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Hamid Dabashi. TheArabSpring:TheEndofPostcolonialism New York: Zed Books, 2012. Paperback $19.99
The Arab Spring is a book about the local, national, and regional political transformations taking place in the Arab World - what came to be known as the "the Arab Spring." As Dabashi explains in his preface to the book: "The world we have hitherto inherited, is changing, and is changing fast. We have now entered the phase of documenting in what particular terms that world is transcending itself, overcoming the mystified consciousness into which it was colonially cast and post colonially fixated" (xvii). In explaining his view that the Arab Spring came to signal the death of postcolonialism, he adds:
The term "West" is more meaningless today than ever before- it has lost its potency, and with it the notion, and the condition, we had code-named postcoloniality.The East, the West, the Oriental, the colonial, the postcolonial- they are no more. What we are witnessing unfold in what used to be called "the Middle East" (and beyond) marks the end of postcolonial ideological formations- and that is precisely the principal argument informing the way this book discusses and celebrates the Arab Spring. The postcolonial did not overcome the colonial; it exacerbated it...