formed and of the relationships between them. These relation- how such variably deposited traces can both en- ships cannot be grasped except by the structured able and disable comparative our strategies of investigation of materials from the maximum di- interpretation. versity of regions and of their comparison. Fourth, it would be a major accomplish- Fourth, none of these desiderata can be ad- ment if CSSAAME encouraged publications in the dressed except by confronting the dominance of critical humanities from scholars and critics who English as a language of scholarship, debate, and now publish mainly in professional journals such publication worldwide. Absent a thoroughgoing as those of law, medicine, science, and business. effort to tackle problems of translation, dissemina- Among these authors are a significant minority tion, and linguistic democratization, non-English who are alert to problems of language, history, arguments on all of these issues will remain mar- region, and genre, and they could bring into the ginal, and the universe of comparison will be un- journal vital new debates in fields such as climate, acceptably narrow. privacy, genomics, and financial derivatives (to name just a few) that have usually been absent in Priorities the pages of such journals as CSSAAME. These challenges suggest some priorities for the CSSAAME comes to a new point in its his- critical humanities and thus for the mission of tory at a time when there is a general exhaustion CSSAAME. First, the rapidly growing field of vi- with involuted recent debates in the humanities sual culture studies should have a prominent place and cultural studies — over postcolonialism, iden- in the journal. We have seen remarkable develop- tity politics, deconstruction, the linguistic turn, ments in the study of mapping, image studies, and and of course postmodernism — and when tradi- the visual technologies of warfare, borders, iden- tional social sciences have increasingly become tification, and security. Each of these has involved allies of the neoliberal global market, largely by new ways of reading the history of visual technolo- abdicating any and all deep criticisms of the global gies and of using these readings to reexamine economy. There has never been a moment when Responses • Mission Statement 139

the world has been so visibly large and varied and will conduct fieldwork in an additional location, the methods for its study so narrow and parochial. but nearly always within the same nation-state CSSAAME can correct this worrisome imbalance. boundaries. This fieldwork is then translated by all disciplinary measures as “methodological ex- Arjun Appadurai pertise” in a region, even though that region is New York University typically defined as broader than the nation-state doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322345 where the original fieldwork was conducted. Thus, a fieldworker in Egypt has expertise in the Middle References East, an anthropologist working in Zimbabwe has Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso, 2013. expertise in Africa, and so on. Not only does this framework conflate nation-state with region, but it Comaroff, Jean and John. Theory from the South: Or, How also assumes that research conducted in one loca- Euro- America is Evolving Toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011. tion or community within a nation-state is more broadly representative of that country. Addition- Mitchell, Timothy. “Rethinking Economy.” Geoforum 39 (2008): 1116 – 21. ally, comprehensive exams or other evaluative structures in graduate training generally carve out an area of “expertise” defined as in-depth knowledge of ethnographic texts based on fieldwork in he relationship between discipline and region a specific region that, in the case of the “areas” of T in the field of anthropology has undergone this journal, also supersede nation-state boundar- major transformations in the past twenty years. ies. These means of producing and assessing aca- Where once an anthropologist could frame his or demic knowledge and expertise in anthropology her work, both methodologically and theoretically, result in ethnographic monographs that are based within a region with assumed spatial and temporal on research in one physical place. These are pro- borders, by the mid-1990s such an enterprise was duced (and read) through a series of structures roundly viewed as misguided if not impossible. The that define them as part of and often representa- groundwork for the destabilization of this relation- tive of a larger region. This privileging of regional ship was laid by Marxist and feminist approaches expertise has often extended from ethnography to beginning in the late 1960s, critiques of represen- theory, as certain theoretical paradigms have been tation and the culture concept dating mainly from associated with specific regions within anthropol- the 1980s, and the concomitant rise of postcolo- ogy in ways that may limit the sorts of questions nial, poststructuralist, and critical theory more researchers ask and the topics they find important generally. For Middle East and South Asian an- to study. thropologists in particular, Edward Said’s seminal For the Middle East, this framework is es- Orientalism (1979) was read as a direct challenge to pecially problematic given that ethnographic reconsider the political implications of represent- fieldwork is nearly impossible in at least half the ing a region as a bounded whole. Older views of an countries of the region because of on-site research anthropology divided into discrete world regions restrictions. As we have discussed in “Anthropolo- were made further untenable in the geopolitical gies of Arab-Majority Societies,” major differences context of decolonization movements, late and in social life across contexts within the region also post – Cold War political realignments, and neolib- challenge the notion that ethnography in any one eral capitalist and technological globalization. place can represent such a diverse whole. With Yet still, anthropology as a discipline con- very few exceptions, it is only when anthropolo- tinues to privilege deep regional experience and gists begin second or third projects that they may expertise. The sine qua non for the discipline is consider doing comparative fieldwork between ethnographic fieldwork in one geographic place, two nation-state contexts within the same region, and nearly all PhD programs require students as George Marcus has pointed out. Even then, we to spend one to two years physically rooted in a rarely see such fieldwork being conducted in two single city, town, or village. Occasionally students different world regions for the same project. 140 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

What may appear as a drawback from the title that is related to gender (and feminist theory) perspective of macrocomparativist approaches and/or religion (especially Islam) has tended to- found in other disciplines is, from the point of ward cross-regional theoretical engagement, per- view of anthropologists, a distinct advantage. An- haps a testament to the longstanding popularity of thropologists may not pursue comparative work those topics for both scholars of these regions and in terms of location of fieldwork, but they would in public discourse more generally. argue that only through ethnography can we get An inherently comparative journal like a fine-grained analysis of how transnational pro- CSSAAME could further encourage these sorts cesses affect social life and vice versa. Also, if the of theoretical cross-fertilizations. For example, impulse behind comparison is to see the similari- research on racialization processes in the Middle ties and differences across regions and assess why East — a significant lacuna in anthropological work they exist, anthropologists typically say that they there — would benefit from and could find inspira- cannot make these distinctions without careful tion in critical race theory that has emerged from ethnography of how processes and structures are work focused in Africa and the Black Atlantic. The made manifest in social life. That is to say, eth- burgeoning theories of youth and generation com- nography can ascertain aspects of transnational- ing out of Africanist and South Asianist research ity and comparativity that more macrolevel studies could be very useful for Middle East anthropology cannot. Fieldwork, in the view of anthropology, is to think through, particularly with the new geo- a privileged means for accessing unexpected simi- political interest in youth in that region. Analyses larities and differences and remaining alert to the that challenge assumptions about sectarianism in possibility that the comparativist impulse across the Middle East could benefit from those that chal- large swathes of world regions can generalize in lenge similar assumptions about ethnic conflict in problematic ways. Africa. And greater emphasis on intersectional- Whatever the pretensions or virtues of this ity within feminist theories, often emerging from perspective on the relationship of anthropology to South Asianist work as well as from work within the region, the fact is that theoretically anthropology US context, might push Middle East anthropolo- has always been deeply committed to understand- gists to connect their analyses of gender to class, ing human societies across space and time and in race, and sexuality in addition to the common in- that sense is deeply comparativist at its core. In the tersection of gender and religion. past twenty years, with the theoretical interven- In addition to this theoretical synergy, Mid- tions and global phenomena mentioned earlier, dle East anthropologists now increasingly engage anthropologists of the Middle East, South Asia, with forms of multi-sited ethnographic research and Africa have found much synergy by reading that involve following transnational circulations, each others’ work to see how historical and con- whether population movements or other transna- temporary global processes may be theorized in tional phenomena that link sites physically, imagi- relationship to daily struggles and subject-making natively, figuratively, and virtually. Most fruitfully processes. (This synergy emphasizes regional in- thus far, scholars have begun to explore labor mi- terconnectedness and is thus very different than gration, for example of workers from South Asia to earlier moments in which, for example, Middle the Arab Gulf, of Lebanese entrepreneurs to West East anthropologists working on tribes may have Africa, and of Arab notables to South and South- adopted or tweaked structuralist analyses of tribes east Asia. CSSAAME could encourage this new developed in Africa). In two prime examples of area of scholarship focused on communities lo- this new synergy, many Middle East anthropolo- cated at the intersections of regions, who maintain gists have incorporated theories of modernity and multiple kinship, social, and economic ties across postcoloniality derived through scholarship on them in their daily lives. Africa and South Asia into their work. They have Anthropology of these three regions would also found very productive theories of neoliberal- also benefit from some comparative consideration ism developed in Africanist research. In addition, of a number of transnational phenomena that are work in all three regions featured in CSSAAME’s becoming the subject of exciting research within Responses • Mission Statement 141

and outside the discipline. Most pressing among and disciplines more generally, are formed in rela- these are carbon economies and their effects on tionship to region. It would also help us continue societies, mega-cities and new forms of urban the projects of decentering Euro-American theo- life and urbanization, cultural production and retical models and generating theory from ethnog- consumption, circulation of mass media across raphy itself. From the perspective of Middle East regional contexts, corporations and their effects anthropology, there is much to be gained from on transnational relationships and local econo- the comparative work that would be generated by mies, resource management and sustainability new post – area studies approaches that nonetheless especially in relation to water and food, resource take area seriously. privatization and the selling of land to other na- tions, and natural disasters. While work on Islam Lara Deeb, Scripps College has long considered similarities and differences Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University in practices and movements across these regions, doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322354 such comparative thinking could be extended to work on Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism as References Deeb, Lara, and Jessica Winegar. Anthropology’s Politics: Dis- well. And at the intersections of scholarship and cipline and Region through the Lens of the Middle East. activism, discussions of contemporary politics in Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming. Palestine and Israel could benefit from careful Deeb, Lara, and Jessica Winegar. “Anthropologies of Arab- comparison to apartheid in South Africa and par- Majority Societies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 tition in South Asia. (2012): 537 – 58. In recent years, Middle East anthropologists Marcus, George. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. have embraced collaborative models of research, Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. including projects that link anthropologists with Bates, Robert H., V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, eds. scholars from other disciplines, groups of anthro- Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research pologists doing research on a single topic in one lo- in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities. Chicago: cale, and collaborations with “native informants.” University of Chicago Press, 1993. Yet hardly any of this research is conducted in a deliberately transregional way. CSSAAME could facilitate such expansion of scholarly networks and o reinvent the content, or slip the shackles, advancement of new research models by actively of area studies and the disciplines is a worthy seeking to publish scholarship produced by these Tgoal. I can only say: may the force be with you. You new research collaborations. Such an initiative have every prospect of success in getting scholars would add considerably to our knowledge of not to send you their best on regions as sources of the- only transregional connections but local processes ory and method, connective and comparative stud- and experiences as well. ies of regions and newly explored transregions. Finally, the comparative thrust of CSSAAME The time seems ripe for those kinds of things. provides a unique opportunity to consider how About disciplines, especially disciplinary his- disciplinary interests get formed in relationship to tory, I am not so sure. The gesture to deep history is regions. We need more meta-analysis of the kinds most welcome. But these days the time depth of the of questions or research foci that anthropology, history discipline gets shallower. History is increas- and other disciplines, take up in different regions. ingly the history of a past that is decreasing. At the CSSAAME could promote research that assesses same moment deep history is being constructed (and compares and contrasts) what scholarship by cosmologists, chemists, geologists, and evolu- in specific regions contributes to particular disci- tionary biologists. Their knowledge surges ahead, plines and theoretical approaches, as collections aided by new instrumentation, new techniques, such as Africa and the Disciplines and our forthcom- new conceptualizations, new zeal for history. ing Anthropology’s Politics work to achieve. Such a What seems to hold us back is an increasing project would allow scholars to see the strengths belief in the singularity of our times and increas- and weaknesses of how subfields within disciplines, 142 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

ing doubt about the ability of the remoter past to dominant language (perhaps two) for sources and explain our times to ourselves — even in the face so on. of the signal accomplishments of the natural sci- There are many reasons for this, among ences in doing just that. For us, the modern exerts which is the persistence of the area studies model a gravitational field that draws everything in. The developed in the US academy during the Cold War, modern is our black hole, which, try as we might, for instance, and therefore it shaped teaching, re- we cannot escape. Deep history is exactly what is search, and generations of scholars unwilling or needed to counteract it. unable to take risks and go beyond expertise in a Is CSSAAME likely to stimulate the produc- country, a linguistic area, or at most an ill-defined tion of this life-giving tonic? Were I to have writ- region (defined more by unquestioned convention ten the mission statement it would not contain the than rigorous analysis, e.g., the “Middle East”) phrase early modern and would not put a limit on as a secondary field of concentration. But cross- the time depth to which articles may go. And the regional comparativism has not been encouraged invitation to consider pieces reaching farther back as a field for deep, systematic research. We inher- would not be so tepid. The tendency of the state- ited the same approaches in the South; as we all ment as written, I fear, may be to make the black know area studies took off with the decolonization hole stronger by reinscribing the singularity of of the South and the imperative to produce knowl- the modern. Deep history does the opposite. And edge about its constituent parts. deep history is a force that knits up the sciences There is then the problem of the cost of such and the social sciences. I say again, may the force research beyond the research ideology of “one be with you. problem, one country.” It is much costlier. In the South, resources are already stretched and HSS Thomas R. Trautmann are very poorly funded. Our governments in the University of Michigan South have the same educational ideals set by the doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322363 OECD and similar organizations, and HSS are recognized only if they can prove to be quantita- tive, or become massively so. Work on texts, on ongratulations to the new editors, editorial historical questions, or contemporary social pro- C board, and home of this important journal, cesses without obvious relevance to developmental which has fostered global and trans-regional schol- problems, or explicitly quantifiable through the es- arship for more than thirty years. So many of the tablishment’s methods, do not really feature in na- issues and themes raised and promoted in the tional funding schemes for higher education. Thus journal remain crucially important in humanities to imagine a library even in the better resourced and social science (HSS) scholarship today. For the institutes in India, for instance, having the range next decade and beyond they will have to have a of up-to-date secondary sources to allow a gradu- prominent place on the agenda, albeit in chang- ate student to construct a project proposal coming and different ways, as can be expected in any paring an aspect of labor history between a South thriving and dynamic field or forum of debate and Asian and Latin American state is asking for much. scholarship. This applies for the entire South. Despite the existence of this journal and a In the mid-1990s Sephis (South-South Pro- few others explicitly committed to fostering com- gramme for Research in the History of Develop- parativist methods and transregional studies, the ment) emerged precisely to enable researchers in dominant trend in various fields of HSS appears to the South with the means and opportunities — remain solidly national and single case in focus — training and funding — to work in a comparative the nation-state remains the object of study, or a fashion focusing on diverse parts of the South. question is framed in terms of its origins and com- Sephis was modestly funded but put explicitly on plexity within a single country, comparisons across the southern research agenda the possibility of regions on the same continent or across continents thinking and doing research across regions in the are the exception, and there is a reliance on one South, of working outside the frame of the nation- Responses • Mission Statement 143

state, and taking research traditions and theory in nineteenth century brought labor from all over the South outside their national spaces to a Global the region to the urban centers of South Africa; South community. the Second World War was another turning point; This task is necessary and massive and re- liberation struggles in the early 1960s led to a flow quires organizations and funding far larger than of ideas and support among leaders and guerril- what Sephis had access to. But in its fifteen years it las of these movements; and the apartheid military moved young scholars and ideas beyond national attacked, threatened, and fostered rebels in all of frontiers and to areas beyond their and our imagi- the states systematically from 1975 onward. nation. The challenges are tremendous (library We can raise similar questions for the Nile resources, language training, conservative patron- Valley where the histories of Egypt and Sudan can- age, inherited research traditions), but with the not be written separately; the region includes Ethi- extension of Internet capacity and web tools there opia and the Nile basin countries. The Levant, the are more ways to address some of these problems. question of Palestine, and so on all are issues that Large bodies of materials from the South, how- can productively be studied in comparative and ever, need to be put into circulation through web cross- regional ways. There are a few cross-regional platforms. A range of problems persists that un- studies, but they are the exception to the rule of dervalues the HSS produced in the South unless single-country emphasis. How to compare across it reaches the northern academies. The challenges these and other spaces? When the Arab Spring was remain in finding the will, intellectual curiosity, in its early phases in 2011, TV pundits raised com- and capacity to take risks and explore beyond the parisons with Eastern Europe in the 1980s. But canon, the established disciplines, and networks what about comparisons with other spaces and ex- embedded in patronage and authority. periences from southern Africa to the Philipines? The nation-state frame has bred an insular- Beyond region and cross-regional compari- ity that is hard to shake off. Prominent publishers son there are entire processes that have for centu- come out every few years with new series of “na- ries spanned large-scale spaces and have in recent tional histories.” This has the effect of promot- years generated exciting new work. We think here ing such intellectual work as an ideal: If a senior of the work done and still in progress on the In- scholar devotes herself or himself to such a task dian Ocean and various discrete parts of this vast then perhaps it’s both a worthy ideal and poten- space. This research has demonstrated the connec- tially lucrative? These histories are useful to have, tions between Yemen and Indonesia, which is not up to a point. But should these be encouraged? an artifact of the past but a living history and real- Look at South Africa, for instance, and the surfeit ity. The same applies to the East African coast con- of general histories and now histories of liberation. necting Cape Town to Zanzibar and to Oman and But I cannot call to mind a single regional history so on. The work on the Indian Ocean shows how of southern Africa; there are a few collections of communities lived with and on the ocean. Yet the essays that pretend to address the region, but they shore, the land, remains crucial in this experience mostly treat the individual states of the region where families and institutions established them- prefaced by an introduction that attempts to inte- selves by building local foundations and maintain- grate the essays. How would a regional, southern ing strong ties of religious heritage and other lin- African history of apartheid look? All the colo- eage networks to their regions of origin. nial regimes had apartheid policies, or variations Such thinking that deepens analysis histori- thereof, without the name. Popular struggles and cally of a region and between disparate parts of liberation movements with bases outside the coun- a continent or between continents requires new try overthrew all of them. So why have there been kinds of training and collaborative work. It also so few attempts to write the history of the region requires linguistic skills to read bodies of litera- in an integrated and comparative fashion? There ture in more languages other than the dominant are key turning points that have had integrating ones in a country and region. The question of powers in the region; for example, the impact of language leads to another set of issues that the the mining revolutions of the last quarter of the new CSSAAME mission statement alludes to with 144 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

“philological renewal.” This is a moment in HSS other historical experiences where classical philo- that is indeed witnessing glimmers of a return to logical methods simply neglected bodies of work philology but not as a style of scholarship that re- and in periods when the idea of an archive was ex- moves the text from its worldliness. The specific tremely limited. details of the European “discovery” of “other” lan- CSSAAME has done admirable work in the guages and the construction of fields of knowledge past; it has to continue pushing comparative fron- from historical linguistics to a broader compara- tiers and the dominant foundations in theory tive philology are themselves now fields of study. and method that genuinely open new pathways to But areas that were once considered not to have think about the world. the materials for philological study, such as intellectual production in large parts of Africa, have Shamil Jeppie earned increasingly more attention. African intel- HUMA (Institute for Humanities in Africa), lectual history was very much a history of writing University of Cape Town doi 10.1215/1089201x- 2322372 in the Latin script (English, French, Portuguese) that emerged with the coming of missionary education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centu- ries. The rest was a problem of the reconstruction ongratulations. Over three decades of sus- of oral tradition. “Mediterranean Africa,” as Hegel C tained labor, CSSAAME has tracked breaking had it, was, and in mainstream work continues to scholarship and scanned long-term trends. Its con- be, cast as a world apart from the Sahara and the tinued existence will fill an important institutional spaces beyond. We have seen just how connected need, but it will also entail — not to be left out — the these regions are today if we consider that the fall ugly, rugged work of maintaining a journal. For of Colonel Qaddafi in August 2011 had a direct those who do not know, the work of publishing a impact on Mali by early 2012. This is one division journal is relentless and unappreciated. It is, more- that persists and that continues to require unlearn- over, remarkably badly “theorized,” given the cen- ing. It coincides with the misleading division of the trality of journals to scholarship and intellectual continent into two distinct parts — orality in the debate and the key role that editors and reviewers North and literacy in the sub-Sahara. play in shaping how initial thoughts become struc- But renewed work on the numerous, mainly tured, publishable ideas. family, manuscript libraries from Senegal to Ethio- Your statement delights in the arrival of post- pia and northern Mozambique opens up new areas disciplinary interstitial university spaces, where re- that require philological training at least in Arabic search and publication shall take place in a brave (and local languages in the Arabic script, ajami). new world to come. How can I fully disagree? I have These manuscripts are not in the standard Ara- also operated in a few of these spaces. Rockefeller bic script of, say, Damascus manuscripts (i.e., khatt and Luce Foundation grants, the generosity of an mashriqi) but comprise a whole range of Arabic impoverished state university, and the largesse of scripts with their own local inflections that have a wealthy private one have kept alive the journal I been dismissed as rather strange and at best me- founded and edit, positions: asia critique — but stew- diocre Arabic calligraphy derived from maghribi, as arding scholarship hand-to-mouth is a hard role to has been the dominant argument. Yet the density maintain, year in and year out. The spaces that you of these materials requires that we look at these celebrate may disappear without warning. I am less scripts as regionally diverse African reworkings of celebratory, of course, but then perhaps it is my the Arabic script. Studies that can argue with the temperament to understate, to avoid the evil eye. canon and place these scripts, and at another level, How does a phoenix journal rise from the the huge and rich volume of work using these ashes of its past? To me, new media are only one scripts, in context will entail philological skills possible avenue for rebirth, and one that requires but also reimagining the archive and the book in scholars to be already engaged in a struggle to Africa. There are parallels and comparisons with define them. positions has welcomed “new media Responses • Mission Statement 145

flows,” a Montreal-based collective that fuses so- do new Marxisms belong? What must we unearth called post – area studies with new media critique. about that scary and weird period when theoreti- Their first issue is in the positions hopper now. My cal Maoism transformed continental philosophy? point is cautionary. Get together with emergent What schools of scholarship have arisen around scholars who already know this struggle firsthand. the great midcentury traumas? We all know them, Collaborate with them. Support their efforts. but what if we were to meet and debate earnestly Change your style. the strengths and weaknesses of these coteries, What sort of submissions should you seek? At some even attached to independent journals? Why positions, we stopped soliciting because we found we not hold a great meeting of journal advocates to did not need to solicit. Projects come to us. I would delineate differences in approach, to draw ideo- say, issue an initial call and projects will contact you logical and political inferences? to sell their ideas. Given the chance, they will pro- On the topic of review essays, I have not had pose why a topic or debate is timely or, in the case luck publishing this genre in our journal, in part of antifoundationalist efforts, absolutely urgent. because it is a hornet’s nest (who wants to offend What is the purpose of a journal? I have anyone these days?), and in part because review thought about this question a long time. Walter essays are a thankless task. I wrote one myself for Benjamin said that the journal is the central ele- another journal and I liked it, because I no lon- ment that marks the extant scholarship of the ger have trepidation and I do have pronounced times. It is not that the editor goes around asking opinions, overviews to contribute. Get older, estab- for scholarship to be written, so much as the editor lished scholars to write review essays. I think we must never publish anything they do not believe owe it to the fields to be frank and critical. in, and must scan the environment to find scholars The best conferences in my experience are and works that speak to the political moment. Now, those that organize around a set of problems. The of course, Benjamin never published a journal. He “After Orientalism” conference in 1992 set the had no real idea what sort of labor it requires. How- agenda for positions’ first two years. The journal’s ever, I take his point. A journal is born with a pur- recent MLA prize – winning special issue — War pose. The purpose of positions was to find out what Capital Trauma — arose out of a conference held at “post – Cold War” and “after Orientalism” would the University of Washington, funded by a Rock- mean in practice for a Cold War Asian studies that efeller Grant in the Humanities for “The Trauma had gone defunct already. In those dramatic days, Project.” Younger scholars also like conferences people fought like animals to establish a thought that address practical questions about the overlap or politics about the future of the corpse of “Asian of individual careers and political engagement. studies,” so there was never a question about the This would suggest a topic about publication ven- journal’s purpose. Purpose and its vigilant editor ues and new strains of research. Any conference arose out of a conjuncture. Where is the conjunc- that brings generations together in comfortable ture CSSAAME finds itself in now? dialogue and company will likely be successful. If you do commission projects, I urge you to One final thought about our fields. What if, use a debate structure. The debates can involve in the projects of the journal itself, you intervene historiography, geography, ideology, periodiza- to show what a field was or might be, or is currently, tion, virtually anything. But the point must be a in ways that help shape the future? Twenty years general one and the invited scholars have to come ago “queer” was a scary word. Now it is a field, and in bands or groups, so that the pure implications positions publishes queer studies. “Postcolonial” arising from the ground of struggle can be shown was not a field then either. Neither was “theory” in bright contrast. These are not the fake debates something you could study formally in school. It where truth is alleged to lie in the middle. I am seems to me that journals like positions have helped talking about debates where genealogies of schol- shape what is acceptable as a field precisely by em- arship are aired. Where in the current debates ploying a strong double-blind review process, en- over neoliberalism and globalization, for example, abling editors to be aggressive, and walking into 146 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

hornet’s nests fairly regularly, particularly in the reference. This means that the journal will inevi- early years of their existence. tably have to deal with the problem of disciplinary Warm collegial thoughts for collaboration in as much as regional knowledge. And what better your brave new future. way to deal with these intertwined problems than by thinking historically about region, context, and Tani Barlow locality rather than in purely abstract terms about Rice University “the historical method” or “ethnography”? The doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322381 interconnection and displacement of such questions is likely to give these debates a new richness of texture. he relocation of CSSAAME to Columbia Uni- Crucial to the mission of the journal should T versity certainly offers its editorial board a be the possibility of restoring in the arena of knowl- great opportunity to rethink both the character edge those interregional relations that were cut of regionally specific scholarship and the possibil- apart by Euro-American political and economic ity of creating linkages and conversations between dominance. Just as important is the task of mak- such regions. I am in full agreement with the jour- ing entirely new relations possible in the Global nal’s mission regarding the limits of the postwar South that needn’t require mediation through the area studies model in the United States as well as West. This is of course already beginning to hap- the dangers posed by the new “scientism” of dis- pen in the political and economic spheres, but the ciplines like political science and their quest for production of knowledge from and about these a universality that transcends place. The journal relationships still lags behind. Will new forms of should indeed provide a forum for thinking criti- knowledge be produced from these sites and travel cally about inherited models of regional knowl- abroad? In contrast to this project is another that edge while at the same time foregrounding new may be said to be its mirror image, the study of theoretical interventions in rethinking its catego- dislocation and mobility in the global arena. Re- ries. And Columbia is so well-placed to make such moved from the ideal of neutral and universal conversations possible that it is even possible to knowledge that characterizes the new “scientism,” conceive of one of the journal’s tasks as being that what makes this phenomenon important is the of engaging its scholars and graduate students, way in which the militant practices of Al-Qaeda, especially in the Department of Middle Eastern, for example, proffer models of knowledge and South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), in communication that are global without being geo- a set of collective debates on these subjects. I can- graphically defined in any strong sense. They have not think of another research institution where the nothing to do with cartographic expansion, like task of a journal maps so well onto the interests of that of commodities, or even with saturating a field its scholars. of visibility seen as a flat and empty space. It seems to me that one of the implications If the globe is not the sum of its geographi- of the increasingly visible limitations of area stud- cal parts, then, of course, the opposition between ies has to do with the revitalization of the disci- local and global falls apart, since what is most glo- pline as a framework for study. Of course such balized might well be the most particular of prac- disciplines are no longer the methodologically tices or experiences. In other words, regional and hidebound things they once claimed to be. In- local worlds are probably more likely than interna- stead they appear to provide scholars with forms tional organizations or large countries to be the of inquiry and styles of narration that can inform homologues of or interlocutors for global move- other disciplines without being welded together ments. This way of thinking about the regional into a single super-model of knowledge. The area, and the global permits scholars, in addition, to in other words, may no longer provide a home for think beyond economies of scale and spatiality in scholars in different disciplines, which must now general to redefine the area by aligning it with — encounter one another afresh in a wider world of rather than against — the globe. And this immedi- Responses • Mission Statement 147

ately makes the model of “scientistic” universality y reflections are of an entirely practical na- outdated and irrelevant as any kind of challenge ture and are based on my experience as edi- to regional knowledge. For the countervailing ten- Mtor of an area-based journal, Central Asian Survey. I dencies to the uniformities of “scientism” are those entirely agree with the observation in the mission discontinuities that attach locality to the global in statement that we are poised at a crucial moment geographically unmediated ways. The opportunity when disciplines and area-based knowledge can of thinking about regional knowledge outside a enter into more meaningful interaction. cartographic framework is one that should not be However, in the UK at least, institutional re- forsaken, as it may well provide an entirely novel search performance auditing (such as the former way of considering the particularity of knowledge. Research Assessment Exercise [RAE], now the Re- This means that we are now able to question all search Excellence Framework [REF]) exerts pow- those accounts of circulation and mobility that erful pressure on scholars not only to publish in take the old-fashioned map as their ground. discipline-based journals but to favor those on a If the journal’s editors want to think critically particular league table of supposed excellence in about expansiveness and spatiality, set against the their parent disciplines. As a result, we have had to global arena and its regional homologues, then rethink the ways in which we could make the most the website and visual materials are crucial. Both effective contribution. In our case we found that works of art and visual studies, as well as scholarly unfolding events in the region we cover (such as interrogations of them, are able to grasp this di- the various “colour revolutions” in the post-Soviet mension of discontinuity better than texts. But the space, for example) receive shallow and often mis- journal should also host the kind of located histor- leading commentary, and we started to think about ical analysis that might counteract the superficial how we could combine current “hot” topics with fixation on mobility and circulation, where things, attention to the longue durée and solid analyti- ideas, or persons are seen as metaphors for the cal grounding. Agenda-setting special issues were movement of capital. But such movements are not the means we used to drive this orientation, put capable of questioning region or locality conceptu- together through a combination of conference pa- ally, only of expanding or contracting their reach. pers, calls for papers, and sometimes invited con- Neither do they allow us to think about global dis- tributions — all subject of course to a rigorous peer continuity, apart from as a limitation, and can only review process. I think it has worked. Left entirely reinstate the traditional cartographic conception to the vagaries of regular submissions, we would of flat space. Is it possible to think about relations never have achieved the goals we set ourselves. among South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in The task of CSSAAME is even more complex a way that doesn’t fall back into the logic of spati- since it has a broader geographical scope than ality and expansiveness? This question, I believe, Central Asian Survey. But it should not be impos- should pose a productive challenge for the jour- sible to identify clusters of issues that can be put nal’s editors and contributors. in a comparative cross-regional perspective and to draw upon different disciplines. (In our case, Faisal Devji for instance, the dialogues between political sci- University of Oxford entists and anthropologists, in particular political doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322390 anthropologists, turned out to be fascinating.) In brief, initially at least, a proactive editorial policy that targets specific issues or clusters of issues that have immediate real-world relevance seems desirable. The issue of so-called postauthoritarian tran- sitions will run and run, and so will resource issues and the geopolitics thereof. What is more important than the actual list of concerns at this point is what editorial mechanisms will be mobilized to 148 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

create a new platform. In my experience this sort tivity gains incompatible with the current model of of thing actually takes shape in the doing anyway. university education. Area studies was particularly Best wishes with this new undertaking. hard hit by such demands. While US government funding and canny Rockefeller grants were crucial Deniz Kandiyoti in establishing and consolidating their intellectual School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London vigor, area studies has always depended on links doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322399 between universities in OECD countries and in the “areas” being studied. Scholars circulated among universities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and t is a pleasure as well as an honor to respond in Euro-America, to the benefit of all. Dependency I to the editors’ statement about their plans for theory, the Dar es Salaam school of historiogra- CSSAAME. As they write, the present is exciting in phy, and subaltern studies are almost random ex- both its opportunities and perils; area studies’ half- amples of the critical importance of global intellec- empty glass can spur new and important scholar- tual exchange. The circulation of scholars became ship. I agree that much of the most exciting schol- more difficult during the 1980s and 1990s as struc- arship of the past decade transcends region — from tural adjustment policies strangled academic life the brilliant scholarship of the Atlantic and Indian in many countries. “Circulation” became “brain- Oceans to the ever-expanding literature on dias- drain,” following cutbacks, which often occurred poras, much of the best work has moved among in rich countries as well. regions and balanced cosmopolitanism with a Within my own field of African studies, one grounding in many localities at once. However, it of the most exciting developments of the 2000s seems to me the defunding of area studies maps was an easing of conditions at many African uni- onto the perilous state of Western universities, versities. Speaking impressionistically, it seems to recently compounded by their governments’ insis- me intellectual ties have greatly strengthened in tence on austerity. More than a shift in academic the past decade. At the same time, more universi- emphasis, scholars based in the West face an accu- ties are attempting to serve international constitu- mulating set of contradictions: the casualization of encies, teaching students and sponsoring research the academic labor force, increasing demands on about South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and candidates for hiring and promotion, and the dif- significantly contributing to the transnational and ficulty of publication especially for junior scholars. transregional trends the editors cite. Thus, the “ex- While one might simply conclude that CSSAAME plosive growth” the editors foresee in non-Western could play a productive role in mentoring young universities is a promising return to earlier periods scholars as they make their first publications and of intense exchange. All of this, of course, is sim- in consolidating its position as a high-quality ply to say that the political economy of higher edu- venue for them to aspire to, a wider lens suggests cation and research will be critical to CSSAAME. additional possibilities for CSSAAME’s future. The past half century of higher education has The editors’ call to recast areal focus can demonstrated that periods of plenty are followed be sharpened and clarified by looking at the cri- by dearth. Programs once cut are often difficult sis of area studies with a wider lens. If the crisis of to revive. The patterns of funding that undergird area studies is of a piece with a worldwide crisis of today’s intellectual excitement will not last forever, higher education, we might date this less to auster- and we must be prepared for whatever comes next. ity policies enforced in OECD (Organisation for But if anything, this can be more an opportunity Economic Cooperation and Development) coun- than a sign of ultimate futility. How can truly tries as a result of the economic crisis of the 2000s global exchanges be sustained given the feast-then- than to the debt crisis of the 1980s and the rise of famine quality of our institutional politics? neoliberalism. Almost everywhere, universities and The greatest hope may lie in another terrible researchers have regularly been faced with ever- danger, that of the crisis in academic publishing. shrinking budgets and with demands for produc- I would urge the editors to consider the problems Responses • Mission Statement 149

of copyright and of access to journals, which of forms of teleconferencing such as Skype, which course is one of the greatest barriers to interna- might enable wider participation and might en- tional scholarship for scholars in poor countries able organizers from a wider range of institutions and for people outside the academy. How might it and backgrounds? It seems to me that a relatively be possible for more people to get access to articles small number of innovations at the center might published in CSSAAME, and how might scholarly make it possible for the journal to address broader discussion be made more accessible to those with- constituencies and to do so without violating the out current academic affiliation? Similarly, schol- copyrights that enable to press to publish. ars in many places have difficulty getting access To shift gears radically, let me illustrate the to up-to-date scholarly debates and therefore face suggestions I have made with a problem and an difficulties in taking international scholarship into example of great concern to me. At the time of account. Even if the current moment is relatively this writing, ongoing violence in northern Nigeria conducive to journal access for scholars in many lo- has been somewhat eclipsed in international cov- cales, we can be quite certain it will not always be. erage of West Africa by the civil war in Mali, but Additionally, in the United Kingdom at pres- the two situations have overlapped in uncomfort- ent, the government is considering requiring all able and problematic ways. Outside commentators research funded by the public research councils to have often taken both as instances of “Islamist vio- be published in open-access venues. It is not clear lence,” local outbreaks of a more general process yet what ultimate policies will result from this, but radicalizing Muslims and part of an ongoing strug- the initiative poses grave dangers to academic re- gle between Islam and the forces of democracy, search in the UK and to journals like C SSAAME, modernity, stability. Needless to say, such a view which might want to publish UK-funded research. is desperately oversimple and indeed no longer The more optimistic way to think about this, how- serves any coherent goal, even to the extent Sam- ever, is to wonder whether CSSAAME and Duke uel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm University Press might be able to find a way of fed a particular neoconservative approach to inter- making work accessible that did not also destroy national relations. Needless to say, the bombings the journal’s ability to pay for itself. To its very and shootings in Nigeria bear little resemblance to great credit, the press offers radically discounted Malian secessionist violence, nor do Tuareg rebel subscriptions to institutions in poor countries and groups and Salafist militias discernably parallel to students, and of course scholarly norms are in- the murky history of Nigeria’s Bok’o Haram or vol- creasingly adapting to a world of e-mail and PDF atile intersection between vigilante organization attachments. Perhaps this is a moment to think and party politics. The broad spectrum of political carefully about how such norms can be system- violence in West Africa is simultaneously local, re- atized and institutionalized. gional, and global. Local leaders with deep-rooted Clearly, neither CSSAAME nor the press can constituencies come into conflict over resources, solve the problem of unequal access to scholarly ethnicity, and patronage, and these conflicts have publishing. But I wonder whether the journal their own long histories. Mali’s troubles cannot be might consider going farther in the direction of ac- understood without a grasp of the intricacies of cessibility in its plans for special projects, commis- Tuareg politics, nor is Bok’o Haram comprehen- sions, and conferences than the editors describe. sible without a longer-term appreciation of the Would it be possible for CSSAAME to broaden role Islam has played in Nigeria’s regionalized and the mandate of a scholarly journal to make itself ethnicized politics. Local political interests come something of a social network as well? Would it into conflict with local rivals and with opponents be possible to make the journal’s website a mes- from elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile, inter- sage board as well, to maintain a database of the national networks circulate ideas, weapons, fight- e-mail addresses of published authors, to create ers, and religious figures. In such circumstances, a set of suggestions for the ideal CSSAAME con- it is unproductive to label conflicts “religious” or ference that might include relatively inexpensive not. Western tendencies to take these complex pro- 150 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

cesses as a kind of religious frenzy do little justice to bring together a variety of forums — civil soci- to their deep historical roots and leave little hope ety organization and research groups in Nigeria, for productive engagement. counterparts in Euro-America, perhaps also on- It would be easy to conclude from this that line fora such as Naija Net to provide a broad spec- what one really needs at such junctures is a revivi- trum of commentaries. An international array of fied area studies, albeit one perhaps more attentive scholars exists to help coordinate such a project, to the role regional and global forces play in in- from the most senior to the most junior, and with fluencing and sustaining local conflict. But there Skype and teleconferencing, the costs of an inter- is something more important to be teased out. national conference could be kept to a minimum. Because as frustrating as so much Western jour- If CSSAAME were to recruit several such figures nalistic coverage and policy analysis is, one cannot to coordinate forum meant to encompass both discard it entirely: such narratives are themselves a academic papers and more general commentar- form of local knowledge. Such paradigms influence ies, and to provide them with a set of templates for many profoundly influential actors and thus are potential publication, the intellectual payoff could necessary to take into account. While many schol- be profound. The result would not only be a series ars are well situated to debunk particular reduc- of distinguished publications but a set of discus- tive narratives, the most useful intervention might sions around them that might have more profound be one that simultaneously provided accounts of consequences. My space here is limited, and thus local conflicts and of the various systems of under- my prescription is necessarily vague and somewhat standing that comprehended them. Narratives of utopian. Nonetheless, in the end CSSAAME will “global jihad” or “Islamism” are more than a para- make its greatest contribution through boldness noid, Orientalist fantasy, in part because they do and through taking advantage of the limitations correspond with universalistic aspirations invoked that might otherwise stifle it. The editors’ state- by groups with international contacts and aspira- ment suggests they have precisely the vision that tions. But more than that, the narrative of religious might make such endeavors possible. danger describing West African violence channels national and international responses to them into Steven Pierce a mode of opposition that can heighten conflict University of Manchester rather than resolving it. Obviously CSSAAME can- doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322408 not somehow create an area studies simultaneously attentive to local complexity, the convoluted epis- temic twists of international systems of knowledge, SSAAME’s proposal to rethink the region and and desirable policy outcomes. Nonetheless, I won- C the disciplines comes at an apposite moment: der if a sustained commitment to international dia- while there is an almost ubiquitous acknowledg- logue and accessibility would not enable a series of ment of the importance of location, attempts to publications that achieve academic rigor while ad- give substance to this idea face the threat of dis- dressing multiple constituencies in a manner that solution of all locations into expansive global nar- enables the imagination of alternative futures. A ratives. Can regional studies offer a new site of careful attention to local particularity and to the engagement with spatial specificity and connect- analytic potential of grand theory is both precon- edness at the same time? dition for and consequence of sustained conver- More than four decades ago, Bernard Cohn sation between Global South and Global North. wrote about there being “as many definitions of More than a forum to engage in both the nomo- regions as there are social science disciplines and thetic and idiographic, CSSAAME might facilitate problems that social scientists investigate.” He a series of dialogues that more profoundly engages identified four kinds of regions for special atten- the multiple constituencies knowledge about the tion: historical, linguistic, cultural, and structural. region must necessarily serve. Cohn’s essay was an attempt to complicate the pic- What would this look like in practice? In ture by focusing on the problems that arose while the case of northern Nigeria, one might attempt working with clear definitions. He questioned in Responses • Mission Statement 151

particular the assumption that regions, once estab- colonial and postcolonial governmental technolo- lished, are unproblematically comparable. gies but also through various techniques of norm The critical valence of the region as an ana- setting within literary institutions and linguistic lytical category in the postcolonial context has practices. New scholarship has highlighted the derived mainly from its ability to avoid simplistic fractured nature of the literary public sphere and paradigms based on the nation or on a unitary its consequences for understanding the formation understanding of the postcolonial condition. The of linguistic identities. region has been invoked in order to designate Literary histories have been a crucial space subnational or supranational locations, often im- for narrativizing linguistic regions. The identity plicitly referring to the category of the nation for of linguistic regions is often secured at the ex- comparison and contrast. In foregrounding sites pense of a wide range of language practices, oral of affective habitation that do not correspond to and written. The historical and political processes national territories, the region has the ability to through which literary regions are shaped can be challenge the nation’s dominance over idioms of grasped only by going beyond monolingual mod- belonging. By bringing longer precolonial histo- els of literary history. Multilingual histories of liter- ries into the discussion, regions have also compli- ary cultures may not only throw better light on the cated easy causal explanations in terms of colonial literary and language practices of a region but also charting and reconfiguration of spaces. However, open regional spaces to new connections beyond while the region may appear as a more immediate the borders of linguistic identities. This has impor- locus of privileged geographical affect than the tant consequences for our reading of individual nation, it is as deeply linked as the nation to politi- literary texts and the history of literary forms. The cal and administrative arrangements and systems space occupied by texts are to be considered not in of control. It is useful to recall the region’s etymo- terms of the history of a single-language literature logical connections with regnum. The common but as constituted by networks of cross-linguistic sets of practices, which give identity to a region, connections and transactions. The philology for develop in a space of rule, regulation, and control our times needs to acknowledge multiplicities of and undergo constant negotiation. articulation and access; this is crucial if the con- In literary studies in India, the category of cept of the vernacular is to retain its critical edge the region has been invoked most often to speak in cultural historiography. of the literary cultures of individual languages. I see this approach as opening regional stud- The phrase “regional literature” refers in practice ies to the rich dynamic of a new sort of compara- to literature written in languages other than Eng- tive work. What I have in mind is not the compari- lish and, to some extent, Hindi. The regional here son of preexisting unities; the work of comparative stands in contrast with the national, indicating its literature within a nationalist frame has often marginal status in relation to the centers privi- moved in this direction. The new comparative leged by the nation-state. This marks a departure work, which does not take the self-intelligibility from the relationship of inclusive transcendence of national literatures for granted, brings into the in which regions were placed within nationalist limelight relationships that cut across languages discourse, where the true meaning of all regions and national territories. is seen as emerging from their identification with A striking example of this is Isabel Hofmeyr’s the nation. However, even when the region stands work on Indian Ocean print cultures, about which in an oppositional relationship to the nation, it has she wrote in CSSAAME recently. Multilingualism, often been conceived in precisely nationalist terms complex and fluid relationships with territoriality, as a site of immemorial and authentic belonging, and multifarious negotiations with imperial gov- as the really true nationality. Recent scholarship ernance, communities, and norms — the Indian has tried to move away from this conception by Ocean print public sphere has brought all these focusing on the political processes through which to the foreground. Even major texts like Gandhi’s regional identities have emerged as sites of con- Hind Swaraj have become available for a fresh trol and exclusion, not only through the work of reading through a rich understanding of genres, 152 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

reading practices, and addressees. Its meticulous cholarship of the last two decades in cultural attention to location and circulation, to spaces and theory has created new paradigms in the processes makes Hofmeyr’s work an important ex- Sreadings of non-Western cultures. Not only have ample of the new comparative work I have in mind. these theories critiqued the universal discourse of Understood in this sense, the region may Western humanism, but they have also attributed be seen not as existing self-sufficiently prior to agency and history to the subaltern human. Who the work of comparison but perhaps as a concep- has the authority to speak for non-Western cul- tual and methodological tool that is constituted tures? Can the colonial past be transcended? What through comparison. We need to see comparison are the appropriate epistemological tools to under- as a process of opening enclosures to understand stand the colonial past? These are questions that them in their contaminated connectedness; it in- in the last two decades have been actively debated volves a training of the eye on the jostling of differ- both in the West and the postcolony. Indeed, the ences from which identities are forged and equali- decades radically rethought European epistemol- ties measured and determined. The consequences ogy and challenged prevailing universal concepts of such reorientation for conceptual categories, of European modernity to rework and redefine methods, and disciplinary assumptions have not knowledge. yet been fully understood. The philology of com- Nevertheless, theories of postcolonialism parative regional studies may learn more from a and cultural studies that have facilitated these de- cultural anthropology of practices than from a bates have also often looked at the postcolony from stable typology of doctrines or forms. CSSAAME’s a distant Western institutional base and have pe- relaunch offers an opportunity to reconsider and riodically neglected key components of subaltern interrupt our disciplinary habits. By challenging identity. What is contentious is that those ideas the stability of proper spatial locations, the cate- that articulate the experiences of coloniality have gory of the region — not as a distinct preexistent also frequently overshadowed the significance of object, but as constituted through comparison in distinct and variegated narratives of the experi- its new sense — offers the promise of productive ences of coloniality. Therefore, while there is an critical interruption. undeniable acknowledgment of the gains of cultural studies and postcolonial theory, there is also Udaya Kumar an emergent consensus among non-Western schol- University of Delhi and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library ars to critically reexamine the textualities and doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322417 discourses of these theories. More and more of us who work in the non-West are finding out that the References claims of these theories cannot be unified under a Cohn, Bernard. “Regions Subjective and Objective: Their Relation to the Study of Modern Indian History and broad rubric without taking into account diverse Society.” In An Anthropologist among Historians and colonial histories and dissimilar postcolonial pres- Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. ents. Certainly, the interventions of these theories Hofmeyr, Isabel. “The Complicating Sea: The Indian have given us a critical paradigm with which we Ocean as Method.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, can interrogate the hierarchies found in culture. Africa and the Middle East 32 (2012): 584 – 90. Yet the riches of interiority ultimately call for a new kind of intellectual enterprise to consider the im- measurable archives that have structured disparate experiences, intellectual trajectories, and contrast- ing social and cultural practices. For instance, debates in African modernism that in the last two decades emanated from dia- sporic African artists, curators, and historians suc- cessfully challenged traditional notions of modernism by introducing modernism’s plurality. Indeed, the hegemonic history of Western art along with Responses • Mission Statement 153

the art market had not accounted for the artistic For instance, Behailu Bezabih, a prominent Ethio- production of the non-West in its narrative of mod- pian artist, works on collages made of old newspa- ernism’s history. This authority of Western art his- pers collected from homes that were destroyed to tory had long complicated the analysis, trading, give way to road constructions, where many peo- and exhibition of African art. Exhibitions such as ple are and continue to be displaced. Although 2002’s “Short Century, Liberation and Indepen- the government provides compensation for these dence” at PSI Contemporary Art Museum and jour- homes, often these compensations are not enough nals such as Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art for purchasing other homes in the city, as real es- nevertheless challenged this canonical ontology of tate prices have skyrocketed. The influxes of for- Western art and gave new importance to the cre- eigners who are representatives of hundreds of ative principles of Africa. In the Western art plat- nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which forms and institutions, complex aesthetic, political, are emblems of neoliberalism, have also exacer- and philosophical questions continue to dominate bated the problem of housing, and many who are discussions of African modernity and modernism, displaced are forced to settle for affordable places exploring an alternative way to understand their that are many miles out of the city. One encoun- trajectory beyond familiar discourses. Unfortu- ters a sense of exile and displacement in one’s own nately, this discourse has also largely ignored the country when identity is thus negotiated and rene- parameters of contemporary and archival accounts gotiated consistently. Road construction has be- of African artists who live in the continent today. come a fetish of modernity because of neoliberal Its critical engagement has been confined to Afri- models of modernization that favor infrastructure can diaspora artists, consequently marginalizing over everyday life. Therefore, artists challenge the the production of art inside the continent itself. contemporary social and political phenomena of The works of artists in the continent is char- Ethiopian subjectivity. acterized by local needs and indigenous cultural While postcolonial theory and cultural stud- forces where the construction of artists’ identities is ies have greatly contributed to the debates of Afri- continuously being challenged. For instance, there can modernism, consequently opening the space are many artists who articulate issues such as the for African diaspora modernists to participate in tribulations of obtaining visas to the West. If one the international art scene, these theories have passes by the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, one is also discounted African contemporary artists who confronted with the notion of absolute Otherness. live in the continent and attempt to articulate the People are lined up in long queues to supposedly political and social conditions of their contempo- attain their passage to freedom. In question here is rary experience. not peoples’ attempt to flee from Africa’s economic It is therefore with great pleasure that we dejection that the West is so much responsible for, African scholars in the continent welcome the but the humiliation and harshness that the subject relaunching of CSSAAME and support its mission, encounters to be granted this authorization. Peo- as we urgently need the platform to critically en- ple are treated like animals, faced with harsh inter- gage our contemporary experiences. rogation techniques and many times false accusa- tions of forgery and deception. The African subject Elizabeth W. Giorgis is constituted, among many other stereotypes, as Addis Ababa University genocidal and destitute. It is no wonder then that doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322426 this subject deserves the cruelty bestowed to mon- sters and animals, not deserving the dignity of a human being. It is this spite of the visa officials that attempts to articulate itself in many artists’ works in the context of identities that both produce and are produced by specific environments. There are also few artists who work on the challenges of neoliberal development paradigms. 154 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

he editorial statement is most promising and Nonetheless, some recent work has attempted suggests that CSSAAME will continue to play to remedy this situation by forging links with other Ta vital role as a forum for publishing rigorous and literatures and advancing the conceptual appara- theoretically informed area studies research. In my tus of the field. Four lines of inquiry have been es- view, the journal’s principal and most distinctive pecially fruitful. First, some researchers, including contribution has been its support for scholarship Jonathan Miran and Scott Reese, have endeavored that transcends the parameters of area studies as it to develop a Braudelian approach to the region by is conventionally understood. Despite several pro- situating the littoral societies of the Horn within vocative analytic interventions — Freitag and von the broader historical dynamics of the Red Sea Oppen’s Translocality and Bayly and Fawaz’s Mo- arena, in the process revealing a host of migrant dernity and Culture, for example — and the growing actors, material flows, and institutional networks interest in South-South connections, it has been that have hitherto rarely figured in scholarship. my experience that North American professional This promising work, some of which has appeared organizations like the Middle East Studies Associa- in recent issues of Northeast African Studies and tion and the African Studies Association are gen- Chroniques Yéménites, has begun to situate North- erally uninterested in interregional work outside a east Africa within Indian Ocean studies. A sec- few well-established domains. Although academic ond and related development has been a growing publishing is considerably more flexible in this re- interest in the region’s manifold ties with Egypt, gard, it is nonetheless true that many area studies the Ottoman Empire, and the Muslim world more journals are skeptical of contributions that make generally, most recently manifest in edited collec- interregional comparisons or draw upon theoreti- tions (by Donald Crummey, Israel Gershoni, Meir cal insights derived from other fields. For better or Hatin, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Kharyssa Rhodes, worse, the region remains the dominant analytic and Haggai Erlich, among others) and several pan- category. els on diasporas, migrations, and imperial strate- The implications of this situation are espe- gies at last year’s 18th International Conference of cially acute in my own field, Northeast African Ethiopian Studies, Dire Dawa. A third line of in- studies. Despite the region’s contemporary geo- quiry, which Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis has encour- political significance and the august history of Se- aged through a special issue of Callaloo, has moved mitic studies related to the Horn of Africa, there from the study of modernization to the interroga- is currently little institutional support for the field tion of modernity as a discursive, aesthetic, and in North America and Europe, and Horn-based cultural phenomenon. Though this work is still scholars face a host of nearly insurmountable ob- very preliminary, it has encouraged the growth of stacles when it comes to obtaining new publica- literary and cultural studies in a field largely domi- tions and funding their own research. For these nated by philology and the social sciences. Finally, reasons, the specialist literature is rich in empiri- a new military historiography is emerging — in cal detail and theoretical implications, but its audi- work by scholars such as Gebru Tareke and Rich- ence is small. While there are numerous journals ard Reid, for instance — that provocatively consid- devoted to — and published in — the region, these ers the political, social, and institutional history of tend to feature research that is highly compart- violence. mentalized within contemporary ethnic and na- A journal like CSSAAME has the potential to tional categories, and there are few other fora for nurture these and other promising developments publishing scholarship related to Northeast Africa. in Northeast African studies and bring them to As a result, the field is now effectively marginalized a wider audience, especially since it represents a from the rest of African studies and entirely di- prominent publication venue for specialists who vorced from Middle Eastern studies. Once rightly wish to engage scholars in adjacent and allied area seen as a borderland, the region itself has been studies fields. To this end, I hope the editors will occluded by the intellectual and institutional fault consider (1) inviting Horn-based scholars to join lines of area studies. the editorial board, and/or (2) organizing special Responses • Mission Statement 155 issues or roundtables related to Northeast Africa hank you for this welcome opportunity for and the Global South. conversation on the new vision and direction Tfor Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the James De Lorenzi Middle East, as announced in the mission state- CUNY John Jay College ment for the journal’s upcoming tenure at Colum- doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322435 bia. I am especially engaged by your accent on the humanities and task of philological renewal, as References by the journal’s commitment to the ongoing dis- Bayly, Christopher, and Leila Tarazi Fawaz, eds. Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. ciplinary life of critical and postcolonial theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Despite the prognostications of demise that have haunted postcolonial theory since its very incep- Crummey, Donald, ed. Land, Literacy, and the State in Su- danic Africa. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2005. tion, the field has been powerfully evolutive over the past three decades. Since the combative and De Regt, Marina, Blandine Destremau, and Stephanie Latte-Abdallah. “Special Issue on Gender and Mo- countercanonical energies of its beginning years bility in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.” Chroniques it has, in the main, comprised laborious empirical Yéménites 17 (2012). work precisely in the domain of connective history: Erlich, Haggai, and Israel Gershoni, eds. The Nile: His- such that the term transnationalism has become by tories, Cultures, Myths. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, degrees the preferred substitute term for postcolo- 2000. nialism. Thanks to the efforts of numerous scholars Fluehr- Lobban, Carolyn, and Kharyssa Rhodes, eds. Race across the disciplines it is all the harder to justify and Identity in the Nile Valley: Ancient and Modern Per- provincial historical thinking: secularism, cosmo- spectives. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2004. politanism, political economy, and indeed mo- Freitag, Ulrike, and Achim von Oppen, eds. Translocality: dernity itself each evince a global canvas. We can The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspec- no longer entirely circumscribe the conditions of tive. Leiden: Brill, 2010. possibility for twentieth-century phenomenology Gershoni, Israel, and Meir Hatin, eds. Narrating the Nile: within Europe, or restrict the political reverbera- Politics, Identities, Cultures. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rien tions of mimamsa to ancient South Asia alone, or ner, 2008. ascribe a purely Western genealogy to the longue Miran, Jonathan. Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and durée of ethical cynicism-stoicism. It now reason- Cultural Change in Massawa. Bloomington: Indiana able to query the pedagogic as well as ideological University Press, 2009. soundness of certain forms of disciplinary abstrac- ———. “Space, Mobility, and Translocal Connections tion — wherein, say, a curriculum that deals exclu- across the Red Sea Area since 1500.” Northeast Afri- sively with the history of European citizenship is can Studies 12 (2012): ix – xxvi. presented as sufficient to the concept of the ”citi- Reese, Scott. Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Dis- zen,” and so on. course in Colonial Benaadir. Leiden: Brill, 2008. To arrive at this critical juncture, however, Reid, Richard. War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa: The Pat- many of us in the humanities have had to take our terns and Meanings of State-Level Conflict in the Nine- cue from the social sciences. Since the 1980s, op- teenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. positional English departments have addressed the Tareke, Gebru. The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn task of substantiating connective histories through of Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. a powerful positivist turn, underwritten by deep Wolde Giorgis, Elizabeth. “Charting Out Ethiopian Mo- suspicion about “pure” literary or aesthetic value. dernity and Modernism.” Callaloo 33 (2010): 82 – 99. Even those scholars who spoke up in defense of theory in past decades did so by insisting upon the ineluctable materiality or evidentiary worth of impalpable epistemologies, whether philosophical or literary. Though this emphasis was especially in- vigorating after the stifling era of postwar synchro- 156 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

nous literary criticism (in the Anglo-American ith the relaunch of CSSAAME the usual academy), perhaps the one-way relationship be- questions come up: What is regional com- tween the humanities and social sciences is ripe for Wparison, and why focus on South Asia, Africa, and reversal under a new interdisciplinary comparatist the Middle East? Comparison is at the heart of dispensation? cultural analysis and needs some reflection. Com- Our collective endeavor in postcolonial lit- parison should not be seen primarily in terms of erary studies has been saturated by the strenu- comparing societies or events, or institutional ar- ous demands of information gathering: Which rangements across societies, but as a reflection on subaltern-colonial conscripts were on the ground our conceptual framework as well as on a history in the world wars of the previous century? What of interactions that have constituted our object of were literate South Asians actually reading in study. One can, for instance, say that one wants to nineteenth-century colonial libraries? What does study the secular governance of religious diversity a transnational history of malaria look like? This in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, but one sort of work remains necessary but is no longer suf- has to bring to that a critical reflection on the fact ficient to the world it has brought into view. We that that kind of study often presupposes a certain are also beholden to the more subtle consciousness understanding of religion as well as the central- that even the most minor histories, or occluded ity and uniformity of secular state formation. Un- life forms, or localized language games might pos- fortunately, such critical reflection often leads to sess an undisclosed global import; the smallest the argument that societies should be understood utterance could be a crucial link in a vast discur- in their own terms and cannot be understood in sive network. Is corroboration the only meaning- Western terms. Nevertheless, in the case of an Eng- ful academic response to such intimations? Or is lish language journal, “their own terms” have to there some untapped disciplinary merit to be had be interpreted and translated in relation to the his- in conscientious, indeed, skilled fictionalizing and torical formation of Western social sciences. More- conjecture? over, such translation and interpretation are al- Literary scholars are, arguably, trained to ready part of a long history of interactions with the overinvest details — the textual or evental frag- West. So, if one speaks about “religion” or “civil so- ment — with planetary significance. They used to ciety” and “the state,” one has to confront a larger, do so in the name of a human condition quite mostly imperial history. Today, there is the added uninformed by the existential materiality of most factor that this field of comparison has been widely global populations. A posthumanistic and, indeed, democratized by modern media so that everyone is post- positivist comparatism may yet pave the way in a mediated touch with, and has views on, every- ahead toward an imaginative and subjunctive his- one else, mostly in a comparative sense. toriography: supplementing the question of “what Comparison, as I understand it, is thus not really happened” with the “what might have hap- a relatively simple juxtaposition and comparison pened” or the “what ought to have happened” of a of two or more different societies but a complex more conjectural and provisional connective schol- reflection on the network of concepts that both arship. Perhaps the newly reconstituted CSSAAME underlie our study of society as well as the forma- will encourage experimentation in the humanistic tion of those societies themselves. So, it is always a social sciences in the course of its efforts to yoke double act of reflection. regions and disciplines anew. Religion is a good example of the conceptual complexity here, since it is precisely the emergence Leela Gandhi and application of this generic term as purport- University of Chicago edly describing, but in fact producing, a distinctive doi 10.1215/1089201x-2322444 social field that shows the value of comparison or, perhaps better, the need for comparative reflection. It shows the central importance of the interactions between Europe and its civilizational Oth- ers in understanding the emergence of this social Responses • Mission Statement 157

field. What I am arguing for here is an approach gional boundaries that are conceptualized in in which the interactions between Europe and the terms of trading or language? Not to mention the former colonies in Asia and Africa are seen as cen- networks of economic connectivity in which Japan, tral to the emergence of modernity in both colo- China, and the Asian Tigers become more and nial and European societies. more the crucial nodal points for the rest of the One can desire to provincialize Europe, but world. All this is perhaps evident, but to under- that very desire has to be expressed within the ge- stand what this means for regional studies requires nealogy of European thought. Europe is an exam- some thought. ple of a region, and examining the difficulties to It is not immediately clear that today the conceptualize it might be instructive. One might connections between South Asia and Africa are think of Europe as a space of interaction among more important than those between South Asia ideas, people, and goods. Such a concept has to be and China. In economic terms China is the larg- dynamic, for sure, because it changes all the time. est trade partner of India, surpassing the United Greece is a reference point for European thought, States. India and China are civilizational states but not for goods. Its inclusion in the European that can be compared at the level of their entire so- Union seems obvious at the level of thought, but cieties, although, at another level, it might be more less obvious as a contemporary economy. And, if fruitful to compare Mumbai with Lagos than with it is a reference point for thought, why not include Shanghai. In terms of religious connectivity Islam Turkey, the site of an important part of the Greek connects South Asia with Africa and the Middle and Hellenic World? The opposition to the inclu- East but obviously also with Indonesia and Malay- sion of Turkey into Europe is partly civilizational, sia. Korean Christianity is everywhere nowadays or rather religious, and partly economic. In the as are Korean soap operas and dancing styles. It discussions on the European constitution the ques- is very hard in such a world to privilege one set of tion of civilization loomed large. Christian Demo- connectivity as the basis of the choice of regions crats have pointed out that Europe was founded on to compare. So, in the end, it is what one wants to a Christian civilization, while liberals and socialist study that determines which regions one focuses have pointed at the secular-liberal foundations of on, but it is doubtful that regions can be deter- Europe. Both arguments were also used against mined at the outset as the basis of a journal. the inclusion of Muslim Turkey as a Member of the Nevertheless, one does need a focus and that EU. The fact that there were already millions of focus is mostly based on institutional academic Turks (as well as other Muslims) in Europe seemed histories. Despite all obvious conceptual difficul- to have no bearing on whether Europe was Chris- ties one does have African studies, and South tian or secular-liberal. The fact that Turkey has a Asian studies, just as there are European studies secular state and a secularism that resembles most and American studies. A major determinant seems French laïcité also did not impact the discussion of to be pedagogical, and the boundaries seem to the inclusion of Muslim Turkey. This civilizational be the product of language and history, political debate shows the extent to which Muslims are de- and cultural. One cannot build departments and fined as strangers in Europe. At the same time, one journals that can deal with an endless variety of may wonder why Turkey is often not considered to languages and histories. The disciplinary conceit be part of the Middle East. of the dominant social sciences (economics, po- An even more complex story is that of im- litical science, and sociology) is that one can do perial expansion that has brought Spain to Latin without language and history and produce univer- America, Portugal to Brazil, England and France sally valid results based on statistically analyzed to North America, and ultimately Britain to Asia data sets. More and more, these social sciences and Africa, Holland to South Africa and Indone- want to connect to the natural sciences, focusing sia, and France to Africa and Southeast Asia, to on the universality of the mind, of cognition, of mention some of the connections. What to think bodily functions, with an increasing emphasis on of the spread of Christianity and Islam with their evolution. Cultural anthropology is the one social own centers and peripheries that confound re- science that largely escapes this fantasy, only to 158 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 33:2 • 2013

be marginalized as endless critique of universal knowledge from the fetishization of the local and specific. The humanities, also increasingly marginalized in the academy, similarly continue their pur- suit of the specific. In passing one may ask why it is that at the time that anxieties about cultural differ- ence are rampant in politics worldwide the study of religious and ethnic diversities is more and more forced to comply with forms of auditing that un- dermine its very existence. I am thinking here, for instance, of the focus on citation indices and the push to marginalize monographs and edited vol- umes that make it difficult to uphold the specific research and publication traditions in this field of scholarship. The expectation that the developmental trajectory of non-Western universities could be a solution to these problems needs to be examined with a wary eye, as my experience in teaching in India, Thailand, and China has taught me. In short, one needs journals like CSSAAME, but much wisdom is required to steer clear of the restraints of regional comparison. The journal needs to be open to the quirky social and cultural trajectories of Manangis or Sindhis or Ismailis that do not confirm to any neatly drawn regional boundaries. It needs to be open to the expansion of China into the regions that are the focus of the journal. While one can easily see from an institutional perspective the advantages of having the journal based at Columbia University with an all- Columbia advisory board, it is as easy to see the in- cestuous possibilities of such an arrangement. One way to escape from that is to commission projects to outsiders that lead to special issues exemplifying combinatory possibilities that go beyond those ac- tualized at Columbia. To give an example from my own recent experience, Encounters, a journal based and funded at Zayed University (UAE), published an issue I edited on religious networks in which work on China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thai- land, Nepal, India, Malaysia, and Palestine was fruitfully brought together. In the end, it might be the capacity to think beyond the region that rein- vigorates regional study.

Peter van der Veer Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen doi 10.1215/1089201x- 2 3 2 2 4 5 3