Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi (Persian: حمید دباشی; born 1951) is an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.[2]
Hamid Dabashi
June 15, 1951
Iranian
Golbarg Bashi (ex-wife)[1]
Trans-Aesthetics, Radical Hermeneutics, Anti-colonial Modernity, Will to Resist Power, Dialectics of National Traumas and National Art Forms, Phantom Liberties
He is the author of over twenty books.[3] Among them are Theology of Discontent, several books on Iranian cinema, Staging a Revolution, the edited volume Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history, Iran: A People Interrupted.[4]
Biography[edit]
Born and raised in the southern city of Ahvaz in Iran, Dabashi was educated in Iran and then in the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Freudian cultural critic Philip Rieff.
Major works[edit]
Hamid Dabashi's books are Iran: A People Interrupted, which traces the last two hundred years of Iran's history including analysis of cultural trends, and political developments, up to the collapse of the reform movement and the emergence of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Dabashi argues that "Iran needs to be understood as the site of an ongoing contest between two contrasting visions of modernity, one colonial, the other anticolonial".
His book Theology of Discontent, is a study of the global rise of Islamism as a form of liberation theology. His other book Close Up: [[[Iranian Cinema]], Past, Present, Future (2001) is a text on modern Iranian cinema and the phenomenon of (Iranian) national cinema as a form of cultural modernity and featured in the Lonely Planet travel guide for Iran. In his essay "For the Last Time: Civilizations", he has also posited the binary opposition between "Islam and the West" as a major narrative strategy of raising a fictive centre for European modernity and lowering the rest of the world as peripheral to that centre.[5]
In Truth and Narrative, he has deconstructed the essentialist conception of Islam projected by Orientalists and Islamists alike. Instead he has posited, in what he calls a "polyfocal" conception of Islam, three competing discourses and institutions of authority – which he terms "nomocentric" (law-based), "logocentric" (reason-based) and "homocentric" (human-based) – vying for power and competing for legitimacy. The historical dynamics among these three readings of "Islam", he concludes, constitutes the moral, political and intellectual history of Muslims.
Among his other work are his essays Artist without Borders (2005), Women without Headache (2005), For the Last Time Civilization (2001) and "The End of Islamic Ideology" (2000).[6]
Hamid Dabashi is also the author of numerous articles and public speeches, ranging in their subject matters from Islamism, feminism, globalised empire and ideologies and strategies of resistance, to visual and performing arts in a global context.
Film and art[edit]
Dabashi was consulted by Ridley Scott for Kingdom of Heaven (2005).[7] Scott claimed his film was approved and verified by Dabashi: "I showed the film to one very important Muslim in New York, a lecturer from Columbia, and he said it was the best portrayal of Saladin he's ever seen".[8]
Dabashi was the chief consultant to Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now (2005) and Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men (2009). Dabashi appears in Bavand Karim's Nation of Exiles (2010), providing analysis of the Iranian Green Movement.[9]
Dabashi has also served as jury member on many international art and film festivals,[10] most recently the Locarno International Festival in Switzerland. In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, he is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema.[2] For his contributions to Iranian cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian film-maker called Dabashi "a rare cultural critic".