“In Memory of Edward Said—the Bulletproof Intellectual,” The University of Toronto Quarterly, Victor Li ed., 83:1, 2014, pp. 12-20 (based on a lecture delivered on a plenary panel, American Comparative Literature Association, 2013) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Palestine Studies (a special issue on Edward Said, edited by Rashid Khalidi), 2004
The essay focuses on the “travel”of various debates—orientalism, post-colonialism, postzionism—between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the “translation” of Said’s ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Said’s work is engaged in its contradictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined include: the nature of the “post” in the concepts of the “post-colonial” and “post-Zionism”; the problem of “hybridity”and “resistance” in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo- American academy, of the “subaltern” intellectual.
Beyond Edward Said: An Outlook on Postcolonialism and Middle Eastern Studies
Social Epistemology
At the forefront of critically examining the effects of colonization on the Middle East is Edward Said’s magnum opus, Orientalism (1978). In the broadest theoretical sense, Said’s work through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge, presented an epistemologico-methodological equation expressed most lucidly by Aimé Césaire, colonization=thingification. Said, arguing against that archaic historicized discourse, Orientalism, was simply postulating that colonialism and its systems of knowledges signified the colonized, in Anouar Abdel-Malek’s words, as customary, passive, non-participating and non-autonomous. Nearly four decades later, Said’s contribution has become tamed and domesticated to an extent that most heterodoxic critical endeavours in the field have become clichéd premeditated anti-Orientalist tirades. At best, these critiques are stuck at analysing the impact of power at the macro-level, polemically regurgitating jargons like “hegemony”, “misrepresentation” and “Otherness”. At worst, they have become dogmatic or ethnocentric, closing space for scholarly debate through insipid cultural relativism, pathological religiosity or pernicious Occidentalism. I argue there is a need to go beyond that old postcolonial epistemological equation through examining the follow on effects of thingification on the thingified subject’s Weltanschauung, cultural practices and more importantly, subjectivity. I aim to undertake this critical endeavour through theorizing what I call Counter-Revolutionary Discourse (CRD). This discourse is an historicized, Eurocentric-Orientalist implicit programme of action and an analytical tool, which functions as a cognitive schema and a grammar of action that assists the colonial apparatus in surveillance, gauging, ranking and subjectifying Middle Eastern subjectivity and resistance according to imperial exigencies. Through tracking the matrix of Western statements, ideas and practices, I demonstrate that imperial enthusiasts in encountering Middle Eastern revolutions, from the Mahdi, Urabi, Zaghloul, Mossadegh, the PLO and the PKK to the ‘Arab Spring’, draw on a number of Counter-Revolutionary Discourse systems of thoughts, which I argue are responsible for re-interpellating Oriental subjectivity and resistance. In the process, I put forward a new post-Saidian equation that not only transcends that tried and tested scholarly narrative, but a formula much better suited for tracing the infinite and insidious effects of neocolonial power that aims to negate the negating act: Colonization= thingification + re-interpellation of subjectivity.
Edward Said and Recent Orientalist Critiques
Arab Studies Quarterly
Abstract: There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's tbesis of tbe "affiliation of knov>/ledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature. Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).
Orientalism: Edward Said’s vision of the clash of cultures
(Chapter of the book RELIGION, CULTURE AND SENSE OE BELONGING)
The Orientalism is probably more than an intellectual overhaul to the legacy of the European colonialism in the Middle East. It is according to one of its most ferocious opponents (the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said), „a way of coming to terms with the Orient” that is based on the Orient‟s special place in European experience, the place of Europe‟s greatest and richest colonies. A site that helped to define Europe (or the West) as the East contrasting image, idea, personality and experience‟ [Said 1978:1-2]. My commentary aims to look inside Edward Said‟s theory and see how it passed the test of time and the consolidation of American hegemonism and Islamic political radicalism.
The Inseparability of Postcolonial Studies from Palestine: Reflections on Edward Said
Asiatic , 2024
The plight of Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora is a result of Israeli settler colonialism. Israel's atrocious behaviour to colonised Palestinians is manifested through a myriad of crimes such as blockading occupied territories, demolishing homes, educational institutions, hospitals, and places of worship, restricting their movements, cutting power and communication, killing rampages, massacres to the extent of genocide, and other gruesome violations of human rights-all designed to force Palestinians off their lands and to eventually occupy them. Among academic disciplines, postcolonialism is most relevant to the discourse of Israel and Palestine and most promising to the cause of justice and the promotion of human rights in the region. In this essay, I argue that, owing to Edward Said's pioneering role in the development of postcolonial studies, the origin of this intellectual and literary movement is traced back to Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonisation. Therefore, practitioners of this decolonial discourse are in principle obligated to address the issue of Palestinian liberation from Israeli colonial oppression. Later in this essay, I also offer a cursory glance at some remarks of Salman Rushdie on the Israel-Palestine issue and discuss a perceived need for decolonising postcolonial studies.
Reorienting Edward Said's Orientalism: Multiple Perspectives
International Journal of English Language Studies , 2023
Edward Said remained a little-known scholar both in the West and in the Arab World until the publication of his major work, Orientalism, in 1978, in which he argues that Western representations of the East have historically been distorted and oversimplified and that these representations have been used to justify European imperialism and domination. This proved a turning point in his academic career, bringing him recognition in the West and, somewhat later, in the Arab World. The purpose of this study is to synthesize and assess Said's theoretical and discursive views in order to offer a full and representative review and analysis of his work and how translation impact on Arabic reader's perspective. When analyzing Said's work, the study primarily relies on his own Orientalism theorizations.