Introduction: Escaping the Nation? National Consciousness and the Horizons of Decolonization

Abstract

This special issue emerges from the debates around the ideas of violence, liberation, and national consciousness. The catalyst that prompted us to interrogate both the necessity of the nation-state form within decolonization, and the need to excavate and illuminate what Gary Wilder (2015, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, xi) called "non-national orientations to decolonization" was provided by Frantz Fanon's reflections on national consciousness. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2004, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 179) states that "[n]ational consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension." The immediate and obvious question that took shape was: what exactly is national consciousness, and how is it different from nationalism? Taking Fanon's prompt, the contributions to this special issue launch the following provocations: what anti-colonial imaginaries and projects existed that did not envisage the end of colonialism as the beginning of nationalism? How

Digital Feminism beyond Nativism and Empire: Affective Territories of Recognition and Competing Claims to Suffering in Iranian Women’s Campaigns

“…Central to the women's rights campaigns I will examine is this sense of remooring rather than unmooring, of locating one's protest within the national territory without the need to fix in place affective borders. It is this local-national situatedness that enables the social media strategy of authentication, which advances recognition claims and which, in Fanonian terms (Sajed and Seidel 2019), may open to a dialogue with the international, thus allowing recognition of a plurality of claims to suffering and injury. These affective reterritorializations would involve contesting twin forms of hegemony: that of nativism and particularism at the national level and that of the liberal order of coloniality at the international level.…”

“…They operate as affective territorializations of a particular kind. Rather than responding only with a focus on deterritorialization, or critical subversion of territorializing discourses, which would be of limited political efficacy, I contend that the task of solidarity would consist in helping unfold women's claims to both national and international terrains, through reimagining, reinscribing, and bringing these terrains into dialogue as complementary spaces of struggle affecting each other through mutual critique (Fanon 1967;Sajed and Seidel 2019). It is within such a framework that campaigns against gender oppression can be systematically linked to the work of decolonization, through the theatricalization and authentication of embodied feelings around suffering and resistance.…”

Theory for a global age: From nativism to neoliberalism and beyond

“…The end of colonialism as an explicit political formation has given rise to claims of postcoloniality and, perhaps ironically, an increased recognition of the role that colonialism played in the formation of the modern world (Sajed and Seidel, 2019). The development of decolonial scholarship points to the work still needed to complete, in Maldonado-Torres's words, 'the unfinished project of decolonisation ' (2007: 263).…”

The Burda: Reweaving the Mantle, Renovating Arab Music Tradition between Egypt and the Arab Levant

“…To complicate matters further, the Tajdıd project is in alignment with a form of national consciousness that looks beyond the nation-state framework to "escape the nation" (Sajed and Seidel 2019). Artistic practice enables musicians such as Mustafa Said to situate his work within a wider momentum for anticolonial struggles.…”