
The New Orientalists
Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard
- 256 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The west's Orientalism - its construction of an Arab or Islamic 'Other' - has been exposed and examined under the critical theory microscope and thoroughly expelled, it seems, from academic thought. At the same time postmodern thinkers from Nietzsche onwards have employed the motifs and symbols of the Islamic Orient within an ongoing critique of western modernity, an appropriation which, this hugely controversial book argues, runs every risk of becoming a new and more insidious Orientalist strain.Ian Almond sensitively yet rigorously examines the work of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek, as well as that of postmodern writers Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk. In doing so he exposes the implications of this 'use' of Islam for both the postmodern project and for Islam itself. Taking apart the assumptions, omissions and contradictions inherent in these thinkers' approaches to Islam and to the Arab world, and drawing on the work of prominent Muslim thinkers including Ziauddin Sardar, Aziz Al-Azmeh and Bobby S. Sayyid, "The New Orientalists" highlights the difficulty of ever speaking truly about the 'Other'.
In light of the current Western climate of fear and hysteria surrounding the Islamic world, this groundbreaking project could hardly be more timely.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I Islam and the critique of modernity
- 1 Nietzscheās peace with Islam
- 2 Foucaultās Iran and the madness of Islam
- 3 Derridaās Islam and the peoples of the book
- II Islam and postmodern fiction
- 4 Borges and the finitude of Islam
- 5 The many Islams of Salman Rushdie
- 6 Islam and melancholy in Orhan Pamukās The Black Book
- III Islam, ātheoryā and Europe
- 7 Kristeva and Islamās time
- 8 Islam and Baudrillardās last hope against the New World Order
- 9 Iraq and the Hegelian legacy of Žižekās Islam
- Concluding thoughts
- Notes
- Bibliography