EUME
2022/ 2023

Saphe Shamoun

Future Alternatives: Syrians in Exile and the Call for Dignity

is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Columbia University in NYC. Working between anthropology, intellectual history, critical theory and Middle East Studies, Saphe’s work grapples with the questions of political imaginaries and how social groups envision future alternatives. He is currently in Berlin in order to conduct his fieldwork with Syrians in exile who took part in the 2011 uprising, focusing mainly on the rise of the concept of dignity as a political demand and how it lives in exile today. His research also focuses on Arab Marxist traditions and how to read the revolutionary hopes and emancipatory promises of the 1970s and 1980s in Syria in light of the 2011 moment. Saphe holds a BA in psychology from Columbia University and completed a master’s degree in Near East Studies at New York University, with a thesis on the Syrian Marxist Yasin al-Hafiz. Saphe is also a DJ and music curator and the co-founder of Laylit, a monthly dance party and platform that brings together DJ sets and live instruments by artists from the MENA region and its diaspora. In the academic year 2022/23, he is an affiliated Doctoral EUME Fellow.

Future Alternatives: Syrians in Exile and the Call for Dignity

My research seeks to unearth the political projects of the 2011 Syrian uprising and to trace their trajectories in exile today. The uprising was a moment that opened up new future horizons for Syrians in their calls for ‘freedom, justice and dignity.’ Yet the trajectory of the “impossible revolution”—as the Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh named it (2017)—seems to have taken the futurity, once again, out of the future for many Syrians. Conducting ethnographic research among ‘the generation of the uprising’ and an older generation of (former) Syrian Marxists who took part in the uprising and currently reside in Berlin, I explore the foreclosures of the 2011 possibilities, and the concept of dignity around which the optimism and the initial demands of the uprising have been framed. Situating the political possibilities opened up the by the Syrian uprising in a global context of social uprisings, my project examines the political conjuncture to which dignity became an answer, and explores how the concepts, affects and political tools that have emerged from the uprising and its exiles open the possibility for new ways of thinking future alternatives. In doing so, I ask: is it possible to think revolution and social change outside the Marxist understanding of capturing state power, or the liberal language of rights and the notion of progress?