On Not Despising the Present: Some Notes on Faris Giacaman’s 'The Sadness of Post-Militance'

[Detail from the cover of Elias Khoury, \"White Masks.\" Image via Wikipedia Commons.] [Detail from the cover of Elias Khoury, \"White Masks.\" Image via Wikipedia Commons.]

On Not Despising the Present: Some Notes on Faris Giacaman’s 'The Sadness of Post-Militance'

By : Anthony Alessandrini

A Brechtian maxim: “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” — Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht”[1]

You have no right to despise the present. — Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”[2]

I was quite moved by Faris Giacaman’s recent article “The Sadness of Post-Militance: Some Reflections on Brown University’s ‘New Directions in Palestine Studies’ Conference.” For a young scholar to call into question the direction of Palestine Studies, focusing on a conference featuring some of the most prominent names in the field, takes no little courage. Beyond that, Giacaman’s larger call to remember the relationship between scholarship and militance, and between knowledge production and revolution, resonated strongly with me, as it no doubt did with many other readers. If, in what follows, I pose a few challenges to some of Giacaman’s premises and conclusions, it is intended in the spirit of moving forward with the larger project that he names as “militant research.” So these comments are intended in the spirit of collaboration and solidarity.

Giacaman’s review of the work presented at the Brown conference stresses the historic nature of this gathering of scholars working on the political economy of Palestine. At the same time, the “sadness” that he evokes in his title (borrowed in part from David Graeber’s observations on what he calls “post-workerism”) has, he writes, “almost nothing to do with the scholarly work of the individuals involved, and much more to do with the political moment in which we currently live.” His overall impression, gathered from the work presented at the conference and from the state of Palestine Studies more generally, is that “the period we are in represents a shift in knowledge-production on Palestine to an age of post-militants.” Against what he sees as the de-politicizing intellectual trends of our time, Giacaman issues a call for a new form of “militant scholarship,” a term that he takes from the work of the Colectivo Situaciones group in Argentina. For him, this means a return to Marxist categories of analysis, and a move away from what he declares to be “the types of postmodern, post Marxist lenses that are a part of the retreat from political engagement”; his sadness stems from his sense that these latter frameworks underwrite much of the contemporary work on Palestine (including work published on Jadaliyya).

I am not certain whether I am necessarily one of Giacaman’s intended interlocutors. I was not present at the Brown conference. I do not work on political economy, as it is generally understood, and certainly would never be mistaken for a political economist. I have written on Palestinian culture and politics, broadly defined, but I would not necessarily fit within the academic field identified as “Palestine Studies.” I have worked occasionally with, alongside, and in the service of activist groups and organizations in Palestine and within the larger Palestine solidarity movement, but I would not be able to comfortably describe myself as an activist or a militant, although my work aims to be in dialogue with the work of activists.

Above all, I might be considered outside the realm of Giacaman’s call because my work draws upon intellectual influences that he sees as part of a supposed “retreat from political engagement,” those “intellectual trends” he names as “Foucauldian biopolitics, postmodern criticism…[and] subaltern and postcolonial studies.” Indeed, a few days before Giacaman’s article was published, I argued for the continuing relevance of post-structuralist analysts like Foucault in helping us to formulate intellectual responses and political contributions to the ongoing revolutions of our time. I would like to think—indeed, it is my purpose here to argue—that the militant research Giacaman calls for has room both for a renewed materialist analysis of the kind that he champions and a continuation of the important forms of analysis developed by those post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers that he proposes “to lay…to rest.” To be true to the complexity of our present political situation, we need all of this, and more.

Just to be clear: I have no intention of defending post-structuralism, postcolonialism, or any other “post” for its own sake. In the face of the struggle for justice in Palestine (and elsewhere), such academic jockeying is a matter of relatively little importance (which is not the same as suggesting that academic knowledge production itself does not matter). What is important, however, and where I do want to be in dialogue with Giacaman’s important arguments, are the ways we ground ourselves as intellectuals. Another way of describing this is the problem of how we engage with the present, in the form of the struggles for justice that are always ongoing. In other words, how do we, as scholars working in the service of the struggle for social change, orient ourselves towards the present, with an eye towards both the radical past that inspires us and the better future that we are seeking to create? It is in this context, reading his article, that I found myself haunted by the two quotes I cited as epigraphs: Walter Benjamin’s Brechtian call to begin not with the good old things but with the bad new ones, and Baudelaire’s injunction, taken up by Foucault, not to despise the present.

Looking back at the generation of intellectuals aligned with Shu’un Filastiniyya, Giacaman finds scholarly work attached expressly to the Palestinian revolution. Articles “explored questions of political strategy, tactics, and practice.” The authors of such articles “were also revolutionaries” and “their allegiance to academic institutions was secondary to their political commitments.” The role of such research “was expressly political,” he concludes. By contrast, looking at the work of the generation that followed, Giacaman diagnoses several different strands, all of which, he argues, “shared a deep skepticism of any ideology emphasizing conscious collective action, especially Marxism as a normative political project.”

Giacaman suggests that he might be accused of “romanticizing” the earlier generation of revolutionary scholarship, but I think he is quite accurate in his assessment. What is missing, however, is an equally historically grounded assessment of the work that followed—or, to put it in materialist terms, a truly conjunctural understanding of this work. Giacaman sums up the “postmodern trend” that he accuses of moving research away from its earlier political commitments as follows: “Collective political action is no longer a viable way forward, reality is far more complex, power is diffused, and the only way to subvert it is at the individual level.” I want to suggest a different genealogy of what he describes as the “post-militant” generation, a different set of intentions, and most important, a different set of conclusions. My intention is to expand our list of our “good old things”—which, in my telling, includes both Giacaman’s militant generation and the “post-militant” generation—so that we can better draw upon these influences for the more important work of struggling against the circumstances of our “bad new ones.” This involves a recasting of the body of work that is often brought together under the phrase “the cultural turn” (sometimes interchangeably described as “the discursive turn”), seen by Giacaman and others as a turn away from politics.

Let me tell the story a bit differently, beginning with the importance of the work of Antonio Gramsci for what Giacaman sees as the “post-militant” generation of intellectuals. In a recent review of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (a book that is a point of reference for Giacaman), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us of the specific conjuncture from which Gramsci produced those prison writings that constitute his primary intellectual and political legacy. Gramsci’s writing on the subaltern classes—written, she reminds us, not from within an academic milieu, but from within “the very thick of things”—was quite literally “the last piece of writing Gramsci was engaged in when he was nabbed by the fascists.” At the center of Gramsci’s subsequent writing, which followed upon the work he had done as a leader of the Communist Party of Italy, was the question of what had gone wrong during the preceding decade: “Acknowledging that the General Strike of 1920 had not worked, he was now looking at the possibility of making long-term change.”[3] Gramsci’s focus upon spheres not ordinarily considered “political” in the traditional sense, including the fields of culture and education, was precisely part of this larger process of theorizing an expanded notion of political action that could prove more effective in carrying forward the struggle amidst the dark times in which he found himself literally imprisoned.

Let us now extend this point to a more global level (and I promise this will help return us to the question of Palestine). In the imperial intellectual centers (from which Gramsci rightly saw Italy as slightly removed), during the time period that Giacaman marks as beginning the era of “post-militance,” a new conjuncture, a new set of political contexts, and a new set of struggles gave rise, certainly, to forms of post-structuralist thought. But it also gave rise to new intellectual and political work in cultural studies, embodied by figures such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy. Through collaborative volumes such as The Empire Strikes Back, and through slow and painful struggles, such work began to recognize the centrality of race as an analytic and political category that could not simply be subsumed by class (perhaps the most famous formulation is Hall’s description of race as “the modality in which class is `lived,` the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and `fought through`.”[4]) This conjuncture gave rise to Edward Said’s monumental Orientalism—a book whose framework owes as much to the work of Gramsci and Williams as it does to Foucault—and to a new set of struggles against a category that had thus been named and identified as a field of political action. It gave rise to the work of too many feminist and queer thinkers to even name here, who threw open new areas of intellectual inquiry and political action, fields of thought and action that had always existed but could now be gotten at through new forms of political struggle.

Clearly, none of this was work born of despair, or of the desire to move away from “politics” and towards some form of neo-liberal self-cultivation. In the struggle to create viable forms of militant scholarship in the face of our political present, our job is to continue to value, as both Giacaman and I do, the unsparing commitment of an earlier generation of militant scholars working in the service of projects such as the Palestinian revolution, and at the same time understand the work of the generation that has followed as coming very precisely in the wake of this earlier work. It is work that, at its best, follows Gramsci’s lead in looking back at the previous generation and asking the question of why things didn’t work out as they should have. It thus opens up new avenues, not only of intellectual inquiry, but also of political struggle.

Missing this point about forms of intellectual and political work too easily dismissed as “postmodern,” for those of us dedicated to the struggle for justice, self-determination, and a different future in Palestine, is also to miss the opportunities for comparative work—not just on the intellectual level, but also on the political level (although even rhetorically separating these levels is ultimately false, since the goal would be precisely to unite them). This is a point raised in interesting ways by several of those who have already commented on Giacaman’s article. I will simply note that these political and intellectual connections are being made every day at the level of practice, in the global movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions that has become one of the major political forces of our time.

But addressing this point regarding global connections also means addressing another aspect of our political present: the context through which one might (or might not) continue to think about “national revolutions” such as the Palestinian revolution that is Giacaman’s focal point. This is one more crucial place where, I would argue, a closer look at the “post-militant” generation whose work Giacaman sees as a detour to be avoided is certainly in order. He provides a list of events that he sees as encapsulating the stages of the “decline of the Palestinian revolution”: “from the defeat in Beirut, to exile in Tunis, to the first intifada’s failure, and Oslo’s advent.” This makes a certain historical sense. But we might pause in the moment between what he describes as “the first intifada’s failure” and that of “Oslo’s advent.” Certainly, one way that the first intifada could be described as a “failure” is the fact that it was followed by Oslo, with all that came in its wake. But I would argue that “Oslo’s advent” was hardly an inevitable outcome of the first intifada. Rather, it represents the rise of a particular form of nationalist leadership (or better said, a group of elites that presumes to assume national leadership without successfully obtaining an actual state) that Giacaman rightly describes as unaccountable, hierarchical, and elitist.

This means that an understanding of the Palestinian revolution of today would need to be quite different from that which guided Giacaman’s earlier generation of militant scholars. As compared to a national liberation struggle aimed solely at a colonizing power (together, of course, with all the international forces allied with and undergirding the Israeli occupation), today’s struggle continues to be against these colonizing forces but should be seen simultaneously as a struggle against those national elites who have consolidated their power and position (such as it is) precisely through their willingness to assume the role of “partners” in the Israeli occupation. This is the slow sad story of the “peace process.”

It is also the story, I would contend, that runs throughout the work of those postcolonial theorists who are too often accused of turning away from “real” politics, and who form part of Giacaman’s group of apparently “post-militants.” But running through the work of so many thinkers whose work has come to be grouped together as “postcolonialism,” from Frantz Fanon to the Subaltern Studies historians to the dependency theorists of Latin America, is the problem of how to think about politics in the light of this particular outcome of national revolutions. It is a state of affairs that could rightly (if perversely) be called “postcolonial,” if by this one means simply the crude sense of technical political independence as compared to direct colonial rule. Even in Palestine, one could, post-Oslo, make such a technical claim regarding the post-colonial state of limited autonomy rather than direct occupation, however laughable such a claim might look in considering the violent reality of colonial rule that represents the actual experience of life in Palestine. Faced with the sight of Abu Mazen meeting John Kerry as an example of the “change” wrought by Oslo, it is instructive to remember Fanon’s words regarding the “change” that post-colonialism brought to “independent” Gabon: “In fact the only change is that Monsieur M’ba is president of the Republic of Gabon, and he is the guest of the president of the French Republic.”[5]

Diagnosing this state of affairs as an outcome of the national revolutions of an earlier generation (not the necessary outcome, but one that nevertheless too often followed such struggles) is not the same as “a retreat from political engagement.” It is simply a clear-eyed attempt to analyze the present, in order to contribute to new forms of struggle against this new political reality. Certainly, the “post-Oslo” present of Palestine (like the “post-colonial” present of Gabon) has nothing to do with the vision of true decolonization for which that earlier revolutionary generation fought. The best work of postcolonial studies has involved the attempt, not only to predict and diagnose what went wrong, but to imagine and theorize what comes after the post-colonial—or, in the case of Palestine, what comes after Oslo. To take inspiration from the militant generation of scholars that Giacaman invokes makes perfect sense in this context. But to confuse this with the assumption that the particular political context, and the subsequent political struggles, of our generation will take the same form as it did for this earlier generation is to risk misapprehending the present. Our political present is not a fallen version of that past in which the militant generation carried out their work. It is rather the context within which we have the responsibility to imagine new forms of militancy.

I will end with this point, regarding the importance of the work of the imagination, as a final moment of dialogue with Giacaman’s argument that I would love to carry forward at further length. He notes in his conclusion that he “do[es] not advocate returning to a carbon copy of the intellectual climate created by the Palestinian revolution.” I want to be certain to acknowledge this point, as well as his further point that what he takes as his main source of inspiration from this earlier militant generation is “the marriage of knowledge-production with political action.” I am in total agreement with this. The next question is: What might politically-engaged knowledge production look like in our political present? He suggests that “one of the roles of academics should be to explore questions of organizational structure: that is, questions having to do with revolutionary practice.” I certainly would not disagree with this.

But there is an absence in Giacaman’s piece that is incredibly striking, and it has to do with his invocation of Elias Khoury, following upon Khoury’s intervention at the Brown conference. Khoury is presented to us as the editor of Shu’un Filastiniyya, as a member of that militant generation that Giacaman honors, and as an inspiration for militant research yet to come. He is of course all of these things. But absent here is Elias Khoury in the role through which many of us know him best: as one of the most important novelists of our time. As any reader of his work knows, Khoury’s fiction is deeply inspired by and connected to his work as a political militant, specifically at the service of the Palestinian revolution. But at the same time, like all great imaginative writing, its direct relationship to political struggle—one might say, more crudely, its immediate applicability to the revolution—is highly complex and mediated. To suggest this is not to step away from “real” politics; it is simply to move towards expanding our political vision.

So an admiration for Khoury’s work is one more thing that Giacaman and I share in our mutual dedication to a renewed form of militant scholarship. But in pushing Giacaman’s vision and conclusions a bit further, I suggest that we begin by bringing Khoury’s work with Shu’un Filastiniyya and his work as a novelist together, under the category of “politically-engaged knowledge production.” This is to say, in short, that imaginative work is also political (just as political work is also imaginative). If we are to take just one lesson from Giacaman’s “post-militant/postmodern” generation, it might be this one. To forget the work of imaginative writing in presenting a vision of militant scholarship is to impoverish ourselves, at a time when we need every single one of what Raymond Williams called our “resources of hope.”



NOTES

[1] Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” trans. Anya Bostock, in Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso, 1998), 99.

[2] Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume I: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 310.

[3] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Review of Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 27 (2014): 193.

[4] Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 341.

[5] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 28.

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Inhabiting the Possible: Pedagogy and Solidarity at Camp Ayandeh

“A decent education cannot be limited to tolerating youth accessing their ethnic and cultural history but must be about facilitating their right to do so.” — Cornel West

Globally and nationally, young people are garnering attention as historical actors and agents of social change. At the same time, federal, state, and local politicians are making drastic cuts to primary and secondary schooling, community services supportive of youth development, and higher education. These cuts coincide with a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and continued demonization of Muslim and Middle Eastern communities. They also intersect with attempts to restrict or dismantle hard-fought ethnic studies programs. These attempts reflect a movement towards narrow, test-based curricula that are more informed by what is good for private business than what is good for students.  

Such conditions threaten the existence and continued development of educational spaces that meaningfully serve young people from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds. In this piece, I describe one such program: Camp Ayandeh (ayandeh means “future” in Persian). This program seeks to realize students’ rights to access and participate in their own histories. These reflections offer pedagogical insights, explore relationships between education and social change, and argue for programs that recognize difference and hybridity as profound resources for learning. [1]

Organized by Iranian Alliances Across Borders. Camp Ayandeh provides a positive, inclusive environment where Iranian American high school students learn about their shared histories and build solidarity across differences. Through cultural, historical, and artistic workshops, as well as community-building activities and critical dialogue, Camp Ayandeh helps students identify and respond to issues they see affecting young people in the Iranian diaspora. This includes working together to deconstruct negative images, and develop more humanizing and complex narratives about their communities, families, and themselves.

Now in its seventh year, Camp Ayandeh has become a unique sociocultural experience organized by young Iranian American adults for Iranian American youth. For one week during the summer, eighty-five high school students and thirty-five collegiate staff build what many participants refer to as a family. Together, they generate the trust necessary to grapple with questions of history and identity, and thereby grow as leaders and human beings.

As the current Camp Ayandeh Director, my perspective is inevitably partial. Part of my role, then, is to seek out tensions and areas for continued growth. As with any narrative, my account is one of many possible views on the camp’s significance.

A Window into Camp Ayandeh

People, what they say and do, and how they treat one another during pedagogical activities are what make up educational environments. Given the opportunity to visit and observe interactions at Camp Ayandeh, you would likely notice the mixing of seemingly dissonant languages, genres, and cultural forms: English and Persian, affectionately referred to as “Penglish” or “Fargilisi”; popular Iranian, Middle Eastern, global, and American music and dance; traditional poetry and hip hop; vasati (Iranian dodgeball), and even spontaneous water balloon fights.

You might also sense the organic rhythm of everyday life at the camp, a marker of the community ethos that deepens as the week unfolds. Waiting for the start of morning activities transforms into an occasion for collective singing and dancing. A question about the meaning of the word “cipher” in a writing workshop that draws on Jay Z’s Decoded leads to its own cipher later that day, with a staff member free-styling over a camper’s beat box. 

A community organizing workshop that teaches campers how to strategize around an issue of concern leads one group to conduct a camp survey on the need for Middle Eastern and Global Studies at the high school level. Another group drafts and later presents a “Campers’ Bill of Rights,” including well thought-out demands, such as thirty minutes of informal time before lights out, and signatures from all fellow campers. Camp organizers publicly amend and sign the document, participating in an impromptu democratic process initiated by the campers. An evening jam session inspires a thirteen-year-old and eighteen-year-old to play guitar together for the entire camp, a performance they had humbly shied away from earlier that day. 

The following video, filmed and edited by Sophomore Leila Sadri, conveys the atmosphere created at Ayandeh.

Above all, you might notice relationships—across age, gender, language, region, first and second-generation immigrants, as well as administrators, counselors, and campers. Traversing difference, such friendships make the cliques and hierarchies of high school seem strange. Older students intentionally reach out to younger participants, sitting together during breaks or chanting one of their names at dinner. Counselors stay up late into the night to brainstorm new ways of encouraging their group members to bond, making sure no one feels left out.

Many identify these “familial” relationships as the most meaningful part of their camp experience. Sophomore Arman Sharif comments, “I literally did not dislike anyone at camp. These are all awesome people. After discussions, being together, and just hanging out, they became my family for life.” Senior Anahita Asefirad echoes, “I can’t believe I could become such good friends with people in seven days.” These comments stand in stark contrast to what many campers share as their initial reaction and hesitancy towards the idea of an Iranian American summer program; it would likely be “extremely lame” to join a camp for “a bunch of Iranian kids.” 

Seen in this light, Camp Ayandeh is an attempt by young people with shared histories and experiences of exclusion to create a space of radical inclusion. Together, they seek to resist the demonization of Iran and the Middle East and interrupt the processes of racialization that often turn inwards, compelling us to reject parts of ourselves in order to belong. To heal these splits—Iranian versus American, East versus West—camp participants call into question colonial ideologies that premise inclusion on assimilation. They imagine and inhabit alternative models of inclusion, learning to assert linguistic and cultural hybridity as a strength rather than a deficit. This, I suspect, leads to much of the joy at camp: a social and educational experience where membership is not premised on checking parts of one’s identity at the door. Camp participants are encouraged to know and be their full selves, and to try out possible selves.

At their best, spaces like Ayandeh make it safe to engage in the vulnerability necessary for any kind of real learning. Speaking beautifully-accented Persian or English becomes comfortable despite past experiences of shame or ridicule. Raising a genuine but potentially controversial question or reading a poem’s rough draft to over one hundred people becomes a daily possibility. Such risks may seem small. But in the history of American education, which often explicitly or implicitly demeans students who do not fit dominant cultural norms, they are important markers of educational dignity and change.

Pedagogical Principles

Though many of us refer to the Ayandeh experience as a “magical” one, such contexts do not emerge magically. They are intentionally organized around a number of key principles and grounded in a history and institutional memory that directly inform how participants move in the present.

First, Camp Ayandeh is organized to be a community of learners where all participants are encouraged to take on the dual roles of teacher and student. This approach is distinct from “adult-centered” or “banking” models that treat students as empty receptacles of knowledge. But it is also critical of “student-centered” models that conflate democratic pedagogy with teacher passivity. In a community of learners, all participants are active. Young professionals and graduate and undergraduate students break down interpretations of the Iranian Revolution or model how to read a Hafez poem, making their knowledge public and available for younger members to engage. At the same time, older community members recognize the depth of experience and understanding younger participants have to offer, seeking out opportunities to share responsibility (as in the case of the “Campers Bill of Rights”) and acknowledge countless lessons learned from one another.  

Learning is understood as a deeply social process that comes alive in the context of inter-generational collaboration and mentorship. In contrast to emphasizing “independent learning,” Camp Ayandeh’s approach seeks to generate a culture of assistance, trust, and community— valuable goals in and of themselves that also amplify what is pedagogically possible. Educators must therefore set the collective tone and model careful ways of being and interacting. When moments of disrespect or potential exclusion do arise, staff members are responsible for firmly but lovingly reminding participants of the community rules.  

Listen closely during camp discussions and you might notice the collective hush when each person speaks. The hush is of often a bit quieter when the speaker is a younger camper or someone who has not spoken up before among the whole group. You will hear finger snaps ripple out across the audience when a speaker strikes a collective chord or says something that resonates with an individual camper’s experience. I personally noticed few if any student comments ending without snaps of praise and support. Such moves index the trust that is continuously established, a working faith in others to responsibly hold each person’s contribution from solid assertions to tentative wonderings or doubts. They also give experiential meaning to terms like “solidarity” and “leadership development.”

Second, Camp Ayandeh situates learning in a context of play, creativity, and imagination. Music, poetry, dance, theater, hip hop, and writing provide affective and creative resources for young people to reflect on their lives and participate in cultural production. These crafts also open up new aesthetic forms that affirm the range of our bi-cultural experiences. While many participants describe the pressures they feel to be “fully” Iranian or American, art redefines the cultural borderlands as a reservoir of creativity, inviting students to render their experiences with honesty and specificity.

Drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Augosto Boal [2], Camp Ayandeh uses theater as a form of dramatic play that allows participants to take on and explore different characters, including the protagonists and antagonists of everyday life. This summer, older and younger campers worked together to develop scenes that addressed racial profiling, patriarchy, bullying, and family conflicts. Given such heavy topics, play and imagination provided spiritual nourishment and helped maintain a focus on the hopeful and possible, blending humor with social analysis and creative, non-violent resistance. As Senior Sheerin Tehrani comments, “I liked teatro because it taught us how to act in case someone was using common prejudices against us in any scenario and how to react and educate others about our culture and heritage."

One could argue that a summer camp is more conducive to such playful artistry. However, primary, secondary, and university classrooms can enable intellectual experimentation by privileging the subjunctive—what if, perhaps, could be, let’s try it out—valuing well-crafted questions over quick or easy answers. Humor and creativity can help teachers provoke genuine engagement and resist various forms of ideological rigidity.

Play is also about mastering and bending rules, offering a way to think about expanding students’ access to dominant cultural tools without promoting assimilation. Young people are often the most skilled at this type of ingenuity and more likely to learn instructions only to invent their own versions and purposes. Yet, in times of forced austerity, art, music, and even writing are the first to be pushed out the school door. Educators can help stymie the deeply troubling effects of such decisions by sneaking them back in through the window, finding opportunities to infuse traditional subjects with the artistic and creative.

Finally, learning about oneself and one’s history is fundamentally connected to building solidarity with others. At Camp Ayandeh, we emphasize the world of diversity within the terms “Iranian” and “American,” making explicit reference to the rich histories of communities of color in the United States. Many camp organizers are students of Ethnic and Women’s Studies, borrowing and refashioning tools to make sense of our experiences as Iranian Americans.

During the camp’s American history workshop, we listened to Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit and Woody Guthrie’s Deportee, treating songwriters as historians that can help us view the past through the eyes of those pushed to society’s margins. Camp participants are often eager to talk about race and racism. Many students express frustration at the negative portrayal of Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the media. Almost all can relay a personal experience of discrimination, from teachers mockingly mispronouncing their names to being attacked and labeled as a “terrorist.” Camp Ayandeh seeks to provide a safe space for critically analyzing and healing from these experiences.

In the process, campers often grapple with their own stereotypes and assumptions. Echoing the cultural exceptionalism espoused by some members of the older generation, students have suggested that Iranians ought to be recognized as uniquely high-achieving and successful, or as distinct from other groups in the region. In one theater scene, campers portrayed two passengers harassing an Iranian family at the airport. One actor countered the antagonists’ stereotypical generalizations by insisting: “We are Iranian, not Arab.”

In response, camp organizers urge students to consider how cultural and community pride can be developed without creating new hierarchies. This includes naming the divisive nature of “model minority” myths and working with students to recognize the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and educational access. It also means explaining how phrases such as “Persian pride”—though meant to combat discrimination—reflect a kind of ethnic chauvinism. Without opportunities to develop nuanced understandings at a younger age, unexamined reactions to discrimination can erase the ethnic and religious diversity among Iranians and contribute to divisions with other communities of color.  

Thus, a key strand of this year’s curriculum was solidarity across Iranian American and Arab American communities. Through a number of special guests and activities, we sought to highlight our shared regional histories and experiences as Middle Eastern Americans. Yousef Baker, an Iranian Iraqi sociologist, recounted his family’s migration story and posed the question “Where is home?” For those displaced by war, political and economic upheaval, Baker suggested, “Home is building a home for those who do not have a home.” Egyptian American writer and professor Moustafa Bayoumi offered narratives and reflections from his book, How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, explicating the post-September 11 context defining much of campers’ lives. [3]

Syrian American hip-hop artist, Omar Offendum, shared his experiences, music, and poetry, affirming the power of bi-cultural artists to construct bridges across borders.  

As captured in the back and forth between Offendum and the audience, solidarity lives in the establishment of a meaningful human connection, one that gives life to, as college freshman Rameen Vafa put it: “having each other’s back.” Such moments not only suggest that we are able to unlearn assumptions and connect across difference, but that we have a deep desire to do so.

Social and Educational Dreams

In the United States, education is organized such that students, if given access, must often wait until college to take courses in Ethnic Studies or Middle Eastern history and literature. This fits with assimilationist trends in American schooling that require young people to access the other from the standpoint of the dominant group, rather than from a conscious position of solidarity and identification. But it may also be premised on another set of assumptions: that immigrant students do not want to learn about their homelands and connect with their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. Or, young people are presumably not yet capable of thinking in mature ways about the social and historical forces that shape their lives. Spaces like Camp Ayandeh directly challenge these assumptions and urge teachers, academics, artists, journalists, community leaders, and elders to continue making their insights available to youth by engaging their questions and listening to what they have to say.

Manuel Espinoza refers to programs like Camp Ayandeh as “educational sanctuaries,” local attempts, either inside or outside school, to provide the “artistic and intellectual freedom, social equity, and access to educational resources typically not enjoyed in everyday institutional settings.” [4] Such contexts stand as lived arguments for the kind of schools and social experiences we would like to bring into being. But sanctuaries, by definition, provide refuge from harm. Their existence is also a testament to the epistemic and cultural violence many immigrant and diasporic youth continue to experience. 

This reality underscores a central tension within such educational efforts; students are offered a powerful but limited encounter with a uniquely supportive, culturally relevant pedagogical setting. Such an experience can embolden participants to stand up for themselves and others, while being confident in who they are. But it can sometimes also make the relative absence of cultural recognition or community that much more pronounced. Camp staff has sought to address this tension by staying connected throughout the year and helping campers join or develop similar spaces back home. Though many successfully do so, they also frequently express the desire for an “Ayandeh High School.”

In a workshop on educational equity, Ayandeh counselor Sara Mokhtari-Fox asked participants to imagine and illustrate their ideal school. Alongside the waterslides and tree-houses, campers’ final designs included clean buildings and healthy cafeteria food, smaller classes, teachers that “promote rather than punish students,” courses on Iran and the Middle East, and a focus on learning over testing. Their basic demands echoed those of students and educators around the country and world, many of whom connect the right to a quality public education with broader struggles for economic and social change. As we support these struggles, let us also join young people in dreaming up and practicing alternatives—educational models fit for a more just and democratic future.                                                                                                                         

[1] Kris D. Gutiérrez, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Carlos Tejeda, “ Rethinking Diversity: Hybridity and Hybrid Language Practices in the Third Space,” Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal 6, no. 4 (1999), 286-304.

[2] Augosto Boal, The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy (New York: Routledge Press, 1995).

[3] Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

[4] Manuel Espinoza, “A Case Study of the Production of Educational Sanctuary in one Migrant Classroom,” Pedagogies: An International Journal 4, no. 1 (2009), 44-62.