የኢትዮዽያውያን ዴሞክራቶች ድረ-ገፅEthiopian Democrats' Website

..... a new planetary awakening far beyond Arab or any other ethnic nationalism. The world is giving birth to a new geography of itself. We must allow for and prepare for a different mode of postcolonial thinking  that will allow the synergy amongst these revolutionary uprisings to work themselves out and stop assimilating them backward into arrested jingoism of one sort or another.

The imaginative geography of this uprising maps out a whole new topography of world for us to navigate and discover. Though every Arab from Morocco to Yemen has every reason to be proud of what the world is witnessing in awe and admiration, neither pan-Arabism nor any other colonially racialized category is a sufficient hermeneutic parallax within which to understand, interpret, and advance forward what is today happening in our liberated world. The liberating geography of this uprising goes far beyond the Arab and even Muslim world. From Senegal to Djibouti similar uprisings are brewing. The commencement of the Green Movement in Iran almost two years before the uprising in the Arab world has had far reaching implications deep into Afghanistan and Central Asia, and today as far as China there are official fears of a "Jasmine Revolution."

Giving birth to ourselves beyond our colonial condition we are the fortunate witness of the dawn of a whole new discovery of who and what we are—from Morocco to Afghanistan, from Turkey to Yemen, from Central Asia to the extended domains of the Indian ocean. We must simply wake up, catch our breath, and wash our eyes. We are the discoverers of a brand new world—a world whose geography is ours to map, over against the colonial map we have inherited and are now finally leaving behind. Our deferred defiance against domestic tyranny and globalized imperialism at one and the same time is the dawn of a whole new horizon on world history.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University

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