Hamid Dabashi

'In Can Non-Europeans Think? Dabashi takes his subtle but vigorous polemic to another level.' Pankaj Mishra What happens to thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical pedigree? In this powerfully honed polemic, Hamid Dabashi argues that they are invariably marginalised, patronised and misrepresented. Challenging, pugnacious and stylish, Can Non-Europeans Think? forges a new perspective in postcolonial theory by examining how intellectual debate continues to reinforce a colonial regime of knowledge, albeit in a new guise. Based on years of scholarship and activism, this insightful collection of philosophical explorations is certain to unsettle and delight in equal measure.

Can Non-Europeans Think?

A leading Iranian scholar provides a political and cultural history of Iran over the last two centuries, offering an insightful analysis key recent events, cultural trends, and political developments, in a revealing look at a country marked by a determination to build a nuclear arsenal, vast oil reserves, rigid theocracy, and anti-Israeli and anti-American stance.

A People Interrupted

Iran

Remembrance of Things Past

On Edward Said

Hamid Dabashi is Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University.

Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future

Close Up

a people interrupted

Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized. The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism. What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence. If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.

Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization

After Savagery

knowledge and power in time of terror

Post-orientalism

Coloniality after Empire

Europe and Its Shadows

Resisting the Empire

Islamic Liberation Theology

Ketlenmis Halk

This book is a meditation on and an attempt to understand suicidal violence in the immediate context of its most recent political surge: the decade between 2001 and 2011, from the suicidal mission of Muhammad Atta and his band in the United States to the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 in Tunisia. After the former a devastating military strike and occupation of two Muslim countries commenced, and after the latter a massive transnational democratic uprising ensued. Suicidal violence is neither specific to Islam nor peculiar to our time. It has been manifested in practically all cultures and religions and throughout human history. But the suicidal violence we witness today is of an entirely different disposition because the bodies (both of the assailant and of the assailed) on which it is perpetrated are no longer the human body of our Enlightenment assumption. What we are witnessing is in fact the contour of a posthuman body. The posthuman body, as Dabashi here proposes, is the body of a contingent and contextual being, and as such an object of disposable knowledge; while the human body that it has superseded was corporeally integral, autonomous, rational, indispensable, and above all the site of a knowing subject.

Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body

Corpus Anarchicum

Peter Chelkowski

"The book's greatest feat is the degree of critical distance it brings to its volatile subject. I urge people to get a hold of this book, more than any other one considered here. It offers no comfort in its extensive demonology of martyrdom, intolerance, and oppression-engendered rage, but it provides its readers with a higher level of understanding than any hundred hours logged on CNN.com" — Carlo McCormick, Bookforum "Chelkowski...and his colleague Dabashi unroll a canvas as detailed as it it broad...This spectacularly illustrated volume is a serious and largely successful attempt to analyze a carefully orchestrated blend of verbal and visual rhetoric." — Religion and the Arts The Islamic Revolution in Iran was one of those remarkable historical events when the power of words and images successfully challenged the military might of an established state. From the fiery words of Ayatollah Khomeini, the charismatic leader of the Revolution, to revolutionary posters, banners, murals, graffiti, songs, and declamations, to the compelling symbols of its shared sacred history, an avalanche of public sentiments was mobilized by the leading figures of the revolutionary movement. In Staging a Revolution, designed by award-winning Jonathan Barnbrook, Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi examine how this massive orchestration of public myths and collective symbols propelled the Islamic revolution of 1978-9 and the war with Iraq that followed from 1980 to 1988. Employing a wealth of primary sources from various active organs of the Islamic Republic, the authors demonstrate how popular belief and ritual were converted into stamps, banknotes, posters, even chewing gum wrappers, and directed towards mass mobilization for revolution and war. Staging Revolution represents a remarkable portrait of a pictorial revolution in which the interplay of sacred sensibilities, revolutionary action, and visual imagery were inextricably bound together.

The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Staging a Revolution

This pioneering elucidation of the Arab Spring will define a new era of thinking about the Middle East. In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, are driven by a "Delayed Defiance" - a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment that signifies no less than the end of Postcolonialism. Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the moral map of "the Middle East" afresh. Ultimately, a "permanent revolutionary mood" has the potential to liberate not only those already ignited, but many others through a universal geopolitics of hope.

The End of Postcolonialism

The Arab Spring

In this social and intellectual biography, Hamid Dabashi contends that Jalal Al-e Ahmad was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad's life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a 'post-Islamist Liberation Theology'.

The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad

Last Muslim Intellectual

Dismantling the myths that divide Islam and the West, this cutting-edge work of critical thinking proposes new ways to reread Islamic and world histories. Extending from the front-page news coverage of our daily lives back into the deepest and most revelatory histories of the last two hundred years and earlier, Hamid Dabashi's The End of Two Illusions is a daring, provocative, and groundbreaking work that dismantles the most dangerous delusions manufactured between two vastly fetishized abstractions: "Islam" and "the West." With this book, Dabashi shows how the civilizational divides imagined between these two cosmic binaries have defined their entanglement—in ways that have nothing to do with the lived experiences of either Muslims or the diverse and changing communities scarcely held together by the myth of "the West." Through detailed historical and contemporary analysis, The End of Two Illusions untangles the motivations that produced this global fiction. Dabashi demonstrates how "the West" was an ideological commodity and civilizational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicenter for the rise of globalized capitalist modernity. In turn, Orientalist ideologues went around the world manufacturing equally illusory abstractions in the form of inferior civilizations in India, China, Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world. The result was the projection of "Islam and the West" as the prototype of a civilizational hostility that has given false explanations and flawed prognoses of our contemporary history, with weaponized Islamophobia on one side and militant Islamism on the other as its most palpable manifestations. Dabashi argues it is long past time to dismantle this dangerous liaison, expose and overcome its perilous delusions, and reimagine the world beyond its shimmering mirage. The End of Two Illusions is the most iconoclastic work of critical thought and scholarship to emerge in recent memory, clearing the way toward a far more liberating imaginative geography of the world we share.

Islam after the West

The End of Two Illusions

Forfatteren beskæftiger sig med viden og magt i verden

Mā baʻd al-istishrāq: al-maʻrifah wa al-sulṭah fī zaman al-irhāb

The name of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is almost synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. The author draws from his friendship with Makhmalbaf, as well as his direct involvement with Makhmalbaf's films and thought, to present us the tumultuous life and spectacular career of a great filmmaker.

The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker

Makhmalbaf at Large

An academically acclaimed and globally celebrated cultural critic, Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books and articles on Iran, Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art, among them Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future; Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (editor), Iran: A People Interrupted, and Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation. He lives with his family in New York City.

Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema

Scores of books and articles have been published, addressing one or another aspect of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Missing from this body of scholarship, however, has been a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual and ideological cornerstones of one of the most dramatic revolutions in our time. In this remarkable volume, Hamid Dabashi brings together, in a sustained and engagingly written narrative, the leading revolutionaries who have shaped the ideological disposition of this cataclysmic event. Dabashi has spent over ten years studying the writings, in their original Persian and Arabic, of the most influential Iranian clerics and thinkers.Examining the revolutionary sentiments and ideas of such figures as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Sharicati, Morteza Motahhari, Sayyad Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, and finally the Ayatollah Khomeini, the work also analyzes the larger historical and theoretical implications of any construction of "the Islamic Ideology." Carefully located in the social and intellectual context of the four decades preceding the 1979 revolution, Theology of Discontent is the definitive treatment of the ideological foundations of the Islamic Revolution, with particular attention to the larger, more enduring ramifications of this revolution for radical Islamic revivalism in the entire Muslim world.This volume will be of interest to Islamicists, Middle East historians and specialists, as well as scholars and students of "liberation theologies," comparative religious revolutions, and mass collective behavior. Bruce Lawrence of Duke University calls this volume "a superb and unprecedented study.... In brilliant figural strokes, he arrays EuroAmerican sociological theory as the crucial backdrop of a deeper understanding of contemporary Iranian history."

The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran

Theology of Discontent

From antiquity to the Enlightenment, Persian culture has been integral to European history. Interest in all things Persian shaped not just Western views but the self-image of Iranians to the present day. Hamid Dabashi maps the changing geography of these connections, showing that traffic in ideas about Persia did not travel on a one-way street.

Hamid Dabashi

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