Hamid Dabashi Quotes
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The visual possibility of seeing the historical person as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.
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While European national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism... in order to match, balance and thus authenticate Western Civilization.
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To read forward Why should Europeans not be able to read, even when we write in the language they understand? They cannot read because they as “Europeans,” caught in the snare of an exhausted but self-nostalgic metaphor are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn.
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This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement...
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Equally scandalized by this election are the colorful band of lipstick jihadi Hirsi Ali wannabes who are writing one erotic fantasy after another about Iranian “women,” oversexualizing Iranian politics as they opt for “love and danger” during their “honeymoon in Tehran.” The representation of Iranian women in the flea market of the US publishing industry began under President Bush with Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and has now reached a new depth of depravity in Pardis Mahdavi’s Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Between a harem full of Lolitas and a bathhouse of nymphomaniacs is where Nafisi and Mahdavi have Iranian women, marching in despair, awaiting liberation by US marines and Israeli bombers. What a contrast to the real work of women, as testified to in this election, and now on the street in defense of the collective will of the nation.
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Racism consists in devaluing the humanity of certain people by dismissing it or playing it down even when not intentional at the same time as highlighting and playing up European philosophy, assuming it to be universal. It may be global, because it piggybacks on imperial expansion, but it certainly cannot be universal.
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There is no pride in a masculinst history that deprives half of humanity a pride of place, the dignity of who and what they are.