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Photo by Goldbarg Bashi |
Hamid Dabashi is
a formidable figure. He has carved out a unique place for himself as a
writer, both in the world of cultural commentary and academia through
his online presence as a columnist for Al Jazeera and Al Ahram Weekly and as the Hagop Kervorkian Professor of Comparative Literature and Iranian Studies at Columbia University.
Dabashi’s are some of the most salient and dynamic arguments available
about the current state of affairs in the Arab world and in Iran. His
critical eye has led many to view him as the bearer of Edward Said’s
life-long endeavor to shift the discussion about the peoples and
societies of the Middle East away from the stagnant views of
Orientalists like Bernard Lewis - who often times either fetishize or
demonize Middle Eastern societies- and towards the evolving realities
and struggles for freedom, justice and dignity within these societies.
In his career, which spans decades of academic work, he has been both
prolific and audacious. It’s not often a professor of comparative
literature is so widely read outside of his own field. And Dabashi, it
seems, has his fingers in everything that is relevant in the world of
social change, art, cinema, and literature in both the Arabic and Farsi
speaking worlds.
Whereas many in academia shy away from commenting on current events,
let alone write books on current social and political phenomena, Dabashi
has not, taking on the role of critic and public intellectual with
verve and spirit. Frantz Fanon, in his powerful work Black Skin, White
Masks proclaimed, “reality requires total comprehension,” and that an
“answer must be found on the objective as well as the subjective level.”
Echoing Fanon, Dabashi, in a brief exchange with Aslan Media, revealed a
similar thought, saying that we must engage in “active soul searching
regarding the endemic issues in our own societies and cultures that
demand and must exact auto-criticism.” This he makes evident in his
newest work, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (reviewed here by
Aslan Media’s Arts and Music Editor), where in his chapter “Race,
Gender and Class,” Dabashi relishes the role set before him to shine a
light on jingoistic racial divisions and the race based atrocities that
have occurred during the Arab Spring as well as the way young
revolutionaries today have rejected those tropes and are now building
bonds of “transnational solidarity.” It must be said that as an Iranian
intellectual in exile, he has stated his own special connection to the
Arab world, especially Palestine, which he has described as central to
his “moral and imaginative geography."
Dabashi is a restless figure. In the last month he has traveled to
the UK, Turkey and Italy to give various addresses and lectures (it
should be noted he is on official sabbatical for one year from his
position at Columbia University). Now he comes to San Francisco to give
the Keynote address at Golden Thread’s ReOrient Forum. The
Forum is coupled with Golden Thread’s Theatre Festival which features
cutting edge works by writers who have found lyrical home in what we
must now call the so-called Middle East. The ReOrient Forum
itself has a stated goal of enabling and allowing for dialogue about
current issues that revolve around Middle Eastern-American theatre. The
panels themselves are represented by individuals with backgrounds in
various disciplines: writers, artists, academics, activists,
intellectuals, and actors. While the Forum does not serve as a place to
discuss the artistic qualities of the plays presented, the plays
themselves serve as a springboard for the discussions.
One of the key issues that nearly all the panels will be grappling
with is representation, and not just as it pertains to theatre, but even
when dealing with philanthropic and humanitarian issues. Aslan Media
writer Mohamed Chakmachi recently had a chance to interview Dr. Dabashi
about these themes, as well as his role as Keynote Speaker to Golden
Thread’s ReOrient Forum.
Aslan Media: First, could you share with us some thoughts you
have on how to remain authentic when dealing or working with issues in
the Middle East?
Hamid Dabashi: We need categorically to abandon the
anxiety of authenticity. Any claim to authenticity is inauthentic. You
know the great motto of good acting, right: “sincerity my dear,
sincerity, if you can fake that you got it made.” On stage and in front
of camera or pondering over a canvas the only authenticity that matters
is the artist’s craft, and her rootedness, or her worldliness. If she is
not true to that world her flawed forms will betray her. No artists
represent anything, except that constellation of form and fury that make
up her art. Know that art is no abstraction—even in the most abstract
forms of art. That art is rooted, and if not it will wither away the
instant it touches the air of reality that permeates the performing
ambience of the world in which it is uttered. So if I were these artists
I would not worry about authenticity for that anxiety is the clearest
sign of artistic inauthenticity.
AM: The first panel will be discussing the phenomena widely
known today as the Arab Spring, the dramatic reverberations of this
movement, how it has traveled and issues of revolutionary aesthetics.
What do you think some of the long-term effects of these reverberations
will be in representing the Middle East in theatre, in art and in the
media either here in the US or in the Middle East itself?
HD: The very first thing that the Arab Spring has
done is dispense this horrid colonial concoction you call “the Middle
East.” Millions of people braving the elements against tyranny and
imperialism are not in the middle of the colonial officer’s east
anymore. They are in the middle of history, of geography, of the world
they are reimaging beyond their parental limitations. That fact and the
phenomenon of the Arab Spring will generate its own artists and its own
art. It is still too early to say, for art is always way ahead of
political events, and thus it will not react to the Arab Spring but
navigate its future. Arab Spring was dreamt by Arab artists, poets,
novelists, dramatist, filmmakers, photographers, etc. for over 200
years—now that it is happening—the next phase will be dreamt by the next
generation. So we should not ask what is the effect of the Arab Spring
on art, but what is the next phase of the Arab Spring that this
generation of artists are dreaming—as we speak.
AM: Cultural jamming, or détournement, has been a key tool
for many in turning Orientalist and simple-minded representations of the
Middle East on their head. One of the panels for the ReOrient Forum is
titled Comedic Counter Terrorism. Do you feel that comedy is an
effective manner in dealing with static notions of the Middle East and
Middle Easterners? When and how does it work best?
HD: Yes of course—comedy is perhaps the best medium
precisely because these latter-day Orientalist (or the recycled ones
like Bernard Lewis) are quite comic. But my contention is that
Orientalism is far more a vexing matter for expatriate intellectuals and
artists here in North America or Western Europe than where these
revolutions are happening. All we need is just to imagine the face of
Bernard Lewis and we have such a visceral revulsion that we become
paralyzed. But the fact is these folks are now made—by the world
historic might of these revolutions –categorically redundant and
useless. They were made paradoxically to have a much longer life than
they deserved, precisely because of the power of criticism that was
launched against them. As I have long since argued, we need to change
the interlocutors. These Orientalists are no longer worth our attention.
History, our people, people at large, have left them behind and so must
we.
AM: Artists are often the subjects of state tyranny. We have
seen how in Syria artists and musicians who have used their talents to
criticize the state have been abused and even murdered. Two groups have
been invited to talk about this issue and the protocol for helping
artists in danger in foreign nations. What are some of the potential
issues or conflicts for a foreign group trying to avoid what some call
the “white-savior syndrome” but whose interests are to help an artist
under attack in the Middle East?
HD: Artists are under attack everywhere—in Syria and
Iran in one way and in the United States and China or Russia in some
other way. In order not to fall into the “white-savior syndrome” as you
rightly call it, you need to include the white artists in the
project—and thus categorically to dismantle the racialized context of
perilous art and artists. Here in the US artists are at the mercy of
commercial capitalism when they fail and they become fetishized into the
culture industry when they succeed; there they are at the whim of
bloody dictators. You need to theorize both sides of the spectrum into a
singular project that avoids the proposition that we are saving them.
AM: Cultural observers and critics like Edward Said have
pointed out that often times multiculturalism requires “othering” so
much so that it ends up reinforcing a dominant cultures colonial role.
The panel on Engaged Performance will try to investigate how artists
across cultures can restore social relationships affected by political
trauma. What do you see as the issues in creating “hyphenated art”?
HD: I have no patience for “hyphenated art.” It
cross-authenticates two fabrications at the both sides of the hyphen, as
it were. When we assay “Arab-American” to accommodate that hyphen we
have in effect authenticated two highly fabricated propositions—Arab and
American. Two fake bookends make for a fake book—and why should we do
that? Home for an artist is where s/he climbs the stage and acts and
performs and laughs and cries in what ever language or medium that comes
most natural to her creative demon—we have no control over these
things—they have control over us.
AM: There is a notion that the great writings of the Middle
East, especially when it comes to poetry, can only be found in the works
that exist within the classical canon of Middle Eastern literature.
Indeed, so-called purists often deride modern representations of
classical works. How do you feel about this specific phenomena? That is
to say to do you feel that using classical poetry in modern works is
effective in creating dynamic contemporary art?
HD: The classics are there to be transgressed—they
are walls, and in being walls they are also ipso facto, invitations to
defiance. Yes they are some mighty walls—sometimes in fragments and
ruins—but we climb and transgress them at will. It is easy to say that
Abu Nuwas or Hafez were great poets—of course they were, but who is the
Abu Nuwas and Hafez wandering among us these days? They are there, and
just like Abu Nuwas and Hafez they have no clue who they are until a
generation or two later.
AM: The last panel will be discussing the similitudes between
the War on Drugs of the 1980s and the War on Terror today. What should
we know about either of these phenomena in the marginalization and
vilification of certain communities?
HD: The key word in both cases is “war”—this empire
has no other way of imagining the world except through its military and
militant apparatus. Manufacturing and combating factual and fictive
enemies is the only way that this empire can sustain its raison
d'être—that is the calamity the world faces. But that militarization has
now reached its point of exhaustion and the world is leaving it behind.
AM: Finally, I would like you to send an image that you might
say best exemplifies the ideas you have about this moment in history:
HD: This is the image:
and this why:
By Mohamed Chakmachi
Read more about Hamid Dabashi's recent books "The Arab Spring" and "Iran, The Green Movement and the USA"
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