By Yusuf Serunkuma
If one of the great lessons of Romance is that we are masters and mistresses of our destiny, that our pasts can be left behind and new futures leaped into, tragedy has a less sanguine teaching to offer. Tragedy has a more respectful attitude to that past, to the often-cruel permanence of its impress: it honours, however reluctantly, the obligations that the past imposes – David Scott (2004), Conscripts of Modernity
Ever since the publication of my response to #CadaanStudies, I have received both critical and favourable responses. The critical responses have challenged my understanding of the terms of the debate – especially how I sought to racialise a debate, which essentially meant to criticize structures of domination and marginalisation in Somali studies. Let me suggest that racialising this conversation, if I did, is not an original sin of mine. Indeed, one well articulated response angrily urged that racialization of this debate is equally important [what a divided opposition I have here]. What I find strange, however, is that categories such as “Somalis,” “non-Somali academics” and “#Cadaan” loud in Safia Aidid’s theorisation of #CadaanStudies denote race and parentage in their first sense. Terms have meaning as they have histories, and genealogies. Terms are never constructed in a vacuum. They are born at specific moments in history. The event for #CadaanStudies is a concern over native representation on the SLAJ – board and editorial. We can stretch #CadaanStudies to mean power and privilege, and weakness and marginalisation on the other hand. This is an important stretch, but we have to refine this debate by placing it in a proper historical and genealogical context.
Anyway, in my polemic, I brought in a bit of me – black and East African – perhaps to destabilise and complicate the context in which #CadaanStudies was being theorised. I also sought to extend the frontiers of knowledge production, insert within these frontiers an Africa-to-Africa dynamic, and then point to the ugliness of othering. I am a “non-Somali academic,” but not Caddaan. Where do I belong? Does the critique include me? If it doesn’t, then academics of Ethiopian parentage would have been representative, if they had proper grounding in the stuff they were writing about. There was that ugly Fox interview with Reza Aslan after the publication of Zealot: The Life and Time of Jesus of Nazareth. I hope it’s not forgotten. The questioner, Lauren Green would not stop stalking the persona of the author: “You are a Muslim, why did you write about the founder of Christianity?” In other words, being Muslim becomes his first intelligibility, and would cloud his scholarship. Does this sound any familiar with debates of exclusion and domination by non-Somali academics?
Yusuf Serunkuma
Email:yusufkajura@gmail.com
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Yusuf is a PhD Student at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.