After Savagery

""Hamid Dabashi is one of the most brilliant and courageous truth-tellers in our grim and dim times. His powerful analysis and poignant words should inspire all who see the flagrant hypocrisy of the West and seek justice for the wretched of the earth."" ―Dr. Cornel West ""After Savagery illuminates why the Gaza genocide exposes the definitional barbarity of the project of European modernity, of which Zionism is an integral part. The engine of Dabashi's book is the question of what we owe Palestinians beyond their metaphorical meanings for an anticolonial struggle. Rather than solipsistically instrumentalizing Palestinian suffering for rehabilitating the modern West's presumed moral authority or Jewish innocence as ""exilic"" as so many other authors in the post-Holocaust and post-Gaza genre book business do, After Savagery enacts a stunning decolonial move through a poetic meditation on an intersectional imagination that destabilizes modernity's genocidal logic."" ―Atalia Omer, author of Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians ""Based on a rich survey of poems, literature and philosophical tracts, Hamid Dabashi exposes how the genocide in Gaza epitomizes a longer history of racism, Islamophobia and orientalism that produced the colonial and post-colonial global order, and informed Europe's most known thinkers who ironically perceived themselves as beacons of humanity. An incisive, disturbing yet thoroughly convincing essay."" --Ilan Pappé ""Arguing that settler colonial genocide in Gaza is historically an extension of the Holocaust, which itself was preceded by racial genocidal practices in the colonies, Hamid Dabashi considers solidarity with Palestine as a truly universal liberation that exposes the provinciality of Western philosophy. If readers evade facing Dabashi's compelling arguments, they can't but enjoy his erudition, his almost poetic literary style, and admire his resolute moral commitment."" ―Azmi Bishara, author of Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice ""With formidable rigour, sophistication, and tenacity, Hamid Dabashi situates Palestine at the heart of a global struggle for liberation from the age of European colonialism. After Savagery places the reader on a daring path to build a new world that is fit for the ""total human beings"" that we are and aspire to be. Dabashi resolutely and defiantly insists that after savagery must come a committed intellectual and political project of resuscitating our collective humanity."" ―Muhannad Ayyash author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel ""Hamid Dabashi has written a distinguished philosophical reflection on civilization and its opposite, on violence in thought and action, on the role of the imagination in human life, and on the enduring consequences of colonialism. In his work, Gaza becomes a paradigmatic example of the conceptual denigration and attempted eradication of all those whom Western governments and thinkers define as irremediably 'other'. Dabashi's analysis is truly impressive in its erudition, sympathetic breadth of vision, and passionate engagement."" ―Raymond Geuss, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Cambridge ""Reading Dabashi is like going for an extended coffee with a very smart friend."" ―Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations ""The grand clash of civilizations and ideologies will increasingly take place in the West, with such writers and intellectuals as Dabashi."" ―The Guardian ""A leading light in Iranian studies."" ―The Chronicle of Higher Education