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http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2369/new-texts-out-now_hamid-dabashi-brown-skin-white-m
Texts Out Now: Hamid Dabashi, "Brown Skin, White Masks"
Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks. New York and London: Pluto
Press, 2011.
JADALIYYA: What made you write this book?
HAMID DABASHI: This book is very much a product of the Bush era
(2000-2008) — a record of my fears and trembling at the sight of a
criminally delusional man at the helm of an imperial killing
machine and lacking any moral conception of what it was he was
doing when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, two
catastrophic decisions that Afghans and Iraqis continue to pay for
with their lives. I was aghast at the sight of the mass frenzy
that accompanied those invasions, the barefaced banality of those
who supported it (even some of the most progressive American
intellectuals considered the Afghan invasion as a case of “just
war,” as in fact later some leading Arab intellectuals were duped
into supporting the US/NATO invasion of Libya), and above all the
criminally complicitous comprador intellectuals like Fouad Ajami,
Kanan Makiya, Ibn Warraq, Azar Nafisi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ad nauseum
who were aiding and abetting in manufacturing consent for those
wars. They were doing so in the name of criticizing militant
Islamism, or misogynist patriarchy, or undemocratic practices and
human rights abuses that their American and European employers —
and by “employers” I mean the lucrative market that was receptive
to their treacheries and made them bestsellers in Bush’s America —
were in fact partially instrumental in causing, conditioning, and
sustaining.
I recall reading about a panel in Washington DC in which Azar
Nafisi had come together with one neocon illiterate or another to
discuss one thing or another about “Islam” that set my antennae up
and got me thinking about the duet they were singing. This was
before the events of 9/11, or the US-led invasion of Afghanistan
(2001) and Iraq (2003), and before she wrote and published the now
infamous Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), which prompted my
al-Ahram essay on it, “Native Informers and the Making of American
Empire” (2006) a couple of years later, which then became the
basis of Brown Skin, White Masks.
So in short I wrote this book to understand a particularly
pathetic aspect of the manufacturing of consent at the heart of
the Bush imperial project through the active participation of
comprador intellectuals (Arab, Iranian, Pakistani, Indian, etc.),
who are in fact drawn from the ranks of the exilic intellectuals,
a condition which from Theodore Adorno to Edward Said has been
celebrated as the condition of dissent. I wanted to show the
underbelly of this celebration — that not all exilic intellectuals
become like Adorno and Said; that Fouad Ajami and Azar Nafisi are
in fact more representative specimen of exilic, comprador
intellectuals, or guns for hire, as I call them. At the same time,
I wanted to shift the color-codification of racism that Fanon had
theorized in his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and that I thought
needed to be pushed into a more supple reading of race and racism
as the foregrounding of imperial hegemony.
So my Brown Skin, White Masks is written and located somewhere
between Edward Said’s take on exilic intellectuals and Frantz
Fanon’s color-coded critique of colonized minds. The title of my
book is obviously an homage to one of these two great thinkers,
and the content of it you might consider a dinner table
conversation with both of them, imagining our two great comrades
with us today as we face the horrors of globalized imperialism.
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