Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Mitchell, T.;Rao, A.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378031pmid: N/A

Bayat, A.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378040pmid: N/A

Bayat’s essay examines the divide between area studies and the social science disciplines. A truly productive engagement with and critical reflection on the social sciences, Bayat argues, is possible only by intimate area knowledge, wide perspectives, a comparative lens, and a search for meaningful knowledge directed at human emancipation.

Sinha, M.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378049pmid: N/A

This essay responds to the mission statement of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and considers the place of region in the contemporary postnational and post-area studies moment of scholarship. In particular, it examines the possibilities of leveraging further the opening that the journal created between area studies scholarship and the traditional academic disciplines.

Mignolo, W. D.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378058pmid: N/A

Mignolo’s essay responds to the mission statement published in the summer 2013 issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The essay asks: How could a journal based in the United States “decenter” itself? Can CSSAAME transcend and transgress scholarly restrictions and publish essays and statements that, rather than following scholarly norms, are made with the force and the demands of the public sphere? If “regions are sources of theory,” Mignolo claims, the regions should be responsible for using the journal to articulate their views and needs rather than mediating the views and needs of Western scholarship.

Das, V.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378067pmid: N/A

Das discusses region as a source of theory and raises concerns about the current state of scholarship, especially (1) the censorship of ideas made possible by government control over research along with a public culture that is increasingly intolerant of differences in interpretation in the name of a feeling ethics; (2) the production of knowledge at different institutional sites that might stand in a tense relation to authorized institutional discourses; and (3) dangerous developments in the rise of new subdisciplines such as global health, which have had serious consequences for freedom of inquiry as a false consensus is generated over what counts as “success” in policy interventions.

Esmeir, S.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378076pmid: N/A

Esmeir’s essay considers the mission statement of the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation (1896-97) alongside the 2013 mission statement of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Joining them, Esmeir contends, is the reference to the method of comparison, and separating them are the details of the comparative practice, its ends and its powers. More specifically, the main difference between the two journals concerns the fate of the world covered on their pages: the first engages in comparative destruction, the second in comparative construction. The essay makes an argument for the value of research projects that examine these two relationships to the world.

Naqvi, T. H.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378085pmid: N/A

Pakistan’s first military dictatorship launched the Basic Democracies scheme in 1960, after a bloodless coup that dissolved political parties and legislative institutions. Naqvi’s essay considers how the architects of the “BD system” reconceived the Pakistani nation in response to the ends of martial rule, namely, the permanent empowerment of the postcolonial executive. Naqvi theorizes the BD scheme as an extraconstitutional system of governmentality that produced the Pakistani citizen ambivalently—as an authentic yet nontranscendent subject of the nation. He further shows how the Basic Democracies scheme rationalized the state’s negation of wider channels of democratic participation by nationalizing the parochial as an expression of the true “genius” of the Pakistani people. Such attempts to fragment and reassign the experience of national solidarity, he contends, drew inspiration from the racial assumptions of the colonial state in a postcolonial context marked by uncertainty about the form of Muslim national solidarity. Moving between programmatic literature on Basic Democracies and nineteenth-century colonial debates on the reform of local self-government, the essay traces the genealogical and comparative significance of the following question: Can a nation in which democratic participation is confined exclusively to the local level continue to feel and act as a nation?

Kostopoulou, E.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378094pmid: N/A

This article aims to revisit autonomy and decentralization in the nineteenth century as dynamics that captured the hybrid position of the Ottomans in the rapidly changing regional and international contexts. Addressing briefly a number of different examples, the article argues that the emergence of the “autonomous province,” as a specific administrative practice, constituted not an imperial defeat but a compromise that allowed the empire to survive. In fact, the different chronological and regional manifestations of autonomy in the empire’s provincial universe invite recognition not only of this specific phenomenon but also of broader, long-ignored aspects of the Ottoman reform as a whole. Within this context, Kostopoulou’s article looks at a number of examples that best capture the elements of both promise and danger entailed in nineteenth-century Ottoman decentralization. This double capacity of being simultaneously a colonizer and a colony characterized the Ottomans throughout the period in question and is best illustrated by their strategies and agonies over their autonomous provinces.

Louro, M. L.;Stolte, C.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378103pmid: N/A

Raza, A.;

doi: 10.1215/1089201X-2378112pmid: N/A

Raza’s essay looks at the role of the Meerut Conspiracy Case in shaping the course of leftist politics in India. In particular, it takes the case study of a regional leftist movement, and its prime figure, Sohan Singh Josh, to illustrate how the Left was impacted by the case. It argues that the trial set the stage for the creation of an official communism in India, which led to unbridgeable rifts within the leftist spectrum across India, and particularly in the Punjab. This essay then touches on how that was true for politics as a whole. Thus, the trial contributed to the sharpening of political divides that distinguished the 1930s from the previous decade, which was remarkable for the amorphousness of the boundaries between ostensibly different political camps. If Meerut is viewed in terms of a simplistic binary of success or failure, then this development alone was the state’s most significant success since it made the political landscape more manageable and hence controllable.