Edward Said

12 Key excerpts on "Edward Said"

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  Critical Theorists and International Relations

  • Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  28 Edward Said Latha Varadarajan Edward Said – the late University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, the music critic for the Nation, the man both widely regarded (by both supporters and critics) as one of the founding figures of the postcolonial tradition in the American academy, the outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause in the West – was one of the best-known public intellectuals of the twentieth century. In a prolific career spanning nearly four decades, Said authored more than 20 books and 125 articles and inspired innumerable others. His influence – both during and after his life-time – over scholarship in fields ranging from cultural studies and English literature to anthropology and geography has itself been the subject of scholarly scrutiny. The goal of this essay is to draw attention to a few of the key texts and ideas associated with Said’s work in light of their importance for critical international relations scholarship. ‘Beginnings’ One of the most important concepts that Edward Said expounded on in all his writings is that of worldliness (Said 1983). Put simply, Said argued that texts and their authors do not exist in a vacuum. To treat the text simply as an inert object (that is to say for instance, a self-contained book), literature as something divorced from the world in which it is created, or the author as just a writer of a particular book is to miss the crucial fact that the production of the text by the author, a cultural production, is a political act that is deeply embedded in the relations of power in any given society. To understand these relations, one needs to understand the rootedness, the socio-political-cultural contexts that are productive of both the author and the ideas that make up his/her text

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  Postcolonial Theory

  A Critical Introduction: Second Edition

  • Leela Gandhi(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  4 Edward Said and His Critics

  T he principal features of postcolonialism’s intellectual inheritance—which we covered in the preceding two chapters—are realised and elaborated in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1991, first published in 1978). Here, as elsewhere in his extensive oeuvre, Said betrays an uneasy relationship with Marxism, a specifically poststructuralist and anti-humanist understanding of the contiguity between colonial power and Western knowledge, and a profound belief in the political and worldly obligations of the postcolonial intellectual. This chapter will provide some contexts for understanding the canonisation of this book as a postcolonial classic through a consideration of its academic influence and theoretical limitations.

  Enter Orientalism

  Commonly regarded as the catalyst and reference point for postcolonialism, Orientalism represents the first phase of postcolonial theory. Rather than engaging with the ambivalent condition of the colonial aftermath—or indeed, with the history and motivations of anti-colonial resistance—it directs attention to the discursive and textual production of colonial meanings and, concomitantly, to the consolidation of colonial hegemony. While ‘colonial discourse analysis’ is now only one aspect of postcolonialism, few postcolonial critics dispute its enabling effect upon subsequent theoretical improvisations.

  Gayatri Spivak, for example, has recently celebrated Said’s book as the founding text or ‘source book’ through which ‘marginality’ itself has acquired the status of a discipline in the Anglo-American academy. In her words, ‘the study of colonial discourse, directly released by work such as Said’s, has… blossomed into a garden where the marginal can speak and be spoken, even spoken for. It is an important part of the discipline now’ (Spivak 1993, p. 56). The editors of the influential Essex symposia series on the sociology of literature also invoke the spirit of Spivak’s extravagant metaphor to argue that Said’s pioneering efforts have single-handedly moved matters of colony and empire ‘centre stage in Anglo-American literary and cultural theory…’ (Barker et al. 1994, p. 1).

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  Arab Intellectuals and American Power

  Edward Said, Charles Malik, and the US in the Middle East

  • M.D. Walhout(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Edward Said, Charles Malik, and American Power

  By the time he died in 2003, the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said was quite possibly the most famous literature professor in the world. His academic reputation was established in the late 1970s, starting with Beginnings (1975), which helped launch the theory revolution in Anglo-American literary studies. With his knowledge of French, Said was able to draw on the work of such avant-garde Parisian theorists as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, many of whom he knew personally. But his most influential scholarly work was Orientalism (1978), arguably the founding text of the new field of postcolonial studies. His argument was that Orientalism—the institutionalized study of the Middle East in post-Enlightenment Europe—had produced anything but objective, disinterested knowledge of the Arabs and other “Orientals.” On the contrary, it had produced biased scholarship premised on the superiority of European civilization and serving the interests of the European colonial powers.

  At roughly the same time, Said was emerging as the leading American spokesman for the Palestinian resistance movement. His first book on the subject, The Question of Palestine , was published in 1979, two years after the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. As far as Said was concerned, there was only one answer to the Question of Palestine: a single, secular, democratic state in all of Palestine, embracing both Jews and Arabs. The publication of The Question of Palestine coincided, more or less, with Said’s debut as something of a media star—a handsome, debonair university professor who spoke flawless English with an American accent and who was somehow, at the same time, an elected member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). From the New York Times to the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

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  Postcolonial Theory

  A critical introduction

  • Leela Gandhi(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4Edward Said and his critics

  The principal features of postcolonialism’s intellectual inheritance—which we covered in the preceding two chapters—are realised and elaborated in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1991, first published in 1978). Here, as elsewhere in his extensive oeuvre, Said betrays an uneasy relationship with Marxism, a specifically poststructuralist and anti-humanist understanding of the contiguity between colonial power and Western knowledge, and a profound belief in the political and worldly obligations of the postcolonial intellectual. This chapter will provide some contexts for understanding the canonisation of this book as a postcolonial classic through a consideration of its academic influence and theoretical limitations.

  Enter Orientalism

  Commonly regarded as the catalyst and reference point for postcolonialism, Orientalism represents the first phase of postcolonial theory. Rather than engaging with the ambivalent condition of the colonial aftermath—or indeed, with the history and motivations of anti-colonial resistance—it directs attention to the discursive and textual production of colonial meanings and, concomitantly, to the consolidation of colonial hegemony. While ‘colonial discourse analysis’ is now only one aspect of postcolonialism, few postcolonial critics dispute its enabling effect upon subsequent theoretical improvisations.

  Gayatri Spivak, for example, has recently celebrated Said’s book as the founding text or ‘source book’ through which ‘marginality’ itself has acquired the status of a discipline in the Anglo-American academy. In her words, ‘the study of colonial discourse, directly released by work such as Said’s, has. . . blossomed into a garden where the marginal can speak and be spoken, even spoken for. It is an important part of the discipline now’ (Spivak 1993, p. 56). The editors of the influential Essex symposia series on the sociology of literature also invoke the spirit of Spivak’s extravagant metaphor to argue that Said’s pioneering efforts have single-handedly moved matters of colony and empire ‘centre stage in Anglo-American literary and cultural theory . . .’ (Barker et al. 1994, p. 1).

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  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  21 Edward Said

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-21

  Introductory note

  Edward Said (1935–2003) was a Palestinian, educated in Palestine and Egypt when those countries were under British jurisdiction, and subsequently in the United States. He was Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Said’s first book was a critical study of Conrad, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), that took a phenomenological approach to its subject, but was recognizably within the tradition of Anglo–American ‘New Criticism’. Said was one of the first critics in America to respond to the challenge of European structuralist and post-structuralist theory, and his thoughtful, sometimes anxious reflections upon these developments may be traced in his books Beginnings (1975) and The World, the Text and the Critic (1983). Said disliked the increasing hermeticism of deconstructive criticism, and was drawn to Marxist and Foucauldian analyses of literature and culture as sites of political and ideological struggle. In Orientalism (1978) he found a rewarding subject for such an approach, and, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), he examined his earlier premisses in relation to the Western canon. In his later years, he took up the Palestinian cause without being impressed by its political strategies, and in The Politics of Dispossession (1994), Peace and its Discontents: essays on Palestine in the Middle East peace process (1996) and Culture and Resistance: conversations with Edward W. Said (conducted by David Barsamian – 2003), he applied some of the insights advanced in Orientalism to contemporary politics, a direct set of references that was to take in the second Gulf War in his From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2003). Always concerned about the human plight of ideological effects, he turned increasingly to a form of humanism, and in Humanism and Democratic Criticism

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  Edward Said

  A Critical Introduction

  • Valerie Kennedy(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  4 Said and Postcolonial Studies

  Introduction

  Any appreciation of Said’s achievement needs to include consideration of the role of his works, especially Orientalism , in influencing developments in the fields of postcolonial studies.1 In postcolonial theory, Said’s work has been continued, opened out, modified and challenged by the work of other scholars, notably Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Moreover, Orientalism gave new impetus to the two forms of colonial discourse analysis in particular: the study of the literature of empire and the theorization of travel writing. This final chapter will offer a sketch of some of Said’s most important contributions to developments in these areas of postcolonial studies. It will also argue that Said’s insistence on the need for theoretical writing to have an effect on the real world distinguishes his writing from much of the work in the field.

  Said and the field of postcolonial studies

  The term ‘postcolonial studies’ is now generally accepted as the name of a field of interdisciplinary studies which encompasses a wide variety of types of analysis. What links them is a concern with the imperial past, with the different varieties of colonialism within the imperial framework, and with the links between the imperial past and the postcolonial present. Postcolonial studies can be said to include two main kinds of work: what Moore-Gilbert calls postcolonial criticism, including the study of ‘Commonwealth literature’, and postcolonial theory. These are often approached through various theoretical perspectives including feminist theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and minority discourse and cultural studies. The field as a whole assumes a continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods, and is concerned with all aspects of the relationship between the imperial or postcolonial centre or metropolis and the colonial or postcolonial periphery.

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  Criticism in Society

  • Imre Salusinszky(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Edward Said

  6 Edward Said

  “The sense of being between cultures has been very, very strong for me. I would say that’s the single strongest strand running through my life: the fact that I’m always in and out of things, and never really of anything for very long.”

  The work of Edward Said represents “practical criticism” in a new, powerful and, above all, oppositional mode. Said’s has been the skeptical voice inside literary theory, constantly reminding it of how impractical its habitual strategies are, since they serve (like the older “practical criticism” associated with I. A. Richards) to split literature and criticism off from wider social practices. By conceiving of “literariness” or “the aesthetic” as isolatable affects open to formal theorizing, critics have marginalized both literature and themselves; and by failing to see the way in which literature – and criticism – are intercalated in a wider field of power and action, they have consciously or unconsciously served the interests of ruling-class power. Said writes against critical modes which, like deconstruction, have a tendency to substitute a pure theoretical consciousness for a critical or oppositional one.

  Opposition, however, has been more than a matter of consciousness for Said. He is a Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1935, and is a member of the Palestine National Council (the Palestinian parliament-in-exile). As well as being a literary critic, he is well known in the United States as a writer, spokesperson and activist for the Palestinian cause, and has written several books on Palestine, Islam, and the treatment of these subjects in the Western media. Said came to the United States in the late 1950s, and was educated at Princeton and Harvard. He is now Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where this interview was recorded at the end of January, 1986.

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  Reading Postcolonial Theory

  Key texts in context

  • Bibhash Choudhury(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  4 Edward W. Said: Orientalism The framing of the case: Said’s ‘introduction’ to Orientalism Edward Said’s Orientalism is an event in twentieth-century intellectual history, in more ways than one. The point Said makes in the book is about perceptions that have informed the Western understanding of the world, and as he looks at the cultural consolidation of ideas and visions that have come to situate what we identify as the Orient, there is also a recognition of the fact that for certain structures to operate there are accompanying conditions that facilitate them. Orientalism recognizes the presence of these cultural practices, and in the course of the book Said goes on to examine how minds have been shaped into engaging with certain operations that have come to occupy us as givens. The many responses to the argument of Orientalism, the most critical as well as the commendatory ones, have surfaced through undertakings that consider the process of historical evaluation Said engages in, but the consensus is that the point made in the book is one that cannot be overwhelmed by either sophistry or counter-logic. In an intellectually invigorating engagement as the one that Said undertook in Orientalism, there is bound to be sides for people to position themselves in, yet no overthrow of his basic argumentative frame has as yet been attempted. The seminal status of the book stems from the force of the argument discussing a practice of cultural structuring that not only is historically substantiated but considered in terms of the multiple trajectories that have converged to make the idea of the Orient what it is

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  The Triangle of Representation

  • Christopher Prendergast(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Representing Other Cultures Edward Said

  The occasion for the following remarks on the work of Edward Said is the appearance (in French translation) of his short book Representations of the Intellectual.1 It is the only one of Said’s books in which the word “representation” figures in the title, although, as I shall show, the term has a very long reach into the arguments for which he is best known. The book’s principal theme—the place of the so-called intellectual in the modern world—is tackled in both theoretical and personal terms, where Said relates several of his own experiences as an “exiled” Palestinian intellectual, the meaning of “exile” being of course one of the central references for understanding his work as a whole and, more particularly, for understanding what is at stake when, notably in Orientalism, Said activates the verb “to represent.” In certain respects, however, the occasion is far from ideal, since the book cannot be said to count among Said’s more impressive efforts. This is doubtless linked to the circumstances of its composition, as a minimally revised version of the BBC Reith Lectures Said gave in 1993. The text was thus originally written for, and accordingly constrained by, the conditions of a radio broadcast, and on reading it in its published form, one has moreover the impression of a job done in some haste.

  At the outset, it has to be said that the strictly theoretical contribution adds little to what we already know. Its principal argument rests on a familiar contrast between Antonio Gramsci and Julien Benda and their respective accounts of the role of the intellectual in the network of relations binding the production of knowledge and the interests of power (to which Said adds a third reference, which has been of the utmost importance for many of his writings from Orientalism onward: the savoir-pouvoir nexus described by Michel Foucault). For Gramsci, working within the terms of Marxism, the category of the intellectual is defined by the notion of function, according to the opposition between the “traditional” intellectual and the “organic” intellectual. The former is absorbed in the production and reproduction of institutionally established knowledge (in the church, the teaching profession, the scientific laboratory, etc.) and enjoys a certain autonomy by virtue of what is culturally and procedurally taken for granted in all forms of established knowledge. The latter, on the other hand, is identified more with a particular organization or cause serving particular interests and thus more directly and visibly involved in the business of legitimation; for better or for worse, the “organic” intellectual is a committed intellectual (to talk the language of Sartre) for whom rhetoric and the arts of persuasion are weapons as important as reason, research, and erudition. Benda, by contrast, is radically antifunctionalist; the intellectual who delivers his knowledge and abilities to either technocratic expertise or ideological legitimation is guilty of “treason.” Rooted in the values of an older humanism, Benda defends the idea of the detached, disinterested intellectual who speaks in the name of the universal against the deforming pressures of the interested parti pris

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  International Relations Theory and Philosophy

  • Cerwyn Moore, Chris Farrands(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 Edward Said and post-colonial international relations Mark B.Salter

  While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision.

  (Said 2000:186)

  Introduction

  Whether a cosmopolitan liberal, an abstract and rational realist or a light-footed ironic post-structuralist, too often International Relations (IR) theorists have used a conceit of placelessness, an Archimedean point outside the world and politics from which they can diagnose the dynamics of power.1 The political implications of these inter-national, abstracted and bloodless theories of world politics have been highlighted by Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker (1990) among others. This critical turn in IR theory inaugurated a period of reflection of culture, identity and discourses, and while Foucault became central to a certain part of the discipline, other contemporary important critical philosophical voices did not find an audience. Edward Said (1935–2003) was a prominent humanities scholar, founding almost single-handedly the field of post-colonial studies with Orientalism (1978). While he came to the attention of IR scholars during his engagement with Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis (2000), Said had long been engaged in questions at the heart of the discipline, and there has been recent recognition of this with a special forum in Millennium (2007). This chapter reads Said back into IR through a meditation on his use of exile, experience and the intellectual as critical concepts.

  Post-colonial studies

  Said inaugurated the field of post-colonial studies, which has flourished over the past thirty years (Moore-Gilbert 1997; Gandhi 1998). Although the very term ‘post-colonial’ is itself a site of debate (does ‘post’ mean a transcendence of the colonial or a past historical epoch?), I will use it here to refer to the set of inquiries into historical and contemporary colonial relations of power. In IR theory, the colonial is often all-too-absent. Brian Schmidt and David Long (2005) and Torbjørn Knutsen (1992) have demonstrated the complicity of early IR theory with the projects of European colonialism, but there is a still a radical underestimation of the power, presence and pertinence of colonialism and imperialism to contemporary world politics. Some postwar Realist and English School writings do treat colonialism as a serious problem for IR theory – and indeed treat colonialism as important material, social, political and economic facets of world politics, notably Frederick Schuman, Hans Morgenthau, Arnold Toynbee, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson. Marxist and Gramscian versions of IR theory, promoted by Robert Cox and colleagues, continued to speak of neocolonialism, driven by their materialist analysis, and some comparativist analysis examined the Non-Aligned Movement; but these were minority voices in the field. While Bull and Watson’s Expansion of International Society (1984) is perhaps the best of this work, decolonization was relegated in IR theory to the analysis of colonialism (or of race) to a historical question.2 Said’s Orientalism (1978) did not have a large impact in IR. The discipline was largely silent on post-colonial theory, until Sankaran Krisha wrote ‘The importance of being ironic: a postcolonial view of international relations theory’ (1993) and Philip Darby and Albert Paolini published ‘Bridging International Relations and Postcolonialism’ (1994). This theme was developed in work by Ahluwalia and Sullivan’s ‘Beyond International Relations: Edward Said and the World’ (2000) and Darby (1998, 2000, 2004), who chiefly focused on third wave post-colonial critics, such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, and on discursive representations of the global south. However, while it cannot be said that Said is at the core of IR, his questions of power, domination, culture, imperialism, identity and territory are at its centre. Darby and Paolini suggest that ‘not only did [Orientalism

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  Radical Thinkers

  Classes, Nations, Literatures

  • Aijaz Ahmad(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  In one sort of reading, where post-Enlightenment Europe is emphasized, Orientalism appears to be an ideological corollory of colonialism. But so insistent is Said in identifying its origins in European Antiquity and its increasing elaboration throughout the European Middle Ages that it seems to be the constituting element, transhistorically, of what he calls ‘the European imagination’. In a revealing use of the word ‘delivered’, Said remarks at one point that Orientalism delivered the Orient to colonialism, so that colonialism begins to appear as a product of Orientalism itself – indeed, as the realization of the project already inherent in Europe’s perennial project of inferiorizing the Orient first in discourse and then in colonization. This is, of course, doubly paradoxical, since Said is vehement in his criticism of ‘Orientalism’ for its highly ‘textual’ attitude, yet in his own account imperialist ideology itself appears to be an effect mainly of cetain kinds of writing. But why has Europe needed to constitute – produce’ is Said’s stark word – the Orient as ‘that hostile other world’; to ‘animate’, as he puts it, ‘the otherwise silent and dangerous space’ as ‘one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (p. 1)? Well, because ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (p. 3). There are many passages of this kind, and Said borrows his language from so many different kinds of conceptual frameworks and intellectual disciplines that one is simply bewildered. 24 There is, for example, enough existentialism in Said’s language, derived from identifiable Sartrean concepts, which stands in a peculiar relation with Derridean ideas of Identity and Difference, all of which is mobilized to posit in some places that the West has needed to constitute the Orient as its Other in order to constitute itself and its own subject position

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  The Re-Emergence of the Single State Solution in Palestine/Israel

  Countering an Illusion

  • Cherine Hussein(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The World, the Text and the Critic, Said would clearly emphasize this point:

  Contemporary criticism has retreated from its constituency, the citizens of modern society … a precious jargon has grown up, and its formidable complexities obscure the social realities that … encourage a scholarship of ‘modes of excellence’ very far from daily life … Criticism can no longer cooperate in or pretend to ignore this enterprise … Each essay in this book affirms the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life.

  (Said 1983: 5)

  Linking this erasure to “the cult of expertise and professionalism” (Said 2001e: 119) Said, as Gramsci did years before him, held intellectuals both accountable for participating within a ‘program of non-interference’ that privileges and exalts professional and expert knowledge, and viewed them as potential powerful agents of dissent, of disseminating non-coercive knowledge, and of outlining alternative social and political relations. He therefore embraced the role of the activist, public, and secular intellectual, who defiantly took positions against injustice, and historicized, contextualized, and humanized knowledge in the name of the oppressed, while reminding readers that knowledge production and the political, the personal, the spatial, and the circumstantial were intimately intertwined.

  Thrust into the realm of the political, and following his newfound conviction in the link between thought and action, Said “began to feel that what happened in the Arab World concerned (him) personally and could no longer be accepted with a passive political disengagement” (Said et al. 2000: xxii). Thus he began to reaffiliate himself with the Palestinian community in the Arab World (Said et al. 2000: xxiv). In 1977 Said was elected as an independent member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), which he embraced as a channel through which he could “act politically on behalf of Palestinian self-determination” (Said et al. 2000: xxiv). The Question of Palestine (Said 1979) emerged in this period, and represented a “more political, cultural, and historical investigation of Palestinian dispossession … (that) delved into the brute practices of the various colonialism that the Palestinians have endured” (Said et al

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