Image: www.habanaradio.cu/articulos/170-anos-de-jose-marti-seamos-moros-marti-ante-la-rebelion-en-el-marruecos-espanol/

Over the past decade, the ReOrient project has become an essential complement to early critiques of Orientalism. Edward Said effectively demonstrated how the modern Western empires of the “second modernity” (from the 18th century onward) constructed their identities in opposition to an imagined Orient that was stripped of its political subjectivity and reduced to an object of study and conquest. The ReOrient collective builds on this insight by affirming the political subjectivities that the West has long negated and that the communities have been regularly adapting, translating and/or regenerating.  In doing so, ReOrient positions itself as a conversational partner within a broader network of anti-imperial intellectual movements. This network, which spans in the contemporary world from the Bandung Conference to Global Palestine, seeks to delink from the Western-imposed imaginaries of the rest of the world. Yet, one lingering question remains: While the Western imaginaries of the Global South should be debunked, what should we do with the images that decolonial projects have of each other in the process of reclaiming their political subjectivity? Are these images a source of potential solidarity or a limitation for South-South dialogues? This is the question I aim to address in this blog.

To do so, I would like to return to the imperial constructions of the “first modernity,” starting in the symbolic 1492 when the subjectivities of a multiplicity of communities were occluded.  For much of its colonial history, what is now considered Latin America was under Spanish and Portuguese dominion. These colonies, influenced by the crusader spirit, continental expulsions, and the early processes of national construction rooted in genealogical constructions of “pure and impure blood,” were formally declared free of Jews and Muslims. I argue that this is just a formal narrative since it is widely accepted that Jews and Muslims, either as New Christians who circumvented bureaucratic prohibitions or as people kidnapped and enslaved in Africa, were present in the continent. What is less recognized is that, irrespective of their actual presence, the imagery of Jews and Muslims played a significant role in the region’s political imaginaries. From early decolonial epistemological proposals to later anti-colonial political struggles, representations of Jews and Muslims were prevalent in revolutionary political discourses.

It is precisely this factor—the construction of political imaginaries using images of people formally absent—that raises a central question to expand the reach of Critical Muslim (and Jewish) Studies [or CM(J)S]: how can we understand political proposals aimed at delinking from Western structures when they rely on the political imaginations of others who are ostensibly (though not in reality) “in another world’? I ask, what are the consequences of one group’s imaginary in one location for the political struggle of another in a different context? And what does this reveal about the possibilities and limitations of these imaginations for their own projects and for South-South intercultural dialogues?”

My intention here is twofold. First, I consider this a potentially productive space to reorient current discussion to explore a field of CM(J)S. Without dismissing the significance of two other well-developed areas within this (perhaps hypothetical) field—namely, their common experiences as minorities in Europe and North America, and their roles in conflicts within imperial contexts, from the divide-and-conquer strategy in Algeria to the settler-colonial project in Palestine—this represents a third, less-explored terrain for CM(J)S. Second, in the conference that preceded this blog I invited my colleagues who are far more knowledgeable than I am about the potential of the political imagery of the Caliphate, to consider whether this promising decolonial project also employs imageries of others ‘from other worlds’ in the construction of their political movement and what are the implications of these images for the project in particular and transnational solidarities in general and for current transnational struggles, such as the ongoing genocide in Palestine, in particular.

Let me illustrate my point by returning to the images of Jews and Muslims in revolutionary proposals from what is now Latin America. In current scholarship, there is little dispute that one of the earliest systematic sources for decolonial thinking is found in a 1,200-page manuscript written by the Native “Peruvian” author Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala at the turn of the 17th century. This work, intended for the King of Spain, critiques the conquest and advocates for Native self-governance within a Christian framework the King could understand. It is precisely this goal of intercultural translation that leads the author to assert that Natives could offer a ‘good government’ because they were of ‘good blood.’ This ‘good blood’ was contrasted with the impure blood of ‘Jews and Mahomedans,’ who, according to the author, should be excluded from the lands that God had given to Natives.            

The imagery of an all-Native Americas, seeking the blessing of Spain through the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, contrasts sharply with another political vision that emerged at the turn of the 20th century with José Martí, the iconic Cuban poet and key figure in the struggle for independence from Spain. During the struggle, Martí drew upon a long intellectual tradition in Latin America and the Caribbean that sought to reclaim identities submerged and negated by Spanish Catholicism. It is within this context that he penned the famous dictum, ‘Let’s be Moors.’ While the text originally aimed to resonate in the Caribbean by invoking the 1893 anti-Spanish Berber rebellion in Morocco, it was widely interpreted in Latin America to bring to light not just solidarities, but a collective unconscious that was already present. Thus, the independent Latin America could forge its identity from its imagined ‘Mooritude’—just as other movements would later define themselves through the embracement of Jewishness.

The political imaginations of both Guaman Poma and Martí are regarded within Latin American circles as epistemological decolonial and/or political anticolonial proposals. Although they differ in their responses to the question of what to do with the imagery of Muslims (and as I intend to show in a longer article, Jews) who are formally distant or absent, both acknowledge that addressing this question is unavoidable in constructing their political visions. The intersection of these two distinct Latin American and Caribbean political imaginations through these imageries opens up multiple possibilities, three of I would like to point out here to explore in further research:

Firstly, within the scholarship that can loosely be categorized under CM(J)S, much attention has been given to the overlapping minority status of these groups in Europe (and North America) and the role of imperial powers in ‘divide and conquer’ strategies. However, exploring Global South political projects that require Muslim or Jewish imagery opens up a promising new line of inquiry. Secondly, the use of such imageries—whether positive or negative—inevitably has consequences for other struggles. Therefore, I want to ask: what are the critical resources for transnational solidarities when one’s project involves the invocation (including the potentiality for misinterpretation or mistranslation of others’ struggles, identities, and histories)? Lastly, recalling the Caliphate as an epistemological proposal for decolonial political formations holds great promise. Given the expertise of the colleagues present at this conference, I wish to explore what images of others are mobilized in its construction, which translations are productive, and what potential for transnational solidarities exists.