Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 13
2/2/2016
Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online
The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
By: Hamid Dabashi
The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. New York, Zed Books, 2012. 296pp. $ 19.95. ISBN: 9781780322230.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Youssef Yacoubi, PhD
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
From the outset it is important to underscore the fact that The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism represents a gesture of solidarity with, and
endorsement of the Arab Spring. On the other hand, this book should be placed within the context of Dabashi’s earlier arguments; it should be
conceived as a continuation in its fundamental process of argumentation of the author’s earlier analysis of the civil rights movement in Iran of 2009
and the Green Movement and the U.S.A. (2010). The Arab Spring, on this account, is yet another chapter in the author’s thinking that stresses the
fact of substantive and consistent movements for change, which have been carving out a new “liberation geography” in the Islamic world at large.
There is of course a degree of unknowability about this new and unfolding horizon, yet Dabashi insists that we need to continue to imagine it and
theorize it even in its most precarious and perhaps cryptic and premature stages. The need to theorize this post ideological moment must also come
from Dabashi’s positioning in the U.S. academia marred by an institutionalized racism against Islamic and Arab ideas (real or sublime). U.S.
academia, having limited the study of the Middle East to national interests, and security concerns, has only promoted the politics of despair and
fatalism about the Arab world. The Arab Spring has continued to challenge the myopic hermeneutics of many so-called experts on the Middle East,
who, like Bernard Lewis and others, continue to rehearse what is not only unreliable knowledge, but also shamelessly oppressive imagining. The
current spin-doctors, or as Dabashi categorizes them, the analysts and the annalists exhibited little trust in the very possibility of democratic
thinking and agency among Arabs and Muslims.
This exigency for theorization inevitably inspired and enhanced by revealing events on the grounds, means that the relationship between all
movements of civil rights and liberation in the larger Islamic world are “variations on the same theme of delayed defiance of bo ]\