Refusals: Opening the Difference in Dialogue

Abstract

The collection of articles in this special issue of Social Identities were presented in two separate panels of the international conference on ‘Dialogue and Difference’ which took place at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies between 12 and 14 September 2001. The idea behind these panels*/respectively entitled ‘Is it Good to Talk?: Refusals of Dialogue’ and ‘Dialogues Between Cultures and Civilizations’*/was to draw attention to the fact that for some dialogue may not exist even in the middle of a conversation or under the circumstances created by contemporary globalization. Indeed for those who exist on the wrong side of the power equation, dialogue, viewed as the need to respond and to respond automatically in a conversation, and in thus responding one’s selfrepresentation as other, may in fact be a mechanism of domination and subjection, a mechanism for levelling the difference of conversant subjects to an identity that can be reproduced at will. As a way of resisting this levelling of difference, cultures and individuals have often adopted the paradoxical strategy of entering into discourse by first refusing dialogue. Such refusals are not necessarily to be understood as the eradication of dialogue, but rather signal ways of entering into dialogue under more conducive conditions. From this perspective the strategy of refusal can also be seen as a way of opening a dialogue between cultures and civilizations without repeating past imperialisms. In different ways the papers in this issue have tried to express the positivity of saying no as a way of affirming and keeping the possibility of dialogue open. Salman Sayyid’s article ‘After Babel: Dialogue, Difference and Demons’ uses the example of Muhammad Khatami’s 1998 interview with CNN. During the interview Khatami, who was then President of Iran, used the work of Tocqueville to demonstrate the homology between principles that were foundational to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. Khatami’s intervention aimed at refusing the media’s terms of conversation which normally reproduced the stereotype of Iranian