ABSTRACT
Schools of Thought Within the field of postcolonial* literary criticism there is widespread admiration for Hamid Dabashi’s work. Vanessa Martin,* a professor of Middle Eastern history at Royal Holloway, University of London, commends Dabashi for “bringing out rich aspects of Iranian culture that are little known or not recognized.”2 The intellectual historian Susan Buck-Morss* hailed his work for being “exemplary of a new Leftist discourse that is undogmatic and non-sectarian … open and intimate.”3 Gayatri Spivak,* a fellow postcolonial critic, a disciple of Edward Said,* and one of Dabashi’s colleagues at Columbia, felt that Dabashi had taken on the difficult task of writing a “history of Iran that teaches us how to understand a people overshadowed by the grand narratives of political (mis)representation.”4
