"... He is not trying to make “both sides” feel seen; he is trying to make the dead visible and the living responsible.
The book will irritate readers clinging to elite decorum or academic hedging. It will thrill and steady readers who have been gaslit by years of “context” that never quite manages to include Palestinian lives.
For an average reader who’s been told that Gaza is too complicated, After Savagery is a relief.
It is not simplistic; it is clarifying. It arms you with frames that travel: read the news critically; translate “security” claims into real-world harms; watch for the “humanitarian crisis” label that surgically removes politics; test every universal against Gaza. If it fails there, it fails everywhere.
This book also gives you a language of joyful defiance. The Kanafani thread is not nostalgia; it’s instruction. The lantern is a method. Culture is a method. Sumud is a method. You don’t wait for elites to license your humanity. You practise it, publicly, until it becomes ungovernable.
After Savagery ends not in despair but in a forward tilt: the old metaphysics are collapsing; help the new one be born.
The argument you’ll carry away when you finish, three convictions stick: Gaza is the measure. Any politics or philosophy that can’t look Gaza in the eye is not worth your time.
The West’s moral exceptionalism has expired. What’s left is the hard work of rebuilding universality from the camp outward, universality as solidarity, not domination.
Palestine is not a cause on your list; it is a lens.
Through it, everything sharpens: climate justice, policing, borders, surveillance, labour. The same empire, the same alibi. Choose your side.
This is a book of witness and a book of strategy disguised as philosophy. It will be shelved under Middle East Studies; it belongs on your desk, annotated, next to your news feed. Dabashi does not ask you to admire his argument. He asks you to risk something for it.
In a season of euphemisms, After Savagery tells the truth with its gloves off and its lantern on."