ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Turning Colonialist Philosophy on Its Head: May Ziadeh, Critic of Technoscientific Determinism

• In Event: Making and Unmaking Colonial Science

English Abstract

I show how May Ziadeh, a Palestinian-Lebanese writer born in 1886, turned Western philosophies that potentially justify colonialism on their head, especially Henri Bergson’s. I review Ziadeh’s critical work before and after her 1918 article on Bergson to show that her interest in him was part of a larger epistemic project to counter technoscientific determinism while promoting scientific and technological development. I show how this agenda mattered to Ziadeh in a time when her adoptive country Egypt, then under British colonial rule, was increasingly suspicious of Western philosophy, science, and technology. I show how Ziadeh rejected this type of sectarianism, championing in her articles in the 1920s and 1930s a universalism that attempted to reconcile West and East as well as science and creativity.

Author

• Rayyan Dabbous, University of Toronto