Description:
Abdallah Laroui and the Location of History is the first major study that considers Laroui's unique theoretical interventions, revealing how his work provides insights into local, regional, and global debates on history, historiography, and time; modernity and Islam; and critique and tradition.
Review Quotes:
"Through a masterful reconstruction of Laroui's negative dialectics, Riecken demonstrates how this postcolonial theorist dismantles both Eurocentric narratives of progress and culturalist accounts of Arab-Islamic authenticity. Laroui reemerges as a crucial interlocutor for contemporary debates on decolonization, pluritemporality, and the politics of historicity--one who refuses to position Western modernity and the Islamic tradition as mutually exclusive foundations for political life. By placing colonizer and colonized, Islam and secularism, continuity and rupture within a single analytic field, Laroui's "activist epistemology" offers pathways beyond the impasses of civilizational discourse. This book reveals why Laroui's situated universalism remains essential for rethinking the grounds of democratic politics in postcolonial contexts and for developing a truly global critical theory."
- Jens Hanssen, Professor of Arab Civilization, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern History, University of Toronto, Canada; Director of the Orient Institute Beirut, Lebanon
"Nils Riecken offers us the first study in English of one of the foremost contemporary Arab thinkers. The book draws on a remarkably wide-ranging global scholarship, producing a careful reading of Laroui's oeuvre. We are offered new perspectives on some of the most burning issues of our early twenty-first century- like universality, modernity, and temporality."
- Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Professor at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies