Description
By (author) Dabashi, Hamid
:
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.
Table of contents:
Introduction: “Exterminate All the Brutes,” Again!
Chapter One: Palestine Is the World; the World Is Palestine
Chapter Two: Israel Is the West; the West Is Israel
Chapter Three: Poetry After Genocide
Chapter Four: Philosophy After Savagery
Chapter Five: The Garrison State Versus the Palestinian Camp
Chapter Six: Palestine Beyond Borders
Conclusion: Writing at the Time of a Genocide
Review quote:
“[A] searing condemnation of the status quo and a poignant intellectual reckoning with an unfolding tragedy.” —Publisher”s Weekly
“Dabashi’s profound reflections are intertwined with updates from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, spelling both urgency in ending the obliteration of Palestinians, and the necessity of understanding what Israel and Zionism mean, what they reflect and embody, which is the entire Western spectrum of colonial brutality.” —Middle East Monitor
“This is a book of witness and a book of strategy disguised as philosophy. It will be shelved under Middle East Studies; it belongs on your desk, annotated, next to your news feed. Dabashi does not ask you to admire his argument. He asks you to risk something for it.” —Middle East Eye
“No book written in the middle of a catastrophe can close the case. After Savagery does something else. It recovers the conditions under which moral speech remains possible. It asks the reader to face a simple verdict. If a system calls itself civilisation while treating a people as disposable, then the name has rotted from within. A new moral grammar must be composed, patiently and truthfully, among those who have refused to disappear. Dabashi does not claim to possess that grammar. He sits with its first terms. He attends to the witnesses. He records the names. He keeps the fire.” —The New Arab
“After Savagery is a fountain of arguments and evidence that goes beyond and gives full meaning to the critiques of ‘the West and the rest’, and of supporters of Israel’s settler colonial erasure against the Palestinian people. Palestine is a revealer—Dabashi exposes the irredeemable racism behind the posture of universalism adopted by the Global Minority (the so-called ‘West’), but he also shows the path toward collective liberation from apartheid and its genocidal consequences. The genocide in Palestine has pushed us toward a critical juncture. Suspended between abyss and hope, we have the choice to preserve what remains of humanity and rebuild Gaza and the rest of Palestine from the ashes of this monstrosity.” —Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian
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