'Orientalism' tag archive

Aijaz Ahmad’s work traversed several disciplines: literary criticism, history, Marxist theory and philosophy, politics and political economy. His book In Theory navigated the intersections of class, nationalism and literature, offering a critique of postcolonial theory at the height of its popularity. 1 His insights in essays like ‘Imperialism of our time’ were a thought-provoking commentary […]

As philosophy departments in the West come under greater pressure to provincialise themselves, calls to give ‘non-Western’ philosophical traditions their due have grown louder – and rightly so. But for all that is surely right about ‘diversifying the curriculum’ as a project driven by the relentless work of anti-racist and decolonial activists, the institutional co-optation […]

REViEWS The cunning of capital explained? Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0. In ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’ (1976) Perry Anderson wrote: ‘Among the concepts traditionally associated with historical materialism, few have been so problematic and contested as that […]

INTERVIEW AijazAhmad Nationalism, Post-colonialism, Communism RP: Could we begin by asking you to tell us something about your background? Ahmad: I was born in India towards the end of colonial rule, so I was very much a child of nationalism. I came from a rather traditional rural family, but my father was a left-of-centre nationalist. […]

Orientalism and After An Interview with Edward Said Edward Said is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York and editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. Best known academically for his book Orientatism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which was a milestone in the redefinition of the concerns of literary studies, […]

Obituary Edward Said, 1935–2003 The erudition, range and élan of Edward Saidʼs work as a literary scholar, cultural critic and politically engaged public intellectual have produced a mountain of commentary, within and beyond academic communities and across continents. With his death, friends, colleagues, collaborators, former students and acquaintances all over the world have been offering […]

‘The madness of Islam’ Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran Ian almond Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe. Michel Foucault in interview, 19781In looking through the half-dozen articles Foucault published on […]

Orientalisms in the interpretation of Islamic philosophy Muhammad ali khalidi The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization. In this article, I will argue that Saidʼs central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory […]

Orientalism in reverse Gilbert achcar The years 1978–79 constitute a watershed in Oriental and Islamic Studies, for they witnessed three outstanding events. I am referring here to events that occurred on two utterly different and therefore incomparable levels, but all three have powerfully impacted the academic field nonetheless. The first two events took place on […]