Open Access Edition of Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, by Siraj Ahmed

FAIN: DR-286797-22

Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305-2004)
Michael A. Keller (Project Director: November 2021 to January 2025)

This project will publish the book Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, by Siraj Ahmed, written by Fellow Siraj Ahmed (NEH grant number HB-50617), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities
Year: 2017
ISBN: 9781503604049
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Author: Sirah Ahmed
Abstract: For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.
Primary URL: https://sup.org/openebook/9781503604049/
Primary URL Description: Stanford University Press
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/76669
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN
Type: Single author monograph

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