Talal Y Asad

Talal Asad

Talal Asad (born 1932) is an anthropologist at the CUNY Graduate Center. Asad has made important theoretical contributions to post-colonialism, Christianity,...

Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Cultural Memory in the Present)

For more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West’s knowledgesespecially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledgesof the non-Western world. The essays that make up this volume treat diverse aspects of ...

Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and ...

Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the M...

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter

Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter

"We have been reminded time and again by anthropologists of the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment in which the intellectual inspiration of anthropology is supposed to lie. But anthropology is also rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and the Third World, which goes back to the e...

Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

In this volume, four leading thinkers of our times confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values. Taking the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammad as a point of departure, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood ...

On Suicide Bombing (The Wellek Library Lectures)

Like many people in America and around the world, Talal Asad experienced the events of September 11, 2001, largely through the media and the emotional response of others. For many non-Muslims, "the suicide bomber" quickly became the icon of "an Islamic culture of death"—a conceptual leap that struck...