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Lecture

"Orientalism" Is Not a Theoretical Machine

10.08.2026 ● 05:00 PM

Event Summary

Wall text for the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, Beirut 1978. Photo courtesy of Fadi A. Bardawil.

Lecture by Fadi A. Bardawil on Edward Said’s "reckoning with difference"

This event is presented by Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration, a 2026–2027 Neubauer Collegium research project organized in partnership with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT).


ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Fadi A. Bardawil’s work investigates the traditions of critical intellectual inquiry and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers at home and in the diaspora. At its heart, his work is animated by the necessity to rethink the multiple genealogies of critical theory to reckon with questions of power, emancipation, and difference in an increasingly interconnected yet fragmented world. Bardawil is the author of Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2020). Some of his Arabic and English writings have appeared in Megaphone, American Ethnologist, boundary2, CSAAME, The Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic edition), al-Jumhuriyya, The Immanent Frame, POLAR Online, South Atlantic Quarterly, Ma3azef, Allegra Lab, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, and World Records Journal. He has recently taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Arab Council for Social Sciences, Princeton University, and the University of Tokyo. He is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Arab Cultures in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.

Research Project

Two men look at each other. Between them, hurried graffiti reads "The End" in all capitalization. The photo is a work by the artist Ezz Monem, who photographed the 18 days of protest in Cairo in 2011. One of those photos is featured here, having been rephotographed, an acid applied to the surface to erase the emulsion from the film before the photograph is manually developed. In the image, the emulsion ripples and tears, creating broad gestures which reflects the charged content of the political photograph.

Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration

2026 – 2027