After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization - Paperback

by Hamid Dabashi (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Among Dabashi's recent books are On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past, The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West, and Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World.