Abstract

What are the still-unknown horizons of world thought?

This book brings together prominent scholars from varying disciplines to speculate on this obscure question and the many crossroads that face intellectuals in our contemporary era and its aftermath. The result is a collection of “manifestos” that contemplate a potential global future for thinking itself, venturing across some of the most marginalized sectors of East and West (with particular emphasis on the Middle Eastern and Islamicate) in order to dissect crucial issues of culture, society, philosophy, literature, art, religion, and politics. The book explores themes such as as universality, translation, modernity, language, history, identity, resistance, ecology, catastrophe, memory, and the body, offering a groundbreaking alignment of texts and ideas with far-reaching implications for our time and beyond.
A set of elegant manifestos on some of the most pressing issues of our time, each adopting a position unmoored from conventional schools, genealogies and traditions of thought, so as to bring the world itself to light in all its heterogeneous reality.
Faisal Devji, Reader in Modern South Asian History, University of Oxford
Lucian Stone is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Dakota. He is co-author of Simone Weil and Theology (2013). In addition he has edited several volumes including: Iranian Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Spheres of Belonging (2014); Dead Man’s Shadow: Collected Poems of Leonardo P. Alishan (2011); The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later (2010); and The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Library of Living Philosophers, Volume XXVIII (2001). He is editor of the journal SCTIW Review.

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. He is the author or editor of The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (2010), Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (2012), The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (2013), and Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (2015).

Contributors: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, SOAS, University of London and Chair of the Centre for Iranian Studies, London Middle East Institute, UK; Banu Bargu, Associate Professor of Politics, New School for Social Research, USA; Réda Bensmaïa, Professor Emeritus, Formerly University Professor of French and Francophone Literature, Brown University, USA; Huda Fakhreddine, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA; Wael Hallaq Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, USA; Rosalind Hampton, doctoral candidate in Educational Studies, McGill University, Canada; Michelle Hartman, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature, McGill University, Canada; Aslı Igsiz, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University, USA; Nanor Kebranian, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, USA; Setrag Manoukian, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Islamic Studies, McGill University, Canada; Ruth Mas, Visiting Scholar, Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS), SOAS, University of London, UK; Andrea Mura, Lecturer, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK; Mahmut Mutman, Lecturer, Department of Cinema and Television, Istanbul Şehir University, Turkey; S. Sayyid, Reader in Rhetoric, University of Leeds, UK; Brian Seitz, Professor of Philosophy, Babson College, USA; Stephen Sheehi, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies, College of William and Mary, USA; Anthony Paul Smith, Assistant Professor of Religion, LaSalle University, USA; Jens Veneman, sculptor, Brooklyn, USA and Menden, Germany; Eyal Weizman, Professor of Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; Jason Wirth, Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University, USA; Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey