Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

THE ARAB SPRING: THE END OF POSTCOLONIALISM

A discussion with Hamid Dabashi

Monday, April 16, 2012  at 7.30 pm

The Proshansky Auditorium

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue

In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes 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. Sketching a new geography of liberation, Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the moral map of ‘the Middle East’ afresh.

HAMID DABASHI is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Authority in Islam (1989); Theology of Discontent (1993); Truth and Narrative (1999); Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001); Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (2000); Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2007); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006). His most recent works are Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008) and Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (Transaction Publishers, 2009).

Discussants:

DAVID HARVEY, Director, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics

ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI, Editor at Jadaliyya.com and Associate Professor of English at Kinsborough Community College. In 2012-2013 he will be a faculty fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

Earlier on this evening at 6.30 in the James Gallery, Alessandro Petti will explore new forms of political action and association – collective protests —  in the Middle East and around the world. Details here.

Against all Odds: Ten Myths Shattered by the Tunisian Revolution

with Taoufik Ben-Amor and Peter Hitchcock

March 21, 2012 at 6.30 pm

The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center

A year after the fall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s government in Tunisia that sparked uprisings all over the Middle East, what is the status of democratic outcomes of the Tunisian revolution? As journalists still fight for freedom of the media and racketeering has erupted in the job market, join Taoufik Ben-Amor (Arabic Studies, Columbia) as he speaks with Peter Hitchcock (Center for Place, Culture and Politics) about the cultural as well as political impact of this historic shift. This conversation finds its home in Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency’s Common Assembly which opens a forum in the James Gallery for discussions of rejuvenation of contested sites.

Taoufik Ben-Amor is Gordon Gray Jr Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies at Columbia University. He specializes in Arabic language and linguistics, language and identity, Arab music, and music in Sufism. His research combines his interests in music, language and identity in the Arab world through the study of lyrics. He has published extensively, including a textbook on Tunisian Arabic. His most recent papers are entitled “Language through Literature” and “The Making of Tradition: Standardization of the Lyrics of the Tunisian Andalusian Malouf.”

Peter Hitchcock has taught in CUNY since 1988. He has been a Visiting Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, Beijing University, and Shanghai University. He studies literary and cultural theory, twentieth century film and literature (American, European, Asian, and African), and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. He is the author of four books: Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice; Dialogics of the Oppressed; Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism; andImaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism. He has edited and introduced a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Mikhail Bakhtin and is on the editorial boards ofDialogism and Cultural Logic. He has published around fifty articles in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Transition,Third Text, Rethinking Marxism, Research in African Literatures, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Cultural Studies,Theory, Culture and Society, Twentieth Century Literature, as well as in a number of anthologies.