Editors’ Note

As we write, encampments are springing up at universities around the world as students, staff, and faculty advocate for justice in Palestine. The special section we publish here on “Decolonizing Research/Politicizing Ethics” asks us to consider the role in and of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the academy and the academic. Where does theory reside? What is the scholar's position with respect to their subject of study? This section comes at a critical juncture in our present; it informs a critical perspective on de-centering a western hegemony on theory-making and power-positioning. In their editors’ introduction, Mayssoun Sukarieh and Lila Abu-Lughod and invite us to think about the standards of academic research and to ponder the university's imbrication in erstwhile and continuing colonial projects. Abu-Lughod draws together the scholarship on Indigenous pasts and presents with that of MENA to illustrate the convergences of colonial erasures. Eight essays ranging across Libya, Iraq, the United States, and Israel careful destructure established “normative” practices of research. A second special section on the “Lyric in South Asia” investigates the role of poesis in literary forms across the diverse languages of South Asia. It thinks across Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, and Urdu and spans the Indian Ocean diaspora. Following a form and a genre across particular corpora allows the contributing scholars—Francesca Chubb-Confer, Jazmin Graves Eyssallenne, Meghan Hartman, Jane Mikkelson, Kristina Rogahn, and Shiv Subramaniam—to advance our understanding of genre poetry especially within the world literature.Finally, we have four substantial independent essays offering interventions of their own. Ezgi Güner writes on the self-presentation of the Süleyman Efendi Cemaati in Senegal and Tanzania, linking the Turkish anticolonial and modernist rhetoric to Muslim Africa, offering important suggestions for how to think about religious connection and disjuncture. David Arnold offers a survey of the role of monumentality in colonial photography in British India; his article proposes an intriguing reframing of the photographic subject, from the ethnographic self to canal building and bridge construction. Humayun Kabir provides a rare intellectual history of a critically important figure, Abul Hashim from Bangladesh, demonstrating the importance of such accounts for the postcolonized world. Rajarshi Ghose and Utsa Ray link Pakistan and Bangladesh in the necessary framework of caste production across the subcontinent.In these terrible times, CSSAAME offers these reminders of the persistence of a multiplicity of knowledge traditions and challenges to epistemic orders that would deny or domesticate them.