The Cultural War on Terror: Race, Art and America Public Diplomacy
Wednesday 29 October, 2014
12:15 - 2pm, $0
Columbia University, International Affairs
420 West 118 Street, Room 1501
Hisham Aidi will discuss his recently published, critically acclaimed book Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Culture (Pantheon 2014), a study of American cultural diplomacy towards the Muslim world over the last decade. Aidi is a lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is also the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008), and editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave 2009). His most recent book has been described by the New York Times as "highly original" and "breathtaking." Writing in the Washington Post, political scientist Marc Lynch praised Rebel Music as "brilliant, utterly unique, effortlessly transnational."
Hisham Aidi is Lecturer in Discipline at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His research interests include cultural globalization and the political economy of race and social movements. He received his phd in political science from Columbia University, and has taught at Columbias School of International and Public Affairs, and at the Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008) a comparative study of privatization and labor movements in Latin America and the Arab world. From 2002-2003, Aidi was a consultant for UNDPs Human Development Report. As a journalist, he has written for various outlets. From 1999-2003, he worked as a cultural reporter, covering Harlem and the Bronx, for Africana.com, The New African, colorlines, and Socialism and Democracy. More recently, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera and Salon. Since 2007, he has been a contributing editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics and Society. In 2008, Aidi was named a Carnegie Scholar. In 2010, he was a Global Fellow at the Open Society Foundation.