Abstract
Yoav Di-Capua’s No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, and Decolonization reads like a thriller in many senses of the word. Ostensibly about the “rendezvous between Arab intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, his French circle, and existentialism,” the book is the thrilling story of a moment in time we now call the decolonization period when “the emancipating promise of global citizenship” seemed within reach for many formerly colonized peoples. Di-Capua tells this story through the “makers and believers” of Arab existentialism, a group of mostly men who were thinking, writing, and arguing over existentialism across the globe, quite literally at times. The seriousness of this generation’s engagement with ideas of existentialism and with each other, and the seriousness with which Di-Capua engages back with them (albeit with a sly and dry sense of humor) decades later is partly what gives this book its exciting narrative feel. Another reason is that Di-Capua has managed to write his book almost like a literary thriller, telling us at the start that this is also a tale of betrayal, a story of how and why Sartre who in 1965 was “at the height of his popularity” in the region, by the 1967 Six-Day war came to see his “entire course of thought quietly disowned.”
In 2017-18, my colleague Greg Childs and I co-organized a Sawyer Seminar titled “Forgotten Dreams and Misplaced Revolutions: Conceptualizing Twentieth Century Revolutions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Over the course of the academic year, as we delved into twentieth century revolutions across the Global South, it became clear that it is difficult to talk about revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century and not bump against decolonization in one way or another, and, vice versa. In fact, at times these two concepts were, if not one and the same (Algeria experienced a revolution for much of this period and Vietnam exemplified a revolutionary movements for many that followed including those in Iran, for example) then understood as inextricably linked. The following conversation is an email exchange with Yoav Di-Capua against the backdrop of his book and my own thinking about revolution in the age of decolonization: