The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION - Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin

  PART I - Beginnings

  1 - The Claims of Individuality (1966)

  2 - The Palestinian Experience (1968–1969)

  3 - Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction (1971)

  PART II - Orientalism and After

  4 - Orientalism

  INTRODUCTION TO ORIENTALISM

  II

  III

  THE SCOPE OF ORIENTALISM - PROJECTS

  5 - Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims (1979)

  I - Zionism and the Attitudes of European Colonialism

  II - Zionist Population, Palestinian Depopulation

  6 - Islam as News

  7 - Traveling Theory (1982)

  8 - Secular Criticism (1983)

  9 - Permission to Narrate (1984)

  10 - Interiors (1986)

  11 - Yeats and Decolonization (1988)

  PART III - Late Styles

  12 - Performance as an Extreme Occasion (1989)

  13 - Jane Austen and Empire

  14 - Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals

  15 - The Middle East “Peace Process”: Misleading Images and Brutal Actualities (1995)

  16 - On Writing a Memoir

  PART IV - Spoken Words

  17 - An Interview with Edward W. Said

  ENDNOTES

  NOTES

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY EDWARD SAID

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The editors wish to thank Dr. Zaineb Istrabadi, Jin Auh, Diana Secker Larson, Shelley Wanger, and, most of all, Edward W. Said for making this publication possible.

  INTRODUCTION

  Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin

  In early September 1991 Edward Said traveled to London to attend a conference he had organized. Taking place on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference, the event was made up of Palestinian intellectuals and activists who heeded Said’s call for joining together in a position of strength to counter the weakness of the Palestinian situation after the Gulf War. It turned out to be a conference of disappointments for Said, full of “the endless repetition of well-known arguments.”1 Midway through it, Said telephoned his wife in New York and asked for the results of his annual physical, as he was concerned about his cholesterol. The cholesterol was fine, his wife told him, but she added that he should call his doctor when he returned to New York. There was something in the hesitation of her voice, Said recalls, that made him call Dr. Hazzi immediately. It was there, in a stolen moment between debates, that Said discovered that he had leukemia.

  Edward Said has the uncanny ability to find himself on the losing side of time. The tragic convergences of this story—while fighting for the disappearing voice of his people he learns he has the fight for his own life ahead of him—seem the stuff of Shakespeare. But Said is no Othello, full of destructive self-pity. His self-made role has been to challenge authority, not to assume it, although his intellect and accomplishments have been nothing less than magisterial.

  Anti-dynastic, rigorous, erudite, polemical, and always driven by a quest for secular justice, Said’s contribution is the clear vision and moral energy to turn catastrophe into ethical challenge and scholarship into intellectual obligation. This means, of course, that he is often on the wrong side of power, challenging the status quo and our critical conscience in a world divided by conflict and driven by arrogant oppression. It is this quality of speaking out on the side of the oppressed that puts Said in the long tradition of engaged intellectuals, people like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky, C. L. R James, James Bald-win, Malcolm X, and Huda Shaarawi—those who seek, as Marx once noted, not just to interpret the world, but to change it. Said’s commitments to his people, to his scholarship, and to his own talents have made him arguably the most important intellectual of the latter half of the twentieth century.

  Like many intellectuals of the turbulent twentieth century, Said has had to reckon with his life as an exile, and the pain of exile has been a grounding philosophy to all his work. Born to a wealthy Palestinian family in Jerusalem in 1935, Said—like the vast majority of Palestinians—was displaced and dispossessed of his home and homeland by the cataclysmic events of 1948. He eventually moved to the United States in 1951, but to live in exile is to exist somehow in an embattled relationship with time. Said’s dissonances with the temporal, however, do not remain on the philosophical level. Tirelessly on the side of the weak and the forgotten, he has become the primary spokesperson in the West for the Palestinians, crafting books and articles, appearing regularly on television and radio, lecturing an American and Western public on the injustices inflicted on them.

  This exposure comes with a price. Said is routinely vilified in much of the popular press. He has been dubbed a “professor of terror,” and “Arafat’s man in New York.” His Columbia University office has been ransacked, he has received numerous death threats, and the New York City Police Department once considered his life in enough peril to install a “panic button” in his apartment. Yet he remains wedded to his principles and unseduced by authority. In September 1993, when the White House called Said and asked him attend the signing ceremony for the Oslo agreements (which he opposed for several reasons, including the fact that the agreements said nothing about the forgotten majority of Palestinians who now reside outside of Gaza and the West Bank), Said declined, telling them the day should be known as a Palistinian “day of mourning.”

  This impulse to bring to light truths that powerful forces either obscure, suppress, or distort can be found not only in Said’s work as a Palestinian activist but in almost all of his work, from his literary and music criticism to his political pieces. Orientalism, his 1978 book on the Western representations of the Muslim Middle East, forced a major rethinking of the workings of culture precisely because it argued that political ideas of domination and colonization can find their strength and justification in the production of cultural knowledge. At a time when most American literary scholarship was engaged in highly specialized, esoteric textual practices to discover “universal truths,” Orientalism forced academics of all kinds to reevaluate the political nature and consequences of their work in the ensuing storm. The Question of Palestine, a highly learned and polemical work, harnessed this same drive to reveal how European colonialism, Zionism, and American geopolitics have all systematically excluded and dispossessed Palestinians from their homeland and dehumanized them to the point where they were almost prevented from representing their existence. In Culture and Imperialism, Said elucidated a more general relationship between imperial ideology and the workings of culture and argued that even the small world drawn by the treasured literary icon Jane Austen is deeply imbricated in the material facts of European colonialism.

  What has occupied much of Said’s energies has been the role and vocation of the intellectual. Europe’s study of the Orient was, after all, for Said an “intellectual” (as well as a human) failure.2 In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said argues that “criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom,” and he posits that the most useful adjective to be joined to criticism would be oppositional.3 In another essay (“Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”) he advocates that “the politics of interpretation demand a dialectical response from a critical consciousness [a repeating phrase in Said’s work]
worthy of its name. Instead of noninterference and specialization, there must be interference, crossing of borders and obstacles, a determined attempt to generalize exactly at those points where generalizations seem impossible to make.”4 And in Representations of the Intellectual, he again puts forth the idea that “[l]east of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good; the whole point [to being an intellectual] is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.”5 For Said, his life has been a commitment to two things: an incorruptible, unassailable belief in the dignity of all people and human justice for everyone, and a lifelong pursuit in the rigors of scholarship to excavate, uncover, review, and interpret all facets of human experience, particularly those that are overlooked by any structure of authority. With these commitments, Said’s oppositional stance becomes not merely a radical posture but a manner of living.

  Said’s deliberate opposition to authority needs to be considered in connection with his meditations on exile. “It is a part of morality not to be at home in one’s home,” wrote the German philosopher Theodor Adorno,6 and Said’s own ethics derive in significant part precisely from this sense of “homelessness.” Living as an exile and thus in an ambivalent relationship with two cultures often at odds with each other (American and Arab), Said has often described how he feels not quite at home in either one. Yet rather than lament this condition of displacement, as many in the twentieth century have done, Said offers a qualified celebration of the possibilities it affords. “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision give rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal. . . . There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be.”7

  Out of displacement and discomfort, Said weaves an approach to the major questions of our era that is neither self-indulgent nor self-pitying. There is no silence or cunning involved in Said’s exile; instead there is the cultivation of a critical consciousness and, perhaps, as Mary McCarthy has described exile, “an oscillation between melancholy and euphoria.”8 Said’s exile has enabled him to see his surroundings slightly askew of those at home in them. “Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate,” Said tells us, “it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable.” If alienation from exile was the paradigmatic mode of the first part of the century, Said’s “pleasures of exile” offer a way to think beyond alienation and embrace creativity and critique.

  Noam Chomsky has described Said’s intellectual contribution in this manner: “His scholarly work has been devoted to unraveling mythologies about ourselves and our interpretation of others, reshaping our perceptions of what the rest of the world is and what we are. The second is the harder task; nothing’s harder than looking into the mirror.” Chomsky, himself a veteran of the media wars, continues: “Edward’s in an ambivalent position in relation to the media and mainstream culture: his contributions are recognized, yet he’s the target of constant vilification. It comes with the turf if you separate yourself from the dominant culture.”9

  What Chomsky describes is, in one way, a possible irony of Said’s work. Despite the criticism that he incurs and the provocative issues he forces his audiences to confront, Said has achieved a remarkable level of influence and recognition. He holds one of the eight University Professorships at Columbia University (University Professor is the highest rank possible for faculty at Columbia). He has published twenty books, which have been translated into thirty-one languages. Over two hundred universities around the world have heard him lecture, and he has delivered prestigious lecture series such as the Reith Lectures for the BBC, the Empson Lectures at Cambridge University, the René Wellek Memorial Lectures at the University of California-Irvine, the Henry Stafford Little Lecture at Princeton University, the T. B. Davie Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, a series of lectures of the Collège de France, and many others. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary member of King’s College, Cambridge. He has been a member of the Executive Board of PEN, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was president of the Modern Language Association (1999). He has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates, from institutions of higher learning including the University of Chicago, Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, the University of Michigan, the American University in Cairo, and the National University of Ireland. He is also the music critic for the Nation.

  In addressing this apparent contradiction—the success of an oppositional critic—it is important to recognize first of all that despite his status, Said is routinely vilified and dismissed by certain segments of the population (particularly for his continued advocacy of the Palestinian cause). More important, however, Said’s reception is instructive for what it reveals about intellectual labor and about the possibilities of a just future for all. “There is no such thing as a private intellectual,” Said explains in Representations of the Intellectual, “since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered a public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written.”10 Said’s own manner of “personal inflection,” his passionate yet reasoned intellect, his erudite yet democratic spirit, his elegance of prose and presentation, have in important ways contributed to the reception of his intellectual beliefs in justice and coexistence in an increasingly fractured world.

  Of even greater significance, however, is that the integrity of the work, committed to the universal application of basic human rights, is globally appreciated. Our overwhelming need to hear and read someone like Edward Said is a double-sided signifier. On the one hand, it reveals that the dominant ways of political power continue to deny basic human rights to people everywhere. Around the world, people feel the need for ideas that can challenge and usurp the triumphalist thinking of Eurocentric colonialism or the defensive reactions of nativist ideologies. This desire to engage with Said—by Indonesians and Parisians, from the Irish to the Iroquois—is perhaps felt even more so today, as bland pronouncements of globalization often mean little more than extending the military and economic reach of the United States, and the confusing reactions to global power fall prey to simple “us” versus “them” dichotomies. Forever wedded to the possibilities of mutual coexistence and universal recognition, Said’s thought has helped many think their way through the minefields not only of the Palestinian struggle, but also of many other such conflicts the world over. On the other hand, the fact that Said has built such a large readership is itself indicative not only of the power of his ideas but also of the future possibilities for justice and dignity contained therein.

  Edward Said was born in November 1935 in his family’s two-story home in Talbiyah, a section of West Jerusalem inhabited at the time almost exclusively by Palestinian Christians. He would be the eldest son in a family of four sisters. Having lost an earlier child shortly after childbirth in Cairo, Said’s mother was determined that her next be born in Jerusalem, and the Saids, living mainly in Cairo at the time, journeyed back to Jerusalem that summer and waited for their son’s birth in his uncle and aunt’s house. The itinerant lifestyle that would mark Said’s later life, both as a Palestinian living in exile and as a world renowned intellectual, was established fo
r Edward even before he was born.

  Said’s father, Wadie, a Jerusalemite, had moved to Cairo in 1929 to establish the Standard Stationary Company, the Egyptian branch of the Palestine Educational Company, a concern founded by Boulos Said, Wadie’s cousin and the husband to his sister Nabiha. In 1932 Wadie married Edward’s mother Hilda Musa, born in Nazareth, who had earlier been a gifted young student at the American School for Girls in Beirut (her mother was Lebanese). Said’s father was a strict, almost Victorian man who believed in the value of an education and uncritically in the worth of the United States. He was made up of “an absolute, unarguable paradox, repression and liberation opening on to each other.”11 Said’s relationship with his mother, full of tender mercies and filial devotion, was marked by the need to seek her affections, where he often found a nurturing repose, and the fear that these same affections could be capriciously withdrawn. He calls her “my closest and most intimate companion for the first twenty-five years of my life,”12 and although his father unfailingly supported Said’s artistic hunger—by providing him with piano lessons from the age of six, opera visits, a rich library—it was through his mother that the young Edward began to cultivate his aesthetic sensibility. Mother and son read Hamlet together in the front reception room of their Cairo apartment when the young Edward was only nine years old.

  Interestingly, both parents had a historic connection to the United States. Hilda Said’s father, who was a Baptist minister in Nazareth, had studied for a time in Texas. Said’s father, who had been urged to leave Palestine by his father to avoid conscription in the Ottoman army, had sojourned to the United States in 1911 after a brief six-month stint in Liverpool. From Liverpool, he and a Palestinian friend took jobs on an American passenger liner as stewards, later disembarking in New York without valid papers. Eventually, he became a salesman for ARCO, a Cleveland paint company, studied at Case Western Reserve University, and upon hearing that the Canadians were sending a battalion “to fight the Turks in Palestine”13 during World War I, he crossed the border and enlisted. When he found out that no such battalion existed, he deserted and crossed back to the United States, where he joined the American Expeditionary Force. Based first in Georgia, Wadie Said was then sent to France to fight for the Americans. After the war, he returned to Cleveland and established his own paint company. Upon the urgings of his mother who wanted him nearby, he returned to Palestine in 1920 as an American citizen.