The world is my home : a Hamid Dabashi reader

By Hamid Dabashi

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 urgently global issues of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those which offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity more generally. 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.

A Hamid Dabashi Reader

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	3
Introduction	5
PART I. Counter-imagining Islam and Iran	27
Islams	28
1. In the Absence of the Face	29
2. Shi’ism as Paradox	85
3. Counter-imagining the Sacred	97
Islamic Ideology	125
4. The Power of Interpretation	126
5. Blindness and Insight: The Predicament of a Muslim Intellectual	141
Iran	168
6. On Nations Without Borders	169
7. Khomeini's Revolution	194
PART II. Emancipatory Aesthetics	201
Poetic Revolution	202
8. Nima Yushij and Constitution of a National Subject	203
9. Forugh Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture	265
Cinematic Palpitations	302
10. Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf	303
11. On Signs and Signation	335
New Global Visual Arts	348
12. Whither Iranian Cinema? The Perils and Promises of Globalization	349
13. It was in China, Late One Moonless Night	388
Hamid Dabashi: A Selected Bibliography	428

The world is my home