Edward Said Memorial Conference - Akeel Bilgrami

Keynote lecture by Prof. Akeel Bilgrami "The View from the South" at the Edward Said Memorial Conference, Utrecht, 15 April 2013.
What is this lecture about?
"Said's remarkable work Orientalism cleared a certain ground and set a challenge. It cleared the ground by exposing the prejudices that come from the intellectual and civilisational surround of power, colonial power; and it set a challenge to us to construct an alternative lens for understanding the civilisations distant from the metropole. But to meet this challenge, one has to have a sense of what the intellectual surround of the metropole looks like from the perspective of the civilisations distant from the metropole, from --to use a current word -- the 'South'. This lecture will make an attempt to do so and then to take some very preliminary steps towards constructing an alternative philosophical framework for a politics of our time."
Edward Said Memorial Conference was organised by the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University as one of the Treaty of Utrecht commemoration events on 15-17 April 2013. More information available at: cfhutrecht2013.com/.