Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme are artists who incorporate a range of sound, image, installation, and performance into their artistic practice. Their joint work explores issues connected to the politics of desire and disaster, spatial politics, subjectivity, and the absurdities of contemporary practices of power.
Meltem Ahıska is a writer and professor of sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She has published broadly on the topics of Occidentalism, Orientalism, identity, social memory, gender, public space, and archives. She is also a contributor to Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (Verso, 2008).
Ahl al-Kahf is an artistic movement founded in 2011 in Tunis, with a network in different places that fulfils and spreads aesthetic terrorism. Ahl al Kahf is neither Tunisian nor Egyptian, nor of any other nationality. It is an epidemic propagated by contagion.
Mohammad al-Attar is a Syrian playwright and dramaturge. His plays Intimacy, Could you Please Look into the Camera?, Look at the Street … this is what Hope Looks Like, and Withdrawal, along others, were adapted for performances on international stages. He is a practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed and regularly publishes articles in international magazines and newspapers.
Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and a founding member of its Committee on Global Thought. He is the author of several books, among them Secularism, Enchantment, and Identity (Harvard University Press, 2014), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Belief and Meaning (Wiley, 1992).
Boris Buden is an author and cultural critic. He teaches culture theory in the Faculty of Art and Design at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He writes on topics of philosophy, politics, culture theory and art, and has taken part in various international art projects, including “Documenta XI” in 2002.
Burnt Friedman is a musician and producer who works under a variety of project names in the fields of Electronica, Dub, and Jazz. His instruments include ambient noise, analog synthesizers and organs, percussion, as well as toy piano. Since 2000, Friedman runs his own record label Nonplace. He lives in Berlin. Link to website
Johannes S. Ismaiel-Wendt is professor for musicology at Stiftung Universität Hildesheim. He teaches and gives sound-lectures on aesthetics and sociology of electronic music, and his research focuses on music as/and postcolonial knowledge production. From 2010 to 2012 he was academic advisor at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin for Global Prayers and Translating HipHop.
Abdelfattah Kilito is a literary theorist. He has taught at the Faculté des Lettres, the Université Mohammed V in Rabat. Among his works are The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010), Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (Syracuse University Press, 2008), and The Author and His Doubles (Syracuse University Press, 2001).
Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and director of the Markerere Institute for Social Research (MISR), Kampala. His work explores the intersection between politics and culture, the modern state and the colonial subject, and the theory, history, and practice of human rights.
Samia Mehrez is Professor of Arabic Literature and Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo. Amongst her recent publications are Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (Routledge, 2008) and Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (editor, AUC Press 2012).
W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry. Among his most recent publications are Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture (dOCUMENTA (13), 2012) and Seeing Through Race (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Prabhat Patnaik is a Marxist economist and political commentator. He was a professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Among his most influential publications is The Value of Money (Columbia University Press, 2009).
James Quandt is the Senior Programmer of TIFF Cinematheque and a film critic. He is, among others, the editor of the broadly received monograph on Robert Bresson (Robert Bresson, revised edition Indiana University Press, 2012). Several of his texts engage with Edward Said’s notion of “Late Style.”
Joe Sacco is a comic-strip artist and journalist. His comic book Palestine (series Fantagraphics Books 1993–1996; collected volume 2001), about his time in occupied Palestine, won an American Book Award in 1996, and its sequel, the graphic novel Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books, 2009) won the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2010. Sacco has also contributed graphic journalism pieces to magazines such as Details, Time, and Harper’s.
Bernd M. Scherer is director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). He holds a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the Universität des Saarlandes. He headed the Department of Humanities and Culture of the HKW from 1994 to 1999 and at the same time served as a deputy director. From 1999 to 2004, he served as a director of the Goethe-Institute in Mexico and subsequently of the Arts Department for the Goethe-Institute Head Office in Munich, before returning to HKW in 2006.
Saam Schlamminger is a musician and performer born in Istanbul and raised in Iran until the age of twelve. He specialized in the Persian instruments Zarb and Daf which he alienates electronically. He has performed worldwide with artists of different styles, like Susan Deyhim and The Notwist.
Adania Shibli is a writer and scholar who has twice been awarded with the Qattan Young Writer’s Award–Palestine, in 2001 and 2003. Her scholarly work engages with the history of vision especially in the Arabic culture; her published works span fiction to narrative essays with critical input on visual art, cinema, and political and social realities.
Rima Nasir Tarazi is a pianist and composer who co-founded, under the umbrella of Birzeit University, the National Conservatory of Music in 1993 which became, in 2004, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM). Tarazi is currently the chair of the ESNCM Supervisory Board. In 2013 she released her album Songs of Freedom and Hope; a compilation of her own compositions.
Fawwaz Traboulsi is associate professor of Political Science and History at the American University of Beirut. His numerous publications deal with history, politics, liberation and social movements, and art in the Arab World. Among others, he has published A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2007) and translated Edward Said’s Out of Place (Al-Adab, 2003) and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Al-Adab, 2005).
Trinh T. Minh-ha, a filmmaker, writer, and composer, is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. A feminist and post-colonial theorist, one of her latest publications is Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (Routledge, 2011).
Michael Wood is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the editor of the late Edward Said’s last book On Late Style (Pantheon, 2006).
Feridun Zaimoğlu is an author and visual artist. He is considered one of most the important poets of contemporary German language. Among his central themes are the problems of second- and third-generation Turkish immigrants to Germany. His latest novel is Isabel (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014).