Waiting for the Barbarians

Timothy Brennan is professor of comparative literature, cultural studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. His books include At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now and, most recently, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of the Left and Right. He writes for a number of journals, including New Left Review and The Nation. Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, and a member of the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science and the School of Public and International Affairs at Columbia University. His previous books include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Citizen and Subject, and When Victims Become Killers. From Kampala, Uganda, he now divides his time between New York and Kampala. Karma Nabulsi is Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall and Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, where she is Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Politics and International Relations. She writes for the London Review of Books, and the Guardian. Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and socialist activist. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Jacqueline Rose is internationally known for her writing on feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and the politics and ideology of Israel-Palestine. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, States of Fantasy, The Question of Zion, and most recently Women in Dark Times.

Edward Said's anger against injustice must become ours, and his pen that challenged the sword must become our weapon in the battle for human values.