Hoffman, blog post for week 2; Comparing forms of "knowledge/power"

Christopher Hoffman

Week 2 blog post

Sorry for the delay!

This week’s readings offered three visions for scholarship on the nexus of Islam and gender studies, a sort of comparison of means of approaching these topics critically. Alloula’s work on colonial-era postcards describes how their visual composition had been sexualized and dehumanized; if Said had schematically described the stereotypes of media depictions of Muslim society and people (see for instance pages 284-288 in Orientalism), Alloula adopts a concise language for putting into language the exploitative themes in these postcards. Stoler’s work, as a historical-sociological comparison of the regulation of sex in colonial societies, writes essentially a literature review for the sake of sketching how the maintenance of the colonial polity and ‘white prestige’ guided the shape of sexual relations (cf. page 30 “Changes in sexual access and domesic arrangements have invariably accompanied major efforts to reassert the internal coherence of European communities…”). Though Stoler renders her work in a more classical fashion (for a social sciences class, at any rate) in terms of language and argumentation than Alloula or Wa’dud, it articulates the shared interest in each piece of the interrelation of knowledge, power, and discourse. As for Wa’dud, the work challenged me because I rarely read texts on theological topics, and for the strength of her faith in the Qu’ran, or to a “hermeneutics” regarding the ongoing interpretation of that text (see page 22, or 63 in the course packet). This week’s reading is out of my comfort zone simply for the breadth of topics that it engages – social scientific work to theological texts and photography – proving the interdisciplinary effort necessary to approach a broad topic like “Gender, Sexuality, and Islam.”

            Certainly each work can be brought back to Foucault’s concept of “knowledge/power” as we discussed in class, especially Foucault’s concern for who produces this knowledge and for which ends. The ends for Alloula’s postcards, for instance, could be seen as capitalist transactions implicated in the production and distribution of photographs like this, which involve the fetishization of a foreign body-space; or how the representation of Oriental bodies in some sense facilitated communication between separated colonial families (here I think of the cursory words on the postcard on page 45 of the course packet). Alloula is concerned with the influence of colonial authorities in the representation of Oriental bodies and how these integrate into a wider cultural and economic framework. Stoler’s work on the history of colonial sexuality pushes toward her thesis that the regulation of this sexuality related in intimate ways to maintaining the distinction between colonized and colonizer, which Europeans struggled with as they acclimatized to colonial environments and had children with native women. Sexuality thus offered both a means of perpetuation of the European-controlled society and the potential loss of white racial ‘purity’; around this latter subject eugenic, anthropological, and medical discourses proliferated and came to dominate colonial society (see page 23, course packet page 51). Finally, Wa’dud’s work offers a critique of Qu’ranic commentaries as perpetuated and benefiting mostly male figures in Islamic societies, preferring an engaged, I would even say humanistic recognition of the necessity for the individual to interpret equitably the Qu’ran for them self while acknowledging the limits of knowledge here. Knowledge here means access to the interpretation of the Qu’ran and the social structures it may endorse.

            Across these three works, I am most interested in how they can be interpreted in light of Foucault’s concept of “expert knowledge” which licenses a specific class of people to produce knowledge on the have-nots. Regardless of the significance of the works of these authors, each of these articles can be considered as another instance of expert knowledge which occupies a privileged position in the worlds of discourse. Specifically in Stoler’s case, I was interested in how that article offered primarily how the male European outlook as manifest in colonial policy and law morphed throughout history, as interpreted through Dutch, French, and English-language sources; if Stoler mentions briefly the hardships of Asian concubines (page 16-7 in Stoler), the roles of colonized men and women yet get little attention in comparison. Stoler is certainly working from a narrower topic, with necessarily limited language skills and a certain pool of primary sources, so I do not wish to fault her for writing an insightful paper; but I wonder where this leaves scholarship on those people excluded from the discussion. My initial reaction is that Stoler’s work, at least, illustrates the racial-sexual-class structure of these colonial societies, giving context for what might be unheard voices and records that might not be visible in Western scholarship because of the obscurity of their language to Western scholars (for instance, I do not expect that Stoler speaks an Indonesian languages). Just as Wa’dud interprets the Qu’ran in light of a certain ethical obligation to the text and to human voices, so my (our) comprehension of texts must be tempered by the presence of blind spots and the failure of my reading.

In addition, I wanted to quickly bring up the French intervention/invasion of Mali, which I think recalls the topics we have been discussing. Said discusses the ongoing expressions of imperialism and the imperial vision despite formal decolonization, and this offers an excellent example of how imperial policies continue. In addition, it occurs to me that the kinds of images distributed in the media I read end up looking (and certainly selling for this reason) like the sorts of action scenes present in the video "Planet of the Arabs" that Professor Savci linked...