On Common Speech

The multilingual turn in literary studies emphasizes the fairly recent emergence of a monolingual attachment to language. While this rightly calls into question the academic focus on monolingual competencies and offers a substantial area of inquiry for scholars working with the linguistically diverse regions of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, this essay posits that the persistence of multilinguality among historical actors from these regions does not merit a shift away from monolingualism in contemporary scholarship. This argument derives from the claims analyzed in this essay, made by South Asian writers in colonial India, about the singularity of one's own language (swabhasha) and the writers' anxieties to protect this language from vulgar speech (gramyam). Building on contemporary work on the vernacular, the essay seeks to draw renewed attention to the role of speech in language debates in Telugu, a language whose particularity has not become a metonym either for the nation (like Hindi) or for a pan–South Indian identity (like Tamil). In tracing the movement from vulgar speech to proper language in this archive, this essay reframes vernacularity as an ethical compulsion premised on the common.

Toward a Global Intellectual History of “Minority”

The term minority is today applied to describe beleaguered, persecuted, and exiled people whose subordination is preserved or merely “tolerated” by majoritarian politics inherent to modern states. As this introduction indicates, however, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries minority politics became a rubric for sociopolitical emancipation, providing a framework for intellectuals in colonized Asia and Africa to question European powers' treatment of marginalized communities. Bar Sadeh and Houwink ten Cate contend that “minority” has unique value as an instrument for historical analysis that is restricted neither solely to minority-majority relations nor to debates about (political) representation. Instead, the authors propose a global intellectual history of “minority” as a concept and experience, which is explored in the essays compiled in this special section, “Minority Questions.” By examining the diverse genealogies of the concept of minority, the essays that follow provide a valuable contribution to efforts to redress historical wrongs, even as they offer a range of explanations for the enduring legacy and power of this multifaceted concept.

The Fruit of the Arts and the Mob

This essay considers accounts of the Dreyfus Affair published in the newspaper Thamarat al-Funun (founded 1875) during 1898 to demonstrate how Arab writers addressed the rights of minorities in Europe and examined failed emancipatory projects. Writing about the Dreyfus Affair allowed intellectuals in the Levant to reverse the power relationship between themselves and Europe and to comment on the kinds of politics that would ensure the equality before the law of the Jewish minority in Europe. These debates further illustrate that even before the shift to electoral politics in the Ottoman Empire (after 1908) and in postwar Arab nation-states, Arab writers were preoccupied with the relationship between statecraft and majority-minority relations. They argued that democratic institutions such as parliaments and courts of law were the best venues to safeguard the rights of religious communities whose mere existence was defined as a problem. Bashkin shows how Thamarat al-Funun pointed to phenomena that endangered religious communities, such as fanaticism, racism, abuse of power by the police and the military, and mob politics.

Minor Threats and the Biopolitics of Youth

In contemporary France, the problem of “immigrant youth”—French citizens, born to migrant parents, often from former French colonies—symbolizes the question of minority and national belonging. The development and disciplining of immigrants have, for several decades, formed the focus of sociological, anthropological, as well as political discourse, especially in the wake of the 2005 urban riots. Considering their case can help us to understand the history and the present-day predicament of “minority” in order to reimagine it beyond restrictive and racist frames.

Paya Soup

This short story set in Mumbai imagines the enduring legacies of pandemic sickness and immunity. Everyday labors, pleasures, demands, and relations must be navigated across the fault lines of health, illness, and state surveillance.

Minorities Treaties and Mandatory Regimes

The post–World War I treaties of Versailles, Sèvres, and Lausanne collectively created two related frames for ongoing Allied control over unreliable territory: a system of “minority protection” in the new and fragile states of eastern Europe, and a neocolonial regime of externally monitored “mandates” in the Mashriq and elsewhere, with both systems falling under the jurisdiction of the newly constructed League of Nations based in Geneva. This article explores how the architects of the peace agreements developed the concepts of minority rights and mandatory responsibilities in conjunction, as a way of codifying, formalizing, and legitimizing restrictions on sovereignty along immovable racial lines.

What Is a “Minority” in an Imperial Formation?

Is minority a term applicable to groups in the Russian Empire, as an imperial formation? This article seeks to answer this question by engaging with two others: (1) Was there a term (or terms) that conveyed that idea? And, (2) Was there a historical experience among particular segments of that society with attributes that we may associate with “minorities”? The article proposes that, on the one hand, there can be no minorities unless a majority has itself come into being, and, on the other, that growing association of the state with the Russian people specifically, and the claim that other East Slavs were also Russian despite regional particularities, along with efforts to create a kind of citizenship through institutions that were inclusive of non-Russian peoples, began to constitute such a majority and minorities in Russia.

Middle East Popular Politics in Gramscian Perspective

This article outlines a theoretical framework for researching popular politics in the Middle East and North Africa. It sketches a Gramscian alternative to existing approaches in materialist Marxism, cultural studies, and social movement studies. It also aims to think a Gramsci useful to historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, beyond the common loci of Gramsci scholarship in political theory, comparative literature, and international relations. With a start point in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis, it puts forward a concept of popular politics as a mostly slow-moving, complex, and many-layered transformative activity, a form of historical protagonism comprising a variety of moments, capable of working changes on existing forms of hegemony and founding new social relations. The point is to enable researchers in Middle East studies to see and research popular politics, carry on a critique of transformative activity, and inform transformation in the present.

From Internationalism to Nationalism

The steady rollout of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a human right? Should patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global South behind in a global queue? These questions are not new; the world struggled with these ethical dilemmas during the HIV-AIDS pandemic at the end of the twentieth century, when global South governments led by Nelson Mandela fought multinational pharmaceutical corporations for the right to essential life-saving drugs. Can the same strategies be mobilized to deal with inequalities in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This article demonstrates a technological and geopolitical shift in the last two decades that hinder global South solidarities actualized during the HIV-AIDS pandemic. Instead, Banerjee argues that in the present, multinational corporations and Euro-American governments are trying to reverse some of the key political visions and victories of HIV-AIDS internationalism, exploiting the urgency of the Covid-19 crisis to put in place a new vaccine apartheid.

From Religious Eulogy to War Anthem

This article looks to two songs, “Layla Said” and “Mammad, You Weren't There to See,” to examine the politics of representation, race, religion, and nationalism in late twentieth-century Iran. “Layla Said,” a religious eulogy sung by Jahanbakhsh Kurdizadeh, would serve as inspiration for the most popular song of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in terms of melody, rhythm, and lyrics. Kurdizadeh, a visibly Black Iranian, is not popularly remembered as the source of the eulogy, an omission that compounds many of the politics of Black representation in Iran. Through an investigation of film, aural recordings, photographs, and more, this article follows the many mutations of the eulogy-turned-anthem to identify the various ways ethnography and documentary works frame blackness in Iran. Kurdizadeh's life and marginalized legacy highlights the tacit erasure of blackness on the national stage in Iran.