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The invention of the nation-state was the crowning achievement of the Sykes-Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France in 1916. As a geostrategic move to divide, defeat, and dismantle the Ottoman Empire during World War I, it was a great success and the modern colonial borders of the Arab nation-states eventually emerged in the course of World War II.Today, as nations are reconceiving their own postcolonial interpolated histories, Arab and Muslim states are becoming total states on the model of ISIS with Iran, Syria, Turkey and Egypt, among others, violently manufacturing their legitimacy. And yet simultaneously, examples such as the Nobel Peace Prize winning formation of a civil society ''Quartet'' in Tunisia allude to a growing transnational public sphere across the Arab and Muslim world.In T Emperor is Naked , Hamid Dabashi boldly argues that the category of nation-state has failed to produce a legitimate and enduring unit of post-colonial polity. Considering what this liberation of nations and denial of legitimacy to ruling states will actually unfurl, Dabashi asks: What will replace the nation-state, what are the implications of this deconstruction on global politics and, crucially, what is the meaning of the post-colonial subject within this moment?>
List of contents
1. The Story of the King who had Two Bodies but No Clothes
2. The Myth of the Postcolonial State
3. From the Myth of the State to the Mystification of Caliphate to the Postmodern Ending of State
4. Palestine without Borders
5. Interstitial Space of the Art of Protest
6. Between and Beyond the Republic and Cyropaedia
7. The Last Grand Revolution at Forty
8. Who Killed Jamal Khashoggi? Who cares?
9. The Story of the Lion, the Fox, and the Ass
About the author
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University. His many books include The Arab Spring and Can Non-Europeans Think?, both from Zed Books. Dabashi has been a columnist for Al Jazeera for nearly a decade and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, the CNN, the BBC, and the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly. His books have been translated into numerous languages.
Summary
The invention of the nation-state was the crowning achievement of the Sykes–Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France in 1916. As a geostrategic move to divide, defeat, and dismantle the Ottoman Empire during World War I, it was a great success and the modern colonial borders of the Arab nation-states eventually emerged in the course of World War II.
Today, as nations are reconceiving their own postcolonial interpolated histories, Arab and Muslim states are becoming total states on the model of ISIS with Iran, Syria, Turkey and Egypt, among others, violently manufacturing their legitimacy. And yet simultaneously, examples such as the Nobel Peace Prize winning formation of a civil society 'Quartet' in Tunisia allude to a growing transnational public sphere across the Arab and Muslim world.
In The Emperor is Naked, Hamid Dabashi boldly argues that the category of nation-state has failed to produce a legitimate and enduring unit of post-colonial polity. Considering what this liberation of nations and denial of legitimacy to ruling states will actually unfurl, Dabashi asks: What will replace the nation-state, what are the implications of this deconstruction on global politics and, crucially, what is the meaning of the post-colonial subject within this moment?
