Dabashi Hamid - Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture

Hamid Keshmirshekan

I was thrilled when Hamid Dabashi, the cultural critic and scholar of comparative literature, suggested to me if I would be willing to edit a collection of essays on visual, literary and performing arts that he had written over the last quarter of a century and adapt them in a volume. I thought it would certainly be an inspiring experience, and it was indeed in practice. For me it was also an exploratory journey, a process of entering new territorial domains with a wide range of materials and methodological approaches and interdisciplinary strategies. As an art historian whose main preoccupation has been art and material culture of modern and contemporary Iran and the Arab world, it was a process of diving into a new territory of knowledge. I realized how Dabashis vast knowledge in historical and contemporary intellectual and artistic practices, Iranian Islamic philosophy, Persian literature, poetry, Arab and Muslim cultural representations, as well as contemporary theories, philosophy, social and political ideologies and public affairs has enabled him to portray an unprecedented critical perspective on artistic practices and their contextual implications.

Dabashis pioneering scholarly writings on the subjects of cultural and intellectual history and postcolonial studies through criticism of Orientalism and imperialism are integrated assets in his writings on interpretation of artistic and cinematic materials. This book is in fact based on works of a cultural theorist who extrapolates more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. The main objective of this volume is to open up the horizons of critical thinking about these arts in a manner that we do not have any available source except by leading European or American critics. By putting these scattered materials together in this anthology, an attempt has been made to underline their theoretical and critical logicsomething quite unique and effectively nonexistent in the field. Given also the recent move within the global art historythe ongoing debates on the Western-centric art histories and criticism, the struggle for an alternative art historical/critical approach within the transcultural contexts and flows, and the search for new methodological and theoretical practicesthis book is indeed a response to this demand. It critically discusses and brings up these issues and concerns with reference to the arts of the Muslim world and beyond.

Dabashis everlasting involvement with postcolonial thoughts has allowed him to construct an extraordinary body of theoretical texts that will provide quite a novel angle for art criticism, literary and world cinema studies. The manner in which they inform a particularly critical angle is identified by a system of interpretation based on the legitimate

What coheres the chapters of this book together is in fact their reflection of Dabashis views on the question of authority, the existing unbalanced and hierarchical subject positions, and their indisputable consequential influence on controlling and determining knowledge and epistemology. He describes how methods and paradigms that were previously thought to be certain and unfailing could now be subject to a radical rethinking and revision. He moreover redefines important issues such as local vis--vis international, center vis--vis periphery, traditional vis--vis contemporary, past vis--vis present, classical vis--vis modern, north vis--vis south, east vis--vis west, and how artists, performers, writers, and other cultural agents react in response to these concepts.

One of the core arguments in this volume is directly linked to the point that Dabashi raises in his seminal essay: Can non-Europeans think? What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical pedigree? In that essay Dabashi points out that:

The question of course is not the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world (deep and far, that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives.

The central argument embracing the principal theme of the essay, prevalent in this volume too, is how thinkers and artists outside the realm of European (and American) domain could contribute to this world and how they are designated and honored in the age of globalised media. (the same way that African philosophy is named ethnophilosophy)? He continues by saying that