1. (Special issue special question): what motivated the special issue / what were some of the challenges in putting it together 

My scholarly interest is within the anthropology of modernity, with a particular emphasis on various but entangled fields such as political, legal, feminist, and medical anthropology and anthropology of art or visual culture. It extends to political sociology, science and technology studies, post-colonial studies, political philosophy, and the exploration of literary and poetic expressions in response to political violence. In recent years I have been working on what I call catastrophic art, dating back to the formation of the modern or colonial nation-state in the 15^th century. It is a critical inquiry into how the plunder of artworks and cultural heritages is tied to the destruction or murder of knowledge, human collective, histories, place, and political organization both within and beyond the colonial context.

In the course of my doctoral research, I learned that engaging in critical research or scholarly pursuits is a profound expression of commitment to understanding human existence, living conditions, and ecologies without the claim of a settled explanation. In this context, it becomes a scholarly responsibility to transcend the embodied memories of the established disciplinary boundaries that demarcate anthropology, literature, philosophy, history, sociology, and poetry. This responsibility is not unique to me; rather, it is a shared practice among numerous scholars with whom I collaborate, including the contributors of the special issue. In our historical moment of digital connectivity, democratic states with nuclear bombs, endless political violence, and endless violent displacement and homelessness, this crossing of disciplinary borders has become both an ethical and scholarly responsibility.

These tangled responsibilities served as the driving force behind the struggles of bringing critical scholars together from various institutions and parts of the world and the dissemination of the special issue. The special issue embodies a commitment to learning and critical knowledge; as critical to the imagination or formation of what Mahmood Mamdani calls the “survivor community” in a decolonised society. The work of inviting scholars to commit to historical inquiry into the concept of a “good society” or a decolonised autobiography or memory is inherently challenging, yet equally rewarding. It is as much about the experience of hospitality as it is the exploration of historical questions, carrying with it the responsibility of creating and giving space to and hosting one another as foreigners, human beings, scholars, and texts. To me, much like any pursuit of knowledge, Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native (2020) and the special issue are ways of imagining that the possibility of political justice after political violence, thinking beyond the legal production of a victim-and-perpetrator binary and all naturalised political identities, and the legal claim of justice itself, are all processes of translation and hospitality, which I discuss in Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers University Press, 2024).

2. (Background) Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

My life in the scholarly research world began, perhaps unexpectedly, as a journey into sociological research in South Africa in 2008: I found myself studying modern forms of state or political violence. At that time, I was an exchange student from Uppsala University, in Sweden, at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Stellenbosch and its university had played a central role in the formation and the brutal life of the colonial apartheid state. It was the centre for the ‘scientific’ justification of racial difference and so the dissemination of the imperial ‘science’ that created racial hierarchy with ‘white/ness’ on top of it and as the natural order of things.

During my time at Stellenbosch University, I gradually became aware of the persistence of apartheid’s institutionalization of ‘racial’ hierarchy and ‘biological’ difference in post-apartheid South Africa. The naturalization of ‘racial or biological differences’ had become ingrained in the everyday language of both lecturers and students. It was and still common to identify as ‘black, Indian, coloured, and white’, and the university itself continued to be regarded as a (historically) ‘white’ institution.

This context led me to focus my MA Thesis on the persistence of apartheid in different forms at Stellenbosch University, exploring the human condition of those who were registered and called ‘black minority students’. It was eventually published as ‘Colour-Line: The Petrifaction of Racialization and Alterity at the University of Stellenbosch’ in The Journal of Higher Education in Africa, CODESRIA. The institutionalization of racism and the enduring perception of irreconcilable racial differences continue to shape collective memory, dividing present-day South Africa into distinct racial categories based on ‘skin colour’.

My scholarly interest in the political violence of modernity continued with my doctoral dissertation, which I completed at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and University of Halle-Wittenberg. It examined the enduring impacts of the Iraqi state’s al-Anfāl genocide in what is today known as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, with a particular emphasis on the recollections of women who had survived mass destruction, rape, and sexual violence, which I engage in ‘The Force of Writing in Genocide: On Sexual Violence in the al-Anfāl Operations and beyond’ in the book Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity, edited by Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia Salvi (Rutgers University Press, 2017).

This anthropological exploration into the political violence of modernity, the haunting experiences of rape and sexual violence, and the intergenerational struggles over the selection of ‘right’ memories or the determination of ‘necessary’ archives and memorials not only fostered my connections with ‘foreign’ people, places, institutions, histories, and travelling memories of state violence, but also opened the door for collaborative work with scholars worldwide. These collaborations not only extended my research to the museographic memories of genocide in Rwanda and memories of the Holocaust in Western Europe but also led to publications such as, Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (co-edited by Ralph Buchenhorst and Maria Six-Hohenbalken, 2017); Tele-Evidence: On the Translatability of Modernity’s Violence (Special Issue, co-edited by Richard Rottenburg), published with the journal of Critical Studies in 2019, as well as collaboration with medical scientists from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, resulting in several publications in Public Library of Science, British Medical Journal, and Quality of Life Research. I have also worked with Stefanie Bognitz, who is among the contributors to the special issue on a forthcoming special issue focusing on the disremembered Black Enlightenment philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo, and working on two separate book projects: ‘Unsettling the Political Lives of Skin Colour’, which we (Stefanie and I) aim to publish with Wits University Press, and ‘Traces of Colonialism and the Call for Justice in South Africa’ with Bongani Ngqulunga, who has also contributed to the special issue.

In this context of colonial modernity, I have also been working on what I call Catastrophic Art. It is a critical inquiry into the imperial colonial murder of knowledge, focusing on the plunder of artworks and cultural heritages as tied to social, cultural and political life in what is today Nigeria and Ghana. I have expanded this research to include colonial art, memorials and monuments in South Africa.

3. (Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article?

Similar to the preceding questions, this one too, at least to me, revolves around the question of autobiography. Beyond my own research, various encounters and committed discussions led me to explore the possibility of a special issue on Mamdani’s book, as an engagement with modernity’s violence, afterlives, political, justice, law, and survivorship. Once it became clear that the editorial members of Anthropological Theory were interested in the issue, I felt the call to explore question of the autobiographical in the context of political modernity.

Let me put it this way. Since the ‘green movement’ or ‘green revolution’ in Iran in 2009, I have occasionally engaged in discussions with my mother regarding the calculated violence perpetrated by the ‘Islamic republic of Iran’ against people within its political borders that the British and French empires drew in early 20^th century. We reflect on how the ‘Islamic republic’ has naturalised itself as the sole God-appointed ruler of a nation with rich histories, including imperial political traditions and violence. Over the past 45 years, my mother, Shakar Nazari, has mourned being completely ‘cut off from Iran’, articulating a condition of absolute dispossession and displacement. As she has aged, the prospect of returning to Iran and living there alone on her own has become an impossibility. It is important to note that this human experience or condition is not unique to my mother or the millions of Iranian mothers who find themselves ‘cut off from Iran’, whether they reside abroad or within the country. This is a condition of destruction, dispossession, and displacement that is emblematic of political modernity, which has been extensively explored within social science, humanities and the arts, powerfully discussed in Mamdani’s book, and which continues to be of scholarly concern to me.

My mother and I have grown older and experienced many changes in our lives since the ‘green movement/revolution’ 2009, or since 1979/80 when my parents escaped the ‘Islamic republic’, which I discuss in my contribution to the special issue: ‘In search of decolonised political futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’s neither settler nor native’. Yet, in Iran, the endless daily political violence, the calculated destruction of lives, the various forms of dispossession, and the ongoing protests for a more dignified life and accountable political organisation remain unabated.

The reading of Mamdani’s brought about thoughtful discussions with my mother. Central to them was the potential transformation of post-republic Iran into what Mamdani terms a ‘community of survivors’. Following these discussions in turn, I took the initiative to organise an episode of what I called Actuvirtual Symposium on the book at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I work. This Actuvirtual Symposium took place in early 2021 and became the space for an engaging discussion on Mamdani’s book with the participation of Mamdani himself, along with Julia Eckert, Leslie Dikeni, and Homi Bhabha.

During the time I was working on my article, the political murder of Zhina/Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022 led to unexpected mass protest – or revolution, as it was also called – engulfing the ‘Islamic republic’. As I discuss in the article, as a woman and under the colonial rule in Iran, Zhina’s murder goes beyond being an isolated autobiography. As ‘Zhen, Zhyan, Azadi’ (Sorani and Kermanji Kurdish) and ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ (Farsi) – Women, Life, Freedom – shows Zhina’s autobiography speaks to that of human condition since the ‘1979 revolution’ and political modernity at large.

4. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions your article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates? [can speak briefly about the other articles as well, if you like]

While engaging with women who survived the Anfāl genocide in Iraq (1987-1991) and continued to reside in some surviving villages, districts and towns deemed outlawed during that period, I frequently encountered inquiries such as ‘how is your mother?’ I slowly learned that no one is really satisfied with my instant answer: ‘thank you for asking, she is fine’. I encountered the exact same question during my research in Murambi and Kigali in Rwanda, and it came from women scholars and public intellectuals with whom I was working, and in South Africa, also from women scholars and friends who know about my research. The question haunted me. It slowly led to me to think of more epistemological questions than a settled answer: ‘Has your mother also experienced political violence? How did she survive? How does she cope? Does she speak of her memories of political violence and displacement? Do you talk with her about us? Why don’t you tell us about her?’

These questions served, I believe, as my infinite pursuit of understanding the question that haunted me – ‘how is your mother?’ At the same time, I felt, that the recurring and singular question was a critical inquiry into my anthropological research on modern political violence such as genocide and feminicide and the extensive movements across continents, countries, cities, towns, villages, museums, archives, libraries, narratives, people, survivors, conferences in pursuit of the research to which I was committed. ‘How is your mother?’ was an autobiographical inquiry into the overarching objectives of my research that made me find myself crossing boundaries, borders, memories, and landscapes, completely unsettling the nationalistic, biologistic, and social and racial narrative of the mother-child relationship. What is at stake in the question is nothing less than the life on earth.

The recurring question about my mother’s life and memories accompanied me, and I would carry this query within me, later discussing it with my mother during visits to Sweden. Whenever she inquired about my work, asking, ‘How is your life? What occupies you these days?’ endless conversations would follow. These conversations would lead to uncovering memories that she had not previously shared with my siblings or me, and memories that I had never shared with her.

These endless and expansive discussions were facilitated and controlled by language. Within our shared context, the act of speaking or narrating transformed into a process of translating the memories and lived experiences residing within both of us. These experiences contribute to shaping our autobiographies, transcending mere personal narratives or self-presentation. As we listened to each other’s narratives, we assumed the roles of both host and hostage to one another. The act of translation played a crucial role in allowing memories to traverse through us as words that are never neutral or innocent, as at issue was haunting memories of acts of political violence. In these processes of translation, we can learn how violence holds its survivors hostage and how such violence remains untranslatable. I learned from women survivors of genocidal violence that when sharing and attentively listening to each other’s memories of modernity’s violence anyone can think and speak of herself as someone with a crowded autobiography that is not always accessible to translational practices, linguistic or otherwise.

For example, I would discuss my research with my mother, describing how women, children, and men survived and live with lasting effects of state organised acts of destruction. When talking to survivors of the Anfāl and Rwandan genocides, I would share my memories of my mother’s memories of state violence that dispossessed and displaced her forever. Through these narratives, I experience myself hoping to carry across both translatable and untranslatable social and political memories that I carry in me and to show how, as both a human and scholar, my life is inherently tied up with global networks of state violence beyond the 20th century. The focus shifts from an isolated life to historical atrocities, memories and human experiences of collective suffering, the struggle for survival, political and legal accountability, law, the pursuit of justice beyond legal procedures, and the future questions of politics and ethics beyond the borders of the modern or colonial nation-state.

Without question, with the encounters and bearing witness to the infinite suffering of others comes hospitality – hosting and becoming hostage to the other and the memories that transcend mere physicality, visibility, and optics. This process unfolds ethical and epistemological questions; responsibilities towards the other or survivors of political violence; the quest for a liberatory or decolonised society; and certain freedom from identification with violent political imaginaries, politicised identities or memories that shape human existence, relations and experiences of life on earth.

Thinking with the concepts of translation, hospitality, and autobiography, we can learn how the contributions in this special issue by Jaskiran Dhillon, Bongani Ngqulunga, Julia Eckert, Stefanie Bognitz, Nadia Abu El-Haj, and myself, shed light on the ways in which the modern or colonial state in Germany, Rwanda, South Africa, the United States, Iran, and Israel, systematically resist and destroy the possible experience of hospitality. What becomes evident is that each of these states has institutionalised a selective memory, carefully crafted through the politics of translation of historical violence. This institutionalisation has come to naturalise an inhospitable national autobiography that privileges a certain politicised identity, systematically eliminating space for the foreign and undesirable ‘other’.

In my own contribution to the special issue, I try to show how such a politics of autobiography and elimination of the possibility of hospitality as giving place is at the heart of the modern or colonial nation-state. Autobiography plays an important role not only in inquiries into the historical atrocities but also in allowing one to think the political modernity as an autobiographical question that is replete with haunting memories that are not always available to the phenomenological or ethnographic privileging of the look or visibility or that which can be made visible and seeable, and the institution of a theoretical hierarchy of knowing.

5. (Expansion) Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

It is clear that in the neoliberal world where the struggle for endless economic growth and a privileged consumerist ethos is tangled with the advancing sciences and technologies or technosciences – e.g. the Internet infrastructure – such as no one could ever possibly have imagined in the 20^th century, has displaced life on earth. This ‘historic’ shift has made the founding and conservation of any theory difficult, continuing to change and control how we experience revolution or look at and live in the world. The political, economic, social and cultural conditions are changing radically; the same goes for education, for institutions of learning, communication, relations, research, and knowledge. We can ask whether this is the future, that could never be imagined decades ago.

At the same time, it is as difficult to say that conceptual oppositions are no longer possible because global awareness or knowledge of how age-old concepts deconstruct themselves or that we enter deconstruction as we start speaking, as intellectual culture is restricted to scholar experts or the academic world or that the university scene is completely detached from the public cultural or the neoliberal memory of consumerism, commodification of knowledge and ecological destruction.

In our time, there are definitely heterogenous ways and always more than one way of looking that cannot be restricted to the qualified academic researchers, publications, institutions, or scenes, even though none of these can be seen or experienced as homogenous. As it happens, there are anthropologists who are committed to the constant unsettling of theory that keeps things intact and there are the embedded anthropologist-ethnographers in imperial acts of conquest and political violence, e.g. in Afghanistan and Iraq in early 21^st century. These relationships demonstrate that under the name of anthropology-ethnography acts of conquest and political violence happen. This can be understood as reunification of anthropology and the imperial state, making anthropology foreign to itself as an ‘independent’ field of critical scientific inquiry or the human pursuit of knowledge. That is the condition of the unknowable future of theory at large.

It is difficult to think that the world of liquid modernity, to borrow from Zygmunt Bauman, as marked by endless political violence, social upheavals, economic uncertainties, ecological destruction, pursuit of justice, feminicide, control of fundamental freedoms, and the university in ruins, colonised university or the struggle for changing theory renders ‘theory’ all the more difficult or completely irrelevant.

Following on what I have said so far, the very act of researching or speaking as an entanglement of autobiography, hospitality, and translation, is an act of theorisation. Speaking as linguistic translation that gather together knowledge and hospitality is an invitation to how one looks, what one sees, or how one experiences and speculates about the world. It is not something that can be seen but it can make us, the listener, both the host and the hostage.

I can just repeat that the word ‘theory’, meaning ‘to look or optical observation’ has indeed dominated the history and trajectory of male governed anthropology-ethnography beyond Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) and others. I am thinking of Ibn Battuta (1304–68/9), Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (978–1048) and numerous others. To borrow from Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist-ethnographer sees through the ‘spy–glass of anthropology’, sees theory as a naturalised act of looking, a solid gaze, and is shaped by anthropology as both a discipline and institution that conserves an epistemological hierarchy that privileges the vision or visual. What would travelling between the department of anthropology and the field mean without the ability to look? Can we truly engage in ‘participant observation,’ as always looking from distance, devoid of vision or optical observation? The essential tasks of note-taking, reading, writing, and drawing the world, as conditioned by the anthropological law, hinges upon the ability to look? The experiences of ethnography or the ethnographic experiences continue to be conditioned by the eye. The institutionalised anthropology – ethnography continue to be constantly supported, founded, and expressed in the acts of seeing, gazing, and visual exploration, rather than in acts of translation, hospitality or the autobiographical.

This anthropology or ethnography as theory, unlike hospitality, has been privileged in particular as the condition of both truth-telling and consuming the ‘other’, for the difference between the ethnographic gaze or look and hospitality is that the ethnographer always looks from a distance and, consequently, they create, remain distanced, and consume the ‘other’. Hospitality as bound up with autobiographical and both translatability and untranslatability does not consume it. Hospitality as a responsible way of learning or ‘theory’ that cannot be confined to a homogenous and homogenising look, is necessary to confronting politicised identities, engaging the entanglement of ‘our’ and the ‘other’s’ heterogenous autobiographies, identities, worlds, histories, memories and pasts. In the digital world which is also a world in ruins, we need hospitality toward the disentangled, homogenised, isolated, targeted ‘other’ who does not speak the institutionalised ethnographic language, yet who makes the colonial anthropologist–ethnographer nervous, unsettling the violence of self-referencing, colonising theory-gaze.

Hospitality can be the experience of a way of living and being with the ‘other’ or a ‘theory’ that allows itself to be theorised with. It is marked by the call for responsible theorisation, or always more than one theory – as translation that is never complete – given that it must deconstruct any privileged vantage point. It calls out and forces us to question the look that defines and makes the ‘radically other’ as a mere extension of ethnography or the ethnographer. Hospitality becomes necessary to move beyond the wilful and homogenising act of looking, defining and producing the other as an experience of utterly foreign and irreconciled other. In our encounter with the ‘other’, be it human or more than human, translation, hospitality, and autobiography become both theoretical and practical imperatives. If anthropology or social sciences at large were to take the experience of hospitality or autobiography seriously, it would both require and constitute an epistemological mutation or revolution in anthropological institutions, education, concepts, and practice. Hence the centrality of hospitality and the indispensability of what I call anthropological hospitality in the twenty-first century and beyond.