Syrians, Camps and a New Cosmopolis
Essay
First published in: Mario Rizzi, Al Inthitar, argobooks, 2013
An essay on the Syrian War and the future of camps on the occasion of Mario Rizzi’s film Al Inthitar (The Waiting).
“Zaatari is the camp where the future citizens of the emerging Arab republics, having exhausted their postcolonial premises, are born.” H.D.
Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor for Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Born 1951 in the south-western city of Ahvaz in the Khuzestan province of Iran, Hamid Dabashi received his early education in his hometown and his college education in Tehran, before he moved to the United States, where he received a dual PhD. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first-rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.