Abstract

Postcolonial theory posits a clash, or at least a conflict, between Western and local knowledge and agency. It identifies the former with power, domination, and colonial imposition, and very often reduces the latter to subversion and resistance. A study of core components of Middle Eastern modernity as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one that is attentive to local voices and sources reveals a much more subtle interplay of agents, designs, and interests, in which power certainly plays a role but is not monopolized by ‘the West’. To illustrate this interplay, I will focus in this talk on notions of time, productivity, and statehood in the late and post-Ottoman Arab Middle East.

Bio

Prof. Dr. Gudrun Krämer is Professor Emerita of Islamic Studies and a historian by training. She formerly directed the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universitaet Berlin. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and an executive editor of The Encyclopaedia of Islam Three.

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