Fadi A. Bardawil, "Difference and Power: Thinking with Talal Asad and Edward Said"

ICM Lecture Series

Fall 2026

FADI A. BARDAWIL (Duke University)

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to welcome Fadi A. Bardawil back to campus as we host a lecture about his current research:

Difference and Power: Thinking with Edward Said and Talal Asad

Abstract

Edward Said and Talal Asad need no introduction. Their oeuvre has been transformative. It opened new vistas for scholarly investigation, bypassed disciplinary gates and resonated with diverse constituencies beyond the academy. That said, with canonization comes normalization in the Kuhnian sense, and the reduction of the process of thought to hardline positions: Said advocate of the secular and humanism, Asad critic of the secular and liberalism. In this talk, I will steer away from this posited face à face to revisit these thinkers’ projects as processes of reckoning with the question of difference and power. What I am after is a labor of conceptual ground-clearing of sorts, an initial unearthing of the questions that animated their explorations, and reconstitution the conceptual and political stakes surrounding them, particularly around divergent aspects of the racism-colonialism-imperialism nexus. To do so is a first step in delineating the contours from which these projects emerged, a task that will assist us in gaining a more reflexive grasp on our present and in doing so re-thinking from that vantage point the interventions of two towering exilic thinkers.

BIO

Fadi A. Bardawil is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. His most recent book Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Duke UP 2020) focuses on how the 1960s Arab New Left addressed the question of mediation between theory and practice, the international circulation of critical theory, the genealogies of postcolonial critique, and the traditions of intellectual inquiry and political engagement of contemporary Arab thinkers. Bardawil is trained as a cultural anthropologist and his ethnographic and historical archival research informs “fieldwork in theory,” to excavate texts, examine the conditions under which they were produced, received, translated, and how they authorized political practice. Bardawil’s latest project re-reads the theoretical and political work of Edward Said and Talal Asad from a current vantage point to explore what was at stake for them in developing their own exilic/diasporic critical agendas, and to re-think the question of war, and violence.

Bardawil publishes in a variety of venues: English language publications such as American Ethnologyist, boundary2; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Arabic journals, e-zines and alternative media platforms. He has been contributing to the Arabic edition of the Journal for Palestine Studies since 2010 and has written for the Syrian opposition e-zine al-Jumhuriyya. Since October 2019, he has contributed weekly op-eds and longer essays to Megaphone, a Lebanese online independent multi-media platform.

Before joining the faculty at Duke, Bardawil taught at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago. He was a Global South Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2025-26), and a faculty member at Cornell’s School of Criticism & Theory (2025). He was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (2016-2107) and EUME fellow in Berlin (2010-2011).