Searching for Solidarity
Autor Noor Ghazal Aswaden Limba Engleză Paperback – 13 oct 2025
In Searching for Solidarity, Noor Ghazal Aswad explores how the emancipatory qualities of transnational revolutionary struggle are often denied, misunderstood, and erased. Drawing on the stories of those in struggle, Searching for Solidarity reimagines solidarity as an affective, ethical, and political capacity that can thrive amid today’s volatile “political economy of emotion”—an environment marked by mistrust, fake news, and disinformation campaigns targeting those in resistance. At the heart of this book is the “radical subject,” which refers to those revolting against repressive forces to achieve liberatory change at the risk of death, injury, or disappearance. These radical subjects offer a new foundation for critical theory—one that rejects “negative solidarity,” the tendency to acquiesce to power or distance oneself from those fighting against systemic injustice. By immersing readers in the testimony, memory, and hopes of these subjects, each chapter reveals solidarity as an affective force capable of cutting through distortive narratives and binding us in a cross-cultural, decolonizing, and nonhierarchical collectivity. Solidarity, through this lens, emerges as a transformative stance that compels us to, as Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes, become “partners in word and deed to change power.”
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| The Ohio State University Press – 13 oct 2025 | 563.97 lei 6-8 săpt. |
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259603
ISBN-10: 081425960X
Pagini: 198
Ilustrații: 13 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 11 mm
Greutate: 0.23 kg
Editura: The Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 081425960X
Pagini: 198
Ilustrații: 13 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 11 mm
Greutate: 0.23 kg
Editura: The Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Perhaps the most powerful affective force of our current times, solidarity pulls us radically together but may also pull us radically apart. In this beautiful homage to the generative capacities of solidaristic relations, Noor Ghazal Aswad takes us well beyond strategic or formulaic paradigms of solidarity to show us the heart of our alignments, our passions, and our commitments to others. Searching for Solidarity is a spiritual balm for our now and a rousing, inspiring disquisition for our futures.” —Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
“Radical subjects are involved in intense struggles for freedom and justice, at risk of being arrested, tortured, and killed. Starting in Syria, this lucid book weaves personal struggles with the political to tell the story of the radical subject, and represents the author’s own fluctuation between the insider’s commitment and outsider’s melancholy.” — Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer and dissident
“This is a book that affect inquiry (and beyond) sorely needs. Situated in case studies drawn from Syrians’ resistance, Ghazal Aswad’s writing arrives as a fully realized grappling with affect in its myriad imbrications—both tragic and joyous—with social movements, liberatory struggles, ‘thick’ solidarities, ‘post’-memories, and political potentialities. Ghazal Aswad continually upends many of our too readily assumed ways of moving with and against the transnational grain of critical/political discourses. Tough-minded and deeply moving, Searching for Solidarity is revelatory in every sense.” —Gregory J. Seigworth, coeditor of The Affect Theory Reader
“In stunning prose and with a compelling argument, this book offers a trailblazing account of solidarity as an affective force of openness to the testimonies, memories, and hope of distant bodies that fight in revolution. Remarkable in its clarity and courage, it brilliantly demonstrates how and why turning our emotion and attention to radical subjects and their struggles of resistance holds the best promise for a new emancipatory politics.” —Lilie Chouliaraki, author of Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood
“Solidarity is collective defiance, collective resistance, and collective hope. As such, if it is the case that ‘where there’s hope there’s life,’ then it is also the case that ‘where there’s solidarity there’s collective life.’ This book explores crucial radical affects and, in the process, weaves them into our existence.” —Ghassan Hage, author of The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World
“Searching for Solidarity contributes to important conversations concerning whiteness and nationalism, testimony and witnessing, public and private memory, territoriality, and hope and community. Ghazal Aswad illuminates the radical subject as both theorist and object of study, who works at moments of political rupture and envisions new political possibilities.” —Mary E. Stuckey, author of For the Enjoyment of the People: The Creation of National Identity in American Public Lands
“With Searching for Solidarity, Noor Ghazal Aswad seeks to shape how we see those who undertake revolutionary work. Her combination of the personal and the political exemplifies current critical work in rhetoric studies—and BIPOC rhetorics and rhetorics of the Global South in particular.” —Ana Milena Ribero, author of Dreamer Nation: Immigration, Activism, and Neoliberalism
Notă biografică
Noor Ghazal Aswad is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research bridges political communication, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and transnational liberation movements, with a focus on grassroots activism in the Middle East. Her research has appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech,Rhetoric and Public Affairs,Critical Studies in Media Communication,Environmental Communication, and Presidential Studies Quarterly, among other venues.
Extras
The thrust of this book has been to think through possibilities for solidarity creation within the fragile political economy of emotion, intensified atmospherics of suspicion, and proliferation of fake news and sophisticated disorientation campaigns about those in resistance. In these pages, solidarity has been theorized as an affective phenomenon arising out of the radical subject and their affective force field. A solidarity that is cross-cultural, decolonizing, and transnational in nature and that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.
With this in mind, this book puts forth a new subject for critical theory, one who might contest the conditions for “negative solidarity,” defined as the absence or rejection of solidarity with those resisting oppression and advocating for liberatory visions of the world. To put it differently, solidarity is an emotional, ethical, and political capacity that blossoms through our attentive regard for specific individuals—the “radical subjects” at the heart of revolutionary journey. These subjects nourish what we do not know, wielding an affective force that transcends circumscribed spaces and extracts us out of our insular realities to contemplate the lives of others from afar. They are nonhierarchical, coming together through shared passions, revolutionary aspirations, and an agency that exceeds them. They are actants, and in our attending to them, we are rhizomatically able to cut through competing and contradictory framings of informational distortion fields. Each chapter proffers an aspect of the affective life and affectivity of the radical subject provocative for solidarity. The radical subject induces, compels, and otherwise affects us to become “partners in word and deed to change power.” In the preceding pages, we have considered the most productive dimensions of their affect—testimony, knowledge, postmemory, peripherality, and hope—as integral for the emergence, disclosure, and practice of solidarity, with those we are likely never to encounter in our lifetime.
It is clear from the outset that I side unequivocally with the Syrian Revolution, taking it as a litmus test of our ability to stand in solidarity with those struggling against imperialism, authoritarianism, and colonialism, under current paradigms. My scholarly interest in social movements only strengthened my persuasion that the Syrian Revolution is the most radical social movement of the last century, one that resulted in a complete collapse of the state and its attendant intelligence services, secret police, prisons, and military.
Before the regime fell, revolutionary fervor had waned among Syrians. In light of the increasingly depressing nature of the present, observers were claiming the revolution’s outcomes were that of a nightmare. Pervasive fear, collective trauma, economic collapse, sectarian divisions, and persistent injustice all seemed insurmountable. The anniversary of the revolution came and went each year, as fewer and fewer of my friends and acquaintances chose to celebrate it. For them, revolution was a phenomenon to be exorcized rather than commemorated. In view of the impasse of international law and the normalization of the Assad regime by several Arab and European countries that were rebuilding diplomatic ties with the regime, cynicism and demoralization took over. The innumerable times our hopes had been raised and dashed allowed for bitter disillusionment and privately shared ambiguity about what brought us here. Shortly before he was killed resisting the advance of the regime into the countryside of Hama in 2019, Abdel Baset al Sarout was at the front lines carrying arms against the regime but was nostalgically recollecting the rawnaq of the earlier days of the revolution, a word which most closely translates into “splendor, brilliance, and purity.”
And yet, on the 8th of December 2024, the revolution’s arc came full circle, ending as it had begun, with the immense joy and intensity that defined its inception. The astonishing fall of the Assad regime following ten historic days of revolutionary battle on the ground marked the culmination of a long and arduous struggle. It was a victory forged by Syrians for Syrians, without the international solidarity they had so fervently sought. One might say that the final sobering lesson is this: while solidarity is desirable—achingly so—it is not always essential for liberatory outcomes. In the end, it was radical subjects, the men and women of the liberatory moment, who took freedom with their own hands. The cost of this freedom is unfathomable, but radical subjects have not lost hope in solidarity, continuing to make bids for support as they rebuild their country and confront the formidable challenges that lie ahead.
Having said this, this book has not meant to idolize the radical subject as above reproach, nor suggest they embody pure innocence or are immune to moral compromise. Neither does it assume that they are homogenous and aligned on all issues. Nor have I meant to circumvent internal critiques of revolution, all of which have their place and have been discussed at length elsewhere. The radical subject does not preclude an acknowledgment of paradoxes within struggle. Embracing the ideological idealism of radical subjects does not obscure the fact that are those who abuse revolution for personal gain. Not all who took part in the revolution always and already qualify as radical subjects. There are many unscrupulous actors who take advantage of revolution or who do not live up to its standards.
With this in mind, this book puts forth a new subject for critical theory, one who might contest the conditions for “negative solidarity,” defined as the absence or rejection of solidarity with those resisting oppression and advocating for liberatory visions of the world. To put it differently, solidarity is an emotional, ethical, and political capacity that blossoms through our attentive regard for specific individuals—the “radical subjects” at the heart of revolutionary journey. These subjects nourish what we do not know, wielding an affective force that transcends circumscribed spaces and extracts us out of our insular realities to contemplate the lives of others from afar. They are nonhierarchical, coming together through shared passions, revolutionary aspirations, and an agency that exceeds them. They are actants, and in our attending to them, we are rhizomatically able to cut through competing and contradictory framings of informational distortion fields. Each chapter proffers an aspect of the affective life and affectivity of the radical subject provocative for solidarity. The radical subject induces, compels, and otherwise affects us to become “partners in word and deed to change power.” In the preceding pages, we have considered the most productive dimensions of their affect—testimony, knowledge, postmemory, peripherality, and hope—as integral for the emergence, disclosure, and practice of solidarity, with those we are likely never to encounter in our lifetime.
It is clear from the outset that I side unequivocally with the Syrian Revolution, taking it as a litmus test of our ability to stand in solidarity with those struggling against imperialism, authoritarianism, and colonialism, under current paradigms. My scholarly interest in social movements only strengthened my persuasion that the Syrian Revolution is the most radical social movement of the last century, one that resulted in a complete collapse of the state and its attendant intelligence services, secret police, prisons, and military.
Before the regime fell, revolutionary fervor had waned among Syrians. In light of the increasingly depressing nature of the present, observers were claiming the revolution’s outcomes were that of a nightmare. Pervasive fear, collective trauma, economic collapse, sectarian divisions, and persistent injustice all seemed insurmountable. The anniversary of the revolution came and went each year, as fewer and fewer of my friends and acquaintances chose to celebrate it. For them, revolution was a phenomenon to be exorcized rather than commemorated. In view of the impasse of international law and the normalization of the Assad regime by several Arab and European countries that were rebuilding diplomatic ties with the regime, cynicism and demoralization took over. The innumerable times our hopes had been raised and dashed allowed for bitter disillusionment and privately shared ambiguity about what brought us here. Shortly before he was killed resisting the advance of the regime into the countryside of Hama in 2019, Abdel Baset al Sarout was at the front lines carrying arms against the regime but was nostalgically recollecting the rawnaq of the earlier days of the revolution, a word which most closely translates into “splendor, brilliance, and purity.”
And yet, on the 8th of December 2024, the revolution’s arc came full circle, ending as it had begun, with the immense joy and intensity that defined its inception. The astonishing fall of the Assad regime following ten historic days of revolutionary battle on the ground marked the culmination of a long and arduous struggle. It was a victory forged by Syrians for Syrians, without the international solidarity they had so fervently sought. One might say that the final sobering lesson is this: while solidarity is desirable—achingly so—it is not always essential for liberatory outcomes. In the end, it was radical subjects, the men and women of the liberatory moment, who took freedom with their own hands. The cost of this freedom is unfathomable, but radical subjects have not lost hope in solidarity, continuing to make bids for support as they rebuild their country and confront the formidable challenges that lie ahead.
Having said this, this book has not meant to idolize the radical subject as above reproach, nor suggest they embody pure innocence or are immune to moral compromise. Neither does it assume that they are homogenous and aligned on all issues. Nor have I meant to circumvent internal critiques of revolution, all of which have their place and have been discussed at length elsewhere. The radical subject does not preclude an acknowledgment of paradoxes within struggle. Embracing the ideological idealism of radical subjects does not obscure the fact that are those who abuse revolution for personal gain. Not all who took part in the revolution always and already qualify as radical subjects. There are many unscrupulous actors who take advantage of revolution or who do not live up to its standards.
Cuprins
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 On Orientation: Disrupting Erasure and Ideologies of Exceptionalism
Chapter 2 On Testimony: Reclaiming Affective Politics
Chapter 3 On Postmemory: Our Hearts Haven’t Been Quenched,[CE1] Yet
Chapter 4 On Peripherality: Mobilizing Affective Geographies
Chapter 5 On Hope: Bloom Spaces and the Circulation of Solidarity
Conclusion
Coda On Exile
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 On Orientation: Disrupting Erasure and Ideologies of Exceptionalism
Chapter 2 On Testimony: Reclaiming Affective Politics
Chapter 3 On Postmemory: Our Hearts Haven’t Been Quenched,[CE1] Yet
Chapter 4 On Peripherality: Mobilizing Affective Geographies
Chapter 5 On Hope: Bloom Spaces and the Circulation of Solidarity
Conclusion
Coda On Exile
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Descriere
Uncovers the lived experiences of radical subjects, blending their testimonies and philosophies into a powerful rethinking of how we approach liberation struggles worldwide.