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Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective

Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective

by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (Author)

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    Paperback 2009

    $20.22
Synopsis

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines-nationalist, Marxist, and religious-and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical responses, this volume illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers, and it connects Arab debates on cultural malaise, identity, and authenticity to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions and various Arab concerns.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 496
 Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 11 Dec 2009
ISBN 10: 023114489X
ISBN 13: 9780231144896
Book Overview: The views presented here are extremely diverse and reflect an intense internal debate among Arab intellectuals over epistemological, cultural, and political causes of decline. Kassab does an excellent job of distilling various ideas and surveying the field, thereby providing the first summative narrative of its kind. -- Ahmad Dallal, Georgetown University The malaise of Arabs today, evident in their critiques of efforts to modernize their culture and society and preserve their identity, is intelligently analyzed in this encyclopedic book. Kassab shows that other nations have experienced similar periods of cultural angst before achieving resolutions specific to themselves. Her book is one of the few in English that can make the Arab world's cultural predicament understandable for open-minded outsiders. -- Issa J. Boullata, author of Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought Kassab has written no less than a monumental intervention in contemporary intellectual history and philosophy. This treatise, rich in erudition and critical reflection, tears apart a web of misrepresentations. Kassab makes visible the ideas, wrought from continuous struggle, crucial to, as she puts it, 'the search for a thought of one's own,' through the power of her scholarship and rigorous argumentation. This work is a triumph, a major achievement in contemporary thought, and a must-read for anyone committed to a more nuanced understanding of the intellectual's role in anticolonial struggle in modern times. As a work in political thought and intellectual history it is destined to be a classic. -- Lewis Gordon, Laura H. Carnell, Temple University, and author of An Introduction to Africana Philosophy

Media Reviews
A must read for all those who want to understand the Arab world's cultural predicament. -- Issa J. Boullata The Middle East Journal [An] outstanding contribution that does an excellent job of exposing the self-analysis of contemporary Arab culture. -- Yoav Di-Capua H-Levant ...a very important contribution to the field of Arab intellectual history...a much-need addition to our field. -- Orit Bashkin International Journal of Middle East Studies
Author Bio
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is a research fellow at the German Orient Institute in Beirut. She has studied in Beirut and Fribourg, Switzerland, and has taught in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut and at the University of Balamand, and in the United States at Columbia University and Yale University. She is the author of The Theory of Social Action in the Schutz-Parsons Debate.