Defacing the Postcolonial Predicament

This trajectory in my scholarship also dates back to 1990s, finding its first clear expression in my Social and Political Thought Ph.D. dissertation titled Sovereign Utopias: Civilisational Boundaries of Greek and Turkish Nationhood (1821-1923).[13] During the last 25 years, I continually addressed the question of why the postcolonial condition is regarded as a predicament, both globally and specifically in the Middle East, the Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean, and South East Asia. The urgent need for the internal and external transformation of this imposed condition demands that we unpack the paradoxes defining post-coloniality, including in the Ottoman/Turkish realm. In my work on the postcolonial predicament, there are three sub-themes informing each other: the postcolonial context of knowledge formation in political culture and history; state and society relations embodied by nationalism, historiography as well as traditions of amnesia; and, the refugee, the stateless subjects, war victims, the disappeared, the cleansed and exiled communities as quintessential subjects of the postcolonial predicament.

In this context, my work on Greek, Turkish and Cypriot subjectivities, traditions of citizenship, identification of the historical trajectories of the treatment of minorities in the Middle East and the Balkans, glorification of war and naturalization of mass violence, as well as the porousness of state borders and the fluidity of new forms of authoritarianism, made a mark on several generations of scholarship. In particular, my article on the typological oddity of Turkish nationalism (2002) is widely cited in syllabi on Middle Eastern and Balkan Histories.[14]

There are several other publications, invited lectures, community projects I have been involved that address similar issues in the Eastern Mediterranean and particularly the Cypriot context.[15] Each of these occasions was related to the coming together of a critical group of scholars, particularly historians, human rights advocates, lawyers, teachers and community organizations. The scholarly work itself became a conduit to understand and take part in the very political project of how to remember what cannot be forgiven, a theme which developed into a second Ph.D. in international criminal law in 2018.[16] This line of work also brought me to India, and from 2010 onwards, and led to the development of several projects and publications with a group of critical scholars based in Calcutta. As a result, my work is now cited in the Indian and South Asian context on account of making contributions to the core of the postcolonial citizenship debate from a comparative standpoint.[17] I made a concerted effort to work with both the Calcutta team at Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group and the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi by giving public lectures, keynotes and by taking an active part at their international school on forced migration.

In all areas of my work, the concept of dispossession plays a crucial epistemic and political role. Formalized relations of belonging idealized by capitalism, seemingly creating an homogeneous legal scheme that is to diminish social conflict and political discontent is a dangerous façade that hides the heterogeneity and hierarchies of identity formation that characterizes the modern state form. My contention has been that, contrary to the dominant narratives of European modernity, postcolonial societies paradoxically are much more open to unpack the history and present of global capitalism and its exigencies. In this sense, there are indeed at least two histories of Capital (Chakrabarty 2008).[18] In dialogue with postcolonial theory and critical historiography, crafting conversations while raising critical questions has been a priority in all areas of my work, along with a sustained critique of Eurocentrism, elaborations and re-iterations of public pasts, and articulations of histories of displacement and dispossession. This desire to re-engage on a wide platform of interrelated issues led to the interest of both an international body of scholars and graduate students to establish synergies with my work in a wide variety of interdisciplinary issues. The PhD dissertations I supervised and continue to supervise both in Canada and overseas include topics such as Alternative Modernities and European History, Limits of Comparative Constitutionalism, Muslim Subjectivities in Legal Form, Art as Discontentment in the Diaspora, Re-reading Otherhood, Border Regimes and International Law in the Global South, Genocide and Erasure of History in the Middle East, The Language of Violence in Law, and, Redefining Dispossession and Agency in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, both postcolonialism and Middle Eastern Studies cannon also exhibit a certain degree of reluctance to engage with other discourses about the violence, truth and memory. Overall, my work points out that there has to be some fundamental changes in the framing assumptions, organizing principles and intellectual habits of this genre, starting with intersectionality and undoing of the blindfold of area studies.[19]