In this social and intellectual biography, Hamid Dabashi contends that Jalal Al-e Ahmad was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. Dabashi places Al-e Ahmad beside other towering critical thinkers of his time, showing how he personified a state of Muslim anticolonial modernity that has now disappeared behind the smokescreen of sectarian politics. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a ‘post-Islamist Liberation Theology’. The Last Muslim Intellectual expands the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity by adding a critical Muslim thinker to it – an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament.

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About the Author: 

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Authority in Islam (1989); Theology of Discontent (1993); Truth and Narrative (1999); Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001); Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (2000); Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006).

About the Speakers: 

Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He is also the Director of Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and also director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. He is the author of numerous books including Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (October 2019, Cambridge University Press); Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Elleni Centime Zeleke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production,1964–2016, among other published works.

Atefeh Akbari is Term Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Her current book project is a cross-cultural comparison of Iranian and Caribbean fiction and poetry from the 1960s through the 1980s. An article from this project, titled ““Where Is the Friend’s Home?”: New World Landscapes in Sohrab Sepehri’s Poetic Geography,” has been published in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (September 2019).

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination; and, most recently, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, among other published works.

Book Panel

Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Identities

registration link for Zoom event

Mahmood Mamdani

Moderator: Gil Hochberg

Speakers:

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Cal State San Marcos

Sean Jacobs, New School for Social Research

Joseph Massad, Professor, MESAAS, Columbia University

Gil Hochberg, Professor and Chair, MESAAS, Columbia University

Date: Friday, March 19, 2021

Time: 12 p.m. (EST, New York City)

Zoom link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/97839642989

Open to all students interested in the MESAAS major or pursuing a senior thesis

Hosted by MESAAS Chair Gil Hochberg and Director of Undergraduate Studies Hamid Dabashi

The Resistance Network is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. Khatchig Mouradian challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor. He ultimately argues that, despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress unhindered—unarmed resistance proved an important factor in saving countless lives.

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“Passing and Personhood: Dalit Writings on Caste Concealment.”

Joel Lee (Williams College) and K. Satyanarayana (EFL University, Hyderabad)

moderated by Balmurli Natarajan (William Paterson University)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/on-edward-said-remembrance-of-things-past-tickets-127041794427

The Eventbrite to RSVP is live, and may be accessed here: https://feministmediationsnov18.eventbrite.com.

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenization of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally.

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For this paper, I propose to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar to explore a set of images from the Capital Art Studio (1930-present) collection produced by Ranchhod Oza (1907-1993), and inherited by his son Rohit Oza (1950-).  I employ a concept of darkness to read this visual archive differently and propose multiple ‘other lives’ for a set of images.  First, by bringing this African photography collection to light, I am taking it out of the ‘dark rooms’ of history in one sense (Hayes 2017) and exposing it for interpretation.  Second, I focus my lens on the Oza physical darkroom located in the back of the studio on Kenyatta Road in Stone Town, where photographs of a range of Zanzibari persons were both developed and printed and that open up the darkroom as a place of photographic complexity and sensorium, and not just mechanical reproduction (Jansen 2018).  Third, I develop darkness as a form of beauty in certain images of sky, water and skin from this archive that showcase Zanzibar’s position as an Indian Ocean island and port city whilst under rule by the Omani Sultanate (1698-1964) and British Protectorate (1890-1963). Fourth, I conceptualize the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 as a time of visual darkness, which temporarily restricted photographic practices operating in Stone Town under the new Afro-Shirazi political party. Throughout my analysis, I use a framing of ‘darkness’ to interrogate photography as an aesthetic practice deeply immersed in materialities and metaphors of dark and light, black and white, and as integral to Zanzibar’s oceanic islandness.

This lecture is part of the year-long project Oceanic Imaginations, led by Mana Kia and Debashree Mukherjee (MESAAS) and sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. Please register at ircpl.columbia.edu/calendar/of-sky-water-and-skin to receive the webinar link.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/of-sky-water-and-skin-photographs-from-a-zanzibari-darkroom-tickets-120575403277

Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.

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