Guest editor’s introduction : Postcolonial Springs? 2011 and the articulation of post-despotic culture in the southeastern Mediterranean

Abstract

In a poignant blog penned in the wake of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings and a week before the UN vote on the recognition of Palestine as a state, Pankaj Mishra described the ousters of pro-American client regimes along the southeastern Mediterranean littoral as ‘amounting to a second round of decolonization’ (Mishra 2011). The implications of such an outlook were, of course, crucial for those eager to see how many of the opinion-oriented fora about the Arab uprisings were to be channelled into more enduring forms of knowledge. But Mishra’s statement was not to pass uncontested. In a somewhat impatient announcement in his The Arab Spring – The End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi rushed to declare that ‘coloniality is finally overcome, not prolonged in the protracted ideological procrastination called “postcolonial”’ (Dabashi 2012: 9). Writing amid the euphoria of the uprisings, Dabashi perceived the unprecedented clamours for dignity and political freedom (horeyya) heralded by the uprisings as an ‘overcoming of that condition in which many ideologies – from Third World Socialism to anticolonial nationalism to militant Islamism (vintage postcolonial ideologies) – were manufactured and put into practice. The epistemic condition of that state of coloniality has finally exhausted itself’.