After Savagery
Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.
The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism.
What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.
If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Since its very inception, Israel is the summation of the West.... It is not just a settler colony that the West supports, but it is ‘the West' in its very quintessence," argues Dabashi (Iran in Revolt), a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, in this piercing study. Making a case that "Palestinians are the simulacrum of the world" and that Israel is "doing to Palestine what the West has done to the world," Dabashi considers Palestine's place in global literature and knowledge production while taking sharp stabs at "Eurocentric Critical Theory" and its thinkers, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for what he considers their blindness to and silence on issues outside of the West. Elsewhere, Dabashi considers political art ("Can a Palestinian artist be anything but a political artist?") and argues that Palestine will be the West's final reckoning: "The West has had its historical course and died in Gaza." While Dabashi's prose style can be academic and jargony, he pulls no punches in his criticisms of the West's self-mythologizing and of where the Western philosophical canon falls short, and his analytical threads are fascinating to follow. It's a searing condemnation of the status quo and a poignant intellectual reckoning with an unfolding tragedy.
