Djelal Kadir

On his book Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability

Cover Interview of April 19, 2011

In a nutshell

Memos from the Besieged City is a series of “reports” to and about certain cultural ancestors whose work has defined cultural traditions and practices in the humanities and human sciences.

The book’s subtitle is “Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability.” And that is because the writers I address here offer some of the most vital lifelines for the survival of human culture and humane existence.

Many of these cultural ancestors have forged their legacy for the future at their own peril—some persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, or burnt at the stake. These are lifelines that must be extended and cultivated, in turn, to ensure the sustainability of our own humanity and our legacy for future generations.

The “memos” trace the itinerary of certain key notions of literacy and culture and assess their status in the present. How well this inheritance has fared and is currently faring may indicate how well we fare into the future as a civilization.

As part of a global conversation in the ethics of intellectual commitment, the findings of this exploration are focused through the protocols of the discipline of comparative literature, broadly defined as the investigation and study of cultures and their literary traditions as they relate to each other across national formations, languages, historical periods, and geographical boundaries.

biography / violence / academia / ethics / urbanity / migration / torture / arendt hannah / calvino italo / auerbach erich /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009