In Barbara Harlow’s last works, there was a distinctive methodological shift as she confronted the new realities of the post-9/11 world. The implications of this methodological movement are explored in this article through a reading of the history of the Yemeni city of Aden. Aden’s history – as a protectorate, an Arabic-speaking port, a virtual city-state and a link to East Africa – suggests the ways in which historical particularity often fits the colonial discourse paradigm imperfectly. Aden also later became a centre of radical anti-colonial solidarity in the 1970s, a centre of extreme jihadi activity during the war on terror and, most recently, a site of catastrophe manufactured by global elites. This historical trajectory also calls for a critical accounting of new methods and approaches for addressing the inequalities of the contemporary global order.
GhoshAmitav, ‘The Anglophone Empire’, The New Yorker78 (7April2003), pp. 46–47.
2.
Amitav Ghosh had been a regular contributor to The New Yorker before publishing this essay, which was very critical of the invasion and its intellectual justifications. Like other elite East Coast periodicals, The New Yorker had been careful to avoid too direct criticism of the war until after the occupation began to founder. Ghosh has not written for the magazine since.
3.
Edward Said in his major critical works focused primarily on the discourse and culture of Anglo-French colonialism, but always turned his attention to US imperialism as an outgrowth of older colonialisms. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994) and Edward Said, Orientalism: western conceptions of the Orient (New York: Vintage, 1979). For this, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) criticised his insufficient attention to the way finance capitalism had redefined the contemporary nature of empire in so thoroughgoing a manner as to render analogies with older historical eras irrelevant. PeaseDonald, in turn, challenges the argument for a unique contemporary form of imperialism as a type of American exceptionalism in ‘U.S. Imperialism: global dominance without colonies’, in SchwarzHenry G.RaySangeeta, eds, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 203–20. See SpivakGayatri Chakravorty, ‘Globalicities: terror and its consequences’, CR: The New Centennial Review4, no. 1 (2004), pp. 73–94; HarveyDavid, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and WallersteinImmanuel, World-Systems Analysis: an introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
4.
See ‘Introduction: living with imperialism’, in Aboul-ElaHosam, Domestications: American Empire, literary culture, and the postcolonial lens (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
5.
During the 1970s, Race & Class was an exception. The journal published: HeikalMohammed Hassanein, ‘Reaction and revolution in the Middle East: Arab perspectives’, Race & Class17, no. 3 (1976), pp. 253–59; Al-AshtalAbdalla, ‘PDRY: politics in command’, Race & Class17, no. 3 (1976), pp. 275–80; LacknerHelen, ‘Revolution in the Gulf’, Race & Class15, no. 4 (1974), pp. 515–27; AliHussein, ‘Notes towards an understanding of the revolution in South Yemen, Race & Class16, no. 1 (1974), pp. 83–100. For a discussion of the way earlier writing on the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen resonated with Barbara Harlow’s revision of the postcolonial method, see the discussion of her Resistance Literature below.
6.
One of the first truly influential instantiations of the colonial discourse method as used today is, of course, Edward Said’s Orientalism, which appeared just before several other influential studies, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reading of Jane Eyre in ‘Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism’, Critical Inquiry12, no. 1 (1985), pp. 243–61; several essays by BhabhaHomi in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); and longer studies like Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: literary study and British rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Robert J. C. Young’s Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1994). These studies called new attention to the ways overseas conquest implicated itself even in ostensibly domestic cultural products of colonial Europe. They also inspired innumerable studies that failed to break new ground in the same manner.
7.
GhoshAmitav, ‘The Anglophone Empire’, p. 46.
8.
GhoshAmitav, ‘The Anglophone Empire’, p. 46.
9.
See KourZ. H., The History of Aden, 1839–72 (London: Cass, 1981), pp. 13–63.
10.
HallidayFred, Revolution and Foreign Policy: the case of southern Yemen, 1967–1987 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 67.
11.
Avery Gordon has called my attention to a recent exception: a BBC television series, The Last Post, set in Aden in the 1960s, which aired initially in the UK in 2017. The release of such a period piece in the midst of the devastation of the Yemen war deserves a separate discussion.
12.
See Mia Carter’s contribution to this volume (Race & Class62, no. 3), ‘In the archives with Barbara Harlow’.
13.
Kour, History of Aden, p. 3.
14.
ṬarābulsīFawwāz, Janūb al-Yaman fī ḥukm al-yasār: shahādah shakhṣīyah [South Yemen under leftist rule: a personal testimony] (Beirut : Riyāḍ al-Rayyis lil-Kutub wa-al-Nashr, 2015), p. 35.
15.
Ṭarābulsī, Janūb al-Yaman, p. 38.
16.
Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy, p. 79.
17.
TakritiAbdel Razzaq, Monsoon Revolution: republicans, sultans, and empires in Oman, 1965–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 98.
18.
Takriti, Monsoon Revolution, p. 99.
19.
My reference here is, of course, to Halliday’s early career when he collaborated with Traboulsi, served as an editor at New Left Review, and helped found the periodical MERIP, which created a space for understanding Arab left perspectives inside the US. His later support for US aggression against Iraq put him at odds with the editorial boards of these movements. In his obituary in MERIP, Joe Stork, another founding editor, wrote: ‘The Gulf war of 1990–1991 created some political distance between Fred and Middle East Report. MERIP opposed Iraq’s invasion and attempted annexation of Kuwait, but did not share Fred’s support for the US-led military intervention to expel Iraqi forces, though many of us agreed that an end to the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein would have to stand on the positive side of any balance sheet of the war. But this distance never became a rupture: MERIP continued to publish Fred’s essays and reviews (his “revisit” of Arabia Without Sultans appeared in MERIP204), though these did not appear as frequently, and Fred’s academic and other work often cited MERIP articles on the consequences of the war and US policies in the region.’ Joe Stork, ‘Fred Halliday’, MERIP40, no. 255 (2010).
20.
KanafaniGhassan, Palestine’s Children, translated by HarlowBarbara (London: Heinemann, 1984); HarlowBarbara, ‘History and endings: Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and Tawfiq Salih’s The Duped’, Minnesota Review25 (1986), pp. 279–86; HarlowBarbara, ‘Introduction to Kanafani’s “Thoughts on change and the blind language”’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics10 (1990), pp. 137–57.
21.
IbrāhīmṢunʻ Allāh, Wardah (al-Qāhirah: Dār al-Mustaqbal al-ʻArabī, 2000), p. 93.
22.
Ibrāhīm, Wardah, p. 272.
23.
Ibrāhīm, Wardah, p. 411. My citations are to the Arabic version of the novel, which has been translated into French, Italian and Swedish. My own English translation is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
24.
See, for example, Lamia Karim’s study of the way microfinance promises a women’s liberation that is belied by conditions on the ground, ‘Demystifying micro-credit: the Grameen Bank, NGOs, and neoliberalism in Bangladesh’, Cultural Dynamics20, no.1 (2008), pp. 5–29.
25.
HarlowBarbara, ‘“Extraordinary renditions”: tales of Guantánamo, a review article’, Race & Class52, no. 4 (2011), pp. 1–29.
In Dred Scott v. Sanford of 1857, the US Supreme Court ruled that slaves of African descent had no legal standing to sue for freedom even in free states because they were not legally considered US citizens with full rights. The decision galvanised abolitionist civil society and remained a rallying point until it was overturned after the US Civil War by the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which banned slavery.
