New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East

Mohaghegh tracks the idea of 'chaos' into the contemporary philosophical and cultural imagination of the postcolonial world, exploring its vital role in the formation of an emergent avant-garde literature in the Middle East, concentrating on the writings of the twentieth-century Iranian new wave.

"A timely and original intervention into current discussions concerning the status of a putatively unified 'West' and the ruin it continues to inflict upon the lands and regions outside of Euro-America. Mohaghegh has taken a productive detour from post-colonial discourse, and its endless effort to establish equivalence with the West through 'negotiation,' even as it recuperates precisely the hierarchical relationship it is dedicated to overcoming. Instead, he has rather turned to those (forgotten) writers and thinkers who have sought to express their resistance to both imported hegemonic literary and philosophic forms and those derived from their 'received' traditions by starting from a 'zero-ground' fraught with torment and ambivalence in order to find a voice that belonged to neither the canonical narrative of the 'West' nor the cultural conventions of a failed and negative 'tradition.' Readers will find in Mohagegh's account not simply the rescuing of a lost moment but also its continued embodiment in his own writing." - Harry Harootunian, Professor of Literature, Duke University

"In this brilliant, wholly original work, Mohaghegh traces the emergent cultural critique in postcolonial fiction. He finds acts of provocation in the voices and cultural poetics of this literature, generativity in its techniques and stealthy routes of circulation, creative violence in the projects that are hidden and on guard within it. Here the postcolonial is not an 'easily locatable cultural mimicry' but a rogue arsenal of displacements and delirious incantations. It as at once material and ephemeral, vulnerable and a prism of extremity, excess and exhaustion. The reader is viscerally transfixed by the dynamics of form and transmogrification, embodiment and disembodiment, and the moves of dispossession, eviction, and dream in the disquieting of worlds." - Kathleen Stewart, Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Texas

"Some books speak to us about the beyond and others embody it. It is the later that affect us the most. Those books that are the beyond (i.e. that which goes further than the expected, the unpredictable, the surprising) make us shudder through the senses that are mostly forgotten: ecstasy and joy (those primary acts of writing and living). This work is an encounter with the style of writing that infuses thought with power, directly and uncompromisingly. Mohaghegh's analysis of literary and philosophical landscape of the Middle East thus exceeds the confines of a geographical context. His writing instructs us not only about the chaotic imagination of the Middle East but, more importantly, how to construct new categories of perception. Simply put, this book, this irreversible gesture of philosophical and poetic expenditure, intensifies us, drowns us, and elevates us." - Dejan Lukic, Reed College

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is an assistant pofessor of World Literature at New Jersey City University. He has taught at Columbia University, The New School University, and Sarah Lawrence College.