(Semi-)Academic Rants: Liberal Arts is what we make of it

Recently, I applied for a job in "Global Liberal Arts." One of the questions on the job application stated: "What do you consider the value of a BA in Global Liberal Arts to be and how would you want to shape the programme over the next three years?" 

At this point, I am more interested in speaking my mind than pandering to search committees. So here is an edited and incomplete version of my response, which I admit may have taken the form of an academic and political rant: 

“Liberal Arts” is a floating signifier: it would be absurd to assign a sui generis value to a floating signifier. Instead we can acknowledge that 'Global Liberal Arts' can be what we make of it. ‘Liberal Arts’ can serve as a throw-back to the classics and their “seven liberal arts,” or as a post-disciplinary gesture that transcends the hegemonic delimitation of systems of power-knowledge (this is not to say, of course, that the options are limited to these two extremes or  that they are necessarily mutually exclusive).  Similarly, the “global” can alternatively operate to de-centralise Western perspectives or to bring the globe to the fold of Western perspective and Occidental power-knowledge. SOAS's Global Studies Programme—a programme that situates its pedagogy within the critique of the institute's own colonial past (a commendable gesture that can alternatively serve as an alibi for the institute's colonial present, a point I will come back to in a moment) but at the same time introduces ‘Israeli culture’ as if it existed outside the imperial past and present of the region and the settler colonial reality of the Israeli state and society—carries both the potential to destabilise and reinforce the colonial. The same could be said largely about SOAS: an institution that both spearheads anticolonial knowledge production and provides training for the empire’s violence workers^* , reducing the global to a body of data that can be consumed by privileged Western subjects and can help imperial armies operate more rationally and humanely. Through the challenging task of teaching Middle East Studies not as another case for the voyeuristic and epistemic consumption of the Western subject but as a lens and a critical tool that deconstructs the hegemonic and the Occidental, I hope to contribute towards a pedagogy and a scholarship that reinforce the anticolonial mission and undermine colonial and imperialistic potentials. 

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^*. and here I must note my debt to my colleague Madiha Tahir who introduced me to this term in her amazingly engaging article "The Distributed Empire of the War on Terror."