In Enacting Decolonization, Yasmeen Daifallah examines the forms that intellectual decolonization takes after the demise of anticolonial revolutions. Daifallah argues that rather than crafting political visions, decolonization operates through anticolonial thinkers’ efforts to cultivate a political subjectivity capable of mastering and critically reworking a colonially imparted modernity. She recovers this argument through Abdallah Laroui and Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, two of the most consequential Arab thinkers of the twentieth century. Typically read as opponents over the fate of the Islamic tradition, Daifallah argues that they share a diagnosis: colonialism produced an epistemological rupture that cannot be wished away. What differs is the ecology of critique each cultivates in response. Laroui wields Marxist historicism to submit anticolonial Arab thought to critique, recovering its possibilities for a subject capable of contesting the postcolonial present, while al-Jabri deploys structuralism to reinterpret the Islamic tradition, modeling a relationship of command and critical distance toward it. Through close readings of their work, Daifallah shows how these thinkers inventively weave conceptual and rhetorical devices to bring decolonized political subjects into being.

Yasmeen Daifallah is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.