Postcolonial Maghreb and the Limits of IR

Jessica da Silva C. de Oliveira, Jessica Silva C. de Oliveira da

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030199845
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030199852
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores narratives produced in the Maghreb in order to illustrate shortcomings of imagination in the discipline of international relations (IR). It focuses on the politics of narrating postcolonial Maghreb through a number of writers, including Abdelkebir Khatibi, Fatema Mernissi, Kateb Yacine and Jacques Derrida, who explicitly embraced the task of (re)imagining their respective societies after colonial independence and subsequent nation-building processes. Narratives are thus considered political acts speaking to the turbulent context in which postcolonial Maghrebian Francophone literature emerges as sites of resistance and contestation. Throughout the chapters, the author promotes an encounter between narratives from the Maghreb and IR and makes a case for the kinds of thinking and writing strategies that could be used to better approach international and global studies.

© The Author(s) 2020

Jessica da Silva C. de OliveiraPostcolonial Maghreb and the Limits of IRGlobal Political Sociologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19985-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Making the Case for Re-imagination

Jessica da Silva C. de Oliveira¹

(1)

Department of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Poços de Caldas, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Jessica da Silva C. de Oliveira

[W]hat do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity …. Even our imaginations must remain forever-colonized.

Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments

End Abstract

Framing the Question

“What the map cuts up, the story cuts across”, writes Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, 130). Certeau’s remarkable words resonate with a number of efforts from inside and across the field of International Relations (IR) and IR theory which share the unease with the discipline’s narrow, self-referential, and lifeless world, the same lifeless and limited Eurocentric view of modernity that Chatterjee (1993) is trying to grasp in his now classical The Nation and Its Fragments. With the declared task of rethinking knowledge frames such as the state-centric world that most IR students find in their first encounter with IR theory and historiography, the flourish of “critical imaginations” in IR—to use Mhurchú and Shindo’s (2016) terminology—however indicates a continuous effort at exploring alternative ways of thinking and talking about the world.¹ For quite a while now, it has been crystal clear that the statist logic of rigid borders and the understanding of the world as “made up of bounded subjects within bounded political communities” (Mhurchú and Shindo 2016, 2) do not reflect the complexities of the overlapping voices, memories, worldviews, and political formations one may find when looking for stories instead of History, for the world instead of world maps.

The main general goal of this book is to explore “what it might mean to bring the world back into IR” (Sajed 2013, 2). What happens if we fill the world of international and global politics with people with their everyday experiences of being in and acting upon the world? What if instead of states, systemic polarity, conflict, and competition, we rethink the world of IR in terms of—sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementing—worldviews and people’s multifarious ways of thinking, narrating, and acting in front of what they immediately conceive as foreign, different, and not the same as “us”? To paraphrase Naeem Inayatullah’s insightful words, it seems that people’s life trajectories are all far more complex than our IR theories, and our dominant myths about politics, collective identity, and belonging can permit us to make sense (Inayatullah 2011). This book attempts to start filling in this often taken-for-granted gap between the world of conventional IR theory and the world(s) of people’s everyday lives.

Some authors have already offered important hints in that direction. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney (2004), for instance, not only traced the discipline’s denial of its colonial character when dealing with difference but also argued for the reintroduction of the language of “culture” as a means to speak of difference. They suggest us to re-imagine IR as a site of “heterology” (a term they borrowed from Certeau), that is, “the study of many modalities of difference” (Inayatullah and Blaney 2016, 71). The language of culture here points to a shared human condition, that is, our ability to construct, maintain, and transform “meaningful and purposeful schemes of existence”, yet these schemes also appear “as multiple, diverse, and often competing human projects” (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, 17). This reminds us that “human endeavours in meaning-making and world-making are multiple and diverse – and thereby partial” (Inayatullah and Blaney 2016, 70); they are ongoing processes “exhibiting the varied possibilities admitted by cultural encounters”, which include violence and silence but also learning and hope (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, 17). Thus, culture points to commonality, but also to partiality and diversity of human experience and modes of thought. From this perspective, IR can be re-imagined as an encounter with difference. Here, difference can be translated in various ways, including what is beyond the language of otherness, intractability, and conflict.

Another important insight comes from Cynthia Weber when she suggests—paraphrasing Clifford Geertz—that IR theory can be conceived as an “ensemble of stories” IR experts tell about the world (Weber 2001, 129–130). Seeing IR theory and the practice of theorizing in this way allows us to read the various approaches to IR as narratives mediating the world from specific standpoints rather than objective reproductions of an outside reality. Weber’s perspective makes visible the authorship to texts and turns the IR theoretician into a subject as much embedded in the world s/he claims to portray as the “characters” (e.g. individuals, institutions, relations, states, etc.) in the narrative. Such a view contrasts with more conventional approaches to IR theory (and theorization) that claim to adopt a disengaged, objective view of an outside reality and portray and analyze that reality as they see it (see e.g. Morgenthau 1985; Waltz 1979). Rather than advocating that “to give meaning to the factual raw material of foreign policy” the researcher “must approach political reality with a kind of rational outline” (Morgenthau 1985, 5, emphasis added). Weber’s stance highlights that the researcher is a subject-position within the process of theorization, rendering him/her complicit with, rather than detached from, the world-making exercise that is knowledge production.

More recently, Aoileann Ní Mhurchú and Reiko Shindo advocated a re-understanding of IR as “a site where relations between various groups such as nations, states and political communities, have been imagined and reimagined” (Mhurchú and Shindo 2016, 2). Besides the ethical and political motivations animating critical approaches to IR, Mhurchú and Shindo follow Sungju Park-Kang’s insights when they highlight the epistemological value of imagination in carving out non-state-centric worlds and vocabulary within and across the field. Theirs is an effort to complicate commonsensical views on how global politics and its related categories and relevant actors have been evolving in a diverse and complex world.

I hereby highlight these three perspectives on how a “worldly” IR—to resort to Edward Said’s (1983) terminology—might look like precisely because “encounters”, “narratives”, and “imagination” are key conceptualizations and analytical devices to my own efforts at re-imagining IR in the following pages. In emphasizing an alternative framework for looking at international relations in which the aesthetics of encounters are privileged over a state-centric logic of rigid borders, subjectivities, and geographies, I am not suggesting that the state is irrelevant as a political site or as a level of analysis in IR. It is rather an attempt to indicate that there is more to spatial, political, and subjective formations that are relevant to world politics than a state-centric grammar would allow us to see. Fortunately, I have not felt alone since I started this endeavor. There are a number of referential works in IR exploring international and global relations from the perspective of encounters to which I am in great debt.²

The locale I chose to engage with, the Maghreb, is a region located between many “worlds”—African, Occidental, Oriental, Mediterranean, pan-Arab, Islamic, and so on. Thus, not surprisingly, it is permeated by a number of depictions and narratives trying to capture and make sense of such diversity and the types of encounters it generates. This becomes implicit in the very meaning of the word “Maghreb”—“place where the sun sets”, that is, the West—usually defined in opposition to Mashreq—“place where the sun rises”, that is, the East—and the many geo-cultural senses this may evoke (Maghreb Studies 2003). In Walter Mignolo’s words, the “geo-historical” location of this region is precisely what turns it into a sort of “crossing of the global in itself ” or a “crossing” instead of a “grounding (e.g. the nation)” (Mignolo 2012, 69). In addition to the Orientalist lens through which the Maghreb has been portrayed in European literature since nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century travelogues (Mortimer 2001)—by that time particularly famous in the former metropole, France—we now have a renewed wave of stereotypical understandings highlighting the region’s political, economic, and social inadequacy, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Making the Case for Re-imagination
• 2. Narrative IR, Worldly IR
• 3. Postcolonial Literature and the Task of (Re-)imagining the Maghreb
• 4. History and Narration as Weapons of Decolonization: Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma
• 5. Language and the (Im)possibility of Translation in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other and Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages
• 6. East and West Encounters and Double Critique in Fatema Mernissi’s Writings
• 7. IR and the Need for Re-imagination: Concluding Remarks
• Back Matter