Deconstructing the Hegemony; Reconstructing the Pluriverse — I

Exploring the foundations of hegemony

Belonging by Shilo Shiv Suleman

Just Beyond Yourself by David Whyte

Just beyond
yourself.

It’s where
you need
to be.

Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.

There is a road
always beckoning.

The unraveling times ask us to go just beyond ourselves. Only then can we reimagine a world that lies yonder, where the horizons meet.

This is a call in solidarity with those who are seeing and sensing the collapse of the hegemonic narrative, who are staring into the heart of darkness but still refuse to give up hope. Who refuse to un-hear the voices buried under the rubbles, who refuse to un-see the trauma, and above all stubbornly continue to believe in the possibilities of a different world—a world where many worlds fit.

As Ben Okri eloquently wrote:

There is a time for hope and there is a time for realism. But what is needed now is beyond hope and realism. This is a time when we ought to dedicate ourselves to bringing about the greatest shift in human consciousness and in the way we live. We ought to consecrate ourselves to bringing about a conscious evolutionary leap forward. No longer can we be the human beings we have been: wasteful, thoughtless, selfish, destructive. It is now time for us to be the most creative we have ever been, the most far-sighted, the most practical, the most conscious and selfless. The stakes have never been, and will never be, higher (italics are mine). ~ Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days

While Okri wrote in the context of the climate crisis, I am taking the liberty to expand his plea to the larger arena of human consciousness and conscience that is currently unraveling with the devastation of Gaza. Today, we stand on the cusp of not only a polycrisis of entangled and cascading outcomes but also a crisis of human conscience. Bearing witness to this unfathomable destruction ineradicably shifts our consciousness. Sides are taken, justifications given. History is quoted, and misquoted. Through it all, the bombing continues defying all reason. And the shiny facade of our 21st century high-tech civilization crumbles and shatters into a million pieces never to be exactly reconstructed in the same way. The very word ‘civilization’ mocks us; its meaning wrenched out of shape, disfigured and distorted.

A vast void has opened up. Waiting to be filled. And slowly people have stepped into this void—filling it with their voices, thousands of feet echoing in unison, reclaiming their humanity, choosing to stand with life in defiance of all the controlling mechanisms unleashed by the hegemony. Once again, we stand on the cusp of another of history’s defining moments that asks us:

Who do you choose to be? What do you stand for? What defines your humanity? Who are you?

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade posed such a question, and led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The Holocaust posed such a question. And the resounding cry of Never Again—a slogan used by the liberated prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp to express anti-fascist sentiment became the mantra! Wherever there has been oppression and suppression of the human spirit, voices have rung out in their cry for freedom. The human spirit must be free or perish in its pursuance.

There are many other such moments lost in the dust and fog of history or not captured within the dominant narrative. Birsa Munda, an Indian tribal leader from the Jharkhand district rose up against the British and became an important figure in the Indian Independence Movement. “The cause of the Munda revolt was the 'unfair land grabbing practices by colonial and local authorities that demolished the tribal conventional land system”. Did Birsa think his lone voice wouldn't make a difference? No. He dared to stand for who he was. Matangini Hazra, a staunch Gandhian and fondly called, ‘old lady Gandhi’ was shot dead by the British Indian police in front of the Police Station, becoming the first "Quit India" movement martyr in Midnapore.

I'm raising these obscure examples—obscure to the international readers—because the fear of showing up holds us back. Gaza has become a microcosm for all that drive today's necro-capitalism and the Eurocentric hegemony. And we have to rise from our obscure corners to make our choice. Five hundred years of colonial history and hegemonic dynamics are playing out on that tiny strip of razed land; the scorched earth and rubbles of Gaza stand testimony to the civilizational narrative created by the Eurocentric colonial-imperial power. The levers and mechanisms of the hegemony, rather aptly called the ‘hegemonster’ stand revealed.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. ~Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

We are at another such defining moment in our civilizational trajectory, which requires not only our courage but our truths—the truths of who we are; what do we stand for; we do we choose to be. People across nations the world over are making their choice. They are showing up in their truths. And this, I believe, is the final blow to the hegemony. When ordinary people rise, the hegemony has already lost. Its propaganda machines have run aground. The disinformation and misinformation sound mindless and hysterical. As the Eurocentric narrative of civilization implodes and disintegrates, new, pluriversal ones are being scripted.

Will everything shift overnight? Absolutely not. Even as the hegemonster falls, it is going to take down everything that stands in its way. I am going to zoom out and roughly sketch how we arrived at this point where a hegemonic monomyth has completely taken over, where the complete annihilation of a people has become acceptable, condoned, and bankrolled by the current unipolar world order.

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The story running the show today roughly dates back to the late 15th Century with the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans. The rest is history. In this context, I highly recommend watching the documentary, The Uprising by musician and activist Pravini Baboeram. The colonization of America became a model for later colonizations; the ensuing decades and centuries gradually consolidated the narrative of the “self-proclaimed universality and superiority of Western civilization”. This received a further boost with the Scientific Revolution followed by the European Enlightenment roughly from the late 17th to the 18th centuries. This was accompanied by a decisive move towards the rise of the individual separate from nature, an emphasis on rationality and logic, and a spirit of skepticism which was a break from the earlier age of Theocracy. The ideas of Enlightenment were further carried into the Industrial Revolution.

While all of these shifts were permeating Europe, its representatives were out colonizing different part of the Global South. This was achieved through conquest, trade, military domination, and administrative control. This manifested in different ways across the Global South nations, and provided Europe with the necessary funds, raw materials, and free labor for its industrial expansion. “Between 1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. By the early 1800s, a total of 100m kg of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the industrial revolution. To get a sense for the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in 1800 at 5% interest – the historical average – it would amount to £110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum.” ~Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations by Jason Hickel

Just to give another perspective: From the 1st century CE to the start of British colonization in India in the 17th century, India's GDP varied between 25% and 35% of the world's total GDP, more than all of Europe combined. It dropped to 2% by the time Britain departed India in 1947. Ironically, as the Industrial Revolution was unfolding in Europe, the first ‘deindustrialization’ happened in India. The British shut down the Indian textile industry to boost its own growth, and forced India to become a supplier of raw materials. Sounds familiar? The peripheries have always been turned into suppliers of raw materials, cheap labor, and land for the metropole—the colonizer’s territory. India was manufacturing 25% of the world’s textiles in the 17th century, and that this share plummeted to just 2% at the end of British colonialism in 1947. In this context, I highly recommend listening to Shashi Tharoor’s Looking Back at the British Raj in India

My intention here is to briefly and quickly highlight the rise of a particular narrative emerging from a very specific worldview and culture, and its imposition on the rest of the planet as a colonial-imperial project. There are very obvious gaps in this outline. I don’t profess to be able to fully synthesize 500 years of colonial history across different countries and cultures with unique experiences of the impact. I have roughly sketched it to show the process of colonization and the imposition of a worldview as a hegemonic force.

Fast forward to the period of ‘decolonization’: After the waves of ‘decolonization’ from the early to mid-twentieth century, some of the colonized nations sought to reclaim not only their physical sovereignty but also economic independence by focusing on nation-building. These efforts were brutally suppressed by the Western powers, that pathologically feared the loss of advantages gained during the colonial era. For a comprehensive understanding of how independent nation-states in the Global South were prevented from rising, I highly recommend Jason Hickel’s The Divide.

I am jumping decades here as we enter the rise and apparent success of neoliberal capitalism and the free market. We see neoliberal capitalism (neocolonialism) rising, ably supported by the World Bank, the IMF, Structural Adjustment Programs, and other Trade Agreements favoring the USA and their allies. I recommend reading Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank, to understand the insidious nature of global macro-economics.

As neoliberal capitalism was forcefully imposed, free trade and free market became the mantra of economists and politicians alike. The underlying narrative became completely invisible. This Eurocentric, hegemonic, and purely economic monomyth perpetuating endless growth, accumulation of capital, and dominance was disguised under the palatable garbs of growth, progress, and development. This was sold as the only path to civilizational progress and modernity to the rest of the planet. And less ‘powerful’ and ‘developing’ nations were coerced into adopting this roadmap. I highly recommend Jason Hickel’s Less is More for an in-depth understanding.

This unhindered rise of capitalism led to the unfettered rise of corporations to the point where corporations have more power than many nation-states. Today, corporations own the media, the politicians, and everything in between. They can sue sovereign nation-states for deemed loss of imaginary profit. I recommend reading Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard to understand the treacherous path the hegemony is treading.

As of 2023, “we have transgressed six of the nine planetary boundaries and pressure is increasing on all boundary processes except ozone depletion” as per the Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023. Through it all, the propaganda machines have been at work obfuscating the truth and confounding the general population. “The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions" of democratic societies. He called it an ‘invisible government’.”

This ‘invisible government’ completely camouflages the real narrative effectively making it invisible. If we zoom out, it is possible to see the defining patterns of the hegemony—a narrative predicated on expropriation, extraction, and exploitation coupled with genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide has finally led us to the brink of planetary collapse. What is playing out in Gaza is a manifestation of all the dimensions of this narrative in hyper-accelerated mode, concentrated on a tiny strip of land. This is the playbook of colonialism.

This entitled hegemony premised on supremacy is directly linked to the imperative to control and access the natural resources of the land of Gaza. One is to build the Ben Gurion Canal which, if the project takes off, will pass very close to Gaza or almost through it. It is seen as a geopolitical necessity for the USA and its allies to stay on top of the power equation in a rapidly energy-depleting world.

Fossil fuel energy is nonrenewable, at least within the human timeframe. The Suez Canal is controlled by Egypt. Suez Canal Authority (SCA) is an Egyptian state-owned authority which owns, operates and maintains the Suez Canal. It was set up by the Egyptian government to replace the Suez Canal Company in the 1950s which resulted in the Suez Crisis. ~Suez Canal Authority. This doesn’t bode well for the Middle East because the USA has never believed in sharing power; it has always endeavored, willy-nilly, to dismantle those governments that appeared to be a threat to its hegemony—from Latin America to Africa, and elsewhere.

To construct the canal, the Gaza strip needs to be cleared. There is also the possibility of gas reserves in Gaza which can be tapped. However, there is a problem. The pesky Palestinians are refusing to move in spite of the 1948 Nakba, the constant dehumanization and harassment by the Israelis, the threat of settlers, and loss of all dignity and freedom. Their resilience, recalcitrance, and occasional rebellions are a thorn in the flesh and a deterrent to the realization of these plans.

Hamas gave them the perfect opportunity and reason to eliminate and evacuate the people and devastate their lands. Olive groves, a symbol of Palestinian resistance, has long been targeted. Settlers have long targeted Palestinians during this period, aiming to disrupt their agricultural livelihoods. Since 1967, settlers have uprooted more than 800,000 Palestinian-owned olive trees. Schools, libraries, and institutes of education, research, and learning are wantonly destroyed and demolished as the process of elimination of a people’s past, present, and future—their very existence from the annals of our civilization’s trajectory.

Hence, we see the triad of genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide playing out with the complete approval of the USA and their allies. They are desperate to not let the unipolar world order shift in anyway. This requires, what is being euphemistically referred to as ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians. The evacuated and empty land of Gaza will be free for expropriation and exploitation. This is the hope and vision driving the hegemonic Western-world leaders today. And of course, needless to say, the fact that Palestinians are brown and Arabs make the evacuation just so much easier to condone.

Shifting from this hegemonic narrative requires accepting the following:

1. Recognizing that the Eurocentric ontology, epistemology, and cosmology are just one among many

2. Acknowledging that its self-proclaimed universality and superiority is a facade, a myth.

3. Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived of as a unified totality; stop playing the ‘god trick’ as Donna Haraway eloquently put it.

4. Accepting that many ontologies (ways of being and relating), many worldviews, and many epistemologies (knowledge systems and ways of knowing) exist.

5. Realizing that when diverse cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies are allowed their own place in the civilizational unfolding, only then can we dream of possible futures different from the hegemonic past.

6. Recognizing that the unheard, unseen, unacknowledged voices from the borders and edges carry the seeds of a post-hegemonic world; they are delegitimized and silenced for a reason.

Writers, journalists, and educators pose the greatest threat to the hegemony. ‘Words’ shape narratives; and narratives shape values and beliefs; values and beliefs manifest in choices and decisions. Therefore, the hegemony is terrified of the wordsmiths, the narrative-builders, the movers and shapers of minds and hearts. No wonder then that Israel has targeted poets, writers, and journalists relentlessly. The hegemony doesn’t want the scripting of alternate narratives. The only alternatives acceptable are those that exist within the hegemonic paradigms and are offered by the hegemony.

In his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat Alareer wrote:

It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.

This brings me to my favorite theme of pluriversality—a world where many worlds exist.

The word pluriverse was first used by the Zapatistas in their “own decolonial political vision of a world in which many worlds would coexist that announced the pluriverse”. Pluriverse is an embodiment of an essentially entangled and enmeshed world—a world where not only many worlds of asymmetrical powers and positionalities coexist but also where our indelible interconnectedness to all of life is a felt sense. In that sense, to describe and inhabit a pluriverse requires not so much a worldview but world-sense. It requires an understanding of our entangled lives on this sentient planet, and how our wellbeing is deeply enmeshed with all of life.

I will unpack the premises for a Pluriverse in the next part. Maybe, we can reconstruct our civilization along more pluriversal lines.