The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics Invites You to a
Book Party
With Saadia Toor and Costas Panayotakis
Authors of The State of Islam and Remaking Scarcity
Thursday, February 23rd, 6.30pm-8.30pm
Room 6107 | PCP Seminar Room
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY 10016
This event is free and open to the public!
Saadia Toor‘s The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan tells the story of the Pakistani nation-state through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, in order to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the rise of militant Islam across the world. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam, and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined political realm, The State of Islam is a Gramscian analysis of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period.
Toor uses the tools of cultural studies and postcolonial theory to understand what is at stake in discourses of Islam, socialism, and the nation in Pakistan. Among other things, The State of Islam seeks to explain how Pakistan went from being a place where the strategic battle for hegemony was fought between two secular forces — the liberal nationalists and the Marxist cultural Left or Progressives — to one where the national discourse has become increasingly defined by the agenda of the religious right. She argues how this was directly tied to the Cold War context in which political Islam was advanced, along with the marginalization and active repression of the organized Left and attempts to marginalize its alternate visions of Pakistani society.
Costas Panayotakis‘ Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy (The Future of World Capitalism), is a powerful challenge to the current economic orthodoxy. It asserts the core principle of economic democracy, that all human beings should have an equal say over the priorities of the economic system, as the ultimate solution to scarcity and ecological crisis. The overriding importance of the logic of capital accumulation accounts for the fact that capitalism is not able to make a rational use of scarce resources and the productive potential at the disposal of human society. Instead, capitalism produces grotesque inequalities and unnecessary human suffering, a toxic consumerist culture that fails to satisfy, and a deepening ecological crisis. The dominant schools of neoclassical and neoliberal economics tell us that material scarcity is an inevitable product of an insatiable human nature. Against this, Costas Panayotakis argues that scarcity is in fact a result of the social and economic processes of the capitalist system.
