Biography

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is the author of Contemporary Arab Thought. Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (2010) and Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution. The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (2019), both published by Columbia University Press and both translated into Arabic. Since 2016 she has been Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar and is currently Chair of the philosophy program. Her research interests lie in modern and contemporary history of Arab thought and culture. Her present work in progress is on “Arab Modernity Between Philosophy and Art. Writing a Different Contemporary Arab Intellectual History.” She is also the elected Chair of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Board of Trustees (2022-2024).

Abstract

What have the Arab Uprisings done to “Contemporary Arab Thought”?

It is an undisputable fact that the Arab uprisings since 2011 have been a most dramatic turn in the Arab region since the founding of the modern Arab states: an unexpected and explainable event that continues to impact Arab life on all levels, including the intellectual. In my talk I look at the new light that that event might have shed on was/is known as “contemporary Arab thought,” the aspects of continuity and discontinuity that it might have revealed about that thought? I ask to what extent we, inhabitants of that region, are still contemporaries of that thought? And to what extent that “contemporary Arab thought” was contemporaneous to the societies it came from? Finally, I offer some reflections on the challenges that a post-2011 Arab critique might be facing.