The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Thus Sir Thomas’s infrequent trips to Antigua as an absentee plantation owner reflect the diminishment in his class’s power, a reduction directly expressed in the title of Lowell Ragatz’s classic The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833 (1928). But is what is hidden or allusive in Austen made sufficiently explicit more than one hundred years later in Ragatz? Does the aesthetic silence or discretion of a great novel in 1814 receive adequate explication in a major work of historical research a full century later? Can we assume that the process of interpretation is fulfilled, or will it continue as new material comes to light?

  For all his learning Ragatz still finds it in himself to speak of “the Negro race” as having the following characteristics: “he stole, he lied, he was simple, suspicious, inefficient, irresponsible, lazy, superstitious, and loose in his sexual relations.”22 Such “history” as this therefore happily gave way to the revisionary work of Caribbean historians like Eric Williams and C. L. R. James, and more recently Robin Blackburn, in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848; in these works slavery and empire are shown to have fostered the rise and consolidation of capitalism well beyond the old plantation monopolies, as well as to have been a powerful ideological system whose original connection to specific economic interests may have gone, but whose effects continued for decades.

  The political and moral ideas of the age are to be examined in the very closest relation to the economic development. . . .

  An outworn interest, whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective, can exercise an obstructionist and disruptive effect which can only be explained by the powerful services it had previously rendered and the entrenchment previously gained. . . .

  The ideas built on these interests continue long after the interests have been destroyed and work their old mischief, which is all the more mischievous because the interests to which they correspond no longer exist.23

  Thus [wrote] Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1961). The question of interpretation, indeed of writing itself, is tied to the question of interests, which we have seen are at work in aesthetic as well as historical writing, then and now. We must not say that since Mansfield Park is a novel, its affiliations with a sordid history are irrelevant or transcended, not only because it is irresponsible to do so, but because we know too much to say so in good faith. Having read Mansfield Park as part of the structure of an expanding imperialist venture, one cannot simply restore it to the canon of “great literary masterpieces”—to which it most certainly belongs—and leave it at that. Rather, I think, the novel steadily, if unobtrusively, opens up a broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture without which Britain’s subsequent acquisition of territory would not have been possible.

  I have spent time on Mansfield Park to illustrate a type of analysis infrequently encountered in mainstream interpretations, or for that matter in readings rigorously based in one or another of the advanced theoretical schools. Yet only in the global perspective implied by Jane Austen and her characters can the novel’s quite astonishing general position be made clear. I think of such a reading as completing or complementing others, not discounting or displacing them. And it bears stressing that because Mansfield Park connects the actualities of British power overseas to the domestic imbroglio within the Bertram estate, there is no way of doing such readings as mine, no way of understanding the “structure of attitude and reference” except by working through the novel. Without reading it in full, we would fail to understand the strength of that structure and the way it was activated and maintained in literature. But in reading it carefully, we can sense how ideas about dependent races and territories were held both by foreign-office executives, colonial bureaucrats, and military strategists and by intelligent novel-readers educating themselves in the fine points of moral evaluation, literary balance, and stylistic finish.

  There is a paradox here in reading Jane Austen which I have been impressed by but can in no way resolve. All the evidence says that even the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were cruel stuff. And everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery. Fanny Price reminds her cousin that after asking Sir Thomas about the slave trade, “There was such a dead silence”24 as to suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both. That is true. But what stimulates the extraordinary discrepancy into life is the rise, decline, and fall of the British empire itself and, in its aftermath, the emergence of a postcolonial consciousness. In order more accurately to read works like Mansfield Park, we have to see them in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting, which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide. In time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central to a new understanding of what Europe was.

  It would be silly to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave. Yet what I have called the rhetoric of blame, so often now employed by subaltern, minority, or disadvantaged voices, attacks her, and others like her, retrospectively, for being white, privileged, insensitive, complicit. Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but do we therefore jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery? Not at all, I would argue, if we take seriously our intellectual and interpretative vocation to make connections, to deal with as much of the evidence as possible, fully and actually, to read what is there or not there, above all, to see complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history.

  Mansfield Park is a rich work in that its aesthetic intellectual complexity requires that longer and slower analysis that is also required by its geographical problematic, a novel based in an England relying for the maintenance of its style on a Caribbean island. When Sir Thomas goes to and comes from Antigua, where he has property, that is not at all the same thing as coming to and going from Mansfield Park, where his presence, arrivals, and departures have very considerable consequences. But precisely because Austen is so summary in one context, so provocatively rich in the other, precisely because of that imbalance we are able to move in on the novel, reveal and accentuate the interdependence scarcely mentioned on its brilliant pages. A lesser work wears its historical affiliation more plainly; its worldliness is simple and direct, the way a jingoistic ditty during the Mahdist uprising or the 1857 Indian Rebellion connects directly to the situation and constituency that coined it. Mansfield Park encodes experiences and does not simply repeat them. From our later perspective we can interpret Sir Thomas’s power to come and go in Antigua as stemming from the muted national experience of individual identity, behavior, and “ordination,” enacted with such irony and taste at Mansfield Park. The task is to lose neither a true historical sense of the first, nor a full enjoyment or appreciation of the second, all the while seeing both together.

  from Culture and Imperialism

  14

  Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals (1993)

  In June 1993, Edward Said delivered the highly esteemed Reith Lectures on BBC radio. (The essays were later collected and published as a book.) Inaugurated by Bertrand Russell in 1948, the Reith Lectures are an important event of intellectual life in Britain and have been given by such luminaries as John Kenneth Galbraith, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Arnold Toynbee. Under Said’s direction, the lectures centered on the representations of the intellectual, a topic meant to have dual meaning: what the intellectual represents to a culture as well as how the intellectual is represented by a culture.

  From the moment he was invited, opposition was raised to giving Said this honor, all of it coming from those who accuse Said of being a fanatic and a demagogue due to his Palestinian credentials. It is with some irony, then, that these lectures oppose exactly this type of narr
ow-minded thinking. In them, Said argues that the role of the intellectual is to raise awkward questions, reject orthodoxies of opinion, and to be “on the same side as the weak and the underrepresented.” Drawing on a wide array of sources—literary, academic, political—Said explains that the true “intellectual” becomes accustomed to being “embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant” to the powers that be.

  The third of six essays delivered as the 1993 Reith Lectures on the BBC in England, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals” is Said’s meditation on the relationship between the life of the mind and the modern condition of exile. (It was also published in Grand Street and later in Representations of the Intellectual. ) By examining the life and writings of the German philosopher T. W. Adorno and others, Said investigates the ways in which exile can be viewed as both an actual condition of banishment and a metaphorical condition of living outside of the privileges, honors, seductions, and powers of a given culture. In this sense, the intellectual as exile, like the actual exile, learns to see the world through a “double perspective.” In other words, “an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light.” This essay extends key concepts from “Secular Criticism” and “Traveling Theory” insofar as the spirit of an undomesticated critical consciousness is propagated, one that is wary of being tamed or put on loan to those who would buy it or appropriate it. “To be marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile,” Said writes, “is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo.”

  Exile is one of the saddest fates. In premodern times banishment was a particularly dreadful punishment since it not only meant years of aimless wandering away from family and familiar places, but also meant being a sort of permanent outcast, someone who never felt at home, and was always at odds with the environment, inconsolable about the past, bitter about the present and the future. There has always been an association between the idea of exile and the terrors of being a leper, a social and moral untouchable. During the twentieth century, exile has been transformed from the exquisite, and sometimes exclusive, punishment of special individuals—like the great Latin poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome to a remote town on the Black Sea—into a cruel punishment of whole communities and peoples, often the inadvertent result of impersonal forces such as war, famine, and disease.

  In this category are the Armenians, a gifted but frequently displaced people who lived in large numbers throughout the eastern Mediterranean (Anatolia especially) but who after genocidal attacks on them by the Turks flooded nearby Beirut, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Cairo, only to be dislocated again during the revolutionary upheavals of the post–World War II period. I have long been deeply drawn to those large expatriate or exile communities who peopled the landscape of my youth in Palestine and Egypt. There were many Armenians of course, but also Jews, Italians, and Greeks who, once settled in the Levant, had grown productive roots there—these communities after all produced prominent writers like Edmond Jabes, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Constantine Cavafy—that were to be brutally torn up after the establishment of Israel in 1948 and after the Suez war of 1956. To new nationalist governments in Egypt and Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world, foreigners who symbolized the new aggression of European postwar imperialism were forced to leave, and for many old communities this was a particularly nasty fate. Some of these were acclimatized to new places of residence, but many were, in a manner of speaking, re-exiled.

  There is a popular but wholly mistaken assumption that being exiled is to be totally cut off, isolated, hopelessly separated from your place of origin. Would that surgically clean separation were true, because then at least you could have the consolation of knowing that what you have left behind is, in a sense, unthinkable and completely irrecoverable. The fact is that for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given today’s world, in living with the many reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, and that the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the old place. The exile therefore exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against.

  Salim, the main character of V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, is an affecting instance of the modern intellectual in exile: an East African Muslim of Indian origin, he has left the coast and journeyed towards the African interior, where he has survived precariously in a new state modeled on Mobuto’s Zaire. Naipaul’s extraordinary antennae as a novelist enable him to portray Salim’s life at a “bend in the river” as a sort of no-man’s-land, to which come the European intellectual advisers (who succeed the idealistic missionaries of colonial times), as well as the mercenaries, profiteers, and other Third World flotsam and jetsam in whose ambiance Salim is forced to live, gradually losing his property and his integrity in the mounting confusion. By the end of the novel—and this of course is Naipaul’s debatable ideological point—even the natives have become exiles in their own country, so preposterous and erratic are the whims of the ruler, Big Man, who is intended by Naipaul to be a symbol of all postcolonial regimes.

  The widespread territorial rearrangements of the post–World War II period produced huge demographic movements, for example, the Indian Muslims who moved to Pakistan after the 1947 partition, or the Palestinians who were largely dispersed during Israel’s establishment to accommodate incoming European and Asian Jews; and these transformations in turn gave rise to hybrid political forms. In Israel’s political life there has been not only a politics of the Jewish diaspora but also an intertwining and competing politics of the Palestinian people in exile. In the newly founded countries of Pakistan and Israel the recent immigrants were seen as part of an exchange of populations, but politically they were also regarded as formerly oppressed minorities enabled to live in their new states as members of the majority. Yet far from settling sectarian issues, partition and the separatist ideology of new statehood have rekindled and often inflamed them. My concern here is more with the largely unaccommodated exiles, like Palestinians or the new Muslim immigrants in continental Europe, or the West Indian and African blacks in England, whose presence complicates the presumed homogeneity of the new societies in which they live. The intellectual who considers him- or herself to be a part of a more general condition affecting the displaced national community is therefore likely to be a source not of acculturation and adjustment, but rather of volatility and instability.

  This is by no means to say that exile doesn’t also produce marvels of adjustment. The United States today is in the unusual position of having two extremely high former officers in recent presidential administrations—Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski—who were (or still are, depending on the observer’s outlook) intellectuals in exile, Kissinger from Nazi Germany, Brzezinski from Communist Poland. In addition Kissinger is Jewish, which puts him in the extraordinarily odd position of also qualifying for potential immigration to Israel, according to its Basic Law of Return. Yet both Kissinger and Brzezinski seem on the surface at least to have contributed their talents entirely to their adopted country, with results in eminence, material rewards, national, not to say worldwide, influence that are light-years away from the marginal obscurity in which Third World exile intellectuals live in Europe or the United States. Today, having served in government for several decades, the two prominent intellectuals are now consultants to corporations and other governments.


  Brzezinski and Kissinger are not perhaps as socially exceptional as one would assume if it is recalled that the European theater of World War II was considered by other exiles—like Thomas Mann— as a battle for Western destiny, the Western soul. In this “good war” the United States played the role of savior, also providing refuge for a whole generation of scholars, artists and scientists who had fled Western fascism for the metropolis of the new Western imperium. In scholarly fields like the humanities and social sciences a large group of extremely distinguished scholars came to America. Some of them, like the great Romance philologists and scholars of comparative literature Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, enriched American universities with their talents and Old World experience. Others, among them scientists like Edward Teller and Werner von Braun, entered the Cold War lists as new Americans dedicated to winning the arms and space race over the Soviet Union. So all-engrossing was this concern after the war that, as has recently been revealed, well-placed American intellectuals in the social sciences managed to recruit former Nazis known for their anti-Communist credentials to work in the United States as part of the great crusade.

  Along with the rather shady art of political trimming, a technique of not taking a clear position but surviving handsomely nonetheless, how and intellectual works out an accommodation with a new or emerging dominant power is a topic I shall deal with in my next two lectures in [Representations of the Intellectual.] Here I want to focus on its opposite, the intellectual who because of exile cannot, or, more to the point, will not make the adjustment, preferring instead to remain outside the mainstream, unaccommodated, unco-opted, resistant: but first I need to make some preliminary points.