Hamid Dabashi

Written by an Iraqi woman, this memoir addresses the experience of imprisonment and struggle against the Baath regime of Iraq, which lasted from 1968 to 2003. Zangana was a radical activist in Iraq in the 1970s, and she wrote of her experiences in hope that she would not betray the memories of the people with whom she worked or was imprisoned.

Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1944, Koorosh Shishegaran is considered one of the most expressive and emotive artists of the contemporary Iranian art movement. He has participated widely in solo and group exhibitions in the region and internationally. Best known for his political posters and abstract linear oil paintings, Shishegaran's work testifies to a wide array of experiments on different media and a range of approaches. With essays and contributions from leading experts in the field and featuring over three hundred plates, this collection will bring together the life and work of Shishegaran for the first time, highlighting the artist's progressive approach, which merged Persian traditional and Western modern art.

"The Shahnameh, an epic poem recounting the foundation of Iran across mythical, heroic, and historical ages, is the beating heart of Persian literature and culture. Composed by Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi over a thirty-year period and completed in the year 1010, the epic has entertained generations of readers and profoundly shaped Persian culture, society, and politics. For a millennium, Iranian and Persian-speaking people around the globe have read, memorized, discussed, performed, adapted, and loved the poem. /In this book, Hamid Dabashi brings the Shahnameh to renewed global attention, encapsulating a lifetime of learning and teaching the Persian epic for a new generation of readers. Dabashi insightfully traces the epic's history, authorship, poetic significance, complicated legacy of political uses and abuses, and enduring significance in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In addition to explaining and celebrating what makes the Shahnameh such a distinctive literary work, he also considers the poem in the context of other epics, such as the Aeneid and the Odyssey, and critical debates about the concept of world literature. Arguing that Ferdowsi's epic and its reception broached this idea long before nineteenth-century Western literary criticism, Dabashi makes a powerful case that we need to rethink the very notion of "world literature" in light of his reading of the Persian epic." -- provided by publisher

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. Brown Skin, White Masks picks up where Frantz Fanon left off. Dabashi extends Fanon's insights as they apply to today's world. Dabashi shows how intellectuals who migrate to the West are often used by the imperial powers to misrepresent their home countries. Just as many Iraqi exiles were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, Dabashi demonstrates that this is a common phenomenon, and examines why and how so many immigrant intellectuals help to sustain imperialism. The book radically alters Edward Said's notion of the "intellectual exile," in order to show the negative impact of intellectual migration. Dabashi examines the ideology of cultural superiority, and provides a passionate account of how these immigrant intellectuals--rootless compradors, and guns for hire--continue to betray any notion of home or country in order to manufacture consent for imperial projects.--From publisher description.

Iran, the Green Movement and the USA presents the paradox that the USA faces in dealing with Iran over its nuclear armament: negotiate, and legitimize Ahmadinejad's otherwise troubled presidency; resort to sanctions or military strikes, and altogether destroy the budding civil rights campaign of the Green Movement. Either way, as leading Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi argues, the Islamic Republic will become even stronger.

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.--

This book is a radical piece of counter-intuitive thinking on the clash of civilizations theory and global politics. The author 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 cataegories have collapsed. The West is no longer a unified actor and Islam is ideologically exhausted in its confontation with colonialism. Rather we are seeing the emergence of the US as a lone superpower, and a confrontation between a form of imperial globalized capital and a new Islamic theodicy.

In the last decade, 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 for the first time brings together, in a sustained and engagingly written narrative, the leading revolutionaries who 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 and here presents his findings in accessible and eminently readable prose. Examining the revolutionary sentiments and ideas of such figures as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Morteza Motahhari, Sayyad Mahmud Taleqani, Allamah Tabatabai, Mehdi Bazargan, Sayyad Abolhasan Bani-Sadr, and finally 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. Likely to establish Dabashi as one of the leading authorities on Islamic thought and ideology, 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.

The Arab Spring: New Patterns for Democracy and International Law explores a number of critical issues brought to the forefront of the international community as a result of the uprisings which began in the Middle East and North Africa in early 2011. Particularly prominent among these are issues concerning the right to democracy within international law, self-determination, recognition of newly installed governments, the use of force for humanitarian purposes, protection of human rights, and the prosecution of international crimes. This important volume brings together a multitude of fresh voices, and as events in the Arab world continue to unfold, is certain to make a valuable contribution to a meaningful understanding of the “Arab Spring” from a constitutional and international law perspective. -- Provided by publisher.

Declares the end of the nation state as a political proposition predicting the dissolution of the state as an organizing framer of politics.