Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization
was written during a genocide. In a world dominated by moral double standards, Dabashi refers to the staggering death toll of Palestinians in Gaza – often reported in a cold and detached numbers – and explores the possibility of making sense of this world of not only incredible injustices but also continued settler colonialism by “the West” and its extensions. The unwavering support by the United States and Europeans of Israeli military campaign in Gaza, as Dabashi argues, reveals the quintessence of “Western civilization.” Dabashi’s work invokes love, poetry, and solidarity in response to oppression, colonization, and genocide. Viewed from the point of view of the wretched of the earth, Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine.
Read book review by Hossam el-Hamalawy.
SPEAKERS
Hamid Dabashi
is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. Professor Dabashi is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. Aside from numerous essays and chapters, Professor Dabashi is the award-winning author of about 3 dozen books on subjects of empire and colonialism, postorientalism, classical and contemporary Persian literature, Iranian cinema, Shi‘i theology, Palestine, and social movements in Iran. His works have been translated into a dozen languages.
Moisés Garduño Garcia
is Full-time Professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He holds a PhD in Contemporary Arab Studies from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His academic background includes degrees in International Relations from UNAM, Social Anthropology from the Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), and Asian and African Studies from El Colegio de México. His research lines focus on conflict dynamics in the Middle East, state-society relations in Iran, and the study of emerging social forces in the Arab world. He has been the recipient of several distinctions, including the National University Recognition for Young Academics (2018 and 2022), the Research Prize for Young Scientists granted by the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2022; and the recognition of his book
The Fighters of the People of Iran in the top 5 books on Asia by International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2021. He is the editor of Thinking Palestine from the Global South (2017) and Autoritarianism in MENA after covid 19(2025). His most recent book is entitled Historia mínima de Irán moderno published by El Colegio de México (2025).
Peyman Vahabzadeh is Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of several books on phenomenology, violence and nonviolence, and social and political movements of Iran in 1960s-1980s, as well as over 70 scholarly, public venue, or online articles and interviews, including a number of interviews by Jadaliyya
. His most recent books include La alternativa de la noviolencia (2025) and For Land and Culture: the Grassroots Council Movement of Turkmens in Iran, 1979-1980(2024).
