Friday, September 26, 2003
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Edward Said Is Remembered for Influential Scholarship and Political ActivismBy SCOTT MCLEMEE
Edward Said, whose advocacy of the Palestinian cause made him among the most prominent and controversial figures in American intellectual life, died early Wednesday evening, following a long struggle with leukemia. He was 67 years old. Mr. Said was a professor of English at Columbia University, where he joined the faculty in 1963. He was the recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship in literary studies, and in 1999 served as president of the Modern Language Association. A prolific author, Mr. Said had recently published an essay in The Guardian, a London newspaper, on the 25th anniversary of Orientalism -- his enormously influential study of how literary and scholarly representations of "the East," including the Islamic world, reinforced European and American imperial designs. "I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam in the US has improved," wrote Mr. Said in his essay, "but alas, it really hasn't. ... What American leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, so that 'we' might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow." As that reference to "intellectual lackeys" may suggest, Mr. Said did not shy away from polemic. From 1977 to 1991, he was a member of the Palestine National Council (often described as the government in exile of Palestine). Following the Oslo accords in 1993, Mr. Said became one of Yasser Arafat's most outspoken critics, saying that under Mr. Arafat's leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organization had made too many concessions to Israel. His columns for the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram reached a wide audience in the Islamic world. The fact that no one could accuse him of sympathy for Israel gave added impact when he criticized contemporary Arabic society for "all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development." Few readers of his early work in literary criticism would have expected Mr. Said to emerge as a political figure. The son of a prosperous Palestinian Christian family, he was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and attended elite prep schools in Cairo and in Massachusetts. At Princeton University in the late 1950s, he came under the influence of R.P. Blackmur, whose subtle and idiosyncratic analyses of modernist writing stressed close attention to how poetic language worked. That formalist emphasis was evident in his dissertation on "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography," completed at Harvard University in 1964, and published two years later by Harvard University Press. In the early 1970s, when scholars in the United States were only beginning to hear about such European intellectual developments as structuralism, Mr. Said was contemplating their implications for literary study. His book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) was no mere introductory guide to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Rather, Mr. Said plunged into their thinking as if joining them in conversation. That dialogue continued in his next book, Orientalism, which drew on Foucault's analysis of the deep links between power and knowledge. Mr. Said contended that the scholarship on Asia and the Middle East produced by experts in Europe and America was part of a longstanding cultural process in which "the West" created and nurtured fantasies about the Oriental "other," treating "the East" as both an object of knowledge and a territory to be conquered. "Orientalism is a book that rests upon an almost superhuman ability to read very complex literary texts, such as those of Flaubert, alongside political and historical texts," says Paul Bové, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the editor of Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Duke University Press, 2000). "It was a strong and exemplary, an influential and representative example of what could happen if a very powerful literary mind adapted the most advanced forms of critical theory to the study of political issues as they are embedded in culture and society." The influence of Orientalism has been lasting, and a source of continuing debate. Critics of Mr. Said's book treat it as an effort to disarm any criticism of the politics and culture of Arab and Asian societies. And Western intellectuals sympathetic to his argument were left in a rather paradoxical position. If any effort to analyze non-Western societies is complicit with efforts to dominate them, just what is left for scholars to do? Those who worked with Mr. Said deny that his attitude toward Western culture was one of simple denunciation. "He was a great lover of classical music," says Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation. "One of his last writings was an essay on Beethoven that we published this month." Mr. Bové recalls that Mr. Said "had very strong and deeply rooted humanistic criteria for the judgment of what was and was not serious work in literature and culture." He points out that one of Mr. Said's final scholarly projects was an extensive introduction to the new edition of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press). It was one of his favorite books, and as consummately Eurocentric a work of scholarship as any ever published. There was no real gap between Mr. Said's political militancy and his rather traditional cultural tastes, says Lindsay Waters, the executive director for the humanities at Harvard University Press. "I read him as having held that, essentially, art provides a key for reconstituting society," he says. "If you are going to reconstitute Palestine, you'll be able to do it by the pleasure of some of the artworks that come from Palestine. Without access to that sort of pleasure, life isn't worth living. Which makes him very old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, I guess." It is an observation that resonates with Mr. Navasky's memory of an occasion when Mr. Said expressed really intense anger. The outburst had nothing to do with politics. "He wanted to write about opera for The Nation," says Mr. Navasky, "and the opera companies wouldn't give him free tickets. He was furious."
Quotations from articles by Edward Said, excerpts of which have appeared in The Chronicle:
"The time has come where we [Arabs] cannot simply accuse the West of Orientalism and racism ... and go on doing little about providing an alternative. If our work isn't in the Western media often enough, for example, or isn't known well by Western writers and scholars, a good part of the blame lies with us." A profile of Mr. Said, from The Chronicle:
Links to additional articles that explore ideas, activities, and criticism of Mr. Said:
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education