Spirals of Feminism in Contemporary Egyptian History Since the late 1960s, the history of feminism has been conceptualized as a series of waves: the first corresponding to the emancipationist movement in the 19th and early 20th century; the second to the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s; the third in early 1990s, claiming to be more intersectional; and the fourth beginning in the early 2000s, and revamping old debates about sexual violence and its connections with political power. Feminist scholars have long discussed the advantages and the limitations of the metaphor of the waves, acknowledging, on one side, the capacity to reflect the constancy of the women’s activism, its energy, and the fact that women’s movements, in their diversity, they all belong to a larger movement. In postcolonial contexts, the metaphor also allowed to overcome feminist scholarship exceptionalism and dependency, by showing that feminism in the colonial world followed trajectories that are comparable to their Euro-American counterparts. On another side, decolonial scholars have warned against the risk of essentialising generational differences, of dismissing the fact that the lives of activists or movements can span multiple generations, while pointing out that the periodization of various waves is based on US history, and does not capture local specificities, while erasing pre-emancipationist experiences of women’s awareness of gender inequality. Grounded in my research on feminist intellectual history in Egypt and First Nations Australian epistemologies, my contribution to this roundtable consists of discussing the possibilities opened by extending our analytical frameworks to include categories developed by First Nations scholars and activists to contexts such as Egypt. Specifically, I explore how the conceptualization of feminist history as a series of spirals instead of waves changes the way the discussion about feminism is framed in Egypt. I borrow the notion of “spiral” from the The Gay’u woman, a collective of Yolnu women and non-Indigenous scholars, to describe a methodology in writing history that does not pursue linearity but focuses more on intergenerational connections. In deploying their terminology and its underlying epistemology to a very different historical and sociological context I am trying to understand if liberating feminist history from linear and teleological narratives can help to overcome the anxiety generated by the use of the term feminism in relation to debates about cultural authenticity and class divide in Egypt.

Collaborative Ontologies and Indigenous Research Methodologies in SWANA studies My contribution to this roundtable is centered on the concept of collaborative ontology through my research both in the Arab world and with Indigenous scholars and communities in Australia, North America, SWANA and sub-Sahelian Africa. the begins with a discussion of how Indigenous scholars and activists understand the notion of coloniality of power, an essential concept within decolonial thought, and why it remains relatively underutilized by scholars of the SWANA region. Does the application of this and other decolonial concepts transform arguments for certain groups, including Palestinians, Bedouin, Amazigh and others in their claims of Indigenous status according to international law? Can one speak of certain places being governed today under colonial conditions without considering the world at large to still be living in a colonial age? How would such an understanding affect discussion of processes as varied as the political economic of knowledge production, as well as cultural production across SWANA? My exploration of these issues centers around Indigenous ontologies - experiences of being- and epistemologies - ways of knowing and communicating knowledge- and how the procedures developed by Indigenous scholars globally to produce academic knowledge would impact and even transform the way subaltern communities in SWANA are engaged, collaborated with, and made agents of the research about them. My discussion is based on the work of scholars such as Smith, Wilson, Yunkaporta, Harris, Moreton Robinson, Sandoval, Kovach, Chilisa and other Indigenous theorists and scholars, and their focus on relationality, respect, deep and resonant listening, and an ethic of care as the grounding of research. With this grounding I discuss how the concept of collaborative ontologies offers a framework for Middle East and North Arica’s scholars to develop shared research agendas, bodies of knowledge and interpretive models that envoice still subaltern communities, expand the possibilities for scholars from outside these communities to acquire a far deeper understanding of the histories and experiences they study, and more powerfully share them through their research.

Is Political Islam “Indigenous?” The rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in its latest period of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheaval (2011-2013; 2013 - present) has prompted the question: are the Muslim Brotherhood (and by extension, political Islam) an expression of “indigenous” Egyptian sentiment? In 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi was elected to the presidency of Egypt in its first free and fair elections in modern history by a small margin. In 2013, millions took to the streets demanding early elections, and/or to remove Morsi from power, resulting in a popularly-backed coup. Since then, then General of the Egyptian military Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has assumed the presidency of Egypt, ushering in an era of extreme political repression. In response to these events, some scholars have cast the Muslim Brotherhood as an expression of “indigenous” Egyptian sentiment, not simply because they won the 2012 elections, but because their public Islamic identity challenges the (relatively more) “secular” state and the attendant society that state engenders. This paper asks: by what standard and using what method do we code political Islam as “indigenous” in contrast to, for example, the military, the westernized (non-Islamist) business elite, sufi orders, what I call “traditional Egyptian Islam”, or, indeed, Coptic Christians? I explore the argument for “yes, the Muslim Brotherhood are an, or the expression of authenticity or indigeneity”, as articulated by scholars such as Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and James Toth; and the argument for “no, we can not make this claim” as articulated by my particular reading of Egypt’s colonial and post-colonial history in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper contributes to this panel by highlighting some of the complexities and competing interests that adhere when we attempt to establish indigeneity both historically and affectively.

Staying with the Theory-Practice Dyad as Required by Decolonization’s Practitioners What role might ethnographically informed theorists hailing from the so-called “Middle East” but based in today’s Anglophone academia play in the making and unmaking of this colonial regional category? As a theorist with such a profile, I explore this question in light of my work over the past 12 years on how Turkey’s historically marginalized communities use visual and spatial cultural production (e.g., art, architecture, commemoration) to contend with political violence and its legacies both within this nation-state and in the diaspora. Communities I have worked with throughout this period range from Turkish and Kurdish memory activists in Germany to artists and environmentalists in Turkey’s Kurdistan and architectural activists in Istanbul’s racialized and informally built neighborhoods. Taken together, these communities are confronted with multiple imaginaries of the colonially inflected center: Europe versus Turkey, Western Turkey versus Kurdistan, natives versus migrants, urbanites versus peasants, oldcomers versus newcomers, etc. Rather than simply decentering these centers through my own theorization as a theorist with the abovementioned profile, I aim to highlight how affected communities themselves navigate such imaginaries and the uses they attribute to theory in so doing. This shift of focus is informed by a series of encounters with interlocutors and collaborators who have repeatedly upended my decolonial-scholarly tendency to disavow the theory-practice dyad by demanding that I shoulder the work of theorization as a form of labor unto itself and dedicate my daily shift to it. My contribution will therefore discuss recent experiences that resulted from such encounters, including (among others) a summer school I coordinated for the Architects’ Chamber in the unrecognized capital of Turkey’s Kurdistan and workshops I led for an independent artist-run organization based in the same city.

Public History: comparative perspectives from South Africa and SWANA In the late 1970s, South Africa witnessed major historiographical changes when a group of historians shook the Apartheid vision and launched a new vehicle for radical research, the Wits History Workshop. This site of knowledge production expanded from its initial concerns with capturing a “people’s history” to later include the concept of “public history”, bringing communities back into the discussions. This has implied using several approaches and experiences, such as enlarging the record of oral history, training representatives of communities, and questioning both “against the grain” of official records and along it. From these perspectives, a new kind of history has brought hidden voices back to public history narratives, but also forced a new way of writing history. In the SWANA region, 2011 saw the opening of spaces of opportunity that broke many of the barriers blocking the emergence of public history. The uprisings led many people to begin to document and collect materials, for instance. And narratives around the events became part of the struggle. A decade later, these initiatives towards public history face new ethical challenges and debates. What kind of testimonies can communities keep and bring to the public? How might individuals who agree to offer their testimony be protected from counter revolution while recording for the future? These two sets of experiences shed light on three main debates that will be tackled through discussion. Writing a history “a part egale” (with equal shares) means taking care of what can happen for the actors in the future. It also requires thinking about where and how to record the events. Finally, it raises the issue of invisibility / visibility: the revolutionary actors needed to be shadowed in the face of repression, even as their voices were recorded for the future. All these aspects question the possibility of public history in the time of authoritarian regimes.

Against the Euro-American monopoly of literary theory and criticism: The tongue of early Arabic Poetics. The paper extends reconsideration to the sphere of what is called ‘literary theory’, considering new attention to indigenous knowledge and theories produced in the premodern Arabic literary criticism. Moving beyond the theoretical parameters of Eurocentric modernity, this presentation argues that medieval Islamic literary criticism can be used as a closer frame to understand the reception of a literary text in the premodern Arabic world(s) and to recognise the various internal forces of literary reproduction. The discipline of balalghah was taught and practised for more than 1000 years in the Islamic world(s). Most of balaghah scholars weren't Arabs, and their native tongue was not Arabic, which invites a further question about the definition of indigenous when speaking about balaghah scholarship. I am arguing for considering balaghah as a premodern literary theory that should be used when reading or analysing Islamic texts. The paper clarifies the role that the premodern Arabic literary theory of balaghah (literally ‘eloquence’ and roughly ‘poetics’) played in the process of reading literary texts and its profound integration into the culture of premodern Arabic writers. Familiarity with such literary interactions is crucial for developing a well-rounded understanding of Islamic Adab’s nature under the realm of World Literature.

The violent genealogies of Area Studies in the SWANA region saw the formation of monolithic, agentless and dependent imaginings of the region. This has been the critique of postcolonial, particularly subaltern, Marxist and feminist studies. The SWANA Feminist Collective were inspired by the works of critical SWANA scholarship and even more so by Indigenous feminist scholarship in settler-states as well as Black and Latin American feminist thinkers to make space for, and think about, marginal radical voices within SWANA feminist communities. Their purpose is to create opportunities for radical, new and Indigenous-centered conversations to take place, to explore alternative forms of knowledge production, and to nurture a community and networks of researchers, scholars, activists and community members that are invested in social change and transformative possibilities. Their work is to also address and define how they understand feminist decolonial/anti-colonial struggles. Centered in their vision is the compulsory need to uphold that they honor and cite Black and Indigenous feminists who are leading the way for collective liberation struggles. SWANA Collective organized a conference in November 2021, titled “(Re)imagining SWANA Futurities”, which was one of the only SWANA conferences on feminist futurities and the first-of-its-kind on Turtle Island (so-called Canada). This critical work was not rooted in identity, rather in material conditions on how SWANA feminist scholars can work towards manifesting alternative possibilities within our region and resist colonial, imperial and capitalist structures of oppression. Moreover, in October of 2022, SWANA Collective collaborated with local feminist researchers to organize a ‘SWANA Decolonial Feminist Methods’ workshop that utilized a decolonial/postcolonial feminist methodological lens (Smith 2012; Tuck & Yang 2012). The workshop sought to create a decolonial pedagogical space for interactive discussions and community building among feminist scholars from the SWANA or whose work is centered on the SWANA region. Building on this conference and subsequent workshop, the contribution to this roundtable is to share and reflect on the challenges, contributions and potentials of what it means to radically adopt and incorporate decolonial and Indigenous methodologies and approaches in the spaces created and shared among peers in and beyond the SWANA region.

The violent genealogies of Area Studies in the SWANA region saw the formation of monolithic, agentless and dependent imaginings of the region. This has been the critique of postcolonial, particularly subaltern, Marxist and feminist studies. The SWANA Feminist Collective were inspired by the works of critical SWANA scholarship and even more so by Indigenous feminist scholarship in settler-states as well as Black and Latin American feminist thinkers to make space for, and think about, marginal radical voices within SWANA feminist communities. Their purpose is to create opportunities for radical, new and Indigenous-centered conversations to take place, to explore alternative forms of knowledge production, and to nurture a community and networks of researchers, scholars, activists and community members that are invested in social change and transformative possibilities. Their work is to also address and define how they understand feminist decolonial/anti-colonial struggles. Centered in their vision is the compulsory need to uphold that they honor and cite Black and Indigenous feminists who are leading the way for collective liberation struggles. SWANA Collective organized a conference in November 2021, titled “(Re)imagining SWANA Futurities”, which was one of the only SWANA conferences on feminist futurities and the first-of-its-kind on Turtle Island (so-called Canada). This critical work was not rooted in identity, rather in material conditions on how SWANA feminist scholars can work towards manifesting alternative possibilities within our region and resist colonial, imperial and capitalist structures of oppression. Moreover, in October of 2022, SWANA Collective collaborated with local feminist researchers to organize a ‘SWANA Decolonial Feminist Methods’ workshop that utilized a decolonial/postcolonial feminist methodological lens (Smith 2012; Tuck & Yang 2012). The workshop sought to create a decolonial pedagogical space for interactive discussions and community building among feminist scholars from the SWANA or whose work is centered on the SWANA region. Building on this conference and subsequent workshop, the contribution to this roundtable is to share and reflect on the challenges, contributions and potentials of what it means to radically adopt and incorporate decolonial and Indigenous methodologies and approaches in the spaces created and shared among peers in and beyond the SWANA region.