How do the political, ethical, and metaphysical ideas of the North look from the perspective of cultures of the South? Can this even be asked fruitfully in a time when it seems that those ideas have themselves comprehensively shaped the perspective of the South through a long period of colonization and now globalization?
Akeel Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy and Global Thought at Columbia, sets out to answer these questions systematically, thereby extending a form of inquiry started by Edward Said to questions that Said himself never asked.
The July 9, 2013 lecture, "Alternative Modernities?: A View from the South," was sponsored by the School of Criticism & Theory.