New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Wael Hallaq

Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge
By: Wael Hallaq

Since Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism has been singled out for critique as the quintessential example of Western intellectuals’ collaboration with oppression. Controversies over the imbrications of knowledge and power and the complicity of Orientalism in the larger project of colonialism have been waged among generations of scholars. But has Orientalism come to stand in for all of the sins of European modernity, at the cost of neglecting the complicity of the rest of the academic disciplines?

In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic thought such as sovereignty and the self. Hallaq traces their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world, interrogating and historicizing the set of causes that permitted modernity to wed knowledge to power. Restating Orientalism offers a bold rethinking of the theory of the author, the concept of sovereignty, and the place of the secular Western self in the modern project, reopening the problem of power and knowledge to an ethical critique and ultimately theorizing an exit from modernity’s predicaments. A remarkably ambitious attempt to overturn the foundations of a wide range of academic disciplines while also drawing on the best they have to offer, Restating Orientalism exposes the depth of academia’s lethal complicity in modern forms of capitalism, colonialism, and hegemonic power.

Amna Akbar, Ohio State University
Brandon Terry, Harvard University
Adam Tooze, Columbia University
and Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia University

read and discuss
Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution by Bernie Sanders
and
Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda by Indivisible

Open to the public, please RSVP to Ghislaine Pages at gmp2142@columbia.edu

This series is also available as a graduate seminar, CPLS GR8867, offered through ICLS for GSAS students.
The series also has the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Maison Française.  

This Roundtable invites historians Marwa Elshakry, Michael Gordin, Malgosia Mazurek, and Carl Wennerlind to discuss Osiris 33, a special issue on “Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories,” with the co-editors of the volume, Will Deringer, Eugenia Lean, and Lukas Rieppel.

The issue examines the historical relationship between science and capitalism, which has long stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge of scholarly interest in the “history of capitalism,” as well as from renewed attention to political economy by historians of science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from microbiology to industrial psychology to public health.

The issue will be available on-line as an e-journal in late October. The roundtable will focus on the introduction in particular, but also include discussion on the volume as a whole.

For more information, click here.