{"title":"From Postcolonialism to Post-Arab Spring","authors":"N. M. Zaamout","doi":"10.1163/18739865-01302001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Hamid Dabashi (2012) saw the Arab spring revolutions as a collective act of overcoming the colonial condition and retrieving a repressed cosmopolitan worldliness that has been overshadowed by the contradictions of postcolonial politics. Dabashi posits that the pluralist and egalitarian slogans of protesters were an expression of this worldliness. In this research I assess this claim in the context of Syria. I examine the question: Has this cosmopolitan orientation resurfaced in Syria? I argue that the 2011 Syrian uprising was a retrieval of what Dabashi describes as repressed cosmopolitan worldliness. It was a grassroots attempt to bring an inclusive meaning to Syrianism, consistent with the country’s boundaries and reflective of its ethnic and religious cosmopolitanism. The transformation of the crisis into a global proxy war has resulted in the rise of hundreds of armed groups driven by competing projects that have vacated the revolutionary attempt to redefine Syrianism.","PeriodicalId":43171,"journal":{"name":"Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication","volume":"13 1","pages":"131-151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18739865-01302001","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Hamid Dabashi (2012) saw the Arab spring revolutions as a collective act of overcoming the colonial condition and retrieving a repressed cosmopolitan worldliness that has been overshadowed by the contradictions of postcolonial politics. Dabashi posits that the pluralist and egalitarian slogans of protesters were an expression of this worldliness. In this research I assess this claim in the context of Syria. I examine the question: Has this cosmopolitan orientation resurfaced in Syria? I argue that the 2011 Syrian uprising was a retrieval of what Dabashi describes as repressed cosmopolitan worldliness. It was a grassroots attempt to bring an inclusive meaning to Syrianism, consistent with the country’s boundaries and reflective of its ethnic and religious cosmopolitanism. The transformation of the crisis into a global proxy war has resulted in the rise of hundreds of armed groups driven by competing projects that have vacated the revolutionary attempt to redefine Syrianism.
期刊介绍:
The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication provides a transcultural academic sphere that engages Middle Eastern and Western scholars in a critical dialogue about culture, communication and politics in the Middle East. It also provides a forum for debate on the region’s encounters with modernity and the ways in which this is reshaping people’s everyday experiences. MEJCC’s long-term objective is to provide a vehicle for developing the field of study into communication and culture in the Middle East. The Journal encourages work that reconceptualizes dominant paradigms and theories of communication to take into account local cultural particularities.