Eurias Fellow 2012-13
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Dr Wilson Jacob (Concordia University, Canada): Sovereignty in Times of Empire: |
This research aims to provide a cultural history and theoretical critique of the present terms of
violence that pit a rule of law, normally represented by states, against a rule of terror, normally
represented by non-state actors. The nineteenth-century encounter between Islamic societies and
colonialism is the launching point for a re-examination of violence and sovereignty from the
perspective of local forms and networks of embodied power, which further illuminates an
alternative history of the modern international order. Rather than being born out of bloody wars
between states in Europe as the standard Westphalian model posits or forged from the clash of
empires and civilizations, the modern international form imposed on the world might be regarded
as the product of a global reconfiguration of relations of power, which took place between and
betwixt nations and states. Hence, contrary to the typical history of the colonial encounter as an
inherent conflict and protracted struggle for the state between colonial rulers and nationalist
movements, my research reframes that history in terms of the contest between “traditional big
men” and the modern abstraction of Man that came with universal claims about law and order
made both by representatives of Empire and by representatives of “the colonized.” This approach
promises a route for rethinking present formations of violence along more complex and nuanced
lines that question the reductive clash-of-civilizations framing of post-Cold War geopolitics
while offering an alternative historical-theoretical framework for analyzing the politics of terror.
The theoretical investigation that seeks to access, and potentially recast, the terms of political
modernity from a new vantage point will be grounded in the histories and ongoing social lives of
an unlikely pair of figures, the “preacher” and the “gangster.” I traverse mostly forgotten contact
zones between “Islam” and “the West” excavating along its borders these two problematic
figures of embodied sovereignty: the mystical, peripatetic sayyid and the criminal, heroic
futuwwa. Exploring the putative abjection of the two figures, which represented archaic forms of
politics and personhood to the West and to modern Islam, provides a unique perspective from
which to re-materialize the vanished realm of their mutual birth and to reconsider their shared
future.
About Wilson Jacob
