Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.
The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism.
What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.
If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.
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"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