Traveling in paradox: Edward Said and critical international relations

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 83-99

  Duvall, Raymond ^a   Varadarajan, Latha ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

^b SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 39049145255     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298070360010601     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Robert W. Cox, 'Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 126-155.
2. Karl Marx, letter to Ruge, Kreuznach, September, 1843; http:// www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm.
3. See, for example, collections of essays that devote substantial attention to these disciplining efforts, such as Frank P. Harvey and Michael Brecher (eds.), Critical Perspectives in International Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
4. and Richard Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001).
5. See also Richard Beardsworth, 'The Future of Critical Philosophy and World Politics,' Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no.1 (2005): 201-235, and the conversation it stimulated, 237-261.
6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). For discussions on the impact of Orientalism, see among others, scholarly journal special issues devoted to commentaries on Said's work, including Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005); and Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006).
7. Scholars who explicitly frame their work as 'postcolonial' sometimes at least begin with a reference to Said. Some, like Timothy Mitchell, explicitly refer to Said's formative influence on their work. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Perhaps, though, we wander from critical international relations?
8. The tension is revealed well in a juxtaposition of two of Said's essays on the Palestinian struggle. See Edward W. Said, 'Permission to Narrate', London Review of Books (February 1984),
9. and Edward W. Said, 'Intifada and Independence', in Intifada, ed. Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989). The former concerns the question of social 'permission' for Palestine to speak, and in that respect has a distinctly post-structural underpinning, whereas in the latter the stone-throwers of the Intifada are heroic figures.
10. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 3.
11. In another of his classics, published 15 years after Orientalism, Said expressly avows his sympathy for, and indebtedness to the approaches developed by Foucault and Raymond Williams. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 41.
12. Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 105.
13. Brennan's argument on the reception of Orientalism constitutes a passionate attempt to 'rescue' Said from post-structuralism. While the essay is somewhat unconvincing in its overarching attempt, it provides an important insight into Said's ambiguous relationship to Foucauldian theory. Timothy Brennan, 'Humanism, Philology, and Imperialism', ch. 3 in Wars of Position, 93-125.
14. Brennan, Wars of Position, 122.
15. Ibid., 122.
16. Karlis Racevskis, 'Edward Said and Michel Foucault: Affinities and Dissonances', Research in African Literatures 36, no.3 (2005): 92.
17. For Said's critique of the limitations of Foucault's conception of power, see Edward W. Said, Traveling Theory', in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 243-7.
18. Edward W. Said, 'Gods That Always Fail', in Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 119.
19. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 11.
20. W. J. T. Mitchell, 'Secular Divination: Edward Said's Humanism', Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 463.
21. Ibid., 463.
22. Ibid., 463.
23. Quoted in Joan Cocks, 'A New Cosmopolitanism? V.S. Naipaul and Edward Said', Constellations 7, no. 1 (2000): 54.
24. Homi K. Bhabha, 'The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism', in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 94-120, at 103.
25. James Clifford, 'On Orientalism', in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255-76.
26. See also Aijaz Abmad, 'Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said', in In Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 159-219.
27. Clifford, 'On Orientalism', 271. The two quoted passages are referenced explicitly by Said in his tempered response to Clifford's review. Edward W. Said, 'Humanism's Sphere', Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8-10.
28. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 7.
29. Edward W. Said, 'Traveling Theory Reconsidered', in Critical Reconstructions, ed. Robert Polhemus and Roger Henkle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
30. quotations are from the reprinted version in Nigel C. Gibson (ed.), Rethinking Fanon (Amherst NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 197-214.
31. Edward W. Said, 'Traveling Theory', in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 226-47.
32. Said, 'Traveling Theory Reconsidered', 197.
33. Ibid., 197-8.
34. Ibid., 202.
35. Ibid., 214.
36. Said, 'Gods That Always Fail', 103-21.
37. Ibid., 105-6.
38. Ibid., 120.
39. Ibid., 120-1.
40. Some postcolonial theorists have criticised Said for identifying his project as 'secular' in 'that the very distinction between religious and secular is a product of the Enlightenment that was used in orientalism to draw a sharp opposition between irrational, religious behaviour of the Oriental and rational secularism, which enabled the westerner to rule the Oriental'. Peter van der Veer, quoted in Bruce Robbins, 'Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said's "Voyage In"', Social Text 40 (1994), 25-37, at 27.
41. Ibid., 26.
42. Ibid., 28.
43. Edward W. Said, 'Criticism Between Culture and System', in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 178-225.
44. Ibid., 221.
45. Said, Culture and Imperialism.
46. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 335-6.
47. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic.
48. Said, 'Gods That Always Fail', 103.
49. Ibid., 105.
50. Ibid., 106, 120.
51. Ibid., 120, 114.
52. Ibid., 106.
53. Ibid., 109.
54. See in particular Ibid., 106-9
55. Even the title of the essay (as Said notes) is a nod towards the confessional edited volume that brought together the mea culpas of various Stalinists, who became staunch Cold Warriors in service of the American state.
56. Ibid., 109.