Abstract
Colonialism operated in Amman through a matrix of power generated from a Western emphasis on its biblical and classical pasts. The cultural dominance of this matrix persisted in the postcolonial period. It perpetuated the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being as it accentuated Western imperial pasts and marked the local – whether heritage or something else – as marginal. Coloniality is reflected in the successive planning and regeneration projects of Amman’s place of origin: Amman Valley (Wadi Amman). A postcolonial approach is usually used to discuss these projects on the basis of locals’ “otherness” and passivity. However, we shift the discussion toward examining local intelligence as having the power to resist the persistent colonial matrix, using the example of an art initiative by local activists in Wadi Amman as part of its regeneration. Using the concept of decoloniality, this article grapples with local knowledge and being in Wadi Amman and their capacity to turn urban heritage spaces into places of resistance. It reveals that despite the resistance potential in urban heritage spaces, the persistent colonial matrix of power reduces them to spaces of illusion. Because of the cultural dominance of the art initiative in Wadi Amman and the marginalization of locality, we conclude that resistance itself is being colonized and decoloniality is but an illusion. In line with decolonial theory, we call for a geopolitical turn that allows us to unfold the different shapes of struggle in the urban heritage spaces of postcolonial cities in order to locate, celebrate, and criticize the liberating genealogies found in them.
Shifting the understanding of Amman from postcolonial to decolonial discourse
Jordan is normally presented as a country at the crossroads of different ancient civilizations (Maffi, 2009). Its capital city, Amman, is known as the biblical Rabbath Ammon of the Ammonites (13th century BCE), Philadelphia of the Greco-Roman Decapolis (3rd century BCE), and Amman of the Ummayads (7th century CE). The different civilizations resided in the Citadel and in the steep hills and the narrow valley, known as Wadi Amman, where Seil Amman (i.e. the ancient river of Amman) used to run. Wadi Amman is a spatial and temporal mosaic that juxtaposes the ancient histories of biblical and Greco-Roman sites with recent pasts associated with Islam and the modern history of Jordan. A finely structured hierarchy of cultural difference between these histories has been mapped (according to factors of age, origin, process of authorization, and means of representation) through successive urban planning and regeneration projects. Ancient remains from the early Iron, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods currently occupy the Citadel (Jabal Al-Qala’a) and its neighborhood (Hay Al-Qala’a). The opposite part of the valley is known as the theater neighborhood (Hay Al-Modarraj), where the Roman theater and the Odeon exist (Figure 1). After a long period of abandonment, Hay Al-Qala’a was permanently inhabited in the late 1870s, when the first wave of Circassian refugees began to occupy the site during the Ottoman period. Wadi Amman became the political center for the Emirate of Transjordan, which was established in 1921 under the British mandate. Since then, and after the emirate was transformed into an independent kingdom in 1946, the city expanded geographically and territorially to reach the surrounding hills and valleys. Nevertheless, Wadi Amman remains the richest historical site in the city; besides the ancient civilizations identified above, it holds local heritage that encompasses the Islamic past and modern history. The appearance and disappearance of the Islamic past in the construction of Jordanian national identity, and the exclusion of the Ottoman era from that construction, have been the subject of many interesting studies, such as Corbett (2015), Anderson (2005), and Massad (2001). However, the use of the Islamic past in the construction of Jordanian national identity is beyond the scope of this study, as it seeks to focus on Wadi Amman and how colonial difference sustained the Greco-Roman past as the valid past of the city.
Imperial classical archaeology in Wadi Amman currently located within Jabal Al-Qala’a and Hay Al-Modarraj (left) and the local heritage of Hay Al-Qala’a as it evolved between Jabal Al-Qala’a and Hay Al-Modarraj in 1941 (right). Source: Modified from http://www.historyofjordan.com/kharja/photos/collection1_en.php?id=7&page=10372
Urban heritage in Wadi Amman is a synthesis of the contemporary local presence in the city, authoritative development projects since independence, and Western representation and imagery formulated by Western Orientalists, both scholars and travelers, since the 19th century. The result of this synthesis, in postcolonial terminology, is a “dual city” – a spatially and temporally dichotomous identity of cities after colonialism. This indicates the continuity of the ideological ethos of the colonial period, which celebrates specific identities and marginalizes others (Garrido, 2013). In his book Postcolonial Cities, King used the term “dual cities” to describe cities that are “ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated between the ‘European’ town and ‘native’ settlement” (King, 2009: 1). This segregation “privileges a representation of the city which foregrounds its colonial past, rather than the city’s present or future” (King, 2009: 2). While the colonial past is highlighted, other pasts reside in the background and become “the other” – the focus of postcolonial scholarship. The “other” historical parts usually exhibit a distinctive composition of histories which have generated unique spatial structures, political organizations, and cultures that are closely relevant to the contemporary time and people. To represent these histories as the “other” is to perpetuate the colonial approach: the colonial knowledge and the colonial being that push the local essence to the border and place themselves in the middle. It is to deactivate the local essence and to render it passive, “insignificant precedents of Western modernity” (Maldonado‐Torres, 2004: 38), and thus incapable of resistance. Part of this passiveness is the romantic and flat representation of the local in development projects as “a nonelite … completely unconnected with the modern and … unable to represent anything other than utter Otherness” (Ram, 1998: 628).
This study uses decolonial theory, its concepts and tools, to provide a redefinition of the colonial matrix of power and its social and cultural transformation in postcolonial cities. It examines how the model of decoloniality can bridge the gaps created by applying the postcolonial model in urban heritage studies, in which local people and pasts have been cemented as passive “others.” It applies the decolonial model to Wadi Amman through examining urban planning and regeneration projects in the city, from political independence from the British mandate up until recent projects. The following discussion explores the decolonial model and how it can shift the postcolonial approach to activate the local essence in urban heritage spaces.
Decoloniality and urban space: Shifting the discourse from interpretation to resistance
Approaching fragmented urban heritage spaces, such those of Arab cities, using the framework of postcoloniality unravels the complexity of the spaces’ contexts but hardly advances the theories related to them (Ong, 2011: 5–6). Amman is one of the Arab cities whose urban space has been theoretically constructed, through postcolonial readings, into three categories: Oriental, modern, and global (Shami, 2007: 211). But Amman fits these frameworks in an unconventional manner. Its modernity is “curtailed and partial,” and its globality is but “trappings of global consumerism” (Shami, 2007: 211). Unlike the typical Oriental city replete with Islamic architecture and urbanism, Amman’s Oriental past is based on biblical and classical interpretations provided by 19th-century Orientalists: Western scholars and travelers who studied the region before the modern colonialism that followed the First World War (Abu-Khafajah and Miqdadi, 2019; Mielke, 2020). Orientalists heavily dwelled on the biblical past in their accounts of Amman, as they reflected their knowledge of biblical Rabbath Ammon on Amman’s historical sites. Mielke (2020: 33) captures this reflection when he concludes that “travelers imagined themselves as witnesses of a Biblical event and came away with an appreciation for the Citadel [of Amman] not as it was in their time, but as it had been during the reign of King David.” Biblical archaeology and its political use in establishing the state of Israel in Palestine demonstrate how the past and its interpretation by the powerful can be a colonial tool. Additionally, the Greco-Roman past in the Arab world was also used by Western politicians and scholars, in the late 19th and early 20th century, to justify modern colonization (Mattingly, 1996: 50; Wengrow, 2006: 192). Therefore, we refer to the biblical and the classical pasts in Wadi Amman as the imperial past, as they are based on Orientalists’ and biblical archaeologists’ reinvention of Amman as biblical and Greco-Roman: a scenario that was cemented in the postcolonial period.
Amman’s urban heritage space has been subject to fragmented, state-sponsored, Western-designed urban planning and regeneration projects since its independence from the British mandate in 1946. The projects are coupled with an absent official discourse on identity to produce a “much-maligned,” chaotic, and identity-less city (Shami, 2007: 208). This description of Amman is common among scholars examining postcolonial cities where a colonial matrix shapes geopolitics (Silver, 2010: 348). Postcolonial cities in the Arab region are shaped by the political history of the region and the continued dominance of former colonizers’ discourses of modernity and development (Al Mtairi, 2019: 2; Al Rabady and Abu-Khafajah, 2015; Pels, 1997: 178).
Seminal scholars examining Arab cities have cemented postcolonialism as the traditional framework for interpreting the dynamics of power which shape those cities after their independence from the West. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) examined Eurocentric hegemony in the Middle East to demonstrate that the imperial representation of the Arab initiated colonialism and sustained Western political and cultural hegemony in the region. The discourse of resistance to Western hegemony in postcolonial studies of Arab cities varies in response to the dynamics of power being examined. For example, when Abu-Lughod examined Arab cities from an economic perspective, she found that the cities, in their pursuit of modernity, presented an urban phenomenon that “neither fits the dependency model … nor … the decolonizing model” (1984: 94) but functioned as “sites for consumption, rather than production” (Abu-Lughod, 1984: 114). Nevertheless, the sense of resistance is detected in studies that examine architectural and urban projects at “moments” of nation-building: when independence indicated a political shift of power and Western modernity needed to be balanced by reflecting on local pasts. Despite the importance of these “moments” of resistance, they either constructed new models out of deconstructing the colonial ones and thus unintentionally sustained colonial knowledge, or reformulated forms from the past that locals found irrelevant and repellent. An example of the former is the 1960s architectural and urban planning projects in the Arab Gulf cities that resulted in “deconstructing European cultural hegemony by establishing its own models to champion” (Al-Ragam, 2011: 468). The latter is demonstrated in the 1950s planning and design of New Gurna village in Egypt by the renowned architect Hassan Fathy, whose “search for an ideal vernacular” resulted in using “unfamiliar forms (domes and vaults) for the project that the local people associated with the tombs and shrines of the dead” (Mitchell, 2001: 12). Despite the centrality of the resistance discourse in postcolonial studies, it is increasingly recognized as being in need of redefinition, restructuring, and further analysis. Jefferess (2008) calls for including, beside the (intellectual) opposition, a redefinition of the concept of power and its social and cultural transformation in postcolonial contexts. Decoloniality can provide this redefinition.
Similar to the postcolonialism that emerged in the Middle East and South Asia, the decolonial concept arose in Latin America (Bhambra, 2014) out of political awareness and contestation against the colonial world order. Self-definition and knowledge production/dissemination are the key elements of the colonial matrix of power, as it is the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being that go beyond the limits of the space, politics, culture, and economy of the colonial period. Walter Mignolo explains the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being by introducing the notion of “colonial difference” to denote “the classification of the planet in the modern/colonial imaginary, by enacting coloniality of power, an energy and a machinery to transform differences into values” (Mignolo, 2000: 13). In short, colonial difference is a mechanism that has been practiced by the Western powers on the rest of the world since they first started exploring/exploiting the world around them in the 16th century (Mignolo, 2000). Colonial difference initiated and advanced the division of the world according to European-based imperial systems of knowledge and being (i.e. Greco-Latin foundations, Latin-based languages, and Christian-related theology that formed the European Renaissance’s theological politics, coupled with the 18th century Western ego, termed ego-logical politics, to produce the current Western hegemony). This colonial difference and its theological and ego-logical politics and principles were placed on the top, and at the center, of the global “progression hierarchy.” Shifting from the colonial theological and ego-logical principles of epistemology to locally based and context-oriented knowledge (i.e. geopolitics of knowledge) is “a decolonial move” – an act of resistance against the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 210).
Whilst placing Western knowledge and being at the center, colonial difference legitimizes the subjugation of the colonized and the subalternization of their knowledge, thus pushing them to the borders. It articulates the colonial matrix of power to complement the ranking of geo-historical locations (as First, Second, and Third Worlds), ontologically excluding the local essence and practicing the subjugation of those outside of the Western canon (Maldonado-Torres, 2004: 47). Local histories of the colonized are accordingly kept marginalized by these spatial/temporal and imperial/colonial differences, manifested in the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being (Mignolo, 2007a: 492–493). Nonetheless, calls for decolonizing imperial/colonial knowledge and being in the former colonies of Latin America started to advance a vision of liberation: a life that is not structured by the imposition of Western cultures, their colonial legacy, and their version of modernity and development (Mignolo, 2007a: 459).
Mignolo (2007b: 156) defines the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being as the main constructs of the Western colonial matrix of power that ensured Western superiority during and after the imperial and colonial period. The term “coloniality” (in contrast with colonialism) refers to persistent patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism and continue to define knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 243). Decoloniality in Latin America tends to connect the geopolitics of knowledge with the “topology of being” to detangle, confront, and escape the colonial matrix of power (Maldonado-Torres, 2004: 44). This matrix results in “the impoverishment of human intelligence and creativity in the name of a superior way of knowing” (Mignolo, 2011: 478). Therefore, the decolonial approach tends to “activate geopolitics of knowledge from the external side of the border to bring to the fore geo-historical locations and biographical histories” (Mignolo, 2011: xxiii). The geopolitics of knowledge implies the “location of new subjects of knowledge and understanding that had been negated, ignored and made invisible, precisely, by the imperial theo- and ego-logical politics of knowledge” (Mignolo, 2007a: 460). Marginalized urban heritage spaces are locations for these new subjects of knowledge.
Activating knowledge that resides in the margins, and recognizing its power in decolonizing knowledge, being, and mind, is identified as “border thinking” (Mignolo, 2007b). Border thinking is about the locality of knowledge, being, and mind; thus, it is “based on the argument that thinking is inevitably based on location” (Faria, 2013: 283–284). This locality demystifies the “universal epistemological perspective” (Manresa Axisa, 2018: 26), and decolonizes the research agenda (Wanderley and Barros, 2019: 5). In short, “border thinking is the epistemology of the future, without which another world will be impossible” (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 207). In order to develop the notion of border thinking even further, Mignolo questions the theological and ego-logical politics of knowledge used to control knowledge and suppress the local essence in Latin America. He suggests de-linking from the colonial theological and ego-logical politics of hegemony and moving toward a geopolitical reading of knowledge and being.
By locating the concepts of decoloniality in postcolonial contexts, border thinking activates the knowledge of the “other” that is not shaped and articulated by colonial difference and its structures of the modern/colonial world (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006). This activation should be critical, intense, and rebellious in order to initiate new kinds of theories and principles that challenge the colonial ones and empower communities of the border who have been disqualified and hence disempowered by the theological and egological politics of knowledge (Mignolo, 2000: 12; Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 206–207). Critical reflection and powerful criticism of hegemonic forms of knowledge from the perspective of the epistemological subaltern are essential for challenging the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being (Mignolo, 2000: 9), and for establishing the “foundations of the non-Eurocentered diversality of another paradigm” (Mignolo, 2007a: 485). Places where border thinking can counteract colonial ontological and epistemological perspectives are those inhabited by marginalized peoples and histories, the “nonelite,” and those subjected to the plans of modernity and development. The colonial encounter is manifested in “the arrangement and disposition of bodies, clothes, buildings … and the construction of landscape” (Pels, 1997: 168–169) in a manner that defies the colonial matrix of power and places local knowledge and being at the center of interest. Upon reading Mignolo (2000), Wanderley and Barros (2019: 5) stress the importance of examining “places that are demarcated by the encounter of local histories with global designs” in activating local knowledge and reviving the authentic mode of being.
These places – the borders – provide the “specific microphysics of colonial struggle, encounter, (knowledge) production, and exchange … [that reside in] the nonverbal, tactile dimensions of social practice” (Pels, 1997: 168–169). The place examined by this article, Wadi Amman, is where imperial pasts and global designs intertwine in a manner that aggravates the marginality of the local past, present, and future. This article uses the decolonial model to examine the mental and physical constructions of Wadi Amman on the basis of colonial difference. It analyzes how Amman’s place of origin (Wadi Amman and its neighborhoods) was made by colonial theological and ego-logical politics into a fragmented landscape, where marginalized local histories are sandwiched between the biblical and the Greco-Roman pasts at the edges of the Wadi: the Citadel and the Roman theater. It then demonstrates how the persistent colonial matrix (the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being) was institutionalized in Wadi Amman through Western (mainly British) experts and their plans on Amman, from after independence from the British mandate up until recent regeneration projects. Interviews conducted with the local professionals involved in the projects demonstrate that the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being are hard at work in shaping and reshaping Wadi Amman. As we recognize the cultural resistance potential in an art initiative conducted by local activists in Hay Al-Qala’a, we examine the possibility of destabilizing the colonial matrix of power for the first time in Wadi Amman. The article then weighs this art initiative against another form of cultural resistance that once appeared in literature about Wadi Amman and its Citadel, Jabal Al-Qala’a. Impacts of this resisting discourse are discussed in relation to their role in advancing a decolonial discourse in Wadi Amman. The study concludes by introducing the ideological implications of considering Amman as a resisting city with liberating genealogies resident in its urban heritage spaces.
Dismantling “postcolonial misery”: Coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge in Wadi Amman
Decolonial theory recognizes how signifying local histories, people, and places as the “other” turns urban heritage spaces into a flat landscape (Yeoh, 2001: 463). The dichotomous reading of the city as a “dual city” is part of flattening the city in a manner that obscures diversity and highlights “Otherness.” Yeoh (2001: 464) suggests confronting this “fraught terrain of [postcolonial] representation … [by] making room for the subaltern to speak, without either romanticizing or flattening out his or her voice.” Therefore, decoloniality depicts the voices of the subaltern and recognizes the “epistemic potential” of their words (Maldonado‐Torres, 2004: 30). This epistemic potential of the subaltern is essential for counteracting the colonial matrix of power; nonetheless, it is obscured by the postcolonial understanding of the city as a “dual city” and the local essence as the “other.” Therefore, instead of approaching Amman as a “dual city” where the local essence is the “other,” we approach it as a palimpsest that exhibits overlapping histories besides the tangible and intangible colonial legacy. We define the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being in Wadi Amman’s urban planning and regeneration projects since the 1950s. We argue that the early Western planning schemes of the city can be justified by the lack of local knowledge and expertise at that time. However, recent ones that mark further marginalization and even destruction of local heritage only prove Chatterjee’s claim that “Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial misery” (1994: 216). The discussion shifts from “postcolonial misery” to the possibility of resistance as we seek to engage with the ongoing decoloniality research agenda by introducing a geopolitical turn that allows us to unfold the different shapes of struggle in the urban heritage space of Wadi Amman. We argue that this turn will shift scholars’ efforts to locate, celebrate, and examine the locality of knowledge, being, and mind found in postcolonial cities. We identify these localities as liberating genealogies. They reside in the resistance possibility generated when counter-discourse takes place as the powerful colonial and the marginalized local exist within one space, which in our case is Wadi Amman.
Counter-discourse, as coined by Richard Terdiman in 1985, indicates the theory and practice of symbolic resistance against identity crisis and cultural hegemony (Terdiman, 1985). It is imperative to revisit the notion of counter-discourse in postcolonial studies because colonial discourse, through its figurative appropriation of colonial subjects and their representation, dominates the development discourse in the former colonial urban space. The colonial urban space in Wadi Amman is distinct from that in other Arab cities, where colonial powers physically built their colonies parallel to, or over, pre-colonial spaces. The colonial urban space of Amman started with images of the imperial past, introduced by the Orientalists, and manifested in the urban planning and regeneration projects of the 1950s onward. The following discussion examines urban planning and regeneration projects in Wadi Amman through three phases, and considers how each phase nurtured coloniality, especially after independence.
Phase one: Coloniality at work in the urban planning of Amman
Urban planning and regeneration projects for Wadi Amman were orchestrated by a governance system composed of Western experts working collaboratively and directly with the Jordanian government. The Wadi was subject to four main urban planning projects that focused on staging the Greco-Roman sites in Jabal Al-Qala’a and Hay Al-Modarraj as part of the newly independent Jordan and its “modern” capital (Abu-Dayyeh, 2004: 94). The 1955 plan was prepared by the British planners Gerald King and Max Lock (King and Lock, 1955). It was followed by the plan of 1968, which was prepared in joint collaboration between the then Jordanian Ministry of Culture, Information, Tourism and Antiquities and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (JPPT, 1968). The third plan was prepared by an Italian company called Italdesign in 1978 (Italdesign, 1978). The fourth plan is the Greater Amman Comprehensive Development Plan (GACDP) of 1988 that was undertaken by a Joint Technical Team composed of local planners from Dar Al-Handasah Consultants and the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM), headed by the British planner John Calder (GAM, 1988).
The King and Lock’s plan of 1955 laid the foundation for the other three plans. It invoked the 19th century Orientalists’1 and the Royal Central Asian Society’s2 Greco-Roman image of Amman. The intent was to link the contemporary Jordanian government to the colonial legacy3 – a legacy of architectural achievement and organized governance offered by the Greco-Roman presence in Wadi Amman. Local heritage, despite its presence in the Wadi and its strong relevance to the contemporary local community, was ignored (Mielke, 2020). Eventually, the postcolonial regeneration of Wadi Amman succeeded in adapting Western models to local realities, generating imperial imagery while removing large parts of local history from consideration. It placed Western imperial universality as the past, present, and future of the “other” and the center of its being. The imperial/colonial discourse has been validated, neutralized, and normalized by consequent urban development projects since 1955.
King and Lock’s 1955 plan established a legacy: a coloniality of knowledge among politicians and professionals interested in crafting Amman as the capital of Jordan. Since the colonial period, creating a cultural heritage in Jordan aimed to impose European domination on the colonized people (Maffi, 2009: 5). The European interest in cultural heritage was “nothing else than a practice oriented towards imposing the physical and symbolic presence of the colonizers on the colonized population … which legitimated the superiority of the colonizers on the colonized and completely cut the latter from their past, relating them in a different spatial and temporal dimension” (Maffi, 2009: 11–12). Maffi’s note is equally valid if applied to the postcolonial period, and specifically to the 1988 plan which created the Hashemite Plaza and Park, which were named after the ruling family in Jordan and are collectively referred to as the Hashemite Plaza (Figure 2(a)). Interestingly, the construction of the plaza entailed demolishing many buildings dating to the late Ottoman period and reused in the early days of the Emirate of Transjordan. These buildings grew to shape the local heritage of Jordan: the first post office; the first Prime Ministry; the first school; and the first five-star hotel, Philadelphia Hotel.4 This local heritage was easily removed in 1988 to open up the space in front of the Roman theater and Odeon and to provide clear visual and physical access to them (Abu-Khafajah and Al Rabady, 2013). As crafted by the Lock and King plan, the local past was removed to stage the imperial one, and the resulting void was named after the new ruling family: symbolically and physically connecting the imperial legacy to the contemporary rulers.
(a) The Hashemite Plaza in Hay Al-Modarraj before regeneration (left picture) and after the 2010s work of clearing the site except for the Roman theaters (right picture). The new design switches the locations of the formal plaza and the garden in order to provide an open and undisturbed view toward the Roman complex. (b) Dominant imperial/colonial ruins after the regeneration project, with the Roman Theater of Hay Al-Modarraj as viewed from Hay Al-Qala’a. (Source: the authors).
Phase two: Coloniality at work in the urban regeneration of Amman
After decades of planning Wadi Amman, a regeneration project took place at the Hashemite Plaza in 2009. The new project was intended to reactivate the 1988 Plaza as part of the social, cultural, economic, and urban fabric of Wadi Amman and to renew the visual and physical connectivity with the imperial past. The 1988 park was replaced with a plaza to provide a clear platform for Roman heritage in Amman. The project was a collaboration between GAM, Urban Workshop (allies of local urban planners), and the British firm LoveJoy. Interestingly, the 1988 park, which replaced the local heritage of the Wadi but managed to grow popular among the locals, mainly because of its trees, was entirely bulldozed in 2009. The organic spaces of the park were replaced with a new order: a formal, rectangular, tiled plaza, representing a Roman forum (Figure 2(a) and (b)). Interestingly, this determination to bring order to a chaotic landscape marked the Orientalists’ accounts, which tended to construct “Jordan as a land of civilizational potential in need of correction through private property and military order” (Mielke, 2020: 32). Bringing order to “a chaotic park with unacceptable social behaviors” was also mentioned by Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) officers interviewed about the project. According to one of these officers, N. Quatanani (R. Al Rabady and S. Abu-Khafajah interview, 2013), the project was a necessity to activate a “dead part of Amman’s center” and to qualify it to receive tourists. Nonetheless, the adverse socio-cultural and economic impact of the 2009 regeneration project on Hay Al-Modarraj and Hay Al-Qala’a is still a common topic among the local community and shop keepers in Wadi Amman (further discussion of the impact is presented by Al Rabady and Abu-Khafajah, 2015).
The project reveals the discourses underlying local marginalization and the appropriation of the imperial past 50 years after independence. The imperial past is still seen as the living culture of the local present. Its persistence in the 2009 regeneration project accounts for the colonial effectiveness in implementing Western continuity in this region: i.e., the coloniality of being. This is achieved by wiping out local heritage and negating people’s sense of belonging to a local past. People relate to Hay Al-Modarraj and Hay Al-Qala’a because of their imperial past but also because such places connect them with their local heritage. Unfortunately, these accounts were not given due consideration by the project’s team. A local consultant and reviewer of the project declares that: We believe that our generation made important contributions to this place also. It is not necessary to re-live in a Roman period since we also have our own culture and we made new additions to this place … they [i.e. GAM, LoveJoy, and Urban Workshop] did not have [a] genuine feeling of responsibility about this project. They did not recognize that what they are doing now will become part of the history of the nation. (R. Al Rabady and S. Abu-Khafajah interview with Z. Ja’ja, 2013) We [local design reviewers] told them [GAM, along with Urban Workshop and LoveJoy] that you cannot deal with the site [Hay Al-Modarraj] as an isolated island. The surroundings should be also taken into consideration. It should be echoed and incorporated in the new design. It should be connected with the project, especially the axes of the stairs and the organic urban fabric … There should be a link … you can’t imagine the difference if these things were done properly. The original fabric of the surroundings is excellent; all that it needs is minimal restoration and cleaning works. (R. Al Rabady and S. Abu-Khafajah interview with F. Yaghmour, 2013)
Phase three: Examining “the possibility of a new geopolitics of knowledge” in hay Al-Qala’a
The above demonstrates that theological and ego-logical politics are constantly activated in urban planning and regeneration projects of Wadi Amman, and that the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being prevented local professionals and scholars from encountering, or even recognizing, coloniality. Channeling coloniality through governmental bodies, such as the GAM and the relevant ministries of the state, increases its subtlety and makes it hard to identify and resist the colonial effect. However, this part of the article examines intellectual projects that seem to have resistance potential. They activate the local essence in Hay Al-Qala’a to become what Slemon (1987: 11) describes as “an especially charged site for the discursive manifestations for what is at the heart a cultural form of struggle.” We detect two cultural forms of struggle in the intellectual projects in Wadi Amman: an art initiative in the physical urban space and a literary initiative in the intellectual urban space of Hay Al-Qala’a. Throughout these projects, we find local heritage transformed from an “other” space – as in the postcolonial discourse – into a “space of encounter” where border thinking is enacted. The following analyzes the two projects and reflects on the encounters therein.
Drawing the urban space: Art as a decolonial tool? Actively importing Western knowledge
The art initiative is part of an urban project undertaken by a Jordanian group of activists called An Urban Reflection as a humanitarian project, in which subalterns are included and engaged in improving their urban space. The group was founded by Nahla Tabbaa, a Jordanian artist, educated in Britain, who established the Urban Reflection group as part of her master’s degree in curatorial practice at Bath School of Art and Design. The activists, mainly artists and people “involved in urban activism and social inclusion” (Tabbaa, 2012), build on situationist theory, which is a mid-20th-century movement based on creating situations – basically art projects – that “agitate the sterility and oppression of the actual environment and ruling economic and political system” (Wollen, 1993: 121). David Debord, one of the movement’s founders, identifies the situation as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events” (quoted in Albright, 2003: 29). The event the Urban Reflection organized used art as a mechanism to express the self: a creative outlet for local artists and youth in Hay Al-Qala’a. It thus added a new layer of signification where “artists … [are] given a role in social development, using their talent to address environmental, urban and social issues” (Tabbaa, 2012). The role of the local community was to “discuss” the subjects to be painted and to participate in their painting. The founder describes this process as the following: “Our team would meet with the artists on a weekly basis, where their proposals were developed through a series of talks, panel discussions, film screenings and on site contact activities with the community of [Hay Al-Qala’a]” (Tabbaa, 2012).
We argue that through this situation, the urban space of Hay Al-Qala’a becomes a space of compensation for the marginalization experienced by the local in the above-described urban planning and regeneration projects. But has this offered the potential for resistance? Or has it converted Hay Al-Qala’a to a space of illusion? We hypothesize that the art initiative in Hay Al-Qala’a is a discursive practice that tends to deconstruct the ongoing colonial discourse in Wadi Amman. Otherwise, it could be a means to confirm the re-construction of the already dominant imperial heritage and dangerously expand “otherness” – a postcolonial term – even further.
Urban resistance in postcolonial cities through “border thinking” is theoretically and practically unexplored. We approach the art initiative in Wadi Amman not to assess its success (or failure) in liberating Amman and decolonizing its urban heritage, but to explore the resistance potential it contains. In this regard, the study follows Tiffin’s conception that decolonizing cultures offer fields of counter-discursive strategies against imperial discourse, yet counter-discourse remains a dynamic process that does not necessarily seek to instantly erode the imperial/colonial discourse in order to give value to the “border” (local) culture (Tiffin, 1987: 18). After all, decolonization is a process, not a destination; it fosters an ongoing dialectic between the dominant Western discourse and its post-colonial dis/mantling (Tiffin, 1987).
In the following paragraphs we explore whether the art initiative in the Hay Al-Qala’a was able to initiate a genuine culture of resistance. Was it able to deconstruct the long-standing existence of the coloniality of being and the coloniality of knowledge? Was it able to present a local cultural discourse that allowed the celebration of local histories and the lived experiences of existing communities? In essence, was it able to legitimately engage in a counter-discourse or was it an illusion, in which counter-discourse remains strictly bound to imperial/colonial discourse to ensure a Westernized reading of cultural identity in the region? Does it offer the possibility of a new geopolitics of knowledge? The study unravels Amman’s experience as a decolonized city that introduces resistance as an emerging counter-discourse into its persistent colonial legacy.
The art initiative highlighted the urban spaces of Hay Al-Qala’a – the stairs, lanes, and alleys – as spaces of compensation. In such spaces, the artistic interventions of the project object to the marginalization of local heritage and its segregation from imperial heritage. Through art, the actors of the initiative recreated the natural heritage of Seil Amman and the imperial past in an attempt at self-determination. Seil Amman was evoked in a metaphoric reflection on the walls of Hay Al-Qala’a that sandwiched the stairs connecting Hay Al-Qala’a and Hay Al-Modarraj. The initiative also recreated Hay Al-Qala’a’s ancient stone stairwell as a “stairway to Heaven” that reached up to the Citadel, engulfed by the hypothetical river: a recreation of Seil Amman, painted on the houses’ walls (Figure 3(a)).
Artistic installations in Hay Al-Qala’a provide two kind of spaces: the first is a space of compensation (a+b) through reflecting the Roman theater in Hay Al-Modarraj and the Citadel in Jabal Al-Qala’a, presenting an image of living history through connecting them with contemporary Jordanian people residing in Hay Al-Qala’a. The second is a space of illusion, which created urban spaces with images (c) irrelevant to the place and its socio-cultural context. (Sources: a+c: an urban reflection إنعكاس a socially engaged residency programme curated by Nahla Tabbaa (2012). Photo courtesy of the ‘An Urban Reflection team’, with kind permission from Nahla Tabbaa; b: the authors).
Imperial heritage is displayed and transplanted within local heritage: the built environment in Hay Al-Qala’a. Interestingly, the word Qala’a (Citadel) was artistically written in Arabic on a side wall of a store in Hay Al-Qala’a to indicate the Citadel’s arches and columns being built out of local material using local construction methods (Figure 3(b)). The front wall of the same store featured two almost featureless portraits – one of a man and one of a veiled woman – to indicate the local community of Hay Al-Qala’a. Reading these two images together, we hypothesize that this is a counter-discourse to the imperial past, where the Citadel is “written” and “drawn” to be more local and closer to the people of the Citadel – a space of compensation. We call this moment of engagement with the urban space the “resistance moment” of the word/drawing. However, we question the authenticity of this moment when we fail to find it in the archive of the project and the social media that documented the project. Furthermore, this moment was “balanced” with many trivializing moments, as cartoon figures and fictional creatures were frequently incorporated in the project (Figure 3(c)). We argue that these trivializing moments reproduced Hay Al-Qala’a as a space of illusion. The initiative’s coordinator justified the random selection of subjects (i.e. historic landscapes, cartoon figures, and patches of colors) on the basis of offering the locals “a modality, a counter arrangement, and an alternative [liberating] way of being and doing” (R. Al Rabady interview with N. Tabbaa, 2013). Nonetheless, the eclecticism, chaos, and haphazardness offered by “liberating” initiatives basically offer a “disruption of standard narratives that reinforced a particular conceptualization of power in the name of a broader humanitarian ethos and providing resources for the construction of other narratives” (Bhambra, 2014: 120). The humanitarian ethos in marginalized places is seen as a target in and of itself. The marginalized are considered lucky to be subjected to this ethos. Therefore, the focus is on the engagement itself rather than on the subject they are engaged with and engaged about. Thus, local intelligence and creativity are missed. This is demonstrated in the founder’s conclusion that the art initiative was “most importantly an experience which ultimately brought people together and inspired us to believe that social change can truly happen through art” (Tabbaa, 2012).
Whilst the 2009 regeneration project of Hay Al-Qala’a deliberately neglects local heritage, the art initiative considers it a “learning lab” – an experiential discovery space of streets, nodes, edges, paths, and landmarks. The initiative reproduces these spaces as spaces of illusion and imagination. One can also argue that they were reproduced as spaces of compensation for the neglect they had received from earlier urban planning and regeneration projects. In this sense, “[a]ll of the city’s inhabitants participate in making and remaking the identity of the city through their labor and imagination” (Shami, 2007: 212). While the resistance moment of engagement reiterates the imperial past as a local one, the trivializing moment offers a simplistic reading of being and knowledge that is deeply troubling because it compromises the complexity and diversity in Hay Al-Qala’a. We argue that the art initiative failed in decolonizing the heritage spaces by underestimating local knowledge and being. In order to explain our argument, we weigh the art initiative in Hay Al-Qala’a against a literary project in which the writer demonstrated the capacity of the urban space of Hay Al-Qala’a to break from the colonial matrix of power.
The concept of decolonial aesthetics was adopted by Mignolo because of art’s role in rectifying colonial difference and exposing the politics of coloniality. The importance of art in coloniality, and hence its importance as a decolonial tool, lies in its efficiency in activating colonial values in a subtle way that can subordinate the local even further. According to Mignolo (Hoffman and Mignolo, 2017): imperial/colonial aesthetics … is a fundamental part in the formation of the colonial matrix of power, which means also, a powerful tool to silence non-Western conceptions of creativity and the corresponding place that such creativity has in the overall cosmo-sense of the civilization in question.
The art initiative in Hay Al-Qala’a, as it differed from the earlier urban planning and regeneration projects of Amman in concept and approach, was expected to challenge the imperial past and to highlight the local one. As a “liberating force,” it was expected to advance an alternative vision of knowledge and the self in Wadi Amman that would be less bounded by the colonial legacy. The colonial matrix of power resurfaced in a place that was originally neglected by it: in the in-between and at the margins. Instead of confronting the dominant colonial matrix and defying the impoverishment of intelligence and creativity in Hay Al-Qala’a, the art initiative reintroduced epistemic obedience by the local activists in charge of it in a way that mimicked what the local reviewers did in the 2009 regeneration project. The initiative was a lost opportunity to put border thinking into practice by embracing alternate forms of knowledge offered by the local. The flat and romantic representation of the local as “a nonelite … completely unconnected with the modern and … unable to represent anything other than utter Otherness,” to use Ram’s words (1998: 628), demonstrates the passive representation of the local in this project. The diversity of the locals that reside in the lanes and alleys of Hay Al-Qala’a was reduced to two almost featureless portraits presented at the neglected resistance moment of word/drawing. Thus, the colonial matrix of power continues to operate as a civilized machine activated by local scholars through “intellectual” projects. The “intellectual” continues to be derived from the West whilst eliminating intellects at the borders – a colonial legacy, to use Maffi’s (2009) words.
The rich diversity of the local community in Hay Al-Qala’a that formed the unique demographic composition of Wadi Amman was captured, and capitalized on, by the local novelist Ziad Qasim in his 1990 novel Sons of the Citadel (Abna’ Al Qala’a). The stairs, lanes, and alleys of Hay Al-Qala’a became a theater for the Palestinians, Shamis (Syrians), Iraqis, Circassians, Hijazis, Bedouins, and peasants who started settling in Wadi Amman in the late 19th century and shaped the local past of the city. The complex political life of Amman during the mid-20th century was the background of the novel, allowing Qasim to highlight the power generated from the diversity of the local community in Amman by that time, united by their Arab identity, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the encounter of colonization. The novel demonstrates how people’s diversity in Hay Al-Qala’a was a source of power, creativity, and uniqueness that shaped Amman’s urban and human landscape. The local in this novel was not simply interpreted but also presented as force of change committed to purposes other than adapting with the political changes of the mid-20th century. The novel gives the reader a strong sense of radical alterity – social movements and struggles, competing with the colonial matrix of power in Hay Al-Qala’a.
The choice of Hay Al-Qala’a – the people and the place – is key in the novel, as the Citadel is, physically and socially, the heart of Amman. The novelist depicted the political and socio-cultural contexts of the time through the people and the place of Hay Al-Qala’a. This depiction was captured by the cover page of the novel, designed by the Jordanian artist Esam Tantawi to embody the dynamic relationship between people and place. In an interview, Tantawi explained that he wanted to capture people’s new lives in the old place of Amman and how these lives were politically and culturally infused by the diverse locality that has shaped Wadi Amman since the beginning of the 20th century (R. Al Rabady interview with E. Tantawi, 2020). The novelist and the artist put at the center of their work the “different local histories and their particular power relations” – to use Mignolo’s (2000: 67) words – to activate “border thinking.” This knowledge stretches the local in Hay Al-Qala’a to include the diversity that resides in the “succession of civilizations over the Citadel … in which the Roman, the Byzantine and the Islamic cultures overlapped” (Qasim, 2009: 13). Furthermore, Hay Al-Qala’a provides an angle of vision from which the symbol of imperial heritage, the Roman theater, “shrinks and appears smaller than it is, and as part of a larger picture of Wadi Amman” (Qasim, 2009: 13). In this broader picture, the imperial heritage is subordinated to the Wadi where “the murky muddy water engulfs the life of the people and the stone” (Qasim, 2009: 13). In Qasim’s novel, the Wadi and its river take agency over the past and the place, but the people have the ultimate authority over this agency through the story the novel tells.
In this sense, the novel Abna’ Al-Qala’a is an example of “border thinking” through which people act to sustain a pluralistic vision of Wadi Amman that includes imperial heritage as part of the place and its time, but not as a discursive power unbounded by time or place. It allows imperial heritage to “shrink” to its temporal and spatial limits and to give space for the local to act, interact, and react, based on its geopolitical base and going beyond the colonial matrix of power that continues to organize Wadi Amman according to the colonial legacy. In other words, the geopolitics of knowledge in this intellectual work activates Amman as a city of resistance that challenges the persistent theological and ego-logical politics of knowledge and of being.
Towards a liberated Amman: Averting a fading (de-)coloniality
This study admits that the provenance of planning and regenerating Wadi Amman is profoundly Eurocentric. It shows the continuous colonial impact on local thinking and the imposition of Western knowledge even when urban resistance occurs. In fact, resistance has been rhetorically introduced in the art initiative of Hay Al-Qala’a, indicating that knowledge and being are persistently colonized even after colonial political dominance has passed. In other words, resistance itself is being colonized. Liberating this colonized resistance requires two things: (1) allowing the local to operate on the basis of its geopolitics and critical border thinking, and (2) approaching decoloniality as an ongoing project.
As per the former, border thinking should be advanced in the Middle Eastern region, to use Mignolo’s term, as “an-other paradigm” (Mignolo, 2007a: 493) – a paradigm through which “border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination, and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories (colonial and imperial …) and corresponding subjectivities” (Mignolo, 2007a: 493). “Critical border thinking” is based on visions and strategies for the decolonization of knowledge and being. From here, new concepts of social, cultural, and geographic politics will activate the urban space. The question thus remains: how could Wadi Amman perform critical border thinking in order to be able to enact the decolonial paradigm shift?
De-linking is introduced as important solution (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 215; Walsh, 2007). De-linking suggests a border thinking that breaks from the colonial matrix of power whilst giving weight to ongoing local epistemic and political struggles, experiences, and knowledge of people who experience colonialism first- or secondhand. In other words, local histories should be able to create another cultural discourse that is grounded in the geopolitics of knowledge and being (as opposed to the coloniality of knowledge and being) (Mignolo, 2007a), or what could be termed “alternatives to Eurocentric-colonial thought” (Walsh, 2007). It requires the conceptualization of spaces and places of critical thought and the building of new critical thinking, interpretation, and intervention that challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric perspectives (Walsh, 2007: 233) – a regeneration that does not involve local exclusion. This does not imply de-linking in terms of abandoning or ignoring imperial pasts and categories of thought. As seen in the novel Abna’ Al-Qala’a, the imperial past remains, but only as part of the place’s story, and not as the whole story. It is important to consider the geopolitical and geo-cultural dynamics of coloniality because border thinking should not be limited to local histories (those of the colonized) while neglecting global designs (those of the colonizer) and their associated forms of modernity. Border thinking is, as suggested by Mignolo (2000: 38, 65), at the intersection of both, but with a perspective that fosters the local as a new epistemological dimension. In other words, border thinking should be able to strike a critical balance between geopolitical configurations and knowledge production.
As per the second requirement for liberating resistance, the geopolitics of knowledge requires a political turn. It should evolve as a continuous process of intellectual decolonization that allows communities to move away from the postcolonial toward the decolonial politics of knowledge: i.e., to act beyond the colonial matrix of power. Nevertheless, this action should be anchored in a wave of “double consciousnesses.” In other words, intellectuals should allow knowledge to be seen from the subaltern experience of colonial difference. There is a need to take a radical step and construct new conceptual genealogies, given that Western-based intellectuals can no longer be those who guide critical thought from the “border side” of colonial difference. Wadi Amman should be decolonized of the space and time challenges imposed by Western hegemony, and the local community should be enabled to position itself on the external side of the border and speak from the people’s locus of enunciation. Intellectual works should be able to mitigate the historical dominance of past decades and activate the urban space of Amman to emancipate it from its long-lasting legacy of colonialism and attain the status of an essentially liberated city.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the study participants whose insights enriched our critical thinking on Amman. The editor of Journal of Social Archaeology contributed tremendously to the proceeding of this publication; for her we are grateful. Our special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that significantly improved the final presentation of the paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.