The New Inquiry Tue, 21 Apr 2015 09:45:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Lies and Videotape Tue, 21 Apr 2015 09:42:24 +0000


In the best documentary films, artifice isn’t an obstacle to truth, it’s a way in

The great irony of so-called nonfiction cinema is that it is often more willfully deceptive, in its form if not its content, than fiction filmmaking. The skills required to sell the audience on a version of reality in both fiction and nonfiction filmmaking are all ultimately at the service of illusion and deceit, sleight of hand and the flick of a wand. As non-fiction techniques have come to dominate television programming since the late 90s, audiences have become as increasingly used to the time compression and sequence reordering. They’ve grown accustomed to editing cues that inform us of “winner” and “loser” narratives as Colson Whitehead recently put it. Yet by filming often underrepresented subjects in their natural habitats, by reenacting past events that are purported to have happened, the serious documentary filmmaker hasn’t necessarily moved any closer to truth than the reality TV carnival barker. In our second great irony, the documentaries that grasp literal truths and create emotional ones are those that are mindful and conscious of the lies they must tell us to do so.

The fissures between the truth and its aestheticization are a central theme in Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes’ 55-film, two and a half week programme at Film Society of Lincoln Center, “Art of the Real.” Back for its second year, “Art of the Real” has provided a forum for some of the most enviably startling and thoughtful non-fiction programming the city of New York has seen in sometime. This is not a zone for easy truths; Lim and Rakes have constructed a sequences of films that test the limits of what nonfiction filmmaking can and is meant to do right in front of your eyes. In these documentaries, a form often likened to journalism is clearly an artistic medium.

Art of the Real numero deux opened on the second Friday in April with a shorts block of three movies, each of which ran approximately 30 minutes: João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata’s rumination on the remnants of a long defunct Macao fireworks factory (Iec Long), Eduardo Williams’s vérité portrait of bored Vietnamese teenagers who turn to jumping between the windows and roofs of buildings for amusement (I Forgot), and Matt Porterfield’s unscripted narrative (Take What You Can Carry), about a young American woman in Berlin we find, according the the festival’s programme notes, “attempting to reconcile her need for a stable sense of self-identity with the fulfillment she derives from her itinerant lifestyle”.

In no other place can I think of would a curator deliberately choose to show these works together. One has the shape and look of fiction, one pays strict adherence to vérité documentary and another blends archival photos and footage, reconstructions centered on figurines, oral history, and glimpses of contemporary life in the fireworks trade (the sound of fireworks is around every hypnotic nook and cranny of Iec Long). Together they pose as representative of various strands of contemporary non-fiction. “Art of the Real” is full of such uncluttered pronouncements and provocations, many of which are short in form —for Lim, Rakes and the high brow audiences they court, the feature has no special closeness to the truth.

The centerpiece of the festival is a partial retrospective of the great genre-bending trailblazer Agnes Varda, whose remarkable work in documentary essay (The Gleaners and I) and naturalist fiction complicated by self-conscious documentary framing (Vagabond) butts up against a series of works that fall all over the surrounding spectrum (Black PanthersMur MursDaguerrotypes).

Perhaps even more revelatory than revisiting Varda’s essential oeuvre is Lim and Rakes’ sidebar “Repeat as Necessary: The Art of Reenactment” a strand that interrogates the various ways doc filmmakers have used seemingly narrative reenactments across a broad spectrum of documentary phenotypes. Reenactments have their detractors; in the wake of the Jinx craze, Richard Brody attacked reenactments en masse just three weeks ago in the New Yorker, claiming they “never work.” But he back-tracked a bit the following week when it came to the work of Elisabeth Subrin.

The Temple University professor and stalwart experimentalist’s program unfurled on Saturday afternoon. It led off with Shulie, a “recreation” of a 1967 documentary about the then-22-year-old Art Institute of Chicago student Shulemith Firestone. Shulie is a canonized classic of the post-New American Cinema era avant-garde film, but little known outside the hard cinephile circles. Three years after the original documentary was made Firestone, born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein to Orthodox parents in Canada before spending her childhood in the American midwest, would pen The Dialectic of Sex, a foundational text of Second Wave Feminism and become one of the most revered, and misunderstood, of feminist writers.

Shulie screened in front of Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, a meditation on memory, national purpose, and gentrification in Subrin’s Williamburg neighborhood that powerfully juxtaposes flag-strewn edifices in the month following 9/11 side by side with their more contemporary, often gentrified incarnations. Sweet Ruin, which offers up Gaby Hoffman in gender-bending dual roles, playing shards of the characters Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson were supposed to play in the never filmed Antonioni screenplay Technically Sweet, closed the troika.

The subject of Shulie, who died at 67 in 2012, is played by Kim Soss. She resembles Firestone superficially and recites, line for line, dialogue that is taken from the unreleased film made about Firestone by Chicago’s stalwart leftist documentarian outfit Kartempquin. The rough hewn, period-appropriate 16mm portrait of this young woman proves to be a potent meditation on the aesthetics and desires of the late ‘60s. Shulie is interviewed on camera, shown getting a bullshit critique from several male instructors, intermittently explores nature, and talks about bonding with professional negroes whose highest possible aspiration was a job at the post office. What the accumulation of these moments provides is nothing less than a glimpse into the flowering of a feminist sensibility as it intermingled with anti-war sentiment and Civil Rights agitation. The nature of reality’s spell in Subrin’s hands is pitched at an angle where we can glimpse the artifice (during one anti-Vietnam rally in the film, the viewer can see modern cars, and a young black child in a black, mid-’90s, Michael Jordan jersey) just enough to meditate on its construction, to redouble our efforts to see Shulie’s message in our own time.


Earlier that Saturday afternoon, Jill Godmilow’s What Farouki Taught and Harun Farouki’s Inextinguishable Fire began the sidebar. Godmilow’s film, made while she taught at the University of Notre Dame in the mid ‘90s, celebrates Farouki’s earlier German black-and-white film with a shot-for-shot English-language color remake and an epistemological investigation of its methods. Godmilow’s film opens opens with Walter Benjamin’s discussion of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, before advancing to a harrowingly personal statement by a Vietnamese man (clearly a caucasian, speaking English in Godmilow’s version), sitting at a desk in jacket and tie. He stares into the lens and relays a story of being victimized by American napalm bombing, after which he was unconscious for 13 days. Then he pauses and says something so startlingly painful and true about how Americans always see, or rather refuse to see, the collateral damage caused by our empire, that the food I was chewing fell right out of my gaping mouth:

How can we show you napalm in action? And how can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you a person with napalm burns, we will hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you’ll feel like we tried napalm out on you, at your expense. We can only give you a hint of an idea of how napalm works.

In both films, the man delivering the monologue takes a lit cigarette from an off-screen ashtray as the camera pushes in and tilts down, stubbing the tip out on his wrist as a voiceover tells us that, while cigarettes burn at 400 degrees celsius, napalm burns at 3000 degrees celsius.

This man is an actor, and Godmilow’s film is agit-prop of the highest order. We don’t know whether this particular napalm incident happened or not, even if Seymour Hersh’s recent piece makes it startlingly clear how common such brutality was. It’s the spirit of the thing that counts; we know it to be emotionally true. Such things did happen, and we as American typically refuse to care. The rest of the film, which blends reenactments and news footage, direct address, and voice-over, indicts the American capitalist engine and the Dow chemical company of Midland, Michigan specifically for manufacturing these tools of destruction when they could use our advanced manufacturing and biochemical capabilities to make products for the world’s betterment.

Godmilow’s film runs about eight minutes longer than Farouki’s; she is interviewed at film’s end, on her own film’s set, about her feelings toward Farouki’s film, which was never shown in the United States during the war. She declines to call it a documentary per se, saying “We don’t have a name for this kind of film. We should get one I think. It’s inexpensive, it’s direct, it’s strong, and for me it replaces the documentary’s pornography of the real.” Another, offscreen voice replaces Godmilow’s, continuing, “pornography of the real, as in the way we get off on war footage, where there’s blood and dead bodies flown all over the place. We love to look at the suffering and shame of famine victims, AIDS patients and unemployed workers. We’re seduced by the realness of the horror. Turned on in a kind of sexual way.”

Affecting, politically conscious remakes unearthed in an era full of mindless, commercial ones, Shulie and What Farouki Taught take the unlearned political lessons of yesterday buried within barely seen films and use them to haunt our present. Perhaps one day we’ll get better at heeding their wisdom and stare their truths in the face.

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Holy Land Mon, 20 Apr 2015 13:12:42 +0000


Zionism excavates its secular justification from the Jerusalem dirt













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Beauty Didn’t Birth the Beast Mon, 20 Apr 2015 04:36:05 +0000


Sally Draper, preachin’ truth.

 I swear I will one day blog about something other than Mad Men. But until that time comes! This episode was interesting in that two separate characters referred to Don’s good looks as a liability. One of the creatives at the agency says to him in anger after Don suggests he might want to work on some character-building, “You don’t have any character, you’re just handsome—stop kidding yourself.” And then toward the episode’s end, his daughter says that both he and first-wife Betty are exactly alike, in that “anyone pays attention to either of you—and they always do—you just ooze everywhere.” (Two of Sally’s friends, totally separate from one another, had each attempted some amateur seduction on both of Sally’s parents in this episode, so this wasn’t out of nowhere.)

The first one was interesting, but mostly just in the context of Mad Men: Don has plenty of character, but we know that indeed a chunk of it has been formed around his incredible looks. The second reference is what’s really juicy here. In fiction, if someone’s good looks are referred to as a liability, it’s usually used to mean a fairly limited set of options. Maybe the character hasn’t had to develop other facets of herself because she’s relied on her beauty. (Which—I mean, has anyone ever met someone like that, for real? In my experience dullness and beauty have exactly zero correlation, let alone causation; the dullards I know are plain and pretty in equal amounts.) Maybe a character been taught her looks are her greatest asset so she’s used them to manipulate others, or his handsomeness has pushed him toward con artistry. If it’s a feminist-minded creator maybe we’ve seen how beautiful women aren’t taken seriously (i.e. the genesis of many a Joan plot line in this very series). Or maybe women don’t trust her, or men don’t trust him, or whatever. (Of course, the #1 way we see a character’s looks work against her is that Her Beauty Drives Men to Madness, but that’s such an ugggh cliché I’m not even counting it here.)

But here you have a character’s attractiveness being referenced not as a liability in and of itself, but as an amplification of an already-existing tendency: the inability to turn away sexual attention. Don and Betty are two people who are starved for attention, and that would be true even if they weren’t played by actors as good-looking as Jon Hamm and January Jones. But their beauty allows the quality Sally refers to as “ooze” to be read by others as charm or graciousness, or as a stream of reciprocal attention. And in turn, both of these characters have learned to trust that that’s how their highly sensitive attention-radars will be seen. The fact that their looks garner each of them a generous amount of attention becomes almost secondary; it just lets them get away with absorbing the gaze of others in a way that doesn’t seem desperate.

I’ve interviewed lots of people, mostly women, in-depth about their relationship with their looks, and when I first started doing formal interviews I was initially surprised that I wasn’t finding any sort of parallel between a woman’s experiences or attitude and how conventionally attractive she was. Asking a professional beauty about her experiences as a model is one thing, but asking her about how her looks had shaped, say, her love life was a different story. I never thought that meant a person’s looks were irrelevant to how she viewed the world, but I sort of chalked it up to beauty not being as important as other factors in shaping one’s worldview, or chirpily shook it off as “Well, everyone’s different!” But I think Sally’s quip crystallizes an important factor: A person’s looks can shape already existing tendencies. It does not create them. Nor does it shape tendencies in the same way for everyone. But I like the idea of looks functioning as a filter—as one of many filters—that determine how we walk through the world. There are so many oppositional ideas about how beauty affects people out there: You’ve got men who are genuinely surprised when they meet a woman who manages to be both beautiful and brilliant, you’ve got people who assume beautiful people have it easy because “everything is handed to them,” you’ve got people shaking their heads about how hard gorgeous women have it because other women supposedly hate them so much. If we come to see appearance as one of many forces that distinctly shape our lives, we might have a more genuine understanding of how the lives of extraordinarily beautiful people are affected by their looks—and of how the rest of us have our lives affected by the same. 

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Sunday Reading Sun, 19 Apr 2015 18:00:31 +0000


Karen Gregory:


Bint Battuta:

Kerim Friedman:


Reclaim UC:



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Miracle on 214th Street Fri, 17 Apr 2015 09:56:38 +0000


The instantaneous apparition of Polaroid images creates miraculous and apocalyptic visions



The pilgrim who sent Polaroid the miraculous photograph belonged to a small but growing group of Catholics known as the Baysiders, who were devotees of Veronica Lueken. A white working-class Catholic housewife from Bayside, Queens, Leuken began experiencing visions in 1968 after hearing on her car radio that Robert Kennedy had been shot. As she prayed for the dying Senator, she felt herself enveloped in the perfume of roses. Thérèse of Lisieux, a saint known as “The Little Flower,” appeared to her shortly thereafter. At first Lueken was terrified, but soon she began to transcribe poems the saint dictated to her during repeated visitations.

“Many people have reported having a mystical experience at some point in their lives,” historian of religion Joseph Laycock writes in The Seer of Bayside, his 2014 book on Lueken and the Baysiders. However, certain historical and social conditions have to be in place, Laycock argues, for a mystical experience to be greeted as a visionary prophecy. A time of general social upheaval, combined with the specific anxiety among Catholic laypeople in the wake of the sweeping modernization ushered in by the Second Vatican Council, created the conditions that made an apparition movement possible in Queens in the late 1960s. As a woman from a humble background with little formal education, Lueken fit the bill for a Marian seer.


Lueken’s visions took a public turn in 1970 after the Virgin Mary appeared in her bedroom and instructed her to establish a shrine to “Our Lady of the Roses” on the grounds of her parish church and hold rosary vigils there. If Lueken faithfully fulfilled this request, Mary promised to use her as the “voice box” for messages from heaven that would spread around the world. Lueken did as she was asked, and beginning in summer 1970, growing crowds gathered for Saturday night vigils on the church grounds where she received divine messages in an ecstatic trance.

As Lueken came into her role as a seer, her visions became graphically apocalyptic. To the chagrin of Church authorities, she prophesied imminent cataclysm in the form of a fiery “Ball of Redemption.” Floods, plagues, stock market crashes and terrorist attacks filled her visions, a doom that could only be averted through prayer and a return to pre-Vatican II Catholic teachings. In its wilder moments, elements of popular culture infused her apocalypse—UFOs, vampires, a “Soviet death ray.”  While the content of Lueken’s visions troubled parish authorities, the crowds of pilgrims that gathered around her mortified the church’s neighbors, middle-class homeowners who regarded Lueken as an interloper from the poor side of the parish and feared for the vigils’ effect on their property values.

The Bayside movement coincided with the advent of the SX-70, and miraculous photographs became a central part of the Baysiders’ devotional practice. The whirr of ejecting film was as characteristic a vigil sound as the chanting of prayers. Only Lueken could see and speak for the divine, but every Baysider could take pictures. Over time, the group developed a divinatory chart for decoding symbols and colors that appeared on the photos: the letter W, for example, signifies worldwide warning, while snakes represent the forces of hell. The color blue indicates Mary, often present in the distinctive “Polaroid blue” cast of SX-70 prints. Folklorist Daniel Wojcik calls the Baysiders’ use of Polaroids “photodivination,” comparing it to Ndembu divination traditions in northwestern Zambia: like Ndembu diviners’ symbols, the symbolic system of miracle photos leaves space for the pilgrim to actively interpret the image.

Vigil photography did not originate at Bayside. Pilgrims took pictures at Marian apparition sites as early as the 1930s, and the oldest known Christian miraculous photograph dates from 1905, just five years after the introduction of the first mass-market camera, the Kodak Brownie. Shot off the Narrows of St. John’s in Newfoundland, it shows an iceberg with a large protrusion in the shape of the Virgin Mary. The Archbishop in St. John’s approved of the photo—so heartily, in fact, that he dubbed it Our Lady of the Fjords and penned a sonnet in praise of the “Crystal Virgin, from the frozen fjords/Where far-off Greenland’s gelid glaciers gleen.”


In an era that saw the search for evidence of the afterlife as a scientific pursuit, the idea that a camera might record supernature as well as nature was not much of a conceptual leap. Nineteenth-century Spiritualists were the first to use the new technology to capture and communicate with the supernatural. In spirit photography, an “extra”—an additional human figure, presumed to be the image of a dead person—appeared on the negative after the photograph was taken. Though the comparison would likely displease both sides, a Spiritualist medium had notable parallels to a Marian seer. Preferably a woman or child, she was supposed to be passive in a particularly receptive way: In Spiritualist language derived from magnetism, the medium’s feminine “negative” charge enabled the spirit to flow into her.

Spiritualists and Theosophists around the turn of the twentieth century debated the mechanics of supernatural photography: Some claimed that spirit photographs simply documented ghosts who happened to be present when the photo was taken; others argued that spiritual forces used images of the dead to imprint messages onto the photographic negative, or that the medium herself was a sort of camera. The Baysiders likewise have a range of explanations for miraculous photography: some say the Holy Spirit enters into the camera to form the images, while others believe that Mary or the saints draw the patterns and symbols onto the film as it develops.

According to a story that resonates deeply with many Baysiders, Saint Veronica—whose name means “true icon”—met Jesus on the Via Dolorosa on the way to Calvary. Jesus wiped his face with her veil, and his image was imprinted on the cloth. The cloth became a holy relic called the Veil of Veronica, which is now stored at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Like the imprint of the crucified Christ on the Shroud of Turin and the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Juan Diego’s cloak, the Veil of Veronica is an acheiropoieton, an icon “not painted by human hands.” Icons that come into being without human artistry are seen to possess a special kind of authority; supernatural photography is a technological variation on this miraculous image tradition.

In America, Jean Baudrillard wrote of the Polaroid as a heightened form of photography’s uncanniness:

to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has become a reality. It is a dream. It is the optical materialization of a magical process. The Polaroid photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.

The “ecstatic” Polaroid is the perfect technology for miracle photography. “Our Lady has directed that the pictures should be taken with Polaroids or other kinds of instant self-developing cameras,” Bayside literature instructs. Polaroid film has the same immediate quality as the imprint created in a traditional acheiropoieton and is less vulnerable than other photographic film to skeptics’ accusations of tampering with the development process.

This “optical materialization of a magical process” was also a potential threat to institutional religious authority. In The Seer of Bayside Laycock frames the Bayside movement as a “dance of deference and defiance” by a group of people who understand themselves as loyal Catholics defending the traditions of their faith, yet act in ways that challenge Church authorities. The book’s account of the struggle over whether the Baysiders fit within the boundaries of Catholicism reveals the ceaseless process of boundary negotiation in lived religion. While they are not central to Laycock’s analysis, divine Polaroids fit this dynamic of deference and defiance. Miracle photos continue the Catholic tradition that the sacred manifests itself in matter and fulfill the call made at Vatican II for more “external signs” of the Catholic faith. At the same time, Polaroid miracles subvert the Church hierarchy by giving lay Catholics agency to receive divine messages directly and providing them with physical objects that can be used as evidence in arguments with Church authorities.

Ultimately, too many Baysiders defied convention too loudly for the middle-class residential neighborhood where they held their vigils. As the vigils drew busloads of pilgrims from as far away as Canada, they attracted vendors selling ice cream, hot dogs and religious objects. Angry neighbors tried to drive the vigils out by running their lawnmowers or singing patriotic songs to drown out the rosary. In what the New York press dubbed the “Battle of Bayside,” conflict escalated to the point of physical fights between pilgrims and neighbors.

The Diocese of Brooklyn eventually sided with the Bayside homeowners. Having initially ignored Lueken, it now investigated her visions and declared them spurious. Bishops around North America issued statements to their flocks that they should not attend vigils in Bayside, as Lueken’s apparitions were the product of a “fertile imagination.”

In what Laycock describes as “perhaps the only case in which alleged miracles associated with a Marian apparition site were the subject of a criminal investigation,” the fraud bureau of the Queens DA’s office—probably at the instigation of the Brooklyn Diocese—sent nine miraculous photos to the Polaroid Corporation for analysis in 1973, even though “supernatural phenomena are generally beyond the purview of the legal system.” A Polaroid corporate attorney responded with noncommittal explanations of how various forms of manipulation could have affected the images. No fraud charges were ever filed: “Because the courts do not acknowledge the existence of miracles,” Laycock writes, “it is almost impossible to convict someone for fraudulently offering a supernatural (and thus legally non-existent) service.”

Though the miracle fraud case fizzled out, the courts did end the Battle of Bayside in 1975, when the Supreme Court of New York issued an injunction banning the pilgrims from Bayside Hills. Lueken then received a revelation that Mary and Jesus would now appear to her in Flushing Meadows Park, at the site of the Vatican Pavilion from the 1964-65 World’s Fair. The Baysiders moved their vigils to Flushing Meadows, and continue to meet there weekly to this day.

The pilgrims at Flushing Meadows still take Polaroids. Many Baysiders have had their cameras blessed by priests. Rose petals are taped onto cameras and rosary beads are draped around them. In a digital era, the Baysiders’ anachronistic photographic practices seem emphatically embodied. Their use of Polaroid cameras has become an assertion that a special miraculous potential resides in Polaroid technology’s combination of the analog and the instantaneous. The development process occurs inaccessibly, yet within an object that is tangibly present. An image “not painted by human hands” takes shape before the Baysider’s eyes, rising up through the chemical layers of the film sheet to emerge into view on its surface. As with traditional acheiropoeita, the miracle depends on the sense of mystery evoked by the conditions of the image’s physical production. In the Baysiders’ Polaroids, a dissident form of direct communication with the divine converges with the photograph’s physicality and  immediate creation to produce a miracle.

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70 Years Ago Today Wed, 15 Apr 2015 18:47:53 +0000


Women and children in one of the huts at Bergen-Belsen, postliberation, April 1945.

Seventy years ago today, British troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. In the days and weeks following the liberation, British and American soldiers took to treating and relocating the thousands of desperately ill prisoners. One of those soldiers, Lt. Col. Mervin Willett Gonin, among other recordings of that time, wrote the following in his diary:




This story has stuck with me since I first read it, even as part of me doubted whether the lieutenant colonel had read the women’s reactions correctly. He was an outsider who, despite having seen firsthand the horrors of Bergen-Belsen, had not experienced them. And, to be blunt, he was a man; what could he truly know about the transformative powers of lipstick?


It wasn’t until I read Linda Grant’s wonderful book The Thoughtful Dresser—which, as it happens, quotes the same passage I’ve quoted here—that I read an account that satisfies those rather academic quibblings. (Eternal thanks to Terri of Rags Against the Machine for pointing me toward Grant’s work.) The story of Catherine Hill, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, is central to Grant’s book, and I don’t want to take away its remarkable narrative arc by saying too much here. What I will say is that at one point in the prison camp, Hill creates an ersatz fascinator out of the hem of her uniform’s dress in order to cover her ears, which were starkly exposed because of her forcibly shaved head. And when an SS officer asked her during roll call what exactly she thought she was doing, her response was simply that she wanted to look pretty. He laughed. But it was the truth: “They could have got rid of me right there and then, but they could not take away my desire to be feminine, and a woman. And my dignity, even in the most degrading situation…”


The entirely human wish to appear pretty is hardly the central meaning of what today symbolizes for Bergen-Belsen’s survivors, liberators, and descendants. And I’m wary of “excusing” my own investment in my beauty work by saying, Well, women in the worst imaginable circumstances still cared, so…. The circumstances are not remotely equatable. Still, the heart of these stories remains true: Vestiges of beauty can be powerful. They can be talismans of routine, of dignity, of what it means to be a woman. Of what it means to be human, and of what happens when the things that make us individuals are erased. And today, in remembering or learning about what happened in those camps, that’s one of the most important things we can remember.

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Justice in One Country Wed, 15 Apr 2015 07:46:05 +0000


So-called left-wing Zionism is white nationalism by another name 

Michael Walzer is an unlikely nationalist. Where many political philosophers, especially on the center-left, tend to think of nation-states as temporary and unfortunately parochial compromises with universal ideas of justice, for Walzer they’re at the center of what it is to form a just community. “To give up the state,” he writes in his most famous book Spheres of Justice, “is to give up any effective self-determination.” But countries have disappointed the public intellectual. In his new book The Paradox of Liberation, Walzer wants to know why the secular and secure states we were promised in the 20th century have failed to appear. This, he laments, is not our beautiful end to history, but a stumble on the way there.

In the current dying generation of American left-wing political philosophers, few have engaged with what passes as the American lettered public as much as Walzer has. Starting at the age of 27, he logged over 50 years teaching at Harvard and Princeton. He spent more than three decades as the editor of the socialist journal Dissent, and remains a contributing editor at the New Republic. Add in dozens of books and hundreds of public essays and academic articles, and he’s as close to a true public intellectual American social democrats are going to get. But since 9/11, his support in principle for the War on Terror (and in particular for the invasion of Afghanistan) surprised readers who had taken him for just another anti-imperialist lefty. Instead, he scolded the left for failing to oppose political Islam and “blaming America first.” 

Close readers of his literary output might not have found this strange. For decades Walzer has been committed to the nation-state as the only plausible structure for the communal exercise of ethical behavior. Universal standards sound nice, he says, but trying to get everyone to agree is more trouble than it’s worth. In his conception, a country is like a family, tied to one another by common heritage and willing to tolerate, admit, and assimilate the occasional outsider. Rejecting a Rawlsian one-size-fits-all model of just governance, Walzer believes that only as nations can groups of people agree on a hierarchy of goods and distribute them fairly. And as nations of people self-determine into nation-states, they’ll tend toward secular democracy as the best way to incorporate different beliefs within the community.

In The Paradox of Liberation, Walzer is curious about why some countries seem to be going in reverse. He focuses on three nations (Algeria, India, Israel) where an original commitment to secular democracy is losing ground to a renewed religious fundamentalism. From these cases, he generalizes a pattern and the titular paradox: To liberate a nation, to bring it into being, leaders need to call upon a common heritage and historical values, but to progress into secular democracy, they need to create a new, modern citizenry, one dedicated to a certain level of procedural pluralism. If their dedication to secularism is too inconsistent, if leaders lapse into easy appeals to religious nationalism, they’re liable to bring about a return of the repressed in the form of right-wing Orthodox Jews or Islamic fundamentalists or militant conservative Hindus.

When Walzer writes of a nation of people, he doesn’t just mean a country’s population. For him, a nation is a historical community, an in-group that shares a relationship to a territory. National belonging is communicated by blood, but there’s no way to test for it; it’s something you have to feel and believe in. Throughout his books, Walzer doesn’t outright say that everyone should go back to where they belong, but the model he has developed over decades suggests they probably should, and if they do, they should be welcomed back by their “own” nation-state. At the very least, he claims, every country owes its minorities the right of safe exit and return to their native land. This formulation echoes Victorian-era ideas of race and nationality, in which blood links one not only to land but to a national cause. In George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, for example, an English gentleman discovers his hidden Jewish roots and decides to follow a vague proto-Zionist move “East.” Or Eliot’s poem The Spanish Gypsy, where a princess discovers she’s also Gypsy royalty and attempts to bring her nation into existence in its “homeland,” the African jungle. Although Eliot’s narratives solicit sympathy, the idea that people have a place on the earth they “belong” according to their identity is as dangerous as it is inconsistent.

Walzer explicitly endorses this idea of national-territorial belonging. In 1983’s Spheres of Justice, he writes, “Nations look for countries because in some deep sense they already have countries: the link between people and land is a crucial feature of national identity.” That “some deep sense” is the vital element that ties people and territory, but it’s hard to explain without recourse to Victorian fictions about blood-based yearnings for homelands. Buying into these narratives allows Walzer to imagine, for example, that the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations after World War I was proper, even desirable, despite resulting in the forced displacement of two million people to territories where they had no historical or present ties. “What else are such states for?” he asks. But only a page later Walzer argues in general against forced transfer of citizens across national borders, implying the he regards the aforementioned deportation of Macedonian Muslims to Turkey and Anatolian Christians to Greece as something else entirely. Here Walzer conceives of national belonging as a function of religious identity, not by name, but as a nebulous ethnic-territorial link.

If you want to stay somewhere you don’t belong, Walzer thinks the people living there probably do owe you something like hospitality, but not as much as you owe them. To describe the process of assimilation, Walzer uses a shocking metaphor. The state with immigrants, he writes, “is like a family with live-in servants.”

That is not an attractive image, for a family with live-in servants is is–inevitably, I think–a little tyranny. The principles that rule in the household are those of kinship and love. They establish the underlying pattern of mutuality and obligation, of authority and obedience. The servants have no proper place in that pattern, but they have to be assimilated to it. Thus, in the pre-modern literature on family life, servants are commonly described as children of a special sort … when servants come to be seen as hired workers, the great household begins its slow decline. The pattern of living-in is gradually reversed, erstwhile servants seek households of their own.

To be clear: this isn’t written as a description of oppression, but as a model of how things should be. It’s hard to say what’s most wrong with this idea of the national family and its racialized servants, but Walzer gives a hint with another couple misguided books. In Interpretation and Social Criticism and The Company of Critics, Walzer outlines his conception of the “connected critic”—the social critic who interrogates his own society’s flaws from a position near the center of his nation. These are the figures who put a check on nationalist zeal, with special attention to the fate of people on the periphery. They share a common conflict, possessing a legitimate and faithful tie to the nation, as well as a critical drive to question it.

Radicals, who want to pull up rather than replant a nation’s roots, are not connected critics. The connected critic’s targets are his own people, not an outside oppressor. Those whose fate is not shared by the rest of the nation cannot be connected critics unless they’re able to stake a national claim. One who Walzer names is Breyten Breytenbach, an Afrikaner poet who was exiled and imprisoned after he married a French woman of Vietnamese ancestry, violating apartheid codes against inter-racial fraternization. But what claim does Breytenbach have to the territory of South Africa? Does he not “belong” in Europe where he was exiled? If he is a connected critic, then forming an ancestral nation is as easy as a few generations of colonial settlement. Walzer confirms as much: “The Afrikaners,” he writes, “have become one of Africa’s tribes, hybrid like all the others.” Breytenbach’s claim is not only legitimate, but as a white victim of apartheid, he is uniquely connected to the nation.

Why, when looking for an exemplary critic of apartheid South Africa, would Walzer go out of his way to pick a white guy? The reason is simple: Black people can’t be connected critics. He writes in Interpretation and Social Criticism:

Marginality has often been a condition that motivates criticism and determines the critic’s characteristic tone and appearance. It is not, however, a condition that makes for disinterest, dispassion, open-mindedness, or objectivity… Marginal men and women are in but not wholly of their societies. The difficulties they experience are not the difficulties of detachment but of ambiguous connection. Free them from those difficulties and they may well lose the reasons they have for joining the critical enterprise. Or, criticism will look very different than it looks when it is worked up on the margins by “alienated intellectuals,” or members of subject classes or oppressed minorities, or even outcastes or pariahs.

For Walzer, a critic without full social rights within a nation cannot truly do critique, because their objections are insufficiently separate from their personal interests. It is too easy for a black person to criticize apartheid South Africa; they aren’t connected to it. This is a white-supremacist inversion of W.E.B DuBois’s “double consciousness,” in which the marginal are compelled to see everything (including and especially themselves) through the eyes of their oppressors. DuBois saw this as part of a national claim to America: “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.” Double consciousness is an affliction, but also a second sight into the nation’s center and its relationship to the margins. For Walzer, however, a connected critic must be detached from the state (he must not be a member of the ruling party, for example) and also “detached from his own marginality.” But in a world where, as André 3000 puts it, “across cultures, darker people suffer most,” detaching is easier for some than for others.

What is the nature of a national claim if the children of settler-colonists like Breytenbach have one but indigenous North Americans do not? Returning to Walzer’s notion of the “deep sense” of connection to a country, it’s clear how it might be easier to develop a deep sense of belonging to a country where you and your ancestors have been treated like equal members than if you’ve been enslaved, murdered, raped, robbed, humiliated, and terrorized for centuries. The Walzerian solution might very well be a Garveyite “Back to Africa” move, but according to Walzer’s formulation, the children of white colonists have a—if not the—legitimate claim to those countries too.

Reading The Paradox of Liberation with this earlier work, it becomes clear that Walzer’s “deep sense” of ancestral attachment to territory is the basis for his entire ethical system. Without this intangible link, there could be no spheres in which to pursue justice. All we would be left with are spheres of domination, where claimless groups fight to maintain their hold on territory though force. Of course, in such a scenario, the dominant groups would probably invent historical rights as part of their ideological justification, as is the conqueror’s wont. How then, do we distinguish a legitimate ancestral claim from, say, Germany’s invasion of Austria, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or Japan’s invasion of Korea, or the Mormon settlement of Wo’tééneihí?

The Mormons are a good example: Before settling the land that would become known as Utah, they had been driven from the eastern states despite an ancestral attachment to New York, where their prophets had buried golden plates with the word of God millennia before. Luckily, in the mid 19th-century, God awarded his wandering disciples a large parcel of incorporated (but not unoccupied) desert land. Only 150 years later, how would Walzer adjudicate a dispute between the Mormons of Utah and the children of the land’s indigenous population? Both have claims to North America that stretch back thousands of years—one is very obviously a modern fabrication, but no doubt Mormons feel nonetheless a “deep sense” of attachment to the territory. Here Walzer gives us a geopolitical rather than a historical standard: Breytenbach has a claim to South Africa because the Afrikaners “are there to stay,” and so too, presumably, are the Mormons.

Walzer puts a lot of faith in the nation. In The Paradox of Liberation, he clarifies his position on nationalism versus the left: “What was probably most important in the failure of Marxist internationalism was the widely shared belief that only sovereignty guaranteed the cultural survival of national and religious groups (and perhaps also the physical survival of their members), and only sovereignty could bring full equality in the already existing society of states.” It’s crystal clear that Walzer’s primary agenda is conservative, to maintain and justify what are, in effect, racial nations. Within these nations, it’s up to connected critics to push the community toward just dealings with outsiders. In Walzer’s model, most people go to or already live where they belong, and the rest choose to rely on the decency of their hosts.

As a work of modern history, Paradox of Liberation is thin and cursory. The sections on the dynamics of Algerian and Indian liberation struggles are worthless. As a work of political philosophy, the book is only notable because it points so directly to the contradiction at the foundation of Walzer’s thought, a contradiction perhaps best expressed in the Israeli flag. The disappointment at Paradox’s core is Israel’s failure in Walzer’s estimation to fulfil its secular promise. “Zionism was,” he writes, “at its center and in the years of its greatest achievements, overwhelmingly a secular project.” Now, authoritarian-minded Orthodox Jews are insurgent within the state, and they seek to replace democracy with religious law. Despite setting out to establish a just, secular, democratic Jewish nation, that trajectory is now in danger.

But how genuine was this possibility in the first place? If the “Jewish” in Jewish state doesn’t refer to Talmudic law, then what exactly does it mean? Under Walzer’s formulation, it refers to the race (in the Victorian sense) of Jews. Israel is our homeland, to which I and all other Jews have an ancestral claim. But not all Jewish claims are equal; the Israeli state has pursued a policy of population suppression among Ethiopian Jews by means of non-consensual sterilization. Racial states are based on stories that are always already entangled in histories of colonialism and wealth extraction justified by white supremacy, and this has affected the legitimacy (that is, plausibility) of every modern national claim. The Zionist fiction, that the race of Jews is entitled to the territory of Israel, can never be the foundation for a secular state. Racialism is a particularly pernicious form of faith.

As a social-democratic connected critic of the Zionist project, Walzer places himself between Israel’s aggressive conservatives and left-wing solidarity with Palestinian liberationists. He endorses Israel’s right to exist, while questioning the “by any means available” that usually follows. But a close reading of his theoretical work reveals a rightward collapse in Walzer’s thought, indeed in all left-wing Zionist thought. Without the messianic narrative (which Walzer rejects), Israel is a Jewish state in the modern mode. There will always be non-Jews in Israel—as Walzer cites in Paradox, an early Jewish criticism of Zionism was that observant Jews could only operate the state’s machinery six days a week. But Israel as such simply cannot assimilate non-Jews as equal citizens. It is condemned, like all of Walzer’s gated ancestral nations, to continue as a “little tyranny,” a theocracy of blood, myth, and guns.

Walzer misses the religious aspect of ethno-nationalism in an inexcusable fashion. In the postscript to Paradox he takes on the United States, which, in his telling, never had a national liberation movement because (Mormons aside) there was no ancestral claim. America’s was a political, rather than a social revolution, which made its secularism especially resilient. “The self-confident activism of the new Americans led to a very harsh engagement with the indigenous peoples of the continent,” he understates, “But it set close limits on the internal harshness of the secular-religious encounter.” Why, without a religious conflict, couldn’t secular democratic America assimilate the indigenous people? For the same reason Ethiopian-Israeli is a contradiction: As a self-consciously white nation, the United States could only ever include native people as “live-in servants” on their own ancestral land.

The possibility of a secular and democratic Jewish state is so hard to incorporate into any consistent system of ethics that Walzer takes it as premise and builds from there. It’s not a bad strategy: if you can’t resolve a contradiction, bury it in the foundation. But the consequence is that Michael Walzer has developed decades of theory on indefensible ground. It’s as if he constructed a whole system of ethics predicated on the Roma nation’s claim to the African jungle. In the name of so-called left-wing Zionism, Walzer has attempted to smuggle white nationalism into the left. But, as Walzer himself might remind us, the Zionist claim to the left is only valid if they’re “here to stay.” Let this not be the case.

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Any person who sings the praises of war is, in our opinion, a blithering idiot (Christmas Day, 1915) Tue, 14 Apr 2015 18:31:01 +0000

O’ROURKE (London.) – Thanks, comrade. We are more proud of the comradeship of toilers like yourself than you can well imagine. It is such loyalty as yours that keeps us hopeful of our class and country.

CÚ CHULAINN (Dundalk.) – No! We do not believe that war is glorious, inspiring, or regenerating. We believe it to be hateful, damnable, and damning. And the present war upon Germany we believe to be a hell-inspired outrage. Any person, whether English, German, or Irish, who sings the praises of war is, in our opinion, a blithering idiot. But when a nation has been robbed it should strike back to recover her lost property. Ireland has been robbed of her freedom, and to recover it should strike swiftly and relentlessly, and in such a fashion as will put the fear of God in the hearts of all who connived at the robbery or its continuance. But do not let us have any more maudlin trash about the ‘glories of war’, or the ‘regenerative influence of war’, or the ‘sacred mission of the soldier’, or the ‘fertilising of all earth with the heroic blood of her children’, etc, etc. We are sick of it, the world is sick of it. And when combined with the cant about ‘patience’, and ‘waiting’, and the ‘folly of rashness’, and the ‘wisdom of caution’, and all the other phrases that are to be heard from the Irish eulogists of war we confess it gives us a feeling like sea-sickness – nausea.

No, friend! War is hell, but if freedom is on the farther side shall even hell be allowed to daunt us.

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A brief review of Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome Tue, 14 Apr 2015 15:00:51 +0000

Screenshot 2015-04-14 10.55.55

In a just world, a virus of tremendous scope and tenacity would ravage all the archives and vaults and shelves, all its servers and drives, its dens and libraries. It would draw no distinction between digital or analogue, bootleg or licensed. The CDC would be baffled: it appears to be crystalline in structure, yet its rate of replication is unprecedented…  Pundits would lose their shit on air, terrified that the virus might mistake them for the already-recorded and snake their throat mid-speech. Amazon would go on full lockdown: nothing in, nothing out, its long-rumored drones circling on updrafts, training red dots on anything that moved. Other rumors abounding, like how a conspirator’s union of ex-Blockbuster execs and the remnants of local videostores were behind it all. Still, it would creep through plastic and code alike, invading mancaves and Netflix queues, no matter the firewalls or plastic sheeting or shotguns. We would be held in thrall, in disarray. But despite the fears of those who lie awake and hear it rifling through code and celluloid, its endgame would not be to spread to the human body. Its symptoms would be simple: whenever it encountered a reel or MP4 or DVD that contained The Help or The Butler or The Intouchables or The Legend of Bagger Vance or Get Hard or Hitch, it would consume all the data that makes them up and leave in its place Welcome II the Terrordome.

But if this was a just world, Welcome II the Terrordome would not exist. It would not be entirely necessary, which is what it is. Maybe that’s the case for any of those rare things that actually deserve to be called political film: they need to be seen, as often and by as many people as possible, but they exist precisely because the order of the world is posed in full against that possibility, its hackles up and Bagger Vances ever-ready for immediate deployment. They could only be about this world, unmistakably so, but it’s this world alone that they exist to ruin.

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The New Somali Studies Tue, 14 Apr 2015 09:50:09 +0000


What would a decolonized Somali Studies look like?

Since #CadaanStudies was launched on Twitter, the tweet that has received the most circulation has been something that British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote in his 1856 travelogue First Footsteps in East Africa:


Burton had arrived in Zeila, his first stop before traveling through the rest of Somaliland and the broader Horn of Africa. He was keenly interested in the culture, beliefs, and practices of the curious “Somali race” that he encountered, and he discovered many things about them. He discovered, for example, that the Somalis of Zeila in 1856 believed that fever was connected to mosquito bites, and he speculated that this “superstition probably arises from the fact that mosquitoes and fevers become formidable about the same time.” He also re-discovered what he already knew: that the difference between “superstition” and “fact” could be traced along racial lines and that knowledge and thought was the realm of the European.

It would not be until 1880 that a French doctor, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, would discover the malaria parasite in Algeria, for which he would win the Nobel Prize. Finally, in 1897, a British medical officer in British India, Ronald Ross, would be credited with discovering that malaria was indeed carried by mosquitos.

Burton’s condescension still characterizes the encounter between European and Somali. When ethnographic observation was crystallized as a methodology and a science, only Europeans were seen as capable of the rigorous analysis, reason, and knowledge production it required. Somalis existed only as the backdrop for their intelligence and understanding, as superstitious, irrational, unsophisticated, and unscientific.

#CadaanStudies explores the ways in which these colonial epistemologies continue to be the foundation of the field of Somali Studies. It began in response to the total absence of Somali academics and researchers from the editorial and advisory boards of the newly launched Somaliland Journal of African Studies (SJAS), which claimed to have been founded in collaboration with the University of Hargeisa, since denied by the university. But the hashtag exploded after a member of the advisory board, Markus Hoehne, made his own observations about Somalis:




Cadaan means “white” in Somali, and the hashtag #CadaanStudies gestures towards the conceptual whiteness of knowledge production in Somali Studies. It is an analysis of the systemic and the normative positions and relations it produces. It is a way of thinking about the words of one anthropologist and the exclusions of one journal not as isolated incidents, but as signifiers of the current state of Somali Studies, and the ways in which it has continued to sustain non-Somali dominance on all things Somali. It examines how colonial logic is replicated in contemporary scholarship on Somalis, and in the research practices of non-Somali academics in their gaze upon the Somali.

Hoehne’s comments offer a unique moment of revelation, but also a window of insight into banal systems of everyday power. They show a mindset in which the Somali is rendered passionately partisan, while the non-Somali researcher remains worldly and detached in his analysis. They highlight a perception of Somalis as too steeped in their Somaliness to objectively assess their own reality. They reveal an understanding of us, the detribalized, tweeting natives of the Somali diaspora, as rebellious, overly emotional and insulting towards the cadaan scholars with which he identifies. They expose the view of Somalis as fundamentally lazy, requiring the non-Somali anthropologist to explain how we can overcome our undisciplined nature through the hard work that we are currently, sadly, incapable of.

As with Burton and the malaria-carrying mosquito, for a European to be unaware of information articulated by Somalis does not indicate his own ignorance. How could it? Somali beliefs are not facts.


The First International Congress of Somali Studies was held in Mogadishu in July 1980; the Somali Studies International Association, which had been founded two years earlier, “sought to promote scholarly cooperation and collaboration in investigations and interpretations of Somali society, culture and habitat.” But while this multidisciplinary sub-field of African Studies was institutionalized in the 1980’s, its origins are during the colonial period, when academic interest in Somalis first emerged alongside and within the colonial project. Some of the scholars in attendance at the 1980 Congress had begun their research on Somalis during the colonial era, starting with British anthropologist I.M Lewis, often called the founding father of Somali Studies.

Somali Studies was established as a subfield and organization in a time of great intellectual ferment. Publications like Edward Said’s Orientalism and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality were in wide circulation by 1980, as were the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, particularly after Raymond Williams began to bring Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to Anglophone audiences. E.P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class had spurred on a variety of new social histories “from below” throughout the 1970s, challenging older, state-centered approaches; by 1979, women’s history had emerged as a field and gender would soon be theorized as an analytical category signifying relations of power in society. Subaltern Studies: Writings in Indian History and Society was launched in 1982, seeking to write histories outside of colonial constructions of knowledge and power.

It was a period of deconstruction and interrogation, of theory and reflexivity. But it did not touch Somali Studies.


Behind all of this new thinking was the decolonization of former European colonies, including the Somali territories. Nationalism and independence had created an epistemic crisis for anthropology, as the discipline grappled with its colonial origins and its focus on so-called “primitive” societies. Talal Asad and others challenged the truth of ethnographic representation and the discipline’s claims to scientific objectivity, enabling ethnography to be rethought as interpretation rather than scientific fact, and to critique its roots in colonial rule. The postmodern turn of the 80s and 90s and an increasing concern for reflexivity and subjectivity further reshaped anthropological praxis: the discipline now engages with the question of power dynamics, representation, and the ethics of research. All of this was necessary for the discipline to have future in a postcolonial world.

I.M Lewis began his fieldwork in the 1950s in British Somaliland, funded by the Colonial Social Science Research Council. His analysis of the Somali clan system—first published in his 1961 book A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics Among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa —continues to dominate understandings of Somali political and social life, despite its flaws. It reduced the complexity and heterogeneity of Somali society as a whole to a monolithic, nomadic pastoralism even though it was based on his fieldwork observations in only one region of Somaliland. His research was firmly embedded in an older tradition of British anthropology and worked to create the fiction of a self-reproducing Somali society, rooted in a rigid kinship system and with traditions unaffected by historical process. It made little sense to ask how clan is a product of modernity and subject to historical process, because Somali society was seen as primordial, outside of history and isolated from the world. He assessed Somali tradition in a vacuum, as though culture and tradition were not being transformed as Somalis were drawn into colonial regimes and a global capitalist economy, the very historical moment that enabled Lewis’ anthropological research in the first place.

He applied his framework to observe the Somali civil war 40 years later: “The political geography of the Somali hinterland in 1992, consequently, closely resembled that reported by European explorers in the 19th century, spears replaced by Kalashnikovs and bazookas.”

A volume of essays on Somali culture, society and politics co-edited by Markus Hoehne and Virginia Luling, which reviewer Gunther Schlee described as a compilation of the “Who’s Who in Somali Studies,” was published in honour of Lewis’ eightieth birthday in 2010. Essay submissions deemed too critical of Lewis did not make it to final publication.


 #CadaanStudies marks a departure from the older and more rigid methodological empiricism of the social sciences that has dominated Somali Studies from its colonial beginnings, and a long overdue move towards theory, subjectivity and postcolonial critique. The social sciences were born in a particular moment of European modernity, resting on concepts like the nation-state that have since taken on new forms in our postcolonial, globalized world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Somali territories, which have undergone radical shifts in the new global order. To read them through a colonial-era lens is to close our eyes to what is there. New sovereigns, forms of governance, and political subjectivities have emerged in the aftermath of civil war, within and beyond the collapsed nation-state, as the Somali territories have become contested ground for world historical processes of capital and modernity, and a vantage point from which to gaze back upon the West and deconstruct broader systems of power, including that of knowledge production.

What would a decolonized Somali Studies look like? You can see glimpses of it in the imaginative scope of research conducted by the many young Somalis whose names appear in the collective response to SJAS and Markus Hoehne. Yusuf Dirie engages with subalternity and examines how Western notions of modernity and progress informs debates on pastoralism in the Horn of Africa. There is the reflexive ethnography of Ahmed Ibrahim in his anthropological study of the local production of Islamic orthodoxy in southern Somalia. There is my own research on the affective and imagined geographies of modern Somali nationalism in its historical interaction with the Ethiopian state. Ilyas Abukar intervenes in practices of diaspora and Somali manifestations of blackness among refugees in the United States. Hawa Y. Mire uses art and storytelling to theorize agency and show the multiple ways that Somali women subvert patriarchal discourse.

#CadaanStudies has revealed a Somali Studies in crisis, trapped within a colonial imaginary in a postcolonial, postmodern world. What started as social media discussion has opened up a new space for thinking and theorizing about Somalis, the Somali territories, and the world they inhabit. Its significance will be its call to reimagine the conceptual apparatus of the field, focusing on the systemic level and how it has come to shape academic knowledge production about Somalis and the Somali region. Somali-produced scholarship will be central to academic knowledge, and #CadaanStudies is a disjuncture from which we can begin to theorize and develop new languages and methodologies to describe, analyze and understand new processes, systems, and ways of being. It is time to reimagine a Somali Studies for the postcolonial moment.

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