136 Hamid Dabashi, with a Foreword Bywalter Mignolo the Very

136 Book Reviews Hamid Dabashi, with a Foreword by Walter Mignolo Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books, 2015. 272 pages. USD 18.95 (Paper- back). ISBN 9781783604197. The very ideological foundation of every civilizational discourse is primarily based on their onto-epistemological premises. One of most influential master- pieces of 20th century, Edward Said’s Orientalism, set the trend for contextual- izing the way in which Western discourse represented and constructed Eastern discourse. Limiting the import of this work only to a literary contribution was intentionally aimed to intellectually undermine its “compelling arguments” to deconstruct the colonial hegemony of post-Renaissance Eurocentric premise of Western thought. The argument started by Edward Said became the pri- mary precursor for some of most known intellectuals and Hamid Dabashi, being one of the closest admirers and followers of Edward Said, took up this task of furthering the intellectual legacy of his mentor. The foreword by Wal- ter Mignolo, one of the well-known specialists in colonial/postcolonial critical circles has buttressed the argument of this boldly unconventional and intellectually eponymous project. The book, “Can Non-EuropeansThink” by Hamid Dabashi, demonstrates why Edward Said and his critique of Orientalism is relevant today more than ever, especially with the epistemic shift of political culture in the Arab World. His words illuminating, utterances compelling, and insights erudite; through this collection of essays Dabashi has shown us how Edward Said has become “the sound with which we sing, the sight with which we see, the aroma of the things we smell” (p. 57). The book is not only in its own right an invaluable contribution to the increasingly important study of the sociology of knowledge, but also a sincere salute to one of the most influential scholars of the twentieth century.Dabashi complains that only European (and by extension some Ameri- can) philosophers are considered “eminent” in a recent Al Jazeera article paying homage to Slavoj Žižek whereas non-European thinkers go unnamed. They are in effect denied “globality” because Europe’s appropriation of what counts as real philosophy or intellectual work is accompanied naturally by a sense of its self, a confidence in its own intellectual hype, what Dabashi calls Europe’s “self- centrism.” Moving beyond the limits of the condition called “postcoloniality,” this book comes together, in effect, as a declaration of independence, not just from the condition of postcoloniality, but from the limited and now exhausted epis- temics it had historically occasioned. As Dabashi puts it: “[P]eople like me are no longer interested in whatever it is they fancy to be ‘hegemonic’ or ‘counter- hegemonic’ in Europe and for Europeans. We have been to much greener pas- © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15743012-02501002 Book Reviews 137 tures … We (by which I mean we colored boys and girls from their former colonies) were mapping a new topography of the world (our world, the whole planetary disposition of the globe we are now claiming as ours) in our thinking and scholarship …” (p. 4). Aditya Nigam’s essay, “End of Postcolonialism and the Challenge for ‘Non-European’ Thought” (which engages positively with Dabashi’s work, from within Dabashi’s argument), demonstrates the problem Dabashi highlights in his book, namely that the many dismissive reactions to Dabashi’s work stem from a superficial reading of non-European philosophical thinking born from a refusal to think outside of Eurocentric thought. Despite titling the collection, “Can Non-Europeans Think?,” Dabashi main- tains at the very beginning of the book that his task here is not to defend the arguments concerning the question per se. “For, whatever it is worth, it stands on its two feet” (p. 5). The issue he wants to address, rather, is “whether or not European philosophers can actually read something and learn from it,” thus the introduction: “Can Europeans Read?” The answer he gives is unequivocal: no, they cannot. Europeans cannot read because “they are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus inca- pable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn” (p. 6) Dabashi contextualizes the magnanimity of Said in chapter 2 “The Moment of Myth: Edward Said” vis-a-vis his path-breaking work on Orientalism. Ori- entalism liberated the immigrant academicians from the embellished conun- drum of “exilic intellectuals” and how his “liberation theology” renewed their lost confidence in their onto-epistemological pretext. Edward Said acted as a lynchpin in creating a platform for disenchanted non-European thinkers – Asians, Latinos, Arabs, Turks, Africans, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Afghans, and South Asians beyond the common denominator of their origin and toward the solidarity of a common epistemologically contextual trans-historical premise. Catholicity of his liberating knowledge, generosity of his moral rec- titude, easily transgressed boundaries and put to shame all territorial claims to authenticity. Dabashi appropriates the direct threats, indirect allusions, guarded remarks and provocative bluffs of anxiety-provoking crescendo in chapter three, “The Middle East is Changed Forever.” Dabashi shows how the hegemonic ruptures of imperial and capitalist powers intelligibly maintain global domination to be politically effective and psychologically enduring, following the maxim of maintaining the hegemony “the state of war is far more important than the actual act of war”, and the threat to violence politically far more destabilizing that the act of violence itself (p. 64). Knowing the key to sustaining the state of war, the warmongers in Washington, D.C., seem to have learned, is to con- Religion & Theology 25 (2018) 131–151.

Load more