Articles

Who are they, the Palestinians, and who has the right to speak for them? Oppressed nationalities find it difficult to get a hearing because those who pretend to represent them are often political adventurers who merely exploit them—whether for other powers’ imperialistic purposes or to vent on imaginary enemies their own hatred of the world.…

In November 2002 an Iranian professor of history, Hashim Aghajari, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, was sentenced  to death by the Islamic revolutionary court in Hamadan among other counts for questioning the practice of blind “emulating/following” (taqlid) of the mujtahids in matters of belief and practice. His sentencing led to several days of widespread…

Prologue Perhaps you know Foucault’s remark that despite the torrent of criticism directed against his philosophical system, “Hegel prowls through the twentieth century.” Consigned to a kind of academic purgatory for the last three decades of the twentieth century, at a time when social theory had migrated from the social sciences obsessed with case studies…

Photography is ubiquitous within global culture, but we hardly understand its meaning. And we have only a dim comprehension of its origin. Unlike cinema, which contains the complexities of motion and montage, the photograph is simple and, for the most part, brutally realistic. Perhaps the photograph has seemed too obvious to merit prolonged scholarly attention.…