A Year at Baraza

The past year has given us time to consider our experience editing this online space for critical reflection on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. As editors of Baraza, we have been grateful for the exposure to our peers’ work and how we ourselves gained from the exchanges of the editorial process.

So after a year, why do we still think this online space is important?

One reason is that it provides an important intellectual exercise: authoring work accessible to a broader audience. As aspiring specialists in a variety of world regions studying everything from modern novels to ancient conceptions of science, it is easy for us to fall into the trap of jargon. Not everyone uses the word “deploy” outside the context of military movements or speaks several non-European languages, but when writing for an audience of specialists, it is easy to make these assumptions. As we edit Baraza, we have been, and aim to continue, cultivating a platform which encourages writing that engages a wide array of interests. Ultimately, this accessibility attracts feedback from a diverse range of people, sometimes even scholars and public figures — as with novelist Minna Sif’s engagement with Mara Lasky’s post on Sif’s Massalia Blues.

Accessibility also lends itself to another important aspect of our fields: interdisciplinary reflection. Authors learn how to receive different forms of feedback. As readers, we have benefited from exposure to different types of pieces that draw on literatures and types of evidence outside of our own field. For example, reading Cristina Violante’s post on valves and technologies of hygiene in the Middle East and Joy Garnett’s “Cross Pollination”, we were able to see how history, sociology, literature, and the study of power, when mixed well, can yield fascinating insights. Finally, accessibility can also mean striking a more reflective tone, as we saw in Shiv Subramaniam’s piece titled “The Question & the Kelvi” on listening, reading and the Kelvi.

As editors, we have been grateful for the chance to engage with students and faculty within our department, the wider Columbia community, and elsewhere outside of campus. As we solicited pieces, we were able to develop important editor-writer relationships, and as we workshopped together, we had the chance to critically engage with each others’ thought processes. Professionally, we have benefited from building up a network of students and faculty with whom we have worked together — often over a period of several weeks or even months — in editing, exchanging ideas, and finally posting and circulating to an audience of colleagues. Baraza has given us an opportunity to focus on our editing skills by engaging horizontally with our peers. As students, we devote countless hours to editing our own work, so having a chance to see others’ writings and to work with our peers to implement suggestions has been rewarding and beneficial for our editing and writing skills.

We wish to conclude this very fruitful year at Baraza by thanking everyone in the department and outside who have read, written for, and offered feedback on our posts. And, we hope a yet more engaging future for Baraza because it is more than just a blog; it is a space that is capable of exceeding the limits of the academic.

Archives and Canons

What is the opposite of a canon? Perhaps an archive, which contains an overwhelming array of texts that very few people intend to read. I sometimes feel like Raph and I are working our way through an immaterial archive that stretches across the globe. This “archive” contains digital copies of short stories culled from published collections, underground literary journals, blog entries, Facebook posts, and unpublished manuscripts. It also presumably includes letters stowed away in old backpacks and journals forgotten in desk drawers. An infinite array of things just waiting to be catalogued and, perhaps, one day, interpreted.

The challenge of transforming such an archive into a collection is partially the brute effort of finding the materials, compounded by the difficulty of working with texts that are rarely annotated. For instance, we have found digital copies of stories typed by hand by literary enthusiasts into labyrinthine websites like Sudanese Online. The multiple copies create multiple versions which, without a robust editorial effort, jostle one another for authority, not unlike the way in which Sudanese folk tales proliferate in near infinite variation. Although unlike scholars who work on manuscripts, Raph and I are not in the business of sussing out the authentic version of a given text, such variations and inconsistencies take us back to the question of how a literary canon is formed.

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Decolonizing the Digital

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On February 28th and March 1st 2013, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University will be hosting its annual graduate conference. Titled “Paradigmatic Conflict and Crisis,” the conference seeks to showcase the work of emerging scholars whose research is concerned with the spaces between conflicting, emerging, and established paradigms, and with new possibilities for our understanding of paradigm as both a discursive formation and a set of practices.

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Recording: A Public Conversation between Professor Hamid Dabashi and Professor Ashis Nandy

The recording is now available for the public conversation between Prof. Hamid Dabashi and Prof. Ashis Nandy.

The two eminent scholars raised crucial questions revolving around the theme of “state, culture, and human imagination.”  Professor Dabashi and Professor Nandy brought to this discussion their respective conceptions of these central ideas.  Of particular interest was the nature of the modern state and its viability within the context of changing epistemological, discursive, and temporal spaces.  Professor Nandy suggests that the advent of the modern state has wreaked devastation upon societies by imposing the necessity of a cultural homogenization project.  Building upon this idea, Professor Dabashi questions the viability of the modern state, in the Weberian sense, suggesting that the amorphous state has a greater tolerance for critical thinking than a totalitarian nation-state. The public conversation between Professor Dabashi and Professor Nandy is crucial to Baraza’s own work, which seeks to imagine – and create – a space that not only facilitates engagement within the geographic and disciplinary boundaries of Area Studies. It also encourages the production of new discursive modes around which these engagements can be centered.

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Digitalization Project Turns a Page in African History

Dr. Livingstone, may not be such the hero we once presumed.
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New digital imaging technology and a team of scholars have recovered David Livingstone’s faded journal entries from the period when the colonial era explorer had lost contact with his European benefactors 140 years ago.

As the introduction of Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition states, the digital project “reveals for the first time the original record of a remarkable and traumatic period in the life of David Livingstone, the celebrated British abolitionist, missionary, and explorer of Africa.”

While on an expedition to find the source of the Nile River, Livingstone encountered illness and other types of hardships. He had lost contact with his European suppliers and required the benevolence of traders and locals to survive. His experiences would be later immortalized by Henry Morton Stanley’s dispatches to the New York Herald. The journal materials cover his most challenging crisis, the one that helped encourage the Crown’s crackdown on the slave trade in East Africa and thus, cementing Britain’s dominance in the region.

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Resolving Differences in the Desert

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Bab’Aziz, the Prince who Contemplated His Soul. Directed by Nacer Khemir. Switzerland /Hungary /France /Germany /Iran /Tunisia /UK, 2005.

“Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis (sic) in the desert.”Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Whether Thoreau really understood the religious ecstasy of Sufi practice firsthand or was offering an off-hand orientalist reference may remain debatable, but what strikes one as most compelling in the above quote is the acute contrast of the simile: a bustling intellectual center and the starkness of an exotic locale.

The desert, that powerful setting, is just the type of place where contradiction, like the one Thoreau offers, seem to resolve themselves and where paradoxes shape reality. It is a landscape where the unseen is as undeniable as the awesome forces of nature that cut the extreme terrain. Nacer Khemir evokes this leviathan of the desert sea and then tries to wrestle a harness over the beast by contrasting it against an alienating modern world.

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The Problem with Campus Watch

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During my final year as an undergraduate student in Canada, I took a class taught by a professor whose monograph–which was required reading–argued that conflict, partisanship, and oppression in the Middle East were fundamentally attributed to tribalism. One lecture focused on honor killings as distinct from, and worse than, other kinds of domestic homicide because they were symptomatic of a violent (Arab/Islamic) culture. At another point in the semester, the professor suggested that Arab states should be thankful that they are in such close proximity to a democracy like Israel. It was in the context of conducting research for this class that I discovered Campus Watch, a project associated with the Middle East Forum that provides critiques of the discipline of Middle East studies in North American universities. Campus Watch highlights five main problems plaguing the discipline today: “analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students.” Initially thinking that I had stumbled upon a project that sought to combat the kind of offensive and deeply essentialist views that were being espoused in this classroom, I soon realized that this professor might have been just the kind of academic that Campus Watch lauded.

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Timeless Tradewinds and Markets of the Mind

Markets, Manthia Diawara has written, are the best reflections of society. His discussion, in the West African context, emphasizes markets as grand public spaces of experience and exchange, “a meeting place for the employed and the unemployed, the young and the old, women and men, the intellectual, and the peasant. They are a site for new generative forces, for the transfiguration of old concepts, and for revitalization.”

Travel writing from Ibn Batutta to today’s Rough guides has often chosen to use bazaars and other markets as emblems for distant, chaotic and antique lands. In reality, these spaces of intense human interaction form an intersection where the world presents itself to the heart of local societies. One would not be surprised to find, in a village market in Northern Ghana, a Lebanese merchant selling Chinese goods. Diawara reports the West African saying: “visit the market and see the world.”