Hamid Dabashi Books

The first monograph to thoroughly document Shirin Neshat's video production, The Last Word provides both a beautiful reminder of her work's color and intensity and a crucial tool for her increasing number of fans and scholars. Neshat, who studied in the United States and has lived in New York for many years, found international success following the explosive release of her images of Muslim women wrapped in chadors with verses by rebel Persian poetesses traced on their faces, hands and feet. She became renowned when her short film Turbulent was awarded the Leone d'Oro at the 1999 Venice Biennale. With her camera persistently focused on the veiled women of the Muslim world, Neshat has continued to make striking and courageous work of rare beauty and intensity, and has presented it to continuing acclaim. She goes fearlessly into the widening gulf between conformism and revolt, submission and compliance, that characterizes the women of the Muslim world, seeking out images from the far sides of the divide that will both narrow the distance and help viewers sound its depths. The Last Word is a necessity for those who would approach, informed, the poetic works and the fierce commitment of an extraordinary artist.

Born in Tehran in 1957, filmmaker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religious and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972, Makhmalbaf formed his own urban guerrilla group and two years later attacked a police officer, for which he was arrested and jailed. He remained incarcerated until 1978, when the revolutionary wave led by Ayatollah Khomeini freed him and launched his career as a writer and self-taught filmmaker. Since then, Makhmalbaf has gone on to make such highly admired films as Gabbeh and The Silence. The three lengthy conversations collected here, between Makhmalbaf and leading Iranian film critic and scholar Hamid Dabashi, traverse the filmmaker's experiences as a young radical, his critical stance regarding the current Islamic regime, and his fascination with films--both as product and as process. In this in-depth view of one of the most significant Middle Eastern filmmakers of our time, Makhmalbaf reflects on the relationship between cinema and violence, tolerance, and social change, as well as the political and artistic importance of the autonomy of the filmmaker.

Moving beyond the Eurocentric approach to travel narratives, this comprehensive and transformative account of the adventures of more than a dozen Persian travelers in the nineteenth century re-discovers and reclaims the world as seen through their rich travelogues, removing the colonial borders within which their narratives had been placed.

Focusing on the War on Terror and the tension between the West and Islam, this book challenges conventional views on the clash of civilizations theory. It presents a provocative analysis of global politics, offering counter-intuitive insights that encourage readers to rethink widely held beliefs about cultural conflicts and their implications for contemporary society.

Declares the end of the nation state as a political proposition predicting the dissolution of the state as an organizing framer of politics.

Europe as we've known it is a dying myth, but colonial relations live on.

The rise of Iranian cinema to world prominence over the last few decades is one of the most fascinating cultural stories of our time. This book is narrated around 15 of the best Iranian filmmakers of the past half-century and takes a close look at both their lives and their greatest works

Picking up where Fanon left off, examining the negative influence of intellectual immigrants as facilitators of American imperialism.

In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen were driven by a 'delayed defiance' - a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike - that signifies no less than the end of Postcolonialism.

A history of the cosmopolitan forces that made contemporary Iran “No ruling regime,” writes Hamid Dabashi, “could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people.” For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in which the traditional ruling Islamist regime is counterposed to a modern population of educated, secular urbanites. However, Iran has for many centuries been a nation forged from a diverse mix of influences, most of them non-sectarian and cosmopolitan. In Iran Without Borders, the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homeland—either physically or emotionally—and imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious.