Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Critical Theory
School	Postcolonialism, critical theory
Main interests	Liberation theory, Literary theory, Aesthetics, Cultural theory, Sociology of Culture
Notable ideas	Trans-Aesthetics, Radical Hermeneutics, Anti-colonial Modernity, Will to Resist Power, Dialectics of National Traumas and National Art Forms, Phantom Liberties

Hamid Dabashi (Template:PerB) is an Iranian-American intellectual historian, cultural critic and literary theorist who has made important contributions to the study of Iran, world cinema and Shi'a Islam from a postcolonial perspective. He is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in Iranian Studies.

He is the author of sixteen books. Among them are his Authority in Islam; Theology of Discontent; Truth and Narrative; Close Up: Iranian Cinema; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran; an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema; and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history Iran: A People Interrupted.

Biography

Born and raised in southern city of Ahvaz in Iran, Dabashi was educated in Iran and then in the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff, the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic. An award-winning author and frequent lecturer around the globe, he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi.

Major works

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In his book Iran: A People Interrupted, Dabashi argues that Iranian history must be understood as defiance against both domestic tyranny (monarchical or Islamist) and colonialism/imperialism.

Hamid Dabashi’s books are Iran: A People Interrupted, which traces the last two hundred year's of Iran's history including analysis of cultural trends, and political developments, up to the collapse of the reform movement and the emergence of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Dabashi argues that "Iran needs to be understood as the site of an ongoing contest between two contrasting visions of modernity, one colonial, the other anticolonial".

His book Theology of Discontent, is a study of the global rise of Islamism as a form of liberation theology and the most comprehensive examination of the ideological roots of contemporary Islamist movements. It is in this book that Dabashi coined the term “colonial modernity," which refers to the paradoxical reception of the European project of Enlightenment modernity by the rest of the world, whereby non-Europeans are assigned subjectness precisely at the moment of the denial of their historical agency.

His other book Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future is the founding text on modern Iranian cinema and the phenomenon of (Iranian) national cinema as a form of cultural modernity – featured even in the Lonely Planet travel guide for Iran. In his essay "For the Last Time: Civilizations", he has also posited the binary opposition between “Islam and the West” as a major narrative strategy of raising a fictive centre for European modernity and lowering the rest of the world as peripheral to that centre.

In Truth and Narrative, he has radically deconstructed the essentialist conception of Islam projected by Orientalists and Islamists alike. Instead he has posited, in what he calls a “polyfocal” conception of Islam, three competing discourses and institutions of authority – which he terms “nomocentric” (law-based), “logocentric” (reason-based) and “homocentric” (human-based) – vying for power and competing for legitimacy. The historical dynamics among these three readings of “Islam”, he concludes, constitutes the moral, political and intellectual history of Muslims. Dabashi’s most influential theory concerning the contemporary rise of Islamism is thus the predominance of the medieval juridical (nomocentric) dimension of Islam, at the grave cost of eliminating both its philosophical and mystical alternatives, but in effective contestation with European colonialism. The result is the formation of a double bind: the worst consequences of European colonialism conditioning and confounding the rise of medieval Islamic theocracies in the guise of modern nation-states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Among his other work — which has been translated into many languages — are his essays Artist without Borders (2005), Women without Headache (2005), For the Last Time Civilization (2001) and "The End of Islamic Ideology" (2000).

Hamid Dabashi is also the author of numerous articles and public speeches, ranging in their subject matters from Islamism, feminism, globalised empire and ideologies and strategies of resistance, to visual and performing arts in a global context.

Philosophy

Among the distinctive aspects of Dabashi’s thinking are a philosophical preoccupation with geopolitics and the transaesthetics of emerging art forms that correspond to it. Dabashi’s principle work in which his political and aesthetic philosophy becomes historically anchored is his work on the rise of national cinema. There he contends that the only way out of the paradox of colonial modernity is the creative constitution of the postcolonial subject via a critical conversation with the historical predicament of the colonial subject. Dabashi argues that it is on the aesthetic site that the postcolonial subject must articulate the politics of her emancipation. In this respect, Dabashi’s major theoretical contribution is the collapsing of the binary opposition between the creative and the critical, the true and the beautiful, the poetics and the politics etc. On the colonial site, Dabashi argues in a memorable dialogue with Nietzsche and Heidegger, the Will to Power becomes the will to resist power.

In an essay on Qur’anic hermeneutics, “In the Absence of the Face” (2000), Dabashi has also taken the Derridian correspondence between the signifier and the signified and expanded it from what he considers its “Christian Christological” context and read it through a Judeo-Islamic frame of reference in which, Dabashi proposes, there is a fundamental difference between a sign and a signifier, a difference that points to a metaphysical system of signification that violently force-feed meaning into otherwise resistant and unruly signs. It is from this radical questioning of the legislated semantics of signs incarcerated as signifiers that Dabashi has subsequently developed a notion of non-Aristotelian mimesis, as best articulated in his essay on Persian Passion Play, "Ta’ziyeh: A Theater of Protest" (2005). Here he proposes that in Persian Passion Play, we witness an instantaneous, non-metaphysical and above all transitory, correspondence between the signifier and the signified and thus the modus operandi of the mimesis is not predicated on a permanent correspondence in any act of representation. There are serious philosophical implications to this particular mode of non-representational representation that Dabashi has extensively examined in his essays on the work of the prominent artist Shirin Neshat. Dabashi’s political dedication to the Palestinian cause, and his work on Palestinian cinema, has an added aesthetic dimension in which he is exploring the crisis of mimesis in national traumas that defy any act of visual, literary, or performative representation.

Dabashi’s primarily feminist concerns are articulated in a series of essays that he has written on contemporary literary, visual and performing arts. There his major philosophical preoccupation is with the emergence of a mode of transaesthetics (“art without border”) that remains politically relevant, socially engaged and above all gender conscious. In his philosophical reflections, he is in continues conversation with Jean Baudrillard, the distinguished French philosopher, and his notion of “transaesthetics of indifference”. Contrary to Baudrillard, Dabashi argues that art must and continues to make a difference and empower the disenfranchised.

In a critical conversation with Immanuel Kant, the founding father of European philosophical modernity, Dabashi has articulated the range of social and aesthetic parameters now defining the terms of a global reconfiguration of the sublime and the beautiful—in terms radically distanced from their inaugural articulation by Kant. His essays on transaesthetics, where these ideas are articulated, have been published in many languages by major European museums.

So far in his political thought, Dabashi has been concerned with the emerging patterns of global domination and strategies of regional resistance to them. Equally important to Dabashi’s thinking is the global geopolitics of labour and capital migration.

Film and art

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Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi has been principal advisor for many globally recognized artists and filmmakers; most recently he was the chief consultant to Ridley Scott in his making of Kingdom of Heaven (2005, Fox Twentieth Century, Hollywood, USA). Scott defended his film by saying that it was approved and verified by Dabashi, he also said that in his opinion, Dabashi is "an important man in New York".

Dabashi was the chief consultant to Hany Abu Assad's Golden Globe awarded for best foreign language film and an Academy Award nominee in the same category “Paradise Now” (2005), and Shirin Neshat’s “Women without Men” (2006).

Professor Dabashi has also served as jury member on many international art and film festivals , most recently the Locarno International Festival in Switzerland. In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, he is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. As a theorist of trans-aesthetics (“art without border”), his articles and essays on the relationship between art and politics have been featured, translated to many languages, and published by museums and cultural institutes in Europe . For his contributions to Iranian cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian film-maker called Dabashi "a rare cultural critic".

Columbia University controversy

In 2004, Professor Dabashi was involved in a dispute at Columbia University between Jewish students and pro-Palestinian professors, which included accusations of antisemitism against the professors. According to the New York Times, Dabashi was mentioned principally because of his published political viewpoints, and that he canceled a class to attend a Palestinian rally. The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sided with the professors. An ad hoc committee formed by Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia University's president, reported in March 2005 that they could not find any credible allegations of antisemitism, but did criticize the university's grievance procedures, and recommended changes.

Controversy

Comments on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Dabashi has made a number of controversial comments regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In an interview with AsiaSource in June of 2003, Dabashi stated that supporters of Israel "cannot see that Israel over the past 50 years as a colonial state - first with white European colonial settlers, then white American colonial settlers, now white Russian colonial settlers - amounts to nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States. Israel has no privilege greater or less than Pakistan or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. These are all military bases but some of them, like Israel, are like the hardware of the American imperial imagination."

In September of 2004, Dabashi wrote in an Egyptian in the Egyptian Newspaper Al-Ahram that:

"What they call "Israel" is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their "soul." What the Israelis are doing to Palestinians has a mirror reflection on their own soul -- sullied, vacated, exiled, now occupied by a military machinery no longer plugged to any electrical outlet. It is not just the Palestinian land that they have occupied; their own soul is an occupied territory, occupied by a mechanical force geared on self-destruction. They are on automatic piloting. This is they. No one is controlling anything. Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can perpetrate what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds."

Dabashi was accused of holding anti-semitic views for these comments, one of which was promiently featured in Columbia Unbecoming, a controversial movie depicting pro-Israel students' allegations of intimidation at Columbia University.

Criticism of the Movie "300"

Dabashi criticized the 300, the 2007 movie which depicts the battle of 300 Spartans against the Persian Empire. Dabashi stated that the director Zack Snyder is fearful of all the racialised minorities in and out of the United States -- Jews, Muslims, Asians, Africans, Latinos -- gathering storm around his white-washed racism, Snyder has quite unbeknownst to himself given a perfect picture of the way the world sees Bush's army." Dabashi also stated "That monstrosity that Snyder pictures marching towards Thermopylae is the American empire -- and that band of brothers that stood up to that monstrosity are those resisting this empire: they are the Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, Hizbullah."

Criticism of Columbia University President Lee Bollinger

Following Columbia Unversity Presdient's statements on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia in October of 2007 (in which Bollinger stated that the Iranian President was a "petty and cruel dictator" who lacked the "intellectual courage" to offer real answers on denying the Holocaust) Dabashi wrote that Bollinger's statements were "the most ridiculous clichés of the neocon propaganda machinery, wrapped in the missionary position of a white racist supremacist carrying the heavy burden of civilizing the world." Dabashi further stated that Bollinger's comments were "propaganda warfare … waged by the self-proclaimed moral authority of the United States" and that "Only Lee Bollinger's mind-numbing racism when introducing Ahmadinejad could have made the demagogue look like the innocent bystander in a self-promotional circus."

Judith Jackson, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia who is the co-coordinator of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, criticized Dabashi for his remarks, stating that Dabashi's article was "sheer demagoguery" and that "attributing President Bollinger's remarks or behavior to racism is absurd."

Selected bibliography

Islamic and Iranian studies

Islamic Liberation Theology Resisting the Empire By Hamid Dabashi

• 2008 Islamic Liberation Theology; Resisting the Empire. Routledge
• 2007 Iran: A People Interrupted. New York, New Press. [1]
• 2005 Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. (Second Edition) with a New Introduction. New York, New York University Press (1993). New Edition, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers.[2].
• 2005 "Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism,” as an Introduction to a new Edition of Ignaz Goldziher’s Muslim Studies. New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers. [3]
• 2000 “The End of Islamic Ideology,” Social Research. Volume 67, Number 2, Summer 2000. pp. 475-518. [4]
• 1999 Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (With Peter Chelkowski). London, Edward Booth-Clibborn Editions.
• 1993 "Historical Conditions of Persian Sufism during the Seljuk Period." In Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), Classical Persian Sufism: From Its Origins to Rumi. London and New York, Khaniqahi Nimatallahi Publishers.
• 1992 Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads. Second Edition. New Brunswick, NJ & London, Transaction Books. Winner of the 1990 Association of American Publishers Award in the category of religion and philosophy.
• 1989 Expectation of the Millennium: Shi’ism in History. With S.H. Nasr and S.V.R. Nasr. New York, State University of New York Press.
• 1989 "By What Authority? —The Formation of Khomeini's Revolutionary Discourse, 1964-1977." Social Compass, vol. 36, no. 4, December 1989.
• 1988 Shi’ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality. With S.H. Nasr, and S.V.R. Nasr. New York, State University of New York Press.
• 1986 "Symbiosis of Religious and Political Authorities in Islam." In Thomas Robbins and Roland Robertson (eds.), Church-State Relations: Tensions and Transitions. New Brunswick, NJ, and London, Transaction Books.
• 1986 "The Sufi Doctrine of 'The Perfect Man' and a View of the Hierarchical Structure of the Islamic Culture." Islamic Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, Second Quarter, 1986.
• 1989 "Modern Shi’i Thought". The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modem Islamic World.

Islamic philosophy

• 1999 Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani. London, Curzon Press.
• 1996 "The Philosopher/Vizier: Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and His Isma’ili Connection." In Farhad Daftari (ed.), Studies in Isma’ili History and Doctrines. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• 1994 "Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi: The Philosopher/Vizier." In Oliver Leaman (ed.), A History of Islamic Philosophy. London, Routledge.
• 1994 "Mir Damad and the School of Isfahan.” In Oliver Leaman (ed.), A History of Islamic Philosophy. London, Routledge.
• 1994 "Ayn al-Qudat: That Individual." In Oliver Leaman (ed.), A History of Islamic Philosophy. London, Routledge.
• 1990 "Danish-namah-yi AIa'i”. Encyclopedia Iranica.
• 1990 "Mir Damad". The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Visual, performing arts and aesthetics

• 2005 “Artists without Borders: On Contemporary Iranian Art” in Octavio Zaya (Ed), Contemporary Iranian Artists: Since the Revolution (San Sebastian, Spain: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005). In English, Spanish, and Catalan.
• 2005 “Shirin Neshat: Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography” in Octavio Zaya (Ed), The Last Word. San Sebastian, Spain, Museum of Modern Art. In English and Spanish.
• 2005 “Women without Headaches: On Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women without Men.’” Berlin, Germany, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart. In English and German.
• 2005 “Ta’ziyeh: Theater of Protest,” in The Drama Review (TDR). [5]
• 2002 “Bordercrossings: Shirin Neshat’s Body of Evidence,” Catalogue of Castello di Rivoli Retrospective on Shirin Neshat. Turin, Italy. January 2002.
• 2000 “In the Absence of the Face,” Social Research, Volume 67, Number 1. Spring 2000. pp. 127-185. [6]
• 1993 Parviz Sayyad's Theater of Diaspora. Costa Mesa, CA, Mazda.

World cinema

• 2008 Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker. London, I. B. Tauris. [7]
• 2006 Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema]. Edited, with an Introduction. London and New York, Verso. [8]
• 2006 Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema. Washington DC, Mage. [9]
• 2004 Yami Karano Kobo] (The Light Arisen from the Darkness: On Mohsen Makhmalbaf) —in Japanese, Tokyo. [10]
• 2002 “Dead Certainties: Makhmalbaf’s Early Cinema,” in Richard Tapper (Eds), Studies in Iranian Cinema. London, I.B. Tauris.
• 2001 Close up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future. London and New York, Verso, 2001. [Translated into Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish].
• 1999 “Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Moment of Innocence,” in Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (Eds), Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema. London, The British Film Institute, 1999. pp. 115-128.

Persian and comparative literature

• 2007 The Adventures of Amir Hamza. Introduction. Random House Modern Library. [11].
• 2003 "Nima Yushij and Constitution of a National subject," Oriente Moderno, Volume xxii (lxxxiii), 2003.
• 1994 "Of Poetics, Politics and Ethics: The Legacy of Parvin E’tesami. In Heshmat Moayyad (ed.), Once a Dewdrop Accosted a Rose: Essays on the Poetry of Parvin E’tesami. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.
• 1988 "Forough Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture." In Michael C. Hillmann (ed.), Forough Farrokhzad: A Quarter Century Later. Literature East and West.
• 1985 "The Poetics of the Politics: Commitment in Modern Persian Literature." Iranian Studies, Special Issue, The Sociology of the Iranian Writer, ed. by Michael C. Hillmann, vol. 18, nos. 2-4, Spring-Autumn, 1985.
• Year? "Persian Literature" for The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modem Islamic World.

Postcolonial theory

• 2008 Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire. New York, Routledge. [12]
• 2001 “For the Last Time: Civilizations,” International Sociology. September 2001. Volume 16 (3): 361-368. [13]
• 2001 “No soy subalternista,” in Ileana Rodriguez (Ed), Convergencia de Tiempos: Estudios subalternos / contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad. Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi b.v. 2001. pp. 49-59.

External links

• Hamid Dabashi's Official Web site
• Hamid Dabashi's academic site at Columbia University
• Persian Biography of Hamid Dabashi, Makhmalbaf Film House.
• Hamid Dabashi speaks in the documentary film on Omar Khayyām, Intoxicating Rhymes and Sobering Wine, YouTube (48 sec).