Reviewing and the politics of voice: peoples in the Arab world “name” their struggles “revolutions” and not the “Arab Spring”

Reviewing is an act of power and not a mere act of applying shared academic standards of rigor. As such, it has social and political ramifications, since it is implicated in the cultural politics of “naming”. In this paper we will animate this taken-for-granted formulation in the sociopolitical context of naming the struggles against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Since the end of 2010, the Arab world has witnessed a relatively organized series of struggles, including various forms of resistance, strikes, protests, street-sustained demonstrations, and sit-ins, with the goal of achieving social justice, equality, and freedom. The masses in these dynamic conditions of the Arab world have named their struggles “revolutions”. Western cultural political discourse lumps together these (trans)locally constituted struggles under the generalizing label of the “Arab Spring”. Thus, the peoples in the Arab world are effectively denied the agency to “name” their struggle simply because, among other things, their struggles do not fit the Western template for understanding socio-political revolutions. Their agentic definitions are “erased” through the cultural political process of (re)translation in Western discourse.

We contend that reviewers, as ideological gatekeepers, are implicated in the cultural politics of voice when they uncritically accept the use of Eurocentric discursive inventions as the “only” appropriate way of naming the world, and in so doing they effectively subvert the revolutionary interests in the Arab world.

We understand the politics of naming as a political discursive construction about the Other, strongly embedded in colonial and colonizing practices. Such a politics works as a form of norming (Berg and Kearns 1996), understood as a discursive apparatus (Foucault 1981) that provides a sense of normality and legitimacy to the naming practices of those who dominate the cultural politics of representation. The focus here is on the conflict over meanings and voice (subjectivity) in specific historical circumstances (Jordan and Weedon 1995). We argue that reviewing integrates such academic politics of representation that helps to normalize certain naming practices in detriment to others. One of the goals of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces is to get access to social institutions and to impose their patterns of speaking, thinking, and acting on the world, i.e., to name the world. This observation obtains not only in the case of everyday linguistic usage but also in specialized fields such as sociolinguistics. Thus, our engagement itself should be seen as an exercise in cultural politics in the sense that it is objectively grounded in discursive analysis. But this form of “objectivity” does not mean “neutrality” in the representationalist conception of the term. It means we need to ground our arguments in descriptions of concrete semiotic structures of texts. This is what we will do in the remaining part of this paper. We will ground our inspection of the cultural politics of naming the struggles in the Arab world in “real-life” data. For limitations of space, we will focus on the context of Sudan, Egypt, and Tunisia.

We start with the cultural politics of “naming” the complex of forms of peaceful resistance to the regime of al-Bashir in Sudan, which started on December 19, 2018. Let us briefly inspect the most official piece of legal written discourse, which is the Constitutional Charter signed on August 4, 2019, to explore how it lexico-grammatically indexes the wider cultural and political world. The following quote is from the preamble:

Drawing inspiration from the Sudanese people’s struggles over the course of history and the years of the former dictatorial regime from the time that it undermined the constitutional regime on 30 June 1989; Believing in the principles of the glorious December 2018 Revolution; In fulfillment of the lives of the martyrs and affirming the rights of the victims of the policies of the former regime; Affirming the role of women and their active participation in carrying out the revolution; Recognizing the role of young people in leading the revolutionary movement; […] And based on the legitimacy of the revolution; We, the Transitional Military Council and the Forces of Freedom and Change, have agreed to issue the following Constitutional Charter. (Constitutional Charter for the 2019 Transitional Period: 1; emphasis is ours)^[1]

The first remark here is that the signatories of the Charter have represented the dynamics as “the December 2018 Revolution” or “the Revolution”. Secondly, the text refers to two forms of political organization of social life: “the former dictatorial regime” (i.e., al-Bashir’s regime) and “the constitutional regime” (i.e., the democratic system 1986–1989). As also indicated in the text, the relationship between these two sociopolitical structures is one of power and domination: the dictatorial regime of al-Bashir “undermined” the constitutional democratic system when it overturned the democratically elected government on June 30, 1989. Most importantly, the December Revolution is not imagined as a free-standing “event” with no grounds in history but rather as part of a long historical struggle including the struggle against al-Bashir’s regime. In other words, the struggle is defined as a historical process, and thus the December Revolution should be conceptualized as a moment or a wave in this long trajectory. More significantly, this constitutionalized usage of the term “revolution” “entextualizes” (Silverstein and Urban 1996) the way it is already used in grassroots and other non-official discourses of resistance to al-Bashir’s regime (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

This sign shows graffiti with the word “Revolution” as a description of the protests against dictatorship in Sudan.

We mentioned previously that since the end of 2010 the Arab world has seen a number of protests and in some cases (e.g., Syria) armed resistance. We should note here that the forms of struggle in almost all the cases carried the name “revolution”. For example, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt are called the “Tunisian Revolution/Jasmine Revolution” (started in December 2010) and the “Egyptian Revolution of 2011/25 January Revolution” respectively (see Figures 2 –5).

Figure 2:

A wall sign displaying the image of Mohamed Bouazizi with an Arabic text. Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010. This act became a catalyst for revolts not just against the Tunisian autocratic regime but also against most of the dictatorships in the Arab world. Translation of the Arabic texts: “The Revolution of 17 December is the symbol of national unity”.

Figure 3:

A Tunisian man reading graffiti. Translation of the Arabic text: “The Revolution of 17 December will never die”.

Figure 4:

This graffiti in Egypt states in Arabic, among other things, that “the 25 January is a real Egyptian revolution”.

Figure 5:

This graffiti articulates the name of the Egyptian protests against former President Mubarak as the “25 January Revolution”.

So, the national context and discursive construction of the struggle in Sudan is intertextual with the popular struggles in the region against dictatorships. They are all predominantly protests for social justice (the term “justice” features in all protesting discourses). However, the mainstream Western political discourse regularly lumps together the (trans)locally constructed forms of struggle with the term “Arab Spring” and retranslated the later anti-government protests in the region (December 2018–2020) including Sudan as “Arab Spring 2.0” (or New Arab Spring).^[2] The term “Arab Spring” is not common in the cultural vocabulary of protests in these countries. Primarily on an ethnographic-sociolinguistic ground, we entirely agree with Khouri (2011) in rejecting this Western conceptualization of the struggles in those countries:

The most important reason for this is that this term is not used by those brave men and women who have been on the streets demonstrating and dying for the past seven months. Every time I run into a Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, Bahraini or Yemeni, I ask them how they refer to their own political actions. Their answer is almost universal: “revolution” (thawra, in Arabic). And when they refer to the collective activities of Arabs across the region, they often use the plural, “revolutions” (thawrat) (Khouri 2011; emphasis in original)

The term “Arab Spring” implies, among other things, that the protesting movements marked a sudden awakening from a long winter slumber, and that they would soon run out of steam and finish (Alhassen 2012). Thus, the Western (mediated) naming practice stripped the struggles in the Arab world of their history. The peoples’ symbolically constructed points of view of the struggle, which is something a sociolinguist should be aiming to capture, is systematically suppressed (on this methodological issue see Geertz 1974). They are all viewed as revolutions of Karama ‘dignity’ (ثورات الكرامة). And the word Karama is part of the repertoire of the slogans of these revolutions (see Figures 6 and 7). These values (dignity, freedom, justice) and the discourses in which they are formulated are a constituent part of the cultural politics of “voice”. This should not imply that the issue of economic distribution is not among the demands. It is among the demands, but the revolutions cannot be reduced to the “bread” only (cf. the Egyptian revolutionary slogan: “bread, freedom, social justice/human dignity”, see Figure 6). And this is precisely what the Western construction of the “Arab Spring” failed to recognize. Alhassen (2012) cogently argued:

The irony of the Western invention of the “Arab Spring” is that regardless of citizenry remonstrations for “self-determination”, we still continue to see the Arab region in our eyes and not through theirs. What is going on in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] is something deeper than a democratic transformation, it is what democracy is predicated on – a demand for recognizing the right to human dignity. What is revolutionary about the revolutions sweeping the Middle East and North Africa is not the call to overthrow dictators, or even the inspiration that [the] Arab world has played in the global staging of governmental greed grievances from European anti-austerity measures protests to the Occupy movement that started in the States. What has been revolutionary is the call to establish a new way of envisioning human treatment, through a demand for dignity.

Figure 6:

A mobile sign in Arabic displaying the slogan of the Egyptian Revolution. English translation: “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice, Human Dignity”.

Figure 7:

This mobile sign documents a street protest in the context of the Marches of Bread and Dignity, which took place on April 4, 2019, in Sudan.

The undifferentiating conception of “Arab Spring” erases the historical specificity of these revolutions. For instance, al-Bashir’s regime is basically a military dictatorial system of Sudanese Muslim Brothers, while in other contexts the Muslim Brothers, as a political party or organization, was a force in the struggles for democracy. Unlike the other revolutions in the region, peace was a fundamental demand in the Sudanese revolution, since the former regime was implicated in genocidal wars in Darfur.

In conclusion, we contend that if we take the definition of sociolinguistics seriously as the “study of language in use”, then we should reframe the subordinated in the Global South as “subjects” of their own definitions formulated from within their own cultural political discourses, rather than as “objects” of Western definitions (Pennycook and Makoni 2020; Piller 2016; Santos and Meneses 2009; Suleiman 2013). Most of the non-Western naming practices are performed in languages other than English, although local publicity is quite often conducted bilingually in English or French to internationalize the cause, but from within their own politics of representation (e.g., Figures 1, 3, and 5). Their “voice”, however, is unheard. It gets “devoiced” as an effect of being retranslated in a different cultural discourse. The majority of languages (e.g., Arabic) have rarely been validated as media of knowledge production on these issues. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language (IJSL) has widened the net of the recognized languages of academic publication in the journal; it is open to considering additional languages. This should be critically welcomed as the linguistic net remains predominantly European (English, French, Spanish, or German). However, the IJSL has tried to mitigate the effect of the hegemony of Eurocentric naming practice by reconfiguring the editorial board to incorporate more reviewers from the Global South. The effect of English monolingualism, which has largely shaped the dominant reviewing practice, is that other non-Western epistemologies as ways of naming the world are systematically rendered invisible.