Can Non-Europeans Think?

Two public talks by Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York.

I) Title: Can Non-Europeans Think?
Thursday, 03 November 2016, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM | Room LEC 1, Humanities Center, University of Alberta

Abstract: Philosophy claims to be the search for knowledge, unbound by any fetters. Yet even a cursory analysis of how it is conceived when it exists outside the European tradition reveals a troubling bias. While European philosophy, for example is simply known as “philosophy,” African philosophy is all too often dubbed “ethnophilosophy.” The Western philosophical tradition simply hasn’t acknowledged the vast amount of innovative thought that has flourished outside the European philosophical pedigree–and that has led to awkward, and damaging, failures to properly reckon with the ideas of people like Japan’s Kojin Karatani, Cuba’s Roberto Fernandez Retamar, or even America’s Cornel West. In Can Non-Europeans Think?, Hamid Dabashi brings together a unique group of historical and theoretical reflections on current affairs and the role of philosophy to argue that, in order to grapple with the problems of humanity today, we must eliminate the ethnographic gaze that infects philosophy and casts Arab and other non-Western thinkers as subordinates.

II) Title: Muslims, Coexistence and Cosmopolitanism in the Emerging North American Political Landscape
Friday, 04 November 2016, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM | Edmonton Islamic Academy, 14525 – 127 Street, Edmonton, T6V 0B3

Biography: Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York. He has written over twenty five books, edited four,  and  contributed  chapters  to many  more.  He  is  also  the  author  of  over  100  essays, articles  and  book  reviews  in  major  scholarly  and  peer  reviewed  journals  on  subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan. A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi  Reader  (2010). His Most recent work includes Being A Muslim in the World (Palgrave 2013), Can Non-Europeans Think? (Zed, 2015), Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Harvard University Press, 2015), Iran Without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation (Verso, 2016).