Hamid Dabashi: Quotes about history

Hamid Dabashi is American academic. Explore interesting quotes on history.
Hamid Dabashi: 12   quotes 0   likes

“Islam and globanalisation', or giving European and American space to Muslim names to denounce their own Islamic phantasms, is a new phase in the social manufacturing of domination -- using nominal Muslims against Islamic abstractions. This -- pitting lapsed Muslims against Islamic sensibilities -- is ultimately an exercise in futility. The fate of the globe, Europe included, is written elsewhere, somewhere between the lines of massive labour migration, on one side, and the global reconfiguration of the capital that systematically seeks to abuse it, on the other. The culture war this has occasioned in the meantime is a murderous nightmare for many, a lucrative pastime for some, a headache for others, and yet at the end an entirely negligible footnote to history.”

Hamid Dabashi

Islam and Globanalisation http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/787/cu4.htm Polish Translation. http://www.uni.wroc.pl/~turowski/dabashi.htm#note

Fate , War , Exercises , History

“Otherwise lacking internal support or external legitimacy, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire. All this to momentarily manufacture consent, to secure a selective memory, and to sustain a far more enduring collective amnesia that may perhaps serve immediate US imperial purposes well, but will ipso facto sustain its self-destructive force of building fictive sand castles near the factual waves of history. This empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today.”

Hamid Dabashi

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm Native informers and the making of the American empire

World , History , Support , Memory

“The link between Betty Mahmoody’s “Not Without My Daughter” and Azar Nafisi’s [Reading Lolita in Tehran] is the link between two phases and modes of labor migration, the moral salvation that “the West” provides, and imperial hubris. What is paramount in all of these is the denigration of local cultures as the site of actual or potential resistance to imperial domination. There cannot be any politics of resistance, aesthetics of emancipation, or prose and poetry of agential autonomy in history for people around the world—nothing except a Starbucks Coffee version of the so-called “Western classics” to go and save them.”

Hamid Dabashi

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10707 Interview with Znet

People , World , History , Coffee