The Edward W. Said Days, held since 2018, open the Pierre Boulez Saal season, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the passing of the Palestinian literary scholar. The program is centered around keynote lectures by philosopher Dag Nikolaus Hasse and musicologist Kofi Agawu as well as two panel discussions exploring subjects at the intersection of music and postcolonialism—both central aspects of Said’s work.

Prof. Dr. Dag Nikolaus Hasse (University of Würzburg)
Edward Said on Andalusia: How Can a Culture of the Past be a Model for the Future?

“Spain's Islamic, Judaic and Christian histories together provide a model for the co-existence of traditions and beliefs.” This is a key sentence from Edward Said’s acceptance speech for the price of the Asturias Award 2002, which he received together with Daniel Barenboim. Said was hopeful about this model, but he also warned against idealizing Andalusia as a lost paradise. Dag Nikolaus Hasse's lecture examines Edward Said’s attitude towards Andalusia and draws on recent research on the culture of multi-ethnic cities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to highlight those aspects of the past that can indeed serve as models for multi-ethnic cities of the future.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse is Professor in the History of Philosophy at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. He was educated at Göttingen and Yale and received his PhD at the Warburg Institute in London. He is the author of Avicenna’s ‘De anima’ in the Latin West (2000) and of Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016). In 2016, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation, and in 2018 the Sheikh Zayed Book Award of the Abu Dhabi Book Fair for his monograph Success and Suppression. His most recent publication is Was ist europäisch? Zur Überwindung kolonialer und romantischer Denkformen (Reclam, 2021).

Curated by Prof. Dr. James Helgeson & Prof. Dr. Regula Rapp

The lectures and symposium will be presented in English. Admission is free, prior registration is required.