Imperial Geopolitics Research Articles

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings: Figures of Decay in the Arab Nahda

Examining the work of Ernest Renan in relation to thinkers confessing Arab and Islamic affiliations in the Ottoman fin de siècle allows us to understand how Orientalist scholarship has used decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims were redistributed as performative speech acts. At the site where language, race, and religion–the positive symptoms of decadence–are knotted together, Renan describes a political theology of the color line. The supposed “truths” about Oriental decadence became distributed among the objects of its study (“Orientals”) within the terrain over which it sought textual (and ultimately, political) authority (“the Orient”). It was the dissemination of the truth of what Edward Said called the “Semitic object” outside of Europe that allowed Orientalism to facilitate the fragmentation and degeneration it only claimed, at one level, to describe. In contrast to Renan, the thinkers and writers of the Arab nahda, or “awakening,” examined here–Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, Farah Antun, and Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq–devised their texts at ground level, shifting their tactics on a dynamic field of operations in response to the rapidly adapting strategies of imperial geopolitics and ideology. While many writers of the Arab nahda imagined an Arab historical subject awakening to a past defined in terms of the kind of authenticity defined by Orientalist scholarship, al-Shidyaq’s novel Al-Sāq ‘alā al-Sāq radicalizes both decadence and philology, demonstrating how the past might erupt in the present through language that forges ambivalent links to a lived relation with the past.

Imperial Geopolitics and the Promise of Democracy

ABSTRACTIn the context of the growing interest in questions of Empire, this essay sets out to explore certain elements of the significant relation between imperial geopolitics and the promise of democracy. The conceptual and historical setting is focused on the United States and its relations with Latin America. The essay has three sections: first there is a discussion of some of the salient specificities of the US with regard to its encounters with the Latin South; second, the phenomenon of geopolitical interventionism is considered as a key reflection of imperial power; and thirdly the complex relations between geopolitics and democracy are briefly explored.

Revisiting Mackinder 1904–2004

The Geographical JournalVolume 170, Issue 4 p. 380-383 Revisiting Mackinder 1904–2004 JENNIFER HYNDMAN, JENNIFER HYNDMAN Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6, E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author JENNIFER HYNDMAN, JENNIFER HYNDMAN Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6, E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 17 December 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0016-7398.2004.00140.xCitations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume170, Issue4December 2004Pages 380-383 RelatedInformation