The World is My Home

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.

ISBN 1412813441   Pages 404 ISBN13 9781412813440 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 635 Publisher Transaction Publishers   Published in Somerset, NJ Imprint Transaction Publishers   Height (mm) 234 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 157 Publication date 15 Nov 2010   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 306.697820955   Academic level Tertiary education, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Acknowledgements
		Introduction		1
Part 1		Counter-Imagining Islam and Iran
		Islams
1		In the Absence of the Face		19
2		Shi'ism as Paradox		57
3		Counter-Imagining the Sacred		67
		Islamic Ideology
4		The Power of Interpretation		87
5		Blindness and Insight: The Predicament of a Muslim Intellectual		101
		Iran
6		On Nations Without Borders		121
7		Khomeini's Revolution		139
Part 2		Emancipatory Aesthetics
		Poetic Revolutions
8		Nima Yushij and the Constitution of a National Subject		147
9		Forugh Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture		187
		Cinematic Palpitations
10		Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf		215
11		On Signs and Signation		239
		New Global Visual Arts
12		Whither Iranian Cinema? The Perils and Promises of Globalization		251
13		It was in China, Late One Moonless Night		281
		A Select Bibliography by Hamid Dabashi		311
		Index		319

"Where would the place be that a Muslim intellectual could call home? Where is the corner on which a homeless mind could address, in moments of some sincerity, the compelling issues of Muslim (post)modernity, of the Islamic past, of the necessity of a reconstructed "Self" and "Other," of a permanent and final disengagement with the postcolonial discourse? - Hamid Dabashi"

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