Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel
By (Author) Mahdi Amel
Edited by Hicham Safieddine
Foreword by Gilbert Achcar
Translated by Angela Giordani
Haymarket Books
Haymarket Books
31st March 2022
United States
General
Non Fiction
320.532309174927
Paperback
148
Width 152mm, Height 228mm
Mahdi Amel (193687) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. For the first time in English, this collection makes available lengthy excerpts from six major works by Mahdi Amel. These include the two founding texts on colonialism and underdevelopment in which Amel began to grapple with the question of dependency, his treatise on sectarianism and the state, his critique of Edward Saids analysis of Marx, his exposure of emerging Islamised bourgeois trends of thought as part of a broader critique of everyday thought, and his reflection on cultural heritage as perceived by Arab bourgeoisie. Amels writings serve as a reminder of the need to renew Marxist thought based on concrete and particular social realities, like colonialism.
Mahdi Amel (193687) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. Born in south Lebanon, he studied, taught, and wrote on Marxist philosophy in relation to colonialism and national liberation in France, Algeria and Lebanon. He was assassinated in 1987. Hicham Safieddine is lecturer in the history of the Modern Middle East at Kings College London and author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon. He is co-founder of Al-Akhbar English and The Legal Agenda English Edition. Angela Giordani is an intellectual historian of the modern Arabic-speaking world. Her translations have appeared in Jadaliyya and The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda