The Arab Spring The End of Postcolonialism

This pioneering explanation of the Arab Spring will define a new era of thinking about the Middle East.In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, were driven by a 'Delayed Defiance' - a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike - that signifies no less than the end of Postcolonialism. Sketching a new geography of liberation, Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the 'the Middle East'. Ultimately, the 'permanent revolutionary mood' Dabashi brilliantly explains has the potential to liberate not only those societies already ignited, but many others through a universal geopolitics of hope.

Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian-American Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City. Hamid has been a columnist for the Egyptianal-Ahram Weekly for over a decade, and is now a regular columnist for Aljazeera, and he has had a regular column at CNN. He has travelled and lectured extensively in the Arab world, from Morocco to Egypt to Palestine to Syria.

"Hamid Dabashi's The Arab Spring is an enormously enlightening and original study, a landmark work of a political and historical convulsion of immense proportion and significance, with ripple effects of great magnitude. The book is so rich, careful and systematic in making its case that I expect it to define a new paradigm regarding the nature of revolution itself, in our understanding of post-colonialism in some of its fundamental articulations, and in putting to rest the Eurocentric hypothesis about the end of history." - Alamin Mazrui, Rutgers University


"A refreshing, thoughtful and historical reading of the dramatic changes sweeping the Arab world." - Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst, Al Jazeera

"Embracing the poetic justice of the Arab Spring, Hamid Dabashi seizes upon and expresses the lyrical. He recounts philosophically an open-ended nonlinear story, which is still in the making. It begins with an end-credit (like in a film) which closes the recent past of wishful tyrannical thinking of total domination, and it announces a new era of young hope which can today dream of the possible. Within this narrative, recent happenings suggest it they will continue indefinitely." - Elia Suleiman, writer and director, The Time that Remains