TY - JOUR
T1 - Reviewing and the politics of voice
T2 - Peoples in the Arab world "name" their struggles "revolutions" and not the "arab Spring"
AU - Abdelhay, Ashraf
AU - Severo, Cristine
AU - Makoni, Sinfree
N1 - Funding Information:
Open Access funding is provided by the Qatar National Library. We would like to thank the General Editor (Alexandre Duchêne) and the associate editors who read the earlier draft of this paper for their very useful comments. We also want to thank the publisher for the permission to publish an Arabic version of this article. We are also grateful to colleagues who have engaged with the Arabic version of the English text (see Appendix), and we particularly want to thank Albashir Mohamed, Mekki Elbadri, Ahmed Berair, and Mohammaed Ismail. The publication of this article was funded by the Qatar National Library.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Ashraf Abdelhay et al., published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2021
PY - 2021/3/1
Y1 - 2021/3/1
N2 - Reviewing is an act of power and not a mere act of applying shared academic standards of rigor. As such, it is inevitably implicated in the cultural politics of "naming". In this paper we animate this taken-for-granted statement in the context of naming the sociopolitical struggles against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Since the end of 2010, the Arab world has witnessed a relatively organized series of protests and the peoples have named them "revolutions". Western cultural political discourse has renamed these (trans)locally constituted struggles the "Arab Spring". If we take sociolinguistics seriously as the "study of language in use", we should consider the peoples in the Arab world as "subjects"of their own definitions, rather than as "objects"of Western constructions. We contend that reviewers, as gatekeepers, are implicated in the politics of voice when they uncritically accept the use of Western inventions as the "only"appropriate way of naming the world, and in so doing they effectively subvert the revolutionary interests in the Arab world.
AB - Reviewing is an act of power and not a mere act of applying shared academic standards of rigor. As such, it is inevitably implicated in the cultural politics of "naming". In this paper we animate this taken-for-granted statement in the context of naming the sociopolitical struggles against dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. Since the end of 2010, the Arab world has witnessed a relatively organized series of protests and the peoples have named them "revolutions". Western cultural political discourse has renamed these (trans)locally constituted struggles the "Arab Spring". If we take sociolinguistics seriously as the "study of language in use", we should consider the peoples in the Arab world as "subjects"of their own definitions, rather than as "objects"of Western constructions. We contend that reviewers, as gatekeepers, are implicated in the politics of voice when they uncritically accept the use of Western inventions as the "only"appropriate way of naming the world, and in so doing they effectively subvert the revolutionary interests in the Arab world.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85102813022&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85102813022&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1515/ijsl-2020-0084
DO - 10.1515/ijsl-2020-0084
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102813022
SN - 0165-2516
VL - 2021
SP - 9
EP - 20
JO - International Journal of the Sociology of Language
JF - International Journal of the Sociology of Language
IS - 267-268
ER -