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3 books match the query 'Dabashi, Hamid'

cover of Brown Skin, White Masks

Brown Skin, White Masks

Hamid Dabashi

Pluto Press, 2011

In this unprecedented study, Hamid Dabashi provides a critical examination of the role that immigrant "comprador intellectuals" play in facilitating the global domination of American imperialism.  

In his pioneering book about the relationship between race and colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon explored the traumatic consequences of the sense of inferiority that colonized people felt, and how this often led them to identify with the ideology of the colonial agency. Brown Skin, White Masks picks up where Frantz Fanon left off. Dabashi extends Fanon’s insights as they apply to today's world.

Dabashi shows how intellectuals who migrate to the West are often used by the imperial powers to misrepresent their home countries. Just as many Iraqi exiles were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, Dabashi demonstrates that this is a common phenomenon, and examines why and how so many immigrant intellectuals help to sustain imperialism.

The book radically alters Edward Said’s notion of the “intellectual exile,” in order to show the negative impact of intellectual migration. Dabashi examines the ideology of cultural superiority, and provides a passionate account of how these immigrant intellectuals—rootless compradors, and guns for hire–continue to betray any notion of home or country in order to manufacture consent for imperial projects.

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cover of Europe and Its Shadows: Coloniality after Empire

Europe and Its Shadows

Coloniality after Empire

Hamid Dabashi

Pluto Press, 2019

Europe has long imagined itself as the centre of the universe, although its precise geographical, cultural and social terrains have always been amorphous. Exploring the fear and fascination associated with the continent as an allegory, Hamid Dabashi considers Europe to be a historically formed barricade against the world.

Frantz Fanon’s assessment that 'Europe is literally the creation of the Third World' is still true today; but in more than one sense for the colonial has always been embedded in the capital, and the capital within the colonial. As the condition of coloniality shifts, so have the dividing lines between coloniser and colonised, and this shift calls for a reappraisal of our understanding of nationalism, xenophobia and sectarianism as the dangerous indices of the emerging worlds.

As the far-right populists captivate minds across Europe and Brexit upsets the balance of power in the European Union, this book, from a major scholar of postcolonial thought, is a timely and transformative intervention.
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cover of Mundus Imaginalis: World Literatures After Phantom Empires

Mundus Imaginalis

World Literatures After Phantom Empires

Hamid Dabashi

Duke University Press, 2027

In Mundus Imaginalis, Hamid Dabashi exposes the Eurocentric worldview underlying the concept of World Literature and maps an alternative vision grounded in a centerless, pluralist world. Drawing on comparisons to the Persian literary tradition, Dabashi shows how imperial pasts cast a long and distorting shadow on cultural presents. Imperial imaginations outlast empires themselves, leaving “phantom empires” that perpetuate particular geographies of the world and arbitrate the literary. The Eurocentric idea of World Literature domesticates and provincializes alternative ideas and conceptions, casting them as national allegories precisely at a time when Europe itself has been exposed for its own provinciality. Drawing on the classical Persian notion of the “imaginal world,” or mundus imaginalis, Dabashi retrieves a metaphysical foregrounding of worldly literature, charting a trajectory of thinkers whose literary imagination does not align with political desires for conquest, calculation, and consumption. Mundus Imaginalis shows how this imaginal world, which gives root to all aesthetic acts, maps an entirely distinct world of creative imagination.
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