Edward Said and Education

Zeus Leonardo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351399920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume offers a deep interpretation of Edward Said's literary thought towards the development of educational criticism. Insofar as Said's academic career was built around the contours of literary analysis, Leonardo demonstrates how Said's work propels scholarship on schooling in ways that enrich our ability to generate insights about the educational enterprise.

The book draws from four main themes of Said's work – knowledge construction as part of empire, representations and reconstruction of the intellectual, the exile condition, and contrapuntal analysis. These themes cohere in providing the elements of educational criticism and placing them in the wider context of a rapidly changing sociality and educational system. The author reviews key arguments in the field whilst contributing new analyses designed to elicit wide-ranging discussions. Edward Said and Education is a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of education studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies.

1
Dis-Orienting Western Knowledge

Coloniality, Curriculum, and Crisis

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical processes to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

(Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1971, p. 324)

I first encountered Edward Said’s work in the mid-1990s. Admittedly, I was a late bloomer into Said studies as he was already an international figure, his 1978 breakout book, Orientalism, well on its way to canonization. I read Said’s work in conjunction with other radical theories of education, from Bowles and Gintis (1976) and Bourdieu’s (1990) study of social reproduction; Giroux (1983), Apple (2019[1979]), McLaren (1995), and Willis’ turn to neo-Marxism and Cultural Studies; Lather (1991), hooks (1994), and Weiler’s (1994) feminist interventions; and, of course, Freire’s (1993) influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the Freirean tradition that followed it (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Critical Race Theory in education was only beginning to make waves with the essay that later launched a thousand books (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). It was an exciting time of intellectual engagement, a sense that radical education was possible.

After I cut my teeth with Critical Pedagogy, I turned my attention to individual thinkers and did a deep dive into their social, philosophical analyses as they are germane to education. From Paul Ricoeur’s (1981) crisp prose on hermeneutics; to Terry Eagleton’s (1991) sardonic Marxism; to Althusser’s (1971) structural Marxist treatment of capitalist interpellation; to Baudrillard’s (1994) aleatory postmodernism; to David Roediger (1991), Bonilla-Silva (2003), and Charles Mills’ (1997) unflinching critique of White supremacy; and then on to Fanon’s (2008) heart-wrenching account of colonialism and negrophobogenesis, I tried to make sense of race and class stratification in education while satiating my appetite for interdisciplinary perspectives about social problems that required the most sophisticated theoretical tools to understand. Sometimes noting the agonistic relationship between race and class critique, I nevertheless insisted that they speak to each other, occasionally coming up with terms or phrases that spoke to their co-implication in social relations of domination, like “racio-economic analysis” (Leonardo, 2010) or “critical raceclass theory” (Leonardo, 2012).

It was not until 2006, when the American Educational Research Association Conference landed in San Francisco, that I started thinking about Edward Said more seriously. At that AERA, I was a presenter for a panel on “Paulo Freire and Race” where I introduced my unsystematic ideas about Said under the rubric of what I then called “pedagogies of exile” (Leonardo, 2006). I sat on that idea for over ten years but I could not shake Said from my ruminations since 2006, his analysis of colonialism and imperialism having a decisive effect on my thinking. Although he hailed from comparative literature, Said’s relevance for education became my interpretive task, this book arguably representing that attempt. For instance, curriculum studies since the golden age of John Dewey, John F. Bobbitt, and George Counts has changed radically over the last 30 years, so much so that the continuity is difficult to recognize, more accurately characterized as a discontinuity. Although prominent curriculum scholars, like Apple, Giroux, and Pinar, continue the relevance of curriculum analysis, the influences of Foucauldian, feminist standpoint, and post- and decolonial theories of knowledge, to name just a few, have shifted the field of curriculum studies in profound ways that make the continuity from Dewey to deconstruction of the curriculum difficult to recognize. In this book, I argue that a deep interpretation of Said’s literary studies of Orientalism, colonial-imperial history, and knowledge relations propels scholarship on schooling in ways that enrich our ability to generate insights about the educational enterprise, broadly speaking. In the space of this book, I concentrate on four of Said’s themes: knowledge, the intellectual, exile, and contrapuntal analysis.

A brief biographical and intellectual sketch of Edward Wadie Said’s life is appropriate at this juncture. Of Palestinian descent, Said was born on November 1, 1935 in Jerusalem to a Christian family, thus giving him a minority status within a dominant Muslim population, although he would later become agnostic. Palestinian identity, in its grandest sense, became central to Said’s scholarly and activist work, but not in any tribalist sense. An activist for Palestinian liberation and independence, Said wrote tirelessly for decades about his group’s displacement and struggles, central to which is the presence of occupied territories in the Gaza and West Bank. In his youth, he traveled and lived with family around the world, including Egypt and later the U.S. where he attended Princeton University as an undergraduate and Harvard University as a doctoral student in literature.

During early schooling, however, it was not obvious that the young Edward was headed for greatness, sometimes too fond of getting into trouble and receiving not so subtle hints from his teachers that he was not disciplined enough or was into breaking rules despite his intelligence. As part of boarding school experience that took him from one elite setting to another, student Edward read rarefied European literature that later would become the preoccupation of the scholar Said. Eventually, he took up an academic post at Columbia University, New York, in 1963 in English and Comparative Literature, as the Parr Professor in 1977 in the same department, and then later finished his career after four decades of prolific writing. At the age of 67, Said died on September 24, 2003 after a long fight with leukemia.

Said is often credited by many intellectuals as the veritable founder of postcolonial analysis in the humanities and broadly, or the study of colonialism as constitutive of literature and other cultural practices. That is and to put it simply, he and other postcolonial scholars trace the effects, contradictions, and ambiguities of colonialism through philological hermeneutics and appreciation for language becomes paramount. Said was best known for his work on the history of Orientalism, or how Europe constructed the Middle East through literary and other artistic representations. His book on the topic was not immediately appreciated and as his reflections contained in Orientalism inform us, Said had some initial difficulties finding a publisher for his breakout book. Now “canonized” despite his own misgivings about such practice, Orientalism’s centrality in postcolonial studies would make that subspecialty incomprehensible without it.

But Said’s influence is felt farther and wider than that great book would suggest, his elegant prose appreciated in cultural and literary criticism in general. His was a dissident voice about world affairs as much as U.S. domestic policies, love for music and no love lost for Derridean deconstruction, and unflinching interrogation of racism (particularly against Arabs and Muslims) while he was no fan of race essentialism. Among his great influences and animators include Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Gramsci and subaltern studies, Foucault and post-structuralism, Fanon and Césaire, and his affection for Aeurbach’s Mimesis and Vico’s The New Science is palpable. He was fond of identity but impatient with identity politics, became an icon for a generation of scholars despite his mild iconoclasm, and his long-time friendship with Noam Chomsky surprisingly never produced a major collaboration between them. Said was among the most prominent of public intellectuals but spent most of his life in private schools and universities. Finally, he was both a lover of European letters and its harshest critic.

The four themes I explicate here lead to my overall proposal for developing a program of educational criticism. Although I am not the originator of that phrase (see Eisner, 1976), I hope to provoke the beginnings of what an educational program might look like through an appropriation and appreciation of Said’s work. And although the reader will have to wait until Chapter 4 of this book before I earnestly discuss the topic of educational criticism, I contend that knowledge, the intellectual, exile, and contrapuntality should be thought together as indivisible parts of a program in educational criticism. Therefore, this entire book is an argument for criticism’s proper place in education. But it is not criticism as understood in common parlance as only a negative move lacking any positive futurity. As I will explain, educational criticism is the assertion of our human powers with the ultimate goal of humanization, even when, through Said, I argue against humanism’s excesses. It is then appropriate that we start with the epistemic problem because educators exist within what many would consider, the “business of knowledge.” For this, we begin with Said’s problematic: empire.

Imperialism is one part cannons, another part canons. In other words, as Edward Said (1978) reminds us in Orientalism, modern imperialism was not only a series of military and material campaigns through the use of cannons. It was equally a knowledge project as a way to domesticate a people, control their history, and distort their representation through canons of knowledge. In short, to know a people is to exercise authority over them, affecting their historical trajectory and social destiny. As much as the Orientalist claims to have discovered the Orient, they were able to invent it through a chain of representations.¹ Seen this way, the general understanding of Orientalism departs from the Marxist tradition of academic discourse that portrays imperialism as an economically motivated and structured domination. Far from rejecting a materialist interaction between the West and the rest, Said inaugurated a significant break that opens the way for a different methodology when it comes to interrogating colonialism and imperialism. For Said, the Orient, which originally represented the Middle East or Near East, becomes a controlled place of difference, which the architecture of knowledge created by the Occident, or Europe, subjugates through Eurocentric epistemology. Understanding knowledge as a social process is key in discussing curriculum constancy and change. Said’s methodology is thus an entirely new way to engage questions of epistemology in the history of curriculum scholarship and the process of decolonization.

This chapter first briefly introduces the field of curriculum studies, an area of scholarship that has a long history in the educational literature. Then, it transitions to Said’s oeuvre, an opening that provides a theory of colonial-imperial knowledge first laid out in Orientalism and then developed in subsequent publications over a long career. Central to this analysis is an accounting for the colonial-imperial function of western knowledge, such as defining and delimiting the other as part of a larger process of dominating them. Finally, dis-orienting western regimes of knowledge suggests intervening in ways that locate them, displacing their Orientalist gaze, while encouraging a sense not only of being critical but self-critical in order to avoid replicating the traps of and desires for western thought.

It should be clear up front that Said was deeply immersed and embedded in western traditions, often referring to himself as conservative in one respect when it concerned the classical curriculum canon, not unlike his animator, Antonio Gramsci. But contrary to E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s (1999) misappropriation of Gramsci as essentially in agreement with him, Said and Gramsci were equally attentive to intent in addition to content (see also Giroux, 1999). That is, they affirmed the social function of knowledge, which for them meant a certain opposition to power rather than its petrification. Said stood at arm’s length when it came to the canon, at once deriving pleasure from the classics while deriding their authors’ elisions because “many of the figures in today’s canon were yesterday’s insurgents … once they mummify into tradition, they cease to be what they really are and become instruments of veneration and repression” (Said, 2004, HDC, pp. 28, 32). Known to elude his readers, Adorno was not fond of eliding power and mystification even if his difficult prose could prove mysterious to his readers. An interlocutor of Adorno’s negative project, Said wrote contrapuntally about the beauty all around us surrounded by a regrettable ugliness. Of the Frankfurt scholar, Said has this to say: “Adorno has throughout his work on music insisted that modern music can never be reconciled with the society that produced it, but in its intensely and often despairingly crafted form and content, music can act as a silent witness to the inhumanity all around” (Said, 2004, HDC, p. 143). This conflicted, intellectual position avoids a totalizing critique or rejection of western thought. Far from it. As with the raw material of language, Said saw life in music and music in life, but always a constitutive part of modern conditions rather than an escape from them. This basic pattern in Said’s thinking makes it difficult to paint him into a corner, the hallmark of self-reflection and self-criticality.

As D. W. Murray’s (1993) uptake of Hume suggests, western thinkers have shown the ability to reflect on the limitations of European thought, including the metanarrative of the transcendent self. In its place, Hume offers a heterogeneous, contingent self that “not only projected a nominalist and fragmentary self-experience but postulated a psychological mechanism to account for the ‘illusion’ of self-continuity and wholeness of the experienced world” (Murray, 1993, p. 14). Or as it concerns humanism, Said states that “attacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroying that thing. So, in my opinion, it has been the abuse of humanism that discredits some of humanism’s practitioners without discrediting humanism itself” (Said, 2004, HDC, p. 13). Going forward, this move may necessitate recruiting western thought in order to critique its excesses and decolonize it. As part of the project to decolonize education, specifically the curriculum, this chapter explicates Said’s anti-colonial interventions.

A Brief History of Curriculum Studies and Reform

First, it is necessary to contextualize this explication within the field of U.S. curriculum studies. Of traditional keywords one could use to describe an article dealing with the topic of education, along with “teaching” or “instruction,” certainly “curriculum” would be a logical descriptor for many. Although periodizing is always difficult, Fredric Jameson (1988) reminds us that it is a necessary, even stubborn, exercise. The curriculum field was arguably inaugurated by John F. Bobbitt’s 1918 book The Curriculum, which was the first book-length treatment of the topic also bearing the term in its title. Certainly, the celebrated American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey produced tomes of material for what may be calle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviated Titles for Edward Said Books
• 1 Dis-Orienting Western Knowledge: Coloniality, Curriculum, and Crisis
• 2 Teachers as Anti-Intellectuals: Towards the Reconstruction of Expert(ise)
• 3 Pedagogies of Exile: Learning In and Out of Place
• 4 Educational Criticism and Contrapuntal Analysis
• References
• Index