Interventions from the Global South

Mohan Dutta 0:02
ICA presents

Kia ora koutou katoa. From the International Communication Association podcast network, this is Interventions from the Global South. In this podcast we listen to the voices of community organizers, activists, and intellectuals from/of the Global South imagining different worlds. My name is Professor Mohan Dutta, from Massey University in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Welcome to this episode. We have the pleasure of having with us today a scholar who has offered some really critical interventions in thinking through the question of solidarity, radicality and empire. Noor Ghazal Aswad is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. She holds an MA in speech communication from North Dakota State University. Her work has been published in several journals, including Environmental Communication, Presidential Studies, Quarterly Political Studies and Media Communication and the Journal of Higher Education, Policy and Management. Her research interests revolve around climate change communication, as well as the political and media rhetoric surrounding immigrants and refugees in the United States. What I find really powerful in Noor's work is her interventions into the concept of solidarity in anti-imperial solidarity politics of change from the Global South. Today, we will discuss the lenses through which struggles against imperialism have been viewed both by the national media and by those fighting on the ground, as well as how the framework of analysis from the Global South creates room for prioritizing those who put their own experiences and bodies on the line. Welcome, Noor.

Noor Ghazal Aswad 2:11
Thank you so much for having me. Mohan. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I was really thinking about the title of this podcast, which is Interventions from the Global South, and really reflecting more on the the utility of the Global South versus the Global North as a lens, through looking at this kind of the binary lens through which we look at what is happening around the around the world. And so while I really think that the term Global South is very useful in various contexts, and it does help us grapple with certain terms.

At the same time, I really think that binary sometimes can, can also kind of mask various oppressions, when you only have kind of Western versus non western nations, and that binary, which arose during the Cold War. Recently, I've really been gravitating, I think, towards the term the periphery. And this is actually not a term that I thought of. It's a term that's being used now, I think by various journalistic collectives, like Mango Media. It really is also trying to get at the the regimes which are also oppressing us.

And so thinking about how the people who are peripheral to the state, regardless of whether that state is the Global South or the Global North - and so thinking about how, for instance, activists in China, in Russia, in Iran and in Syria, are peripheral to those states, which are then also peripheral to maybe to the West or to Western nations. And so the realities on the ground are a lot more complex than just looking at through this kind of simple ideological lens of Global South versus Global North. I've been thinking more about how we need to also maybe separate the nation state from the people on the ground. And it is so difficult to enter into these conversations because you never want to be perceived as somehow excusing certain imperialisms. But I think it's important that we add new ones and that we really look at the people on the ground and that we are able to see how in some situations, various imperialisms have been more harmful than others. And also, it's really important, I think, not to look at the region with one broad brush.

So for instance, I look, I think, in Syria, the US invasion of Iraq, which was extremely harmful and extremely, I mean, horrific, but it's still is the lens through which the region is seen. And so it's been over 20 years now. And it almost seems like for many Americans, I think time solidified in that moment. And that's how they've seen any intervention, or it really has colored how the Arab Spring, as it's called, has been, has been seen. One of the interesting things I've looked at more is how the US and the West continues to be placed at the center of the analysis, instead of really centering those on the ground. And so that's not to say that America hasn't been damaging to Syria, for instance, but that there are other oppressors who are on the ground in in a much more damaging way. The narratives, for instance, of moral exceptionalism have an idea of seeing America, the nation state, as a unique beacon of light for the world, as a unique, as a kind of special humanitarian actor for good. But then, to see how that same kind of moral exceptionalism sometimes can be flipped, and can only see America as a kind of a rogue imperial actor, and nobody else really is able to take that space. And what happens is that the the realities of those on the ground, and then kind of erased: the micro politics of resistance, for instance.

And so I remember when the assassination of Qasem Soleimani happened. Immediately, there was World War Three trending on Twitter. And there was a lot of concern about what it would mean, about the legality of the strike, about what it would mean for the Iranian-US relationship. And really, there was no real mention of Iranian imperialism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. On the other side of the globe, if you look to what was happening in Syria, Syrians were in the streets celebrating, he was considered a child murderer, he was considered a terrorist, he was considered a colonial figure who had, you know, engaged in starvation sieges, who had engaged in genocide, who had really elongated their own oppression by the Assad regime.

And so there is an erasure of the suffering of Syrians at the hands of another, and it shows you this detachment which is occurring. And when we can only see brown state actors as only being victims of America and they're all apolitical victims, there is this zero sum equation of evil in the world, and only America can commit oppression. And so I love the quote from Rohini Hensman, who talks about like, brown actors have agency to do good and to commit evil against others.

Mohan Dutta 6:51
Yeah. I also find it really interesting, Noor, that in many post colonial contexts, how the local elite draw upon the anti Western discourse. So in Singapore, they talk about Asian values, for instance, as if that is an opposition to Western hegemony in order to create infrastructures of oppression, exploitation, and erasure.

So what I find really interesting in your articulation, then, is an invitation to listen. An invitation to listen to the voices of the margins, and to listen to the voices that are erased.

Noor Ghazal Aswad 7:34
This is exactly the project that I'm working on right now. And really, I've taken Syria as a litmus test, aside from the fact that I am Syrian, but -- looking at the case of Syria is fascinating in seeing the erasure of certain voices, and why mechanisms for solidarity are really not occurring. And so there has been an immense amount of documentation of what is happening in Syria. But you still see this doubt, this attitude of doubt towards Syrian revolutionaries. In fact, Syria has been the subject of several disinformation campaigns that have been really very damaging. And today, I mean, now it's 10 years on, there has been no harms addressed, no reconciliation. No major regime figure has really been held accountable for crimes and the genocides which have occurred. There has been no referral of Syria to the International Criminal Court. And so, and on top of that, there's a lot of gaslighting of Syrian activists, and so Syrians are often schooled on what is happening in their own country by others who know better than them. And so this really got me thinking about why Syrians were not being given competency in an understanding of what was happening. And also, there was an otherizing of Syrian revolutionaries in a very racialized, gendered, classed way, which made them completely kind of either invisible or only visible in very damaging ways. You also have this difficulty of bridging experiences. And so there definitely is conceptual effort and hard labor involved in discerning the flux of forces which makes us impervious to these voices. And so I've really been thinking about how there needs to be -- there's almost a leap that needs to occur for these two worlds to come into encounter with one another. I often struggle with the idea of prioritizing certain voices as a way of saying, no critique is allowed. But in fact, it's really redirecting our critique in a way that we are then able to combat those who are already being erased. We have to also acknowledge self doubt, towards our knowingness and ability to access the totality of knowledge and that sometimes knowledge is bounded in certain locations and certain spaces. The radical subject is the person who acts with embodied agency and the body is involved. And their struggle really is at the risk of death, injury, disappearance. What does their testimony look like? What does their struggle look like? What kind of character, what kind of rhetoric and how can we treat the rhetorics of those who are actually on the front lines? And so I've actually discovered that it's a lot more controversial than I thought it would be to say that we should introduce specific hierarchies in how we look at certain testimonies as sacred or as being able to access the truth.

And so for me, looking at the authoritarian context, in particular, is really enlightening. And seeing that oftentimes, there are no observers. I mean, observers may come into these kind of war conflict situations for short times. There is very limited media access for independent media or NGOs. And so oftentimes, you see that these revolutionaries who are on the ground, and they could be protesting, they could be armed struggle. It could take various shapes and forms. You really see that they're not only in struggle, but they're also providing testimony. And sometimes that includes taking footage with their camera and using their weapons. So, it's not only the first-hand exposure to revolution and literally being there. But also, for instance, in the situation of Syria, the regime has been in power for over 50 years. So these are generational struggles. It's not just happening right now. And so, in many cases, these individuals are the inheritors of memories of resistance. And so looking at, for instance, Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch, who talks about how the generation after the Holocaust, who didn't live the Holocaust, inherited a personal collective, the cultural trauma of their parents, and what that meant for their testimony. I think in Syria, you also see a really similar situation where in the 80s, there was a different resistance. I mean, these take very different shapes and forms. But at the same time, a lot of this knowledge and this memory wasn't publicly circulated. It wasn't allowed. And I have to kind of train myself sometimes that just as we are quick to critique, we need to be careful not to put a knife in the back of those in revolutionary struggle and really respect those who are actually sacrificing. And so that's where I'm thinking about how we can look at that testimony and identify it. And then how do we treat it? How do we deal with that discourse?

Mohan Dutta 11:36
One thing that really I find so inspiring is what you talk about in terms of attending or turning toward the body in struggle. Why is the body so important?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 11:49
That's an important question. I think, for me, there is a bravery there when you're putting your actual life on the line. I think this is where a lot of this high theory approach to being activist scholars, but we're also removed sometimes from the actual material consequences of actually being there. And also marrying the idea that those in that embodied struggle actually have intellectual ideas, which are equal, if not superior, to us who are kind of academic institutions or who are in these institutions, and we have some protections. This also goes back to the question of what is Global South theory? And what does it really mean for us to think of social actors in political struggle as actually having ideas that are worthy of recognition?

Mohan Dutta 12:34
So, would you say then, that the very idea of global sound as method is an invitation to decolonize, if you will, the very sources of what make up knowledge, because you're turning from this construction--or the favoring of disembodied cognition--to the body as the site of theorizing in a very visceral way?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 13:06
Yeah, I mean, I really think, and this is where I feel like the ethnographies are very particular. Whenever we theorize from these voices, especially as minority scholars, I often feel like our theories or the ideas that we take are often taken as only applicable to the situations that we are talking about. Marx, Agamben, Foucault who operate from this very anti-identitarian space, and if you read them, they operate in generalities and it's very rare to see historical nitty gritty facts of where they are theorizing from. And so, they operate as if they are objective and as a theory neutral. Whereas, in fact, you know, critical theory really should be put into conversation with the constraints that it has, and input into conversation with these particular contexts. And at the same time, I admit that many of these struggles are very nuanced. We were speaking about that earlier: Hong Kong, how China treats the Uyghurs and what's happening now, in Ukraine, we see how the discourse is very different. But at the same time, there are lots of commonalities. Even looking at the Black Lives Matter struggle, it's not only an American or United States struggle, but really is connected to anticolonial movements worldwide. And how many of these struggles have a lot in common if we look at the people who are actually invested in that struggle?

Mohan Dutta 14:19
And in that sense, I suppose anticolonialism can be bold in the sense of resistance to the colonizer and oppressor, and the resistance to the US empire and its projects. Our question, then, is how to hold these both together at the same time?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 14:40
I'm thinking more about the term nested colonizations, or what's been called like the heterarchical nature of colonization, where it's not just one system of world dominance, but in fact, many of these actually support each other and are entangled together. So for instance, if you look at Syrian revolutionaries, they were actually not only fighting Assad, which is considered a local authoritarian, but they were also then fighting Iranian forces on the ground. They were also fighting extremist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. So they're actually facing both of them.

At the same time, you have US imperialism in Syria, which is, I wouldn't say it's to the same degree as Russia and Iran. I'm really speaking from what has been most damaging to Syrians. And so I don't see these separate struggles, I see that they're very intertwined. And that's one of the reasons for instance, Qasem Soleimani, that Syrians saw him as being an elite enabler of Assad, as an enabler of their continued oppression and his continued existence in the country. And so I think those nuances are important to explore and to really understand that imperialism doesn't always have just one shape and one form.

Mohan Dutta 15:48
And it brings me back to this notion that you articulate of the radical subjects testimony as sacred knowledge, you know, and particularly the idea of the testimony of the margins as sacred. So how does one go about doing that?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 16:06
I love Edward Said. And it's amazing how prescient he was in writing about things that are still applicable today. And he was talking particularly about discourse. And about the idea that, you know, Foucault's idea that power circulates everywhere. And he makes the differentiation in thinking about resistance, as not only being a weapon against power and a reaction to power, but also exceeding it in a way, and also not completely interpolated by it. And he makes the distinction that resistance is morally superior to power. And that when we flatten the discourse that only looking at power counts everywhere, we also forget that those in resistance, in some ways their discourse is different. One of the challenges of those people who are oppressed is that they actually feel that they have to organize their struggles. They have to transmit it, in a way that we can listen to it. So they're rummaging to organize their narratives for you to identify with them. And so that's why I think this leap needs to occur. We need to be able to want to take that leap, and match and respond to their articulations of hope, their circulations of hope, which occur among them. And over here, I'm thinking about hope, in the way that Ghassan Hage does when he talks about paranoid nationalism. And so you see the circulation of hope when there is no hope. You see how protesters are being killed. And protesters continue dancing, and they continue singing, even though their comrades are being killed, even though their own children are being killed. There's a contract there to continue to struggle. And so I'm not really saying here that the macro politics isn’t important, that the bio political apparatuses of power are not important. But when you use the lens of the radical subject, you are able to perceive these dynamics in a way that is most meaningful to solidarity.

Mohan Dutta 17:56
How might we be with the voices of radical subjects when they interrupt narratives about ourselves that we hold dear? That is so powerful, because it's an invitation for ourselves to undo, if you will, the narratives that we hold so close to ourselves, right?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 18:15
Yeah, and that's why I think the American Left is an interesting space to look at because these are, a group that is very intent invested in social justice issues on the ground, and in a way that's very inspiring, holds a very high standard. But when it comes to transnational others, we still see a lot of, for instance, Islamophobia. We see a lot of erasure. We see an inability to suspend the self, even momentarily, so that we might listen to these narratives an these subjects. And so it adds, I think, a burden on people who are already very burdened.

Mohan Dutta 18:48
As we move toward wrapping up, I would like to ask you then, now that we have sort of thought through these ideas of the periphery, and the periphery as a register, what do you think are some of the key methodological entry points for interventions from the Global South?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 19:08
I think there needs to be more effort for many of us scholars together to think through what it really means to theorize from the Global South and take that kind of social movement theory seriously. And we're also constrained as well by being located within spaces that are separate from those places. And our voices are sometimes marginalized. And so how can we think of something new when we're already in these systems? There's so many constraints to that.

Mohan Dutta 19:34
One of the things that really inspires me is the ways in which you center your personal stories and your personal narratives in this process. So what is it like to embody that history that holds you as you engage with these broad questions of solidarity?

Noor Ghazal Aswad 19:58
It comes to the question of advocacy. Many scholars shun the idea because it almost seems like you are less objective, less neutral, because you're advocating for a certain point of view. But in fact, if you think about it all scholarship is advocacy. And sometimes it's implicit. It's not explicit. And I think, how I feel about my own positionality, I actually kind of really struggled with it, to be honest with you. Because sometimes I'm worried about being pigeonholed. I feel like it's harder for minority scholars to operate from this space of neutrality. But in fact, I really kind of resist that kind of pigeonholing. And so I do struggle with it. And as well, you know, I do autoethnographic work. And so I have a chapter on postmemory, where I examine my own family history. And that's, I think, something that all of us need to do, and not only people of color who are doing this work, it's almost as if we have to do that work.

Mohan Dutta 20:49
Noor thank you so much for this really thought provoking conversation.

Noor Ghazal Aswad 20:56
Thank you so much for giving me the space to speak and I look forward to future conversations. And thank you. Thank you so much.

Mohan Dutta 21:10
This episode of Interventions from the Global South podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. The show is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar, producing and promoting evidence-based storytelling focused on histories, cultures, & media of the Global South.
Our producers Ilana Arougheti and Daniel Christain. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. If you’d like to hear more about the participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai