The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  16. This is especially true of Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), which is nevertheless one of the two or three best studies of Iran done since World War II. Maxime Rodinson, in Marxism and the Muslim World, has nearly nothing to say about the Muslim religious opposition. Only Algar (note 15 above) seems to have been right on this point—a remarkable achievement.

  17. This is the argument put forward in Edward Shils, “The Prospect for Lebanese Civility,” in Leonard Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), pp. 1–11.

  18. Malcolm Kerr, “Political Decision Making in a Confessional Democracy,” in Binder, ed., Politics in Lebanon, p. 209.

  19. See the extraordinarily rich material found in the Moshe Sharett Personal Diary (Tel Aviv: Ma’ariv, 1979); Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents, introduction by Noam Chomsky (Belmont, Mass.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates [AAZG], 1980). See also the revelations about the CIA role in Lebanon by former CIA advisor Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980).

  20. Élie Adib Salem, Modernization Without Revolution: Lebanon’s Experience (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 144. Salem is also the author of “Form and Substance: A Critical Examination of the Arabic Language,” Middle East Forum 33 (July 1958): 17– 19. The title indicates the approach.

  21. Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 296.

  22. For an interesting description of “expert” illusions about Lebanon on the eve of the civil war, see Paul and Susan Starr, “Blindness in Lebanon,” Human Behavior 6 (January 1977); 56–61.

  23. I have discussed this in The Question of Palestine, pp. 3–53 and passim.

  24. For a brilliant account of this collective delusion see Ali Jandaghi (pseud.), “The Present Situation in Iran,” Monthly Review, November 1973, pp. 34–47. See also Stuart Schaar, “Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism,” Race and Class 21, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 67–80.

  25. James A. Bill, “Iran and the Crisis of ’78,” Foreign Affairs 57, no. 2 (Winter 1978–79): 341.

  26. William O. Beeman, “Devaluing Experts on Iran,” New York Times, April 11, 1980; James A. Bill, “Iran Experts: Proven Right But Not Consulted,” Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 1980.

  27. As opposed to scholars during the Vietnam War who made a stronger case for themselves as “scientists” willingly serving the state: here it would be good to know why Vietnam specialists were consulted (with no less disastrous results) and Iran experts not. See Noam Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” in American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), pp. 23–158.

  28. See Said, Orientalism, pp. 123–66.

  29. On the connection between scholarship and politics as it has affected the colonial world, see Le Mal de voir: Ethnologie et orientalisme: politique et épistémologie, critique et autocritique, Cahiers Jussieu no. 2 (Paris: Collections 10/18, 1976). On the way in which “fields” of study coincide with national interests see “Special Supplement: Modern China Studies,” Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars 3, nos. 3–4 (Summer– Fall, 1971): 91–168.

  30. See Edmund Ghareeb, ed., Split Vision: Arab Portrayal in the American Media (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, 1977). For the British counterpart see Sari Nasir, The Arabs and the English (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1979), pp. 140–72.

  31. James Peck, “Revolution Versus Modernization and Revisionism: A Two-Front Struggle,” in Victor G. Nee and James Peck, eds., China’s Uninterrupted Revolution: From 1840 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 71. See also Irene L. Gendzier, “Notes Toward a Reading of The Passing of Traditional Society,” Review of Middle East Studies 3 (London: Ithaca Press, 1978), pp. 32–47.

  32. An account of the Pahlevi regime’s “modernization” is to be found in Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979). See also Thierry A. Brun, “The Failures of Western-Style Development Add to the Regime’s Problems,” and Eric Rouleau, “Oil Riches Underwrite Ominous Militarization in a Repressive Society,” in Ali-Reza Nobari, ed., Iran Erupts (Stanford, Calif.: Iran-America Documentation Group, 1978). Also Claire Brière and Pierre Blanchet, Iran: La Révolution au nom de Dieu (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979); this book has an interview with Michel Foucault appended to it.

  33. There has been an extraordinary reluctance on the part of the press to say anything about the explicitly religious formulation of positions and policies inside Israel, especially when these are directed at non-Jews. There would be interesting material found in the Gush Emunim literature, or the pronouncements of the various rabbinic authorities, and so on.

  34. See Garry Wills, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” subtitled “Blissed out by the pope’s U.S. visit—‘unique,’ ‘historic,’ ‘transcendant’—the breathless press produced a load of papal bull,” Columbia Journalism Review 17, no. 5 (January–February 1980): 25–33.

  35. See the excellent and exhaustive study of Marwan R. Buheiry, U.S. Threats Against Arab Oil: 1973–1979. IPS Papers no. 4 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1980).

  36. This is a peculiarly American syndrome. In Europe, the situation is considerably more fair, at least as far as journalism on the whole is concerned.

  Chapter 7: Traveling Theory

  1. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 24.

  2. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 90.

  3. Ibid., p. 105.

  4. Ibid., p. 186.

  5. Ibid., p. 199.

  6. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the “Pensées” of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 15.

  7. Ibid., p. 15.

  8. Ibid., p. 99.

  9. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 13.

  10. Ibid., p. 21.

  11. Ibid., p. 21; emphasis added.

  12. Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 252.

  13. Williams, The Country and the City (1973; reprints, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 141.

  14. Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, p. 351.

  15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 74, 102.

  16. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978).

  17. Ian Hacking, “The Archaeology of Foucault,” New York Review of Books 28 (May 14, 1981): p. 36.

  18. There is much evidence of this in the Winter 1980 issue of Humanities in Society, vol. 3, entirely devoted to Foucault.

  19. The distinction is made by Foucault in Radical Philosophy 17 (Summer 1977).

  20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 93.

  21. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 26–27.

  22. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1980), p. 148.

  23. Ibid., pp. 150ff.

  24. A transcript is to be found in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, ed. Fons Elders (London: Souvenir Press, 1974). The curious thing about this book and the program—“the Basic concerns of mankind”—is that “mankind” is spoken for entirely by white European-American males. No one seems bothered by the claims for universality.

&n
bsp; 25. Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (New York: Pantheon, 1979), p. 80.

  26. Reflexive Water, pp. 184–85.

  Chapter 8: Secular Criticism

  1. There is a good graphic account of the problem in Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (New York: Pantheon, 1977): 6. See also Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon, 1981): 147–64.

  2. The example of the Nazi who read Rilke and then wrote out genocidal orders to his concentration-camp underlings had not yet become well known. Perhaps then the Durrell-Secretary of Defense anecdote might not have seemed so useful to my enthusiastic friend.

  3. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

  4. See my article “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” Critical Inquiry (Fall 1982), for an analysis of the liaison between the cult of textuality and the ascendancy of Reaganism.

  5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (1953; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968): 557.

  6. See the evidence in Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937).

  7. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. M. and E. W. Said, Centennial Review 13 (Winter 1969): p. 17.

  8. Hugo of St. Victor, Didascalicon, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961): 101.

  9. See Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), esp. chap. 1.

  10. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

  11. See Orientalism, pp. 153–56; also the important study by Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978).

  12. See my Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975): 81–88 and passim.

  13. The information is usefully provided by Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

  14. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1932; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1953): 343–44.

  15. Georg Simmel, The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. and ed. K. Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968): 12.

  16. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979): 32.

  17. John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977): 193–94.

  18. For an extended analysis of the role of interpretive communities, see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

  19. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979): 252.

  Chapter 9: Permission to Narrate

  1. Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987): 288.

  2. David Gilmour, Lebanon: The Fractured Country (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).

  3. “The Permission to Narrate: A Reconstruction of the Siege of Beirut,” London Review of Books (February 16–29, 1984).

  4. Books discussed: Sean MacBride et al., Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission (London: Ithaca, 1983). Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un massacre (Paris: Seuil, 1982). John Bulloch, Final Conflict: The War in the Lebanon (London: Century, 1983). David Gilmour, Lebanon: The Fractured Country (Oxford: M. Robertson, 1983). Jonathan Randal, The Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and American Bunglers (London: Chatto, 1983). Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, God Cried (London: Quartet, 1983). Salim Nassib and Caroline Tisdal, Beirut: Frontline Story, with photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins (London: Pluto, 1983). Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the United States and the Palestinians (London: Pluto, 1983).

  5. MacBride et al., Israel in Lebanon, p. 222.

  6. Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew, Publish It Not . . . :The Middle East Cover-Up. (London: Longman, 1975).

  7. Yoav, Karni, “Dr. Shekel and Mr. Apartheid,” Yediot Ahronot, March 13, 1983.

  8. In Critical Inquiry (autumn 1980).

  9. A persuasive study by Mark Heller, an Israeli political scientist at the Centre for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University: A Palestinian State: The Implications for Israel (Cambridge, Mass., & London: Harvard University Press, 1983), represents an exception. Heller argues that a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza is in Israel’s best interest, and is more desirable than either annexation or returning the territories to Jordan.

  10. In Commentary (September 1982).

  11. Richard Poirier, “Watching the Evening News: The Chancellor Incident,” Raritan 2, no. 2 (fall 1982): p. 8.

  12. The background of collaboration between Zionist groups and various European fascists is studied in Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of Dictators: A Reappraisal (London: Croom Helm, 1983).

  13. Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p. 106.

  14. Ibid., p. 102.

  15. There is one exception to be noted: Lina Mikdadi, Surviving the Siege of Beirut: A Personal Account (London: Onyx Press, 1983). This delivers a Lebanese-Palestinian woman’s account of life in Beirut during the siege.

  16. Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1977) and Crossroads to Civil War: Lebanon 1975–1976 (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1976).

  17. Elie Salem, Modernization without Revolution: Lebanon’s Experiences (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1973).

  18. Jacobo Timerman, The Longest War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982).

  Chapter 11: Yeats and Decolonization

  1. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995): 99.

  2. Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Eighteenth Century to the 1780’s (London: Cape, 1981): 14. A philosophical and ideological accompaniment is provided (alas, in a terrible jargon) by Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review, 1989). By contrast, a liberationist account—also on a world scale—is in Jan Nederveen Pietersee, Empire and Emancipation (London: Pluto Press, 1991).

  3. Calder, Revolutionary Empire, p. 36.

  4. Ibid., p. 650.

  5. Eqbal Ahmad, “The Neo-Fascist State: Notes on the Pathology of Power in the Third World,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 170–80.

  6. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint, New York: Viking, 1964): 189.

  7. Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (London: Muller, 1956): 93–114.

  8. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 196–216.

  9. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984): 102.

  10. Ibid., p. 146. Further differentiations of space, with consequences for art and leisure, occur in landscape and the project for national parks. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Jane Carruthers, “Creating a National Park, 1910 to 1926,” Journal of South African Studies 15, no. 2 (January 1989): 188–216. In a different sphere compare with Mark Bassin, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (June 1991): 763–94.

  11. Mahmoud Darwish, “A Lover from Palestine,” in Splinters of Bone, trans. B. M. Bannani (Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1974), p. 23.

  12. Mary Hamer, “Putting Ireland on the Map,” Textual Practice 3, no. 2 (Summer 1989):
184–201.

  13. Ibid., p. 195.

  14. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 1985): 38.

  15. Ibid., p. 49.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976): 127. See also Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, pp. 83–97.

  18. Ibid., pp. 129, 136.

  19. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 203.

  20. Césaire, Collected Poetry, p. 72.

  21. Ibid., pp. 76 and 77.

  22. R. P. Blackmur, Eleven Essays in the European Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964): 3.

  23. Mahmoud Darwish, The Music of Human Flesh, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, 1980): 18.

  24. Pablo Neruda, Memoirs, trans. Hardie St. Martin (London: Penguin, 1977): 130. This passage may come as a surprise to anyone who had once been influenced by Conor Cruise O’Brien’s essay “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats,” collected in his Passion and Cunning (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988). Its claims and information are inadequate, especially when compared with Elizabeth Cullingford’s Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1981); Cullingford also refers to the Neruda passage.

  25. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1959): 146.

  26. Pablo Neruda, Fully Empowered, trans. Alastair Reid (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986): 131.

  27. Yeats, Collected Poetry, p. 193.