Cutting Edges of the Decolonial: Thinking Anthropocentrism and Queerphobia from/in the Arab-majority World(s)

Dr Ali Kassem – Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore, and former IASH Fellow

Over the past years, decolonisation has emerged as a significant discourse across social spheres (Maldonado-Torres 2011; Behari-Leak 2019). This has been particularly relevant in Euro-America, and within academic and education settings (Bhambra et a. 2020). Slowly, this turn has made progress into the global south(s), including the Arab-majority world(s). This paper auto-ethnographically analyses this emerging interest in ‘decoloniality’ across multiple sites of the Arab world. Based on extensive advocacy work, multiple research projects, collaborations, seminars, meetings, and classes taught with students and academics across the region in higher education institutions, secondary schools, policy institutes, Non-Governmental Organisations, and Muslim religious establishments, the paper makes visible an ‘identitarian haunting’ of the decolonial. Doing this, it analyses a selective embrace of the decolonial - as anti-Islamophobic for example - entwined with slippages into an always-already ready religious-cultural alternative – or a rejection of one. Specifically focusing on relationality to nature/anthropocentrism and queerphobia, I argue that these slippages make visible cutting edges of the decolonial as it re-inscribes power rather than disrupt it. Reflecting on the consequent foreclosures of liberatory possibilities through this decolonial grammar, the paper raises problematics, ambiguities, and an impasse as the ‘decolonial turn’ sojourns in the global south(s). Yet, cognizant of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality’s violence and destruction, the paper closes by positing a decolonial politics of entangled hopes to re-articulate the decolonial in, for, alongside, and against the region. 

Moderator: Aerin Lai (School of Social and Political Science)

This event is presented by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, in partnership with the Alwaleed Centre, GENDER.ED and RACE.ED.