Modern Peoplehood

2011

in partnership with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library. GAIA volumes, which are published in both print and open-access digital editions, illuminate complex global phenomena and contribute to the renewal of area studies. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

2011

in partnership with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library. GAIA volumes, which are published in both print and open-access digital editions, illuminate complex global phenomena and contribute to the renewal of area studies. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

International Studies Review, 2006

Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, 2014

ritical ethnic studies interrogates positivist US liberal understandings of race within the broader materialist conversation of political modernity as a global social formation. Gathering together a broad variety of critiques of positivist political practices, it observes that disciplinary knowledges centrally mediate our contemporary social formation, regulatively tying the formal "appearance" of race to the national state. It asserts that the liberal positivism that saturates disciplinary and socially hegemonic ways of knowing produces race as an instrumentality of modernity, making race within political modernity nearly identical in meaning and position to violence itself. Both race and violence are defined as effects of contingent practices and historical differences distinct from the epistemological and formal structures of the political sphere they helped inaugurate. In contradistinction, race can be considered the social and discursive "appearance" of the material conditions of possibility that saturate disciplinary expressions and practices of knowledge, neither an error nor an object of knowledge in the proper sense. Yet especially in relation to gender and sexuality, race can be affirmed as a valuable critical tool, as the medium for encountering "alternative contingencies" immanent to normative modernity that remain effectively repressed by the modern disciplinary subject of knowledge. Crucially linked to modern violence, race then also designates a specific field of politics generated by modern knowledge. Critical ethnic studies offers us access to an oppositional understanding of political modernity, the politics of knowledge, and the persistent re-emergence of racialized cruelty and extreme violence. By repositioning slavery, empire, wars, land seizures, deportations, and racialized immigrations as crucial and ongoing resignifications of the racial nation's dependence upon "fictive ethnicity," critical ethnic studies provides a genealogy of juridical equality and state-based and state-enforced understandings of freedom. It is a genealogy that narrates state

Th is third issue further explores social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-themaking, with a certain emphasis on the historical, situated, and contextual nature of the imaginary that incorporates an intercultural perspective. Th e Durkheimian problématique of collective representations clearly plays a role in most understandings of social imaginaries, but the existing tensions, possibilities for signifi cant shifts in interpretation, and crucial role of confl ict is more duly emphasized within a social imaginaries framework than in many Durkheimian approaches. Social imaginaries not only institute horizons of cultural meaning that structure interpretations of the world, they always already incorporate modes of action and power. Th e imaginary dimension is articulated in societal institutions, as instituting society (to draw on Castoriadian terminology), not least in the fundamental, political sense of confi guring society, but equally informing specifi c components of historical constellations, such as the political, the economic, the ecological, and the cultural. Th e gap between an instituted reality and the imaginary makes societies always open to forms of critique and interpretative confl icts. Attention to specifi c cultural projects of power and varieties of social doing thus becomes important, as it sheds light on the specifi c 'translations' of imaginaries into more concrete institutional constellations of historical societies and civilizations.

2014

This is a short preface for a book written by South African M I Meer immediately after the Second World War when hopes ran high for colonised people throughout the world. As the various European colonial powers held tenaciously to their possessions, a new class of the colonised was emerging that demanded immediate independence and self-rule. At the same time, there was considerable disagreement among the latter over the kind of societies and states to replace the departing colonisers. Among them were those that emphasised religion and ethnicity as a basis for the new societies, while others demanded a national foundation to include all the inhabitants of the previously col-onised peoples in a country or state. MI Meer derived inspiration from Muslims in India who grappled with these questions. Some, led by the Muslim League, had come to see themselves as a nation in the modern sense of the term, and wanted some form of autonomy and self-rule. On the other hand, leading religious scholars (ulamâ) did not see the immediate need for an exclusive Islamic state. Among these were Mawlânâ Abul Kalâm Âzâd (1888–1958) who led a large number of Muslims to join hands with Indians across the religious spectrum against the colonial occupier. With an emphasis on ethics and values, Mawlânâ Âzâd fashioned a theology of One-ness with the Other. Mi Meer picked up this thread and employed it in the 1950s in South africa where similar struggles were taking place. In the context of an ascendant apartheid state,

The Return to history in the title is in oblique reference to Francis Fukuyama's static, quasi-messianic view of history. It flatly contradicts his thesis that a predominant West (the United States, England and France)—or for that matter, the predominance of any particular geopolitical or cultural sphere—could ever signal the " end of history. " Although the thesis itself has been roundly discredited and he has since distanced himself from it, the Eurocentric interpretation of history upon which he based his argument continues to be assumed in practically every debate on modernity and civilization. For a specialist in Islamic Studies like myself it has always had a vestigial air from a bygone era. A systematic critique of it would require at least another volume, and since this is not a historical study I shall limit myself to disposing of certain misconstructions at the root. My main goal is to examine key aspects of Islamicate philosophy continuously with certain developments in contemporary thought and others that I consider promising or have otherwise left their imprint. The developments I have in mind, and which I think point to a more realistic beginning for a debate, have expanded the space within which scholars and laypersons from every background have been engaging each other to meet the challenge of living in an unpredictable but also unparalleled time of history. More concretely, this study has selected a few relevant but notoriously difficult issues in philosophy that German, Islamicate and western European intellectual traditions in general have shared. These issues are not of mere academic interest or only the province of historians of philosophy. Because they are closely connected with identity and personhood, they figure at the core of how people fundamentally come to view and organize themselves, relate to their fellow human beings, and live in the world. The emphasis on " fundamentally " is meant to distinguish the principal aim of this book from an accounting of their undertakings based on empirical research. Many other books take the latter approach with which the reader will no doubt be familiar. Though the fundaments of thinking are properly the domain of philosophers, I hope the reader will already have gained the sense, then, that what thinking thinks is not the sole preserve of academic philosophy or mental acrobatics. Nothing happens in a vacuum , not even the systematic approach expected of philosophy. The general development of philosophy, the social sciences, not to mention the epistemology of physics and indeterminacy, illustrates how this insight has become integral to contemporary thought in its own imperfect way. It marks an overdue penetration into dimensions of knowing not covered by formal logic but which are still regarded as only indirectly related to a philosophical enterprise that has suffered marginalization.

Missionization (Christianization) and Colonization have left a mark on women in the Asia-Pacific Region where in many ways, aspects of liberal democracy and globalization have greatly devalued roles of women and their associated contributions to society leading to active and indirect forms of resistances disguised as conformity. This research paper provides in depth ethnographic field research through several case studies on how matrilineal societies and their women, such as those in the Marshall Islands where group consensus affords indirect exchanges of resistances (disguised as actual conformity), have adapted to invented traditions in an effort to safely navigate their free space when existing as themselves in a high risk society. It showcases the various forms of feminism in several specific contexts revealing how feminism has ultimately been in existence in the Marshall Islands through shadow governance of the behind the scenes master architect type as well as through skillful demonstrations of the visible leadership ones at the face of male criticism and patriarchal dominance. These stories reveal a human story of perseverance unnoticed by Western prevailing ideals of dominance, technology, science, and downright ignorance to those whom we often view as backwards for not possessing the same raw resources of materialism. It reveals how invented traditions have ultimately demean the way we view " Other " cultures rooted in their ways of knowing and being that were in existence prior to colonization and Christianization efforts. This paper offers an alternative lens to view people the way they view themselves rather than the way our formal structures tend to view them based off of foreign observations of the unknown peeking into the souls of the unconquered.

Dialogue Canadian Philosophical Review, 2005