Routledge The World is My Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader

As 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 that offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashi's wide-ranging and brilliantly insightful corpus. Dabashi combines deep knowledge of the subject matter about which he writes, and highly refined sociological, hermeneutical, and cultural interpretive skills, moving far beyond the limiting, distorted, and intellectually stifling character of reigning absolutist conventions. He places existing authoritative frameworks under close scrutiny in order to produce novel and penetrating insights. These essays reflect historical and geographical worlds that are best viewed when Hamid Dabashi's work is read as a whole, which this one- volume work makes possible for the first time. Review -If anyone can lay claim to Nima Yushij's statement that this world is his home, it is Hamid Dabashi. His book of that name is learned, poetic, ranging from philosophy to film, every word written with a commitment to the possibility of a just world. I have worked with him in the past and will work with him again in the future. I want a very broad readership to know the quality of his writing and thinking, of his immense epistemic and historical scholarship. This book serves that purpose.- --Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University -Hamid Dabashi is one of the foremost exponents today of postcolonial critical theory, whose work deserves to be called post-colonial with all the multivalence of this description. In his work, post-coloniality does not mean a denial or denunciation of the modern European tradition of philosophy and social theory, but their effortless absorption into a larger, more complex reflection. This collection shows the strong, inimitable particularity of his voice, which articulates a thinking with a wide universalist appeal. Dabashi has an astonishing ability to range over some of the most complex issues of modern intellectual life--the strange, unpredictable transformations of religious thought in the peculiar crucible of modernity, the complex interaction between the authority of religion and the power of the modern state, and the new strands of aesthetics that some peculiarly modern forms like cinema have produced. Equally fluent in philosophical reasoning, literary interpretation, visual hermeneutics and writing with a rare combination of penetration and lyricism, Dabashi's work continues values of both modern criticial theory and the highly sophisticated and subtle intellectual traditions of Iranian Islamic reflection--for both of which he is a wonderfully sympathetic reader. From the deep interrogation of the intrinsic paradoxicality of the tradition of Shi'i Islam to the formation of the state, to the constitution of the national subject--this collection covers an immense range of subjects. Additionally, as a writer, Dabashi has a gift of language