A Propensity for Self-Subversion and a Taste for Liberation: An Afterword

It is daunting to be asked to write an Afterword to a volume in honor of my contributions to the field. I am, indeed, honored by the essays in this special issue and am indebted to JMEWS Editors, Special Issue Guest Editors Azza Basarudin and Khanum Shaikh, and the Contributors for their insightfulness. I am humbled by the experience of reading this volume. I am very lucky to be treated to meditations on some of my work. I cannot help but think that, instead of bringing things to a close, this volume will instead set the stage for the direction of my future work. The essayists accomplished this through their commentary on, and critique of, the ideas and standpoints in my work: my analyses of Sudanese and feminist art all the while loving it and living it; the work’s international dissemination and deliberate mentoring; the living fieldwork that I have carried out over many years; my ideas about Islam and Islamic movements and women and social movements; my challenges to other’s work on the Middle East and Sudan; my use of personalized methodologies, especially oral histories in various forms; my love of working with people, especially Sudanese; my refusal to disengage from the politics that come to my door as part and parcel of the research; and my refusal to set myself at a distance in the ethnographic encounter. As the poet Dylan Thomas said: “We are all in the exact middle of a living story.” The essayists in this volume seem to understand that that was my goal: to be in the midst of it all.

In this brief Afterword I muse about some of the theories and methodologies that I have held dear, but nonetheless often subverted, and contemplate if these are some of the ideas I want to carry forward. I have been asking for many years, with considerable anxiety, if the research enterprise, as it is currently constructed, is anathema to certain values, ethics, and politics I hold. Is it possible to be held to a kind of “academic rigor” and yet be accountable—ethnographically and to oneself? Does working in Middle East women’s studies heighten the tension of that question?¹

Intervening in Modernist Agendas—Oral History, Ethnography, Memory, and Solidarity

In 1997, primarily because of an essay I had written for a feminist oral history volume (Hale 1991), I was asked by the editors of one of the leading Arab women’s periodicals, Nour, to give a substantial workshop commentary on the ideas of the keynote speaker, a well-known African scholar and activist Archie Mafeje, who was living in Cairo at the time, in exile from apartheid South Africa. His paper, “Oral History: A Theoretical Framework,” was provocative (Hale 1997, Mafeje 1997).

In a sense, my commentary started where Mafeje’s ended: with the feminist critique. He stated, “The feminist critique is probably the most important social and historical development this generation” (Mafeje 1997, 14). He gave it even more importance than I. Perhaps his seeming hyperbole was because, as an outsider, a man writing about women’s oral history, he may not have been as deeply entangled in self-criticism as I. As an outsider in Middle East and African studies, I have recently given more credence to the postcolonial theories of global South scholars and activists (some specifically and as a whole) as the most important critique of this generation. But he and I did agree that feminism is an important critical stance or perspective, in this way veering away from identity politics. He argued that proclaiming the alterity of women is an important strategy, and I agreed, that is, if we are to think of it as a liberatory strategy.

Mafeje critiqued the stated goals of the workshop, pointing out that a “random collection of biographies and oral testimonies or histories does not constitute history” (16), that what is missing is a “research question” (16); he argued that it is not enough to declare the existence of women and their struggles (16). As to feminists’ frequent claim to egalitarianism because...