Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective

The Centre for Arab Unity Studies has published the third edition (with a new introduction) of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective by Dr. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab.

This book examines contemporary Arab debates on culture, which have been dominated by the quest for a liberating and self-affirming meaning, a meaning held back by a whole range of intellectual, cultural, economic, political and often military challenges. A comparative reading sheds light on the motives, aims, premises and challenges of these postcolonial debates on culture.

This study offers a new basis for understanding contemporary Arab intellectual life, viewing it from three main perspectives:

The first focuses on the self-critical turn, at a time when attention had been devoted almost exclusively to the ideological orientation of this intellectual life, whether Islamist or nationalist; the second examines how critical thinkers understood cultural malaise in political terms; and the third breaks the isolation in which Arab debates on culture, and the study of them, have been confined until today.

The book explores three main questions in depth: (1) How has contemporary Arab critique approached cultural problems, which issues has it addressed, and what direction has it taken? (2) To what extent, and on what grounds, did Arab critical thinkers after the 1967 defeat (the Naksa) see cultural crises as political crises? (3) How were concerns expressed and approaches adopted in these Arab debates, compared with debates in other postcolonial regions of the world such as Africa and Latin America? What patterns of thought does this comparison across regions, cultures, religions and races reveal, what does it tell us about the nature of Arab postcolonial debates, and why does this matter for our understanding of contemporary Arab thought?

In the new introduction to this third edition, the author turns to ways of improving the study of Arab thought by drawing on research that has appeared in recent years in neighbouring fields, such as the social history of the publishing houses, research centres and journals that produced the body of work making up contemporary Arab thought, as well as studies in the history of contemporary Arab design and visual arts. She also traces the shifts in the Arab intellectual landscape from the Arab revolutions that began in 2011 through to the genocidal war in Gaza.