EUME
2010/ 2011

Fadi A. Bardawil

When All that is Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Leftist Levantine Intellectuals

studied Sociology at the American University of Beirut and did his doctoral work in Anthropology at Columbia University. His dissertation titled “When All that is Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Leftist Levantine Intellectuals,” examines the collapse of Marxist thought and practice in the Levant through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation (born around 1940) of prominent public intellectuals. Through engaging memoirs, newspaper archives, party documents, theoretical texts as well as interviews, this work explores ideological transformations in the region, the vexed relation of intellectuals to political militancy as well as the shifting articulations of Western metropolitan fields of cultural production to Arab peripheral ones.
He has taught introductory social sciences courses at the American University of Beirut and Contemporary Western Civilization at Columbia University. He was an associate researcher at the Institut Français du Proche Orient in Amman and Beirut (2005–7) and one of the two conveners of the Middle East and North Africa Workshop at Columbia (2009–10).

When All that is Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Leftist Levantine Intellectuals

In Berlin Bardawil will revise and develop his dissertation project through an examination of the international circulation of theoretical discourses, their political effects, and the ethical dilemmas they pose in the wake of Marxism’s ebbing away as a transnational idiom of critique and a promise of emancipation.