Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 14
2/2/2016
Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online
Exhaustion is the moment when an idea becomes extinct, self-defeating, and self-negating by the sheer measure of its many repetitions, its many
ideological pronouncements; and by very fact that the idea had been overtaken by the internal logic of historical processes. For the first time,
postcolonial critics may bring the debate of postcoloniality to a close; the idea of postcolonialism can be pronounced dead; “The epistemic
condition of that state of coloniality has finally exhausted itself”.
Yet, even as we take Dabashi’s optimism seriously and the potential for the idea of postcoloniality to have exhausted itself, aren’t we simplifying
the latent ideological sediments of global capitalism; its slippery capacity to remain invisible and suspiciously quiescent in the emerging new
structures of domestic and global discourses as we see in the most prominent case of Egypt in its attempt to further resolve the mandate of the
democratically elected new president? Is the postcolonial condition truly and completely over or “overcome”? Isn’t this “overcomeness” not
necessarily total, totalizing or complete as yet? How do we know the completeness of epistemic exhaustion if we continue to also see its returns—
usually hidden in national and global capitalist subconscious as the White House itself becomes black, yet continues to perform white supremacy?
The two adjectives that have occurred consistently in Dabashi’s analysis (exhaustion and finality) may be too premature at times considering the
unfinality of both operations and therefore the need for waiting and more patience to allow more realistictime and its many contingencies to subvert
postcoloniality’s procedures of persistence. Dabashi’s insightful, thought-provoking and progressive reading is punctuated by a sneaky certitude
that may be unsettling and at times more wishful than real.
This audacious elevation of the Arab Spring to the level of epistemic breakthrough, of radical discontinuation with discourses of imperialism and
postcoloniality is necessary, but should remain un-circumscribable. The strength of Dabashi’s argument is paradoxically his deferral of any
potential faux pas in articulating the new knowledge of Arab self-liberating modernity; the Arab has indeed woken up from a deep slumber for
good, and as a result he will circumvent the restrictions of his postcolonial condition of political and cultural malaise. This is indeed just the
“outdated ethnos” that will be overcome by the Arab’s ethos of inclusion that will undermine the production of repressive knowledge from
ethnographic museums, the National Geographic, the academic discipline of anthropology an Z\