SWANA Feminist Futurities: Collective Reflections on the Making of Alternative Spaces for Imagined Futures

Ten years after what has been popularly called the “Arab Spring,” amid a decade of reflections, analysis, research, activism, and lived experience, the SWANA Feminist Collective emerged to provide an alternate account of shared struggles against colonial-imperialist and neoliberal encroachment in the region. Dominant Eurocentric academic analyses have often focused on subjects, actions, movements, institutional powers, and discussions on “failures” and “lessons” or the nostalgic and romanticized memorialization of revolutions (Shihade and Shihade 2012). These narratives echo the Orientalist narrative that has long been produced in academic institutions in the global North and elsewhere and has been critically addressed by postcolonial and anticolonial (feminist) scholars (e.g., Abu-Lughod 2013; Mohanty 1988; Said 1978; Shihade and Shihade 2012).The function of overromanticized or oversimplified narratives of the 2011 revolutions is similar to that of the colonially constituted Orientalist ones, often producing the category of the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa) as unstable and agentless. While the critique of Orientalism emerged more than forty years ago (Said 1978) and has succeeded in questioning academic thinking on the binary divisions and othering of non-Western subjects, the political and material implications of Orientalism remain and continue to shape these societies. The SWANA Collective aims to move away from narratives about the region that depict it as a space stuck in a moment of time and that characterize the people living there as docile masses subjected to despotic powers. The revolutions of the so-called Arab Spring were not merely momentary political acts; they were the continuation of long-term struggles against what Frantz Fanon (1968) called “colonial violence,” a violence that postcolonial regimes have not just inherited from the colonial rulers but have even augmented. The revolts in 2011 were also acts of resistance to a continuing colonial violence, or what Aníbal Quijano (2000) describes as the “coloniality of power,” in which the national ruling bourgeoisie adopts colonial social orders and forms of knowledge to further its interests. For these reasons, they cannot be confined or contained within certain spaces and times; they need to be accounted for outside Western (his)torical and contemporary accounts.With that being said, we wanted to (re)imagine SWANA futurities1 by centering peoples’ lived experiences, emotions, relationalities, power struggles, and ongoing decolonial and anticolonial praxis within the region and its diasporas. This approach is inspired by Black, Indigenous, and racialized feminist scholars who argue that knowledge can be found in places, spaces, and bodies that have largely been marginalized and who challenge the sites and subjects seen as the sole producers of legitimized knowledge (Campt 2014; Hartman 2019; Hill Collins 2000; Simpson 2014; Smith 2012). For instance, Indigenous scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012: 30) highlight that “history is a modernist project which has developed alongside imperial beliefs about the Other.” Smith states that (his)story is presented to us by the dominant group as a totalizing, universal, and chronological discourse that supposedly brings together all knowledges and shared human experiences in an orderly fashion.The postcolonial South African feminist scholar Nokuthula Hlabangane argues that the myth of objectivity within Western-centered traditions rooted in the Enlightenment era and colonial expansion inherently privileges rationality through binary hierarchies that disconnect the body from the mind, the universal from the particular, men from women, slave from master, nature from culture, and reason from emotion. These binaries, integral to Western epistemologies, congregate to form power structures and systems that privilege the white, Western male, promote the “agenda of civilized oppression,” and thus silence other ways of knowing and being-in-the-world (Hlabangane 2018: 661). Thus these scholars encourage us to look for (his)stories in other spaces, through other means (poetry, photographs, etc.), and among other peoples (e.g., Bengezi 2023; Campt 2014; Hartman 2008).Inspired by our feminist predecessors, we seek to create a decolonial feminist space within studies particular to the SWANA region to reflect on alternative forms of knowledge production and (his)stories and to envision other futures for our scholarship. We, as the organizers of the conference, along with those who understood our vision and participated in presentations and hearty discussions, dedicated the space we created and the thematics of futurities that we developed to the concept of reclamation. Futurities for us is a reclamation. It is a reclamation of space, (his)story, identity, power relations, and an envisioning of what could be.While our conference, on the surface, reflects the skeleton of traditional academic conferences, its anatomy was developed with decolonial and anticolonial feminist intent to allow for voices and visions of scholars, loosely defined, who were outside the imaginaries of white, male, and Western understandings and assumptions of the SWANA region.We, the organizers, often grieve over how the SWANA region seems to hold no weight in Turtle Island academic institutions despite being a focal site in international relations. When the region is examined within these institutions, it is done through the lens of intervention, war, death, despotism, underdevelopment, and the solutions the West has to offer to all these problems. For instance, discussions of the 2003 Iraq war in mainstream international relations courses have favored a Western realist lens, which describes the invasion as “necessary” and a matter of “national security” (Gilpin 2005). This lens operates through a colonialist move, as Chandra Mohanty (1988) defines it, which represents Iraq as a static region of devastation, similar to its neighboring countries. Thus the multiplicities of lives lived and visions had and sought by Iraqis were overshadowed by a singular Orientalist and static narrative of Iraq and its people.Our educational training has been centered in the West, specifically Turtle Island (Canada), and in a Western-oriented understanding of political science that has reproduced the SWANA region through an imperialist and monolithic gaze that often theorizes what the West should and shouldn’t do with the “problematic” region (e.g., Gilpin 2005; Goldberg 2016; Keohane 1984; Tansel 2019; Van Rythoven 2016). The realist and liberal understandings of the SWANA region that we have been exposed to have repeatedly categorized the region as a site of despotic rule and agentless subjects in need of Western assistance and intervention. Within our left-leaning institutions, critiques of realist and liberal narratives were offered to us (Abu-Lughod 2013), but the understanding of the region and its diverse perspectives was monolithic. Moreover, outside normative understandings of resistance through mass protests and mobilization, few alternative imaginaries of the region were offered to us.In thinking about these inundating forms of knowledge that have persisted within our academic experiences, during the tenth anniversary of the so-called Arab Spring (Sly 2021), we found ourselves envisioning alternative ways of imagining the SWANA region. These reflections were happening at the time of the pandemic, and although this was a far-from-pleasant experience, it was a catalyst that allowed us to think about how we can make connections with others despite spatial barriers. The vision for the (Re)imagining Feminist Futurities Conference was not something we could take for granted as graduate students at York University. Rather, we, the organizers, navigated the search for funding, created and implemented our vision, and established a new platform for decolonial feminist imaginings with little prior experience and without a template to guide us in our venture.The purpose of our conference was to create space for different types of conversations to take place, explore alternative forms of knowledge production, and nurture a community and network of researchers, scholars, activists, and community members invested in social change and transformative possibilities. Our vision as the SWANA Feminist Collective is to reach a much larger goal of ensuring that marginalized voices do not fall through the cracks.The initial process began with a visioning note about how we each wanted to engage in this work, collectively, by building consensus. Brainstorming was a collaborative process whereby we opened up and held space for each other to share and discuss ideas freely with no preconceived agendas. While many graduate student groups, professional associations, and collectives do similar work, we felt that often planning and organizing events can turn into strictly professional and strategically oriented work that removes the necessity of genuine relationship building as organizers. We asked ourselves, How do our positionalities, backgrounds, and lived experiences shape our thoughts and work?We organized a consensus training with a local community organizer about how we make decisions and how to ensure that all our voices are being heard. The consensus training was a two-hour workshop in which we discussed our decision-making styles through a series of questions and activities. The training helped our collective define our roles and skills and how to best contribute to the collective using those skills. Notably, the training supported our vision of challenging power structures in academe. This nonhierarchical approach offers a balance of responsibilities, tasks, and leadership within the collective. Reflecting on the power and privilege we all carry, we made sure not to reproduce academic power dynamics and hierarchies (Nguyen et al. 2016: 29). The consensus training was transformative in that it disrupted the lines between professionalism and interpersonal relations, a line that must be disrupted to engage in decolonial, anticolonial, and nonindividualistic praxis.We were guided by our core values of openness, communication, empathy, gratitude, and respect. The “epistemic friendships” we made and the support we offered each other were a large part of this process, ensuring that all of us were mindful of each other’s capacities and that the work was equally and equitably distributed among us (Nguyen et al. 2016). Importantly, our intentional community-making strategies were situated in our common goals and visions for liberation. As Nicole Nguyen et al. emphasize, “It is the common struggle toward liberation and the recognition of common interests that unite women cross-culturally, rather than an assumption of shared oppression” (13). Through our collective reckoning with how we can imagine liberatory futurities, we were able to collaborate in ways that brought about the conference’s success.The planning and organizing of the conference were centered on collective practices wherein we all assigned ourselves to specific tasks regarding funding, organizing the participants, choosing the right themes, and picking the right advisory board. Building on our vision, we drafted a proposal for the conference. We edited it with the guidance of our advisory board, which consisted of Nergis Canefe, Anna Agathangelou, and Sanober Umar, who provided helpful commentary in refining the thematics of the conference. The themes were “(His)stories and Geographies,” “Resistance and Refusal,” “SWANA Feminisms,” “Time/Temporality and Modernities,” and “SWANA Futurities.” The participants engaged with these themes in a number of ways, including through art forms such as short stories as well as academic essays and articles.Presentations were interdisciplinary and covered a variety of contemporary topics. For instance, Nisrine Chaer’s presentation delved into the geographies of home and security and how the state in Lebanon weaponized the refugee crisis and the gendered logics of oppression. In the same panel, David Semaan spoke about the use of technology and artificial intelligence in state surveillance by examining the targeting of queer folks in Lebanon and Egypt while questioning the potential of reconstituting technology for abolitionist movements. The politics of the body, state oppression, and gender-based violence were also addressed by Nehal Meligy, who presented on the local feminist group Bussy, which performs public acts in Egypt that offer counternarratives about contentious issues such as sexual harassment. Feminist consciousness and the significance of storytelling and archiving were evident in Douja Mamelouk’s presentation on the power of feminist literature in decolonizing minds in past and present Tunisia. They are also reflected in Mohammad Tonsy’s short story, which expresses frustration with how traumatic revolutionary experiences are narrated and confined within academic language. Here archiving, as a way of seeing and reporting on a moment, becomes a form of resistance. Regarding resistance and refusal, Maysam Abu Khreibeh highlighted the struggles and resurgence of land-based cultivation by fellahin in Palestine. These everyday small-scale revolutions show how life and land are interconnected and speak to the importance of joint struggle across SWANA communities.Even though participants presented on various topics and case studies, the conference brought together connections that might have otherwise been overlooked and neglected. For example, discussions on the role of Palestinian peasantry in anticolonial resistance efforts were connected in broader ways to the role of performance art groups in Egypt fighting against gender-based violence. These liberation movements intersect in their struggle against neoliberal imperialist structures and in their quest for radical social change and liberation.The conference brought together scholars from all over the SWANA region as well as Europe, Australia, and Turtle Island (North America). While we were from different parts of the world, experiencing different realities and envisioning a multitude of futurities, the conference space that was created allowed us to partake in shared ideas as a collective. Conference participants could echo shared frustrations of the lack of alternative imaginings of the SWANA region and were grateful for the space to do so. For instance, Semaan, whose presentation was titled ‘“Against the Order of Nature’: An Abolitionist Analysis of the LGBTQ+ Surveillance Economy in North Africa and South West Asia,” reflected the following view about the conference: I was initially drawn by the conference because I was excited to see a critical conference on the SWANA region based in feminist epistemologies, and I wanted to be part of broader discussions that I view as needed and often missing in political science, particularly SWANA studies. There is a strong desire by many to fill the gap of this type of knowledge in conventional academic spaces, and I wanted to be a part of a community of people who are contributing to and creating that space by bringing forward their critical work.The space’s unique positioning was further articulated by Chaer. In “Intimate Infrastructure of Transgender Refugee Security in Lebanon,” Chaer remarked, “This conference was unique because the panelists were from various disciplines, but they were all researching the SWANA region through feminist and decolonial lenses, which is very rare to find in academic conferences.”The participants also commented on how the conference space was unconventional compared to mainstream academic conferences. Chaer noted: “The conference space felt very safe because the organizers did a great job at managing it and facilitating the panels and the discussions. The communication with us as panelists was excellent. They were responsive, and they made everything extra clear. The organizers, the respondents, and the attendees were very generous in their feedback on the papers.” This sentiment was also echoed by Semaan, who stated that “the conference space felt like a genuinely safe and open place of critical interventions but also caring and humane space of exchange and conversation where ideas could really get traction without getting weighed down by self-censorship or conflicts that hold up the conversation.” The space that the participants reflected on was an intentional space that we organizers were careful in constructing as a starting point for our work in making possible alternatives.In choosing our keynote speaker, we were drawn to the work of Sara Salem, particularly her theoretical approaches to the relationship between the past and the future. Her work, which in part draws on how we can look at revolutionary anticolonial pasts to imagine alternate feminist futurities, was crucial to our collective approach in organizing this conference. Salem’s keynote explored anticolonial memory and archiving as entry points into broader questions of temporality, the politics of the present, and imaginings of the future. Her address spoke to the significance of looking at the anticolonial past and its material implications on the present to (re)imagine solidarities in the present and alternative futurities.The critical work of the SWANA Feminist Futurities Conference is rooted in anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and decolonial feminism and takes seriously material conditions. We work toward manifesting alternative possibilities within the region by resisting colonial, imperialist, and capitalist structures of oppression. It is an unpaved path, for us and many of those who support our vision, toward alternate SWANA feminist imaginings that situate marginal decolonial and anticolonial feminist positionings at the center of research and praxis of the SWANA region.We recognize that our vision and its manifestation through this conference and beyond include tensions and disagreements that can be worked through with a collective framework of understanding and consensus. In making possible the visions of this conference and our subsequent events, including a four-day SWANA methodologies workshop with scholars from and in the region, and in making space for our collective voices, we began to feel optimistic about the potential of SWANA feminist futurities. The act of creating a small collective of decolonial and anticolonial SWANA feminist scholars has allowed us to model the materiality of imagining SWANA futurities outside Western institutional knowledge production and situated in lived experiences, relationalities, and decolonial and anticolonial methodologies and theories.

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