Description
Book SynopsisAs recent events indicate, Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Islamic politics more broadly have been deeply influential in world affairs. Hamid Dabashi has been a highly visible and prominent commentator on these affairs, explaining, interpreting, and providing a critical perspective. This volume gathers together his most influential and insightful writings.
As one of the foremost contemporary public intellectuals and scholars of our time, Dabashi''s interests and writings span subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature, from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globalization to imperialism and public affairs. There is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgent global issues of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those
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"Where would the place be that a Muslim intellectual could call home? Where is the corner on which a homeless mind could address, in moments of some sincerity, the compelling issues of Muslim (post)modernity, of the Islamic past, of the necessity of a reconstructed "Self" and "Other," of a permanent and final disengagement with the postcolonial discourse? - Hamid Dabashi"
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1: Counter-Imagining Islam and Iran
Islams
1. In the Absence of the Face
2. Shi'ism as Paradox
3. Counter-Imagining the Sacred
Islamic Ideology
4. The Power of Interpretation
5. Blindness and Insight: The Predicament of a Muslim Intellectual
Iran
6. On Nations Without Borders
7. Khomeini's Revolution
Part 2: Emancipatory Aesthetics
Poetic Revolutions
8. Nima Yushij and the Constitution of a National Subject
9. Forugh Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture
Cinematic Palpitations
10. Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf
11. On Signs and Signation
New Global Visual Arts
12. Whither Iranian Cinema? The Perils and Promises of Globalization
13. It was in China, Late One Moonless Night
Hamid Dabashi: A Select Bibliography
Index
