Who Are the People? A Conversation on the Assemblages and the Archives of the People
2/12/2015
by Sherene Seikaly, Laila Shereen Sakr, Hoda Elsadda, Pascale Ghazaleh, Lina Attalah, and Dina Mansour
Scholars of the Middle East have grappled for several decades with what seemed to be the death of “formal” or “official” politics in their attempt to explain the seemingly impenetrable force of authoritarianism and the pacification of Arab politics. Some work reified older understandings of the idea of agency and the centrality of state institutions. Others broke new ground on the idea of the individual, critically deconstructing the seemingly self-evident meaning and universal values of “freedom” and “agency.” In some ways, both conventional and cutting edge approaches worked to obscure the possibility of politics that could effectively challenge authoritarian structures. What emerged was a lachrymose epistemology of despair. The Arab uprisings seemed to offer a way out of this thinking. But epistemologies of despair continue to hold ground in many academic approaches, which insist on ringing the death knell of participatory politics. At the same time, an epistemology of hope has taken new force. Activists, journalists, practitioners, filmmakers, visual artists, techies, and performers have honed strategies and visions for the present and the future, centered on collective action.
As part of the Arab Council of Social Science’s inaugural research project, “Producing the Public,” the working group on “Who are the People?” seeks to bridge the gaps between hope and despair by understanding actors outside academia as social theorists and by placing various kinds of social theorists in conversation. The basis for this conversation will be a focus on the histories, experiences, representations, and potentialities of collective action and their relationship to shaping and experiencing various sorts of publics. Such a focus challenges the confines of “civil society,” and its purported lack in the Arab world, to more rigorously engage how collective action shapes and envisions the public. In critically engaging the very idea of the people, both through and against state power, intellectual hierarchies, and national movements, this project will rethink notions and practices of popular sovereignty.
The working group met in a productive all-day brainstorming session on 2 November 2013. The group together articulated shared goals, perspectives, and visions. Since that meeting, two of our members were unable to continue with the project. One of them, Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent activist, has been in and out of solitary confinement for most of the last year. Another, Ahmad Gharbeia, had to take on more tasks in his work at the Arab Digital Expression Foundation due to the untimely death of the organization’s director. While neither Alaa nor Ahmad will continue with the working group, the spirit of their insights and work continues to inform our work and appears in the framing of our visions and perspectives.
On 19 and 20 December 2014, our working group, which now includes Lina Attalah, Hoda Elsadda, Pascale Ghazaleh, Laila Shereen Sakr, and Sherene Seikaly, met over a two-day period to discuss the basic questions that our research and our working conditions have raised over the last two years:
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/20844/who-are-the-people-a-conversation-on-the-assemblag
