A Material and Symbolic Intifada
Why must we continue to write and speak back to colonial power "in the hour of genocide"?
The facilitation of this genocide is contingent upon the great discursive and material weapon of the West. —Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
My previous post tried to think through the urgency of a decolonial theoretical intifada—a shaking off of the dehumanizing modern/colonial/racial discourses that justify domination, dispossession, and genocide. As I usually try to do in most of my writing, I made the case that an uprising against material domination must also be accompanied by symbolic and spiritual resistance and reconstitution. This is not a new argument. Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Amilcar Cabral were clear about not making sharp categorical distinctions in revolutionary praxis between the political, ecnomic, and cultural spheres. Conceptually, these may be separated into domains, but within decolonial liberation struggles, separating the cultural from the political or the economic from the political is, to put it simply, unrealistic.
As Cabral noted, we can’t organize a revolution on empty stomachs. He understood that colonialism is primarily or perhaps is initially economic (land dispossession and labor exploitation), but he didn’t believe anti-colonial resistance was merely economic or that colonial domination is maintained solely through economic means. When Cabral says that colonialism is primarily economic, it's due to the fact that no one colonizes solely for cultural colonization. In other words, cultural colonialism justifies extraction, exploitation, dispossesion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It sustains it and offers it legitimacy since it finds in the colonized a selected few who are coerced into reproducing the colonial system that subjugates their own people. Coloniality is powerless without complicity. Therefore, cultural, symbolic, spiritual, or epistemological colonialism has a purpose and is not an end in itself.
Cabral understood that in order to liberate the land economically, one must organize politically, and that economic resistance is an entangled process linked to political and cultural resistance, as well as armed resistance. He didn’t understand these multiple forms of resistance in a sequence but rather as simultaneous. Decolonial modes of resistance are thus intertwined and co-constitutive, meaning that emphasizing one at the expense of the other is detrimental to any struggle.
Cabral’s notion of the economic also includes communal modes of production that support the struggle and all spheres of social existence. Through communal existence and production, the armed resistance, which also contributes to this production, can sustain itself. Armed militant groups are not the beneficiaries of a particular community’s agricultural production but are active participants. A material form of resistance also creates alternative social and cultural practices, not to mention political forms of organizing. And it is for this reason that we cannot separate, in actuality, material resistance/re-existence from symbolic resistance-re-existence. In Palestine, we see how this plays out with Israel ecocidal campaign destroying the ability to sustain life.
As mentioned above, a material intifada in inseparable from a symbolic/cultural intifada. It’s not coincidental that everything taught in schools adopts and glorifies the colonizers' history, culture, language, and geography. It’s not a coincidence that the mainstream media, universities, and publishers are supporting Israel’s settler colonial project of death.
Despite the silence and complicity, people continue to resist. In the process of resisting, however, people do not only seek to reclaim territorial autonomy. They also aim to reclaim and reconstitute the relationships, stories, histories, knowledges, and socio-cultural practices colonialism sought to permanently destroy. We can refer to this as decoloniality, decolonizing the mind, or cultural resistance, but what’s important to recognize is the relationship cultural resistance plays in other spheres of resistance. Collective social practices that create a more radical (rooted) sense of belonging, militancy, and autonomy undoubtedly play a role in breathing cultural life to political organizations, which at the same time complement political-economic analyses.
Returning to the initial discussion, why must we continue to write and speak back to power while a genocide is taking place? Why is a cultural and theoretical intifada more urgent than ever? Fargo Nissim Tbakhi asks a similar question: “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” Fargo explains that to begin to answer this question we must first unsettle the notion of our writing “craft.” As he explains, the notion of “craft” represents “the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire. Anticolonial writers in the U.S. and across the globe have long modeled alternative crafts which reject these priorities, and continue to do so in this present moment.” As intellectuals committed to decolonial liberation struggles, who navigate the institutional violence seeking to repress our voices and solidarity with Palestine, we know very well the affective , emotional, and psychological consequences of refusing to be silenced. We also know the importance of co-creating knowledge and disseminating said knowledge, since knowledge that is urgently needed is not something that can afford to be peer-reviewed and published a year later. Politically urgent knowledge must be shared now, even if that means that certain phrases and modes of expression don’t align with our academic craft ot that do not follow the methodological standards (or obsession) of our fields of research and disciplines.
What purpose does our writing serve “in the hour of genocide”? Fargo reminds us that our writing or craft may follow market and imperial forces, which are “inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same.” Our writing may do more to reproduce the colonial foundations of Western universities and its publishing apparatus, which constitute “regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are…facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe.” If our writing, however, seeks to unsettle the behavioral-regulating (Wynter) and sanitizing effects of dominant discourses and narratives, it demands an ethico-political commitment and awareness that consequences form part of this process. It means that sacrifices must be made, whether this is by focusing less on advancing our careers through ceaselessly publishing peer-reviewed articles or by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation or by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, which, as we know, can end our careers. In times of genocide, losing our careers pales in comparison to what is happening in Gaza, so our risks, though undoubtedly important, cannot be compared to the incalculable violence experienced by Palestinians. We must therefore write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s at stake.
As Fargo discusses, our writing must contribute to the symbolic or cultural intifada, which necessarily complements the material intifada: “Palestine demands that all of us, as writers and artists, consider ourselves in principled solidarity with the long cultural Intifada that is built alongside and in collaboration with the material Intifada.” This suggests that we cannot make up excuses in the spaces and institutions in which we find participate. Our voices and writing must also seek to move others to take action. It is affective both for the author and the reader. Our writing must not only include “the dailiness of resistance and unrelenting struggle.” It must make more visible the “astonishing diversity of forms—forms of care, of tenderness, of violence, of ingenuity, resource, and survival.” Our writing bears witness, not in the passive sense, but rather as an active response to the horrors and paradoxically hopeful (in the radical sense of the word) times we are living in—a moment in time and space—a geopolitical conjuncture that has unmasked Western institutions (educational, political, and economic) supporting Israel’s efforts to annihilate Palestinians materially, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Yet despite Israel’s Western-supported effort, the world has risen to protest against a colonial, racial-capitalist system that is seemingly indestructible. We have reached a point of no return—a time of a permanent and global intifada.
As decolonial intellectuals committed to the material and symbolic intifada, we become or at least aspire to be what Walter Rodney referred to as guerilla intellectuals. We modestly contribute to liberation struggles by negating colonialism’s "denial of the historical process of the dominated people” (Cabral). The historical process of decolonization simultaneously demands the reconstitution of all spheres of social existence, as Quijano referred to the political, economic, cultural, social/intersubjective, and epistemological dimensions of coloniality and decoloniality. As guerilla intellectuals, we refuse to use the master’s conceptual tools (Lorde). Instead, we build more radical conceptual tools to interrogate the social totality that has been systematically hidden and distorted. Unsettling the concepts that distort our understanding of the modern/colonial world is not only about changing the content but rather changing the terms of the conversation, that is, shifting the epistemic positions from where we speak, simultaneously enacting a geopolitics of knowledge from below that refuses to be represented by dehumanizing racial discourses that have constituted the humanities and social sciences for far too long. Whether it is Eurocentric historiography or anthropology, the representation of the Other has been the same—primitive, backward, despotic, traditional—and the consequences justified by these have also been devastating. It’s no surprise that these enduring discourses make their grand appearances in the media to justify the atrocities unfolding in Gaza.
As guerilla intellectuals, we must counteract these discourse and write with urgency, historicize the contexts that are misrepresented as novel (October 7th), and carefully study to generate ideas that contribute to building a revolutionary consciousness. We can contribute to what Maldonado-Torres refers to as combative decoloniality, which demands the critique and reconstruction of knowledge situated in sites of struggle. Fargo invites us “to engage in a guerilla war on the page, to consider it an additional front in our solidarity with those who will always and forever be the targets of the state’s weapons.” We must be modest and ask what is demanded of us by liberation movements? What stories must we write and how should we express them in the process of showing unwavering support for those who have been represented as barbaric, subhuman, terrorists? “What tactics, shapes, strategies and necessities do their struggles demand of our narratives? How might our narratives serve the haunting of the indigenous remainder, eating away at the foundations of empire like termites?”
As I draft these ideas, I am not completely sure if they were able to find coherence. But perhaps that is the point, that we write despite the uncertainties taught to us by colonial education systems and academic expectations that have done more to silence us than to liberate our thoughts in support of those on the receiving end of domination. When in doubt, remember that the academic craft we’ve cherished for so long is founded on lies. Its aim is to reproduce colonial power. The conventional academic craft is a weapon that manufactures consent, norms, values, silence, and complicity. In Fargo’s words, “We have to abandon it and write with sharper teeth, without politeness, without compromise. We have to learn, or build, or steal, or steal back, the craft we need for the long Intifada, which we carry with us to liberation and beyond.”