"Orientalism" Is Not a Theoretical Machine

A lecture and discussion with Fadi A. Bardawil about Edward Said's "Reckoning with Difference" This event is presented by Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration, a 2026–2027 Neubauer Collegium research project organized in partnership with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT). ABOUT THE SPEAKER Fadi A. Bardawil’s work investigates the traditions of critical intellectual inquiry and modalities of political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers at home and in the diaspora. At its heart, his work is animated by the necessity to rethink the multiple genealogies of critical theory to reckon with questions of power, emancipation, and difference in an increasingly interconnected yet fragmented world. Bardawil is the author of Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2020). Some of his Arabic and English writings have appeared in Megaphone; American Ethnologist, boundary2; CSAAME; The Journal for Palestine Studies (Arabic edition); al-Jumhuriyya; The Immanent Frame; POLAR Online; South Atlantic Quarterly; Ma3azef, Allegra Lab, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, and World Records Journal. He has recently taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Arab Council for Social Sciences, Princeton University, and the University of Tokyo. He is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Arab Cultures in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.