This book is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections
over many years on the question of authority and the power to
represent. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? When
initiated in the most powerful military machinery in human history,
the United States of America, already deeply engaged in Afghanistan
and Iraq, such militant acts of representation speak voluminously
of a far more deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, a
phenomenon that will have to be unearthed and examined.
In his groundbreaking book, "Orientalism," Edward Said traced
the origin of this power of representation and the normative agency
that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band
of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries,
and European Orientalists around the globe, which enabled them to
write and represent the people they thus sought to rule. The
insights of Edward Said in "Orientalism" went a long way in
explaining conditions of domination and representation from the
classical colonial period in the 18th and 19th century to the time
that he wrote his landmark study in the mid 1970's. Though many of
his insights still remain valid, Said's observations need to be
updated and mapped out to the events that led to the post-9/11
syndrome.
Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial
representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back
and resisting it. This is not to question the significance of
"Orientalism" and its principal concern with the colonial acts of
representation, but to provide a different angle on Said's entire
oeuvre, an angle that argues for the primacy of the question of
"postcolonial agency." In Dabashi's tireless attempt to reach for a
mode of knowledge production at once beyond the legitimate
questions raised about the sovereign subject and yet politically
poignant and powerful, postcolonial agency is central. Dabashi's
contention is that the figure of "an exilic intellectual" is
ultimately the paramount site for the cultivation of normative and
moral agency with a sense of worldly presence. For Dabashi the
figure of the exilic intellectual is paramount to produce
counter-knowledge production in a time of terror.
"Hamid Dabashi" is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian
Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is
the author of, among other works, the acclaimed "Authority in
Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the
Umayyads," in religion and philosophy.
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