This book is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections over many years on the question of authority and the power to represent. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? When initiated in the most powerful military machinery in human history, the United States of America, already deeply engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, such militant acts of representation speak voluminously of a far more deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, a phenomenon that will have to be unearthed and examined. In his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, Edward Said traced the origin of this power of representation and the normative agency that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe, which enabled them to write and represent the people they thus sought to rule. The insights of Edward Said in Orientalism went a long way in explaining conditions of domination and representation from the classical colonial period in the 18th and 19th century to the time that he wrote his landmark study in the mid 1970's. Though many of his insights still remain valid, Said's observations need to be updated and mapped out to the events that led to the post-9/11 syndrome. Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. This is not to question the significance of Orientalism and its principal concern with the colonial acts of representation, but to provide a different angle on Said's entire oeuvre, an angle that argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency. In Dabashi's tireless attempt to reach for a mode of knowledge production at once beyond the legitimate questions raised about the sovereign subject and yet politically poignant and powerful, postcolonial agency is central. Dabashi's contention is that the figure of an exilic intellectual is ultimately the paramount site for the cultivation of normative and moral agency with a sense of worldly presence. For Dabashi the figure of the exilic intellectual is paramount to produce counter-knowledge production in a time of terror.

Product Description: Philosophy claims to be the search for knowledge, unbound by any fetters. Yet even a cursory analysis of how it is conceived when it exists outside the European tradition reveals a troubling bias. While European philosophy, for example is simply known as “philosophy,” African philosophy is all too often dubbed “ethnophilosophy...read more

Product Description: A Fundamental Fear was written in 1997, long before 9/11 and the global rise of a new generation of Islamic fundamentalist groups. Its author, S. Sayyid, offered what we recognize now as a prescient warning of a dangerous specter he saw haunting Western civilization...read more

Product Description: What does it mean to be a Muslim - in this world, in this deeply transformative time? Hamid Dabashi suggests that the transition to a changed, post-Western world requires the crafting of a new language of critical conversation with Islam and its cosmopolitan heritage - a language that is tuned to the emerging, not the disappearing, worl...read more

Product Description: Born in Tehran in 1957, filmmaker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religious and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972, Makhmalbaf formed his own urban guerrilla group and two years later attacked a police officer, for which he was arrested and jailed...read more

Product Description: In this unprecedented study, Hamid Dabashi provides a critical examination of the role that immigrant "comprador intellectuals" play in facilitating the global domination of American imperialism.  In his pioneering book about the relationship between race and colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon explored the traumatic consequences of the sense of inferiority that colonized people felt, and how this often led them to identify with the ideology of the colonial agency...read more

A piece of counter-intuitive thinking on the clash of civilizations theory and global politics. This book argues that after 9/11 we have not seen a new phase in a long running confrontation between Islam and the West, but that such categories have collapsed.

Product Description: Cultural critic and historian Hamid Dabashi draws from his friendship with Makhmalbaf, as well as his intense involvement with Makhmalbaf's films and thought, to present a deeply engaging examination of the tumultuous life and spectacular career of this great filmmaker...read more

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.

Product Description: The rise of Iranian cinema to world prominence over the last few decades is one of the most fascinating cultural stories of our time. There is scarcely an international film festival anywhere that does not honour the aesthetic and political explorations of Iranian artists...read more

Product Description: Hamid Dabashi is Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "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...read more