Book Launch
Book Launch: After Savagery. Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization
- Date
- Wednesday 15 October 2025
- Time
- Explanation
- Registration is required to attend this event
- Location
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 3.60
We are pleased to invite you to the launch of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery. Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization. Professor Hamid Dabashi will be in conversation with Dr Marina Calculli and Dr Vineet Thakur. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during the event.
About the book
Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.
The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism. What remains of the theories we use to understand our world?
With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.
If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.
About the speakers
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also a founding member of both the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and of the Center for Palestine Studies. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. A prolific scholar, he has written over two dozen books, edited four volumes, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010). Beyond the academy, Hamid Dabashi is an active public intellectual and commentator on current affairs. His opinion pieces and essays appear regularly in outlets such as Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera.
Marina Calculli is a University Lecturer of International Relations at Leiden University. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris. Her research explores the nexus of security and imperialism in postcolonial states, sovereignty beyond the West, and the role of ideology in world politics, with a particular focus on armed resistance in Lebanon and Palestine. Her work has been published in English and Italian in Security Dialogue, The International Spectator, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Vita & Pensiero, Il Mulino. She is the author of two books in Italian: Like a State. Hizbullah and Strategic Mimesis (2018) and Sovereign Terror. State and Jihad in the post-liberal era (2017 – co-authored with Francesco Strazzari). She is a member of ‘Leiden Scholars for Palestine’ and ‘Rete RUP – Ricerca e Università per la Palestina’. She regularly writes essays and op-eds for a range of media outlets, including Il Manifesto and Middle East Eye.
Vineet Thakur is a University Lecturer at Leiden University. He studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and has previously worked at Ambedkar University (Delhi), University of Johannesburg and SOAS London. He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, and Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. His research focus in on diplomatic histories of the global south. He is the author of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri: A Liberal Life (2023); India’s First Diplomat: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (2021); The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (2020 – with Alexander Davis and Peter Vale); South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (2020 – with Peter Vale; winner of the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for the Best Book in Historical International Relations); Postscripts on Independence: Foreign Policy Discourses in India and South Africa (2018) and Jan Smuts and the Indian Question (2017). His forthcoming book is an archival history of the Bandung Conference of 1955.
Questions about the event can be addressed to: m.calculli@hum.leidenuniv.nl