The politics of dispossession, belonging, and hope: Remembering Edward W. Said

Alternatives

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 251-273

  Heristchi, Claire ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Dislocation; Orientalism; Political intellectual; Representation; Self determination

Indexed keywords

EID: 27744439457     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540503000301     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. All spoke of his academic achievements, but many close to him also spoke of his commitment, loyalty, friendship, and kindness. A number are quoted later in this article. The most emotional tribute was paid by Ramzy Baroud, editor in chief of the Palestine Chronicle, who stated he was "immersed in overwhelming loneliness" and that "Edward Said stood for everything that is virtuous" ("Edward Said, You Are Not 'Out of Place,'" Palestine Chronicle, 2003, available at www.palestinechronicle.com).
2. The strangest comment came in Mark Feeney's obituary in the Boston Globe: speaking of Said's charisma, Feeney said "he possessed striking looks, as well as an aristocratic bearing and suave manner" ("Edward Said: Critic Scholar, Palestinian Advocate," Boston Globe, September 26, 2003.
3. A piece in the Revolutionary Worker said Said's life was "honoured" by "the proletariat" ("J.S.," "Remembering Edward Said: An Extraordinary Citizen of the World," Revolutionary Worker no. 1215, October 12, 2003).
4. For instance, Yassir Arafat and the PLO executive issued a statement referring to Said's "eminent genius," despite their deep differences of opinion (retrieved from www.dailytimes.com.pk).
5. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was equally complimentary: "Said was for years often the sole and most effective advocate for bringing truth and light to the Palestinian cause in Israel." The obituary includes a reference to Said's work for the Palestinian National Initiative, but fails to mention that this movement largely condemns the misrule of the current Palestinian leadership, including the PNA (retrieved from the PNA International Press Centre's www.ipc.gov.ps).
6. By contrast, the New York Times obituary attracted controversy: It remains ambiguous as to whether Palestinians such as the Saids lost their homes upon the creation of the state of Israel. The author quotes more critics than supporters of Said's work on Orientalism, in particular Bernard Lewis, Said's archrival, without problematizing his contribution. The piece also relates the scandal of Weiner's accusations that Said had fabricated his past, but does not explicitly acknowledge that these accusations were completely rebuked, leaving the reader undecided - an issue discussed later in this article (Richard Bernstein, "Edward Said, Leading Advocate of the Palestinians, Dies at 67," New York Times, September 25, 2003).
7. Interestingly, Bernard Lewis refused to contribute his comments to an obituary article in Le Monde. He stated: "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" (One can only speak well of the dead) (Sylvain Sypel, "Edward Said, le Palestinien de Colombia," Le Monde, September 26, 2003). Issues raised in this note are explored below.
8. Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 1999), p. 294.
9. This is, for instance, what Mourid Barghouti states in his obituary, "Edward Said (1935-2003)," Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 657 (September 25-October 1, 2003): www.weekly.ahram.org.eg.
10. Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966).
11. Jacqueline Rose, "More Writing to Be Done," Observer (London), October 5, 2003, comment section.
12. Emmanuel Hamon, director, Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said; documentary produced by Wamip Films and Al-Jazeera Television in association with TV5; screened on TV5 in 2003.
13. His first marriage, to Maire Jaanus, ended in divorce.
14. Said, note 3, p. 295.
15. Ibid., preface, xiii.
16. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1984).
17. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intentions and Method (London: Granta, 1998).
18. Gauri Viswanathan, ed. Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
19. See also David Barsamian and Edward Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (Boston: South End Press, 2003).
20. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Random House, 1988).
21. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-94 (London: Vintage, 1995).
22. Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (London: Granta, 2001).
23. See also Edward W. Said, Peace and Its Discontents: Gaza-Jericho, 1993-1995 (London: Vintage, 1995).
24. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient [1978] (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1995).
25. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism [1993] (London: Vintage, 1994).
26. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World [1981] (London: Vintage, 1997).
27. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Random House, 1994).
28. Edward W. Said and David Barsamian, The Pen and the Sword (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994).
29. Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations, Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
30. Hamon, note 7.
31. Said, note 17, p. 3.
32. Ibid., p. 96.
33. Ibid., p. 6.
34. The issue of representation in Said's work mirrors his concerns in literary criticism; see Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon (London: Athlone, 1991), pp. 202ff.
35. Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.
36. See Imre Salunsinszky, "Edward Said," in his Criticism and Society (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 124. On p. 125, Salunsinszky also points to the influence of Deleuze, Vico, Chomsky, Lucacs, and Fanon on Said's work in literary criticism (an issue that is equally relevant to his work on Orientalism and the representation of Islam).
37. Said, note 17, "Afterword to the 1995 Printing," pp. 331-332 (italics added).
38. Benita Parry, "Edward Said, 1935-2003," Radical Philosophy (2003): www.radicalphilosophy.com.
39. Covering Islam in particular echoes themes raised in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
40. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (Harmonsdworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1969);
41. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London: Vintage, 1991);
42. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media [1988] (London: Vintage, 1994).
43. Said acknowledges this when he states: "What I said in Orientalism has been said before me by A. L. Tibawi, by Abdullah Laraoui, by Anwar Abdel Malek, by Talal Asad, by S. H. Alatas, by Fanon and Césaire, by Pannikar, and Romila Thapar, all of whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism, and who in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the science that represented them to Europe, were also understanding themselves as more than what this science said they were": in Edward W. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Francis Barker et al., eds., Europe and Its Others, vol. 1: Essex Sociology of Literature Conference (University of Essex, 1984), p. 17.
44. For a similar type of analysis, but applied to the work of Max Weber, see Bryan Turner, "Weber's Orientalism," in his For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 257ff.
45. Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: "The East" in European Identity Formation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
46. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature (London: Verso, 1992).
47. Simon Philpott. "Farewell Edward Said," Borderlands E-Journal 2, no. 3 (2003); available at www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au.
48. John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 234.
49. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 8.
50. Quoted in Sylvain Cypel, "Edward Said, The Palestinian of Colombia" (my translation).
51. This, in turn, implied that the bias identified by Said could be used by regimes in the Middle East to legitimize authoritarian rule and to reject Western criticism in these terms.
52. Turner, note 28, p. 7, and Lewis, note 40, pp. 121-122.
53. For a good analysis and a balanced overall assessment of the importance of Said's work, see Bart Moore Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), chap. 2.
54. For a discussion of this "neoOrientalism," see Yahya Sadowski, 'The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate," in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, eds., Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997).
55. Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 2001).
56. Christopher Hitchens, "My Friend Edward," Observer (London), comment section, September 28, 2003.
57. Christopher Hitchens, "My Friend Edward," Observer (London) Ibid. 2003
58. Quoted in Rose, note 6.
59. These arguments are developed in a number of sources, but the main, original locus for their enunciation remains Said, note 15.
60. Quoted in Malise Ruthven, "Obituary: Edward Said," Guardian, September 26, 2003.
61. Daniel Barenboim, "Edward Said Obituaries, 1935-2003," Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 657, September 25-October 1, 2003: www.weekly.ahram.org.eg.
62. The original source for this quote is unclear or, rather, multiple. A clear if short outline of this position can however be found in an anonymous obituary in the Washington Post, "Professor Edward W. Said, 67, Dies; Leading Advocate for Palestinians," Washington Post, September 26, 2003; online at washingtonpost.com.
63. Hamon, note 7.
64. Even though this quotation can be found in many recent sources on Said (such as obituaries and short memorial pieces), the original quotation is actually the title of an article published by Edward Alexander as early as 1989; it thus obviously does not refer to the War on Terror or Said's stance toward it. In his piece, Alexander talks of the attraction toward terror by intellectuals, and extrapolates between Said's work on Joseph Conrad and his commitment to the PNC in the 1970s and 1980s. It would therefore be misquoting Alexander to attribute to him a post-9/11 anti-Arab crusade, as some have done. While his criticism of Said is clearly fierce, it occurs in a different context; see Edward Alexander, "Professor of Terror," Commentary 88, no. 2 (1989).
65. Justus Reid Weiner, '"My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," Commentary 108, no. 2 (1999); retrieved from internet archives.
66. The Wall Street Journal piece included only parts of the original text but reached a much wider audience. See Justus Reid Weiner, "Commentary: The False Prophet of Palestine," Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999. In turn, this format was reprinted for a variety of pro-Israeli internet websites,www.freeman.org including the one from which I obtained a copy of the article: www.freeman.org/m-online/sept99/weiner.
67. In fact, Said always acknowledged that his family left Palestine just before most Palestinians were evicted, and he always saw his privileged position, in financial and educational terms, as a compelling factor in speaking out for those who had been less fortunate than him.
68. See, for instance, the discussion by Craig Huffman in Salon.Com, where Hussein Ibish was quoted in defense of Said. This piece was balanced in its reporting of the whole affair, but the Salon reaches a much smaller audience than the Wall Street Journal. Craig Hoffman, "Edward Said to Respond to Claims That He Is Not a True Palestinian," Salon.Com. August 26, 1999. www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/08/26/said.
69. Weiner, note 56, online, p. 2.
70. Ibid., p. 8.
71. Christopher Hitchens, "Commentary's Scurrilous Attack on Edward Said," Salon.Com discussion pages. September 7, 1999: www.salon.com/news/ feature/1999/09/07/said.
72. Edward Alexander, Nicolai Popov, and Marc Lange, "Edward Said's Parting Shots," Grad.Washington.Edu, May 20, 2003: www.frontpagemag. com/Articles.
73. Hamon, note 7.
74. See, for instance, www.campus-watch.org/about.php.
75. Edward W. Said. "'We' Know Who 'We' Are," London Review of Books, 2002;
76. reproduced by the Guardian at www.books.guardian.co.uk/ lrb/articles.
77. Ibid. Guardian at www.books.guardian.co.uk/ lrb/articles.
78. Edward Said, "When Will We Resist?" Guardian, January 25, 2003.
79. John Nichols, "Against Blind Imperial Arrogance," in 'The Online Beat,' Nation, September 25, 2003, and at www.thenation.com/thebeat.
80. Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
81. Hamon, note 7.
82. Parry, note 31.