(On a leftist trainspotting note, Timothy Brennan was a member of the
Young Socialist Alliance in New York in the late 60s. I remember him
well. Smart but arrogant.)
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION REVIEW, MARCH 19, 2021
The Making of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’
How an unlikely best seller spawned academic feuds, global fame, entire
subfields, and its author’s ambivalence.
By Timothy Brennan
Now an academic classic, Orientalism was at first an unlikely best
seller. Begun just as the Watergate hearings were nearing their end and
published in 1978, it opens with a stark cameo of the gutted buildings
of civil-war Beirut. Then, in a few paragraphs, readers are whisked off
to the history of an obscure academic discipline from the Romantic era.
Chapters jump from 19th-century fiction to the opéra bouffe of the
American news cycle and the sordid doings of Henry Kissinger. Unless one
had already been reading Edward Said or was familiar with the writings
of the historian William Appleman Williams on empire “as a way of life”
or the poetry of Lamartine, the choice of source materials might seem
confusing or overwhelming. And so it did to the linguists and historians
who fumed over the book’s success. For half of its readers, the book was
a triumph, for the other half a scandal, but no one could ignore it.
As an indictment of English and French scholarship on the Arab and
Islamic worlds, Orientalism made its overall case clearly enough. The
field of Oriental studies had managed to create a fantastical projection
about Arabs and Islam that fit the biases of its Western audience. At
times, these images were exuberant and intoxicating, at times
infantilizing or hateful, but at no time did they describe Arabs and
Muslims accurately.
BrennanSaid-0310-1975-76.jpg
CASBS (CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES), STANFORD
UNIVERSITY
Edward Said during his fellowship year at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences
Over centuries, these images and attitudes formed a network of mutually
reinforcing clichés mirrored in the policies of the media, the church,
and the university. With the authority of seemingly objective science,
new prejudices joined those already in circulation. This grand edifice
of learning deprived Arabs of anything but a textual reality, usually
based on a handful of medieval religious documents. As such, the Arab
world was arrested within the classics of its own past. This much about
Orientalism, it seems, was uncontroversial, although readers agreed on
little else.
While drafting the iconoclastic book, Said found his friendship with
Noam Chomsky valuable. Chomsky’s jeremiads had given him plenty of
experience with bad press. Said was familiar with his critique of the
complicity of academic institutions in the Vietnam War, and Said briefly
considered writing with Chomsky a book on spurious cultural portrayals
of the Middle East. Chomsky, though, was unable to see the project
through because of other commitments, so Said forged ahead alone.
Orientalism was the result.
The MIT linguist lent a hand in other ways. He was the first to read
Said’s initial draft, absorbing the manuscript, he wrote to Said,
“virtually at a sitting.” He admired its penetrating analytical rigor
but cautioned Said to pay more attention to “the balance between
analysis and direct quotation.” His critics “will not be few,” Chomsky
added, and are likely to seize on the relative lack of documentation.
“It might be useful to add something about the matter of racism,
Orientalism, and the Vietnam war — I think we’ve discussed it.”
The brunt of the first draft was composed, oddly enough, at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in Stanford, Calif.,
where Said was a fellow in 1975-76. Humanists were not typically
welcomed to the center, and Said was the lone literary critic in his
cohort. The fellowship, interestingly, is not one for which one can
apply. Those selected are plucked out of the academic crowd by an
anonymous list of venerables. One day a letter of invitation
mysteriously arrives in the mail. What did the philosophers of science,
sociologists, and psychologists in those rarefied circles see in Said?
There seemed to be two reasons for his invitation. First, the center
apparently wanted to learn more about the Middle East, and Said’s stated
aim to study “the rise of the discipline of Oriental philology” and “the
contemporary Arabic novel, particularly the cultural and political role
played by the novel,” fit the bill. Second, in the politically
progressive interregnum of Jimmy Carter’s America — which led to the
most promising White House openings for the Palestine Liberation
Organization — Said’s comparative radicalism was itself a draw for the
open-minded Californian researchers.
Despite writing to friends in England that he was “not enjoying the
Center that much,” the California weather reminded Said of the eastern
Mediterranean, and he soon discovered a Lebanese restaurant in Berkeley.
His “high, tennis-playing spirits” made him sociable, particularly with
women, in whom he found it easier to confide. Jonathan R. Cole, later
provost at Columbia, was a fellow that year as well and remembers Said
being the center of attention, at ease with others in long and lively
conversations over lunch.
With uncanny symmetry, one of Said’s co-fellows that year was Yehoshafat
Harkabi, the former head of Israeli military intelligence and a renowned
Israeli Arabist. Deeply cultivated, a lover of Arabic poetry,
“secret-policelike” in his quiet reserve, according to the art historian
Svetlana Alpers, he described himself as a “Machiavellian dove.” Some
feared the duo might prove combustible and start a Middle East proxy war
at the center. In fact, Said and Harkabi retained their decorum and if
not warm were mostly polite to each other.
In the years before arriving at the center, Harkabi had evolved from a
hard-liner (his “clever innovations,” Chomsky drily observed, included
“letter bombs in the Gaza strip in the 1950s”) into an outspoken
proponent for a Palestinian state. In Orientalism, he made an appearance
briefly as “General Yehoshafat Harkabi,” a man characterized as arguing
that Arabs were “depraved, anti-Semitic to the core, violent, unbalanced.”
Even before Stanford, Harkabi and Said had a tense history. Five years
earlier, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, of which
Said was a member, held its annual convention in the Orrington Hotel, in
Evanston, Ill., and by coincidence Israeli students based in the United
States were holding their annual meeting only a few blocks away, with
Harkabi their keynote speaker. Impulsively, the “good general”
apparently led 90 of them without advance notice to the Orrington for a
good-faith dialogue.
Enraged by what he considered sheer “provocation,” Said led his group to
confront them. As they approached, Said shouted, “Provocateurs!” After a
tense standoff on the stairs, with Harkabi shouting over the noise that
they had come in peace, the Israelis backed off and left.
Agood deal of Said’s general case in Orientalism can be traced to works
such as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) and the
1920s-era linguistic theories of the Italian communist intellectual
Antonio Gramsci. For years, Said kept in his office a poster of his
joint appearance with Williams at an event at the University of London,
in 1987. They had met the year before on the set of the British
television program Voices along with Roger Scruton, the oddball
conservative of the culture wars whose vituperative assault on the New
Left, Thinkers of the New Left, had recently appeared, singling out Said
as one of its principal offenders.
At first glance, The Country and the City would seem to have little to
offer an exposé on Arab stereotypes, for it was about 18th- and early
19th-century English rural life as seen through the prism of
country-house poems — paeans, basically, to the estates of wealthy
landowners. Behind this screen, though, Williams was interested in how
the utopian idylls of the gentry had subverted the histories of terrain
and landscape, superimposing on harsh rural conditions a distorting
self-portrait.
Nor was the anti-imperial thrust of The Country and the City buried.
Williams wrote of poems that bore witness to a transitional era of
English social life in which a new kind of political control was being
exerted over the colonies both within and outside the country. The war
between rural and urban territories within England mirrored the
antagonism between the periphery and the global metropolis, reproducing
each other on a different scale. For Williams, it is the critic rather
than the poet who leads us out of euphemism to the crescendo of his
argument: “One of the last models of ‘city and country,’ is the system
we now know as imperialism.” Long before the rise of postcolonial
studies — the field Said was said to have founded — Williams had already
moved beyond his contemporaries in search of alternative traditions.
So too had Antonio Gramsci, a prisoner in Mussolini’s fascist jails, one
of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and a culturally
Catholic revolutionary in a 20th-century milieu dominated by Jewish
Marxists. A geographic imperative shaped Gramsci’s identity. As a
Sardinian from Italy’s rural South, he pursued his studies in Italy’s
industrial North, and so was seen there as racially and ethnically
inferior. In “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926) — an essay
Said taught frequently — Gramsci found in this clash between country and
city an instance of what Said in Orientalism calls “imaginative
geography,” where land itself becomes a symbol of invidious cultural
distinctions.
Said’s overstatements were designed to unleash a purifying
indignation in his readers.
Even more important, for Gramsci it is language that defines territorial
conflict. Gramsci had studied under Matteo Bartoli, one of the era’s
most outspoken proponents of a school known as spatial linguistics.
Bartoli and his circle had argued that language was the embodied record
of migration and foreign conquest, not only the “soul of a people,” as
the Romantics had it. In territorial conflicts, two idioms are violently
thrust together and forced to compete for prestige.
With these sources in mind, Orientalism mobilized a series of spatial
metaphors. One of these, “strategic location,” referred to how an author
is positioned in regard to his or her own writing; another, “strategic
formation,” to how works acquire more “referential power” so long as
they are positioned within a constellation of complementary works rather
than standing on their own.
Said was obsessed with learning about how certain texts gather force and
influence whereas others do not. By “imaginative geography,” then, he
was referring to the paradox that the proximity of the Middle East made
the Oriental especially potent and dangerous in the Western mind.
Precisely because of the region’s adjacency to Europe, it could be more
easily visited by travelers, colonial adventurers, and missionaries.
Their experiences, then, had to be managed by a shared story that gave
them their “true” meaning. Land may be the material stuff of geography,
but ideas tend to dematerialize place, making neighbors appear distant.
At first, Orientalism’s reception was jubilant. The book was nominated
for the National Book Critics Circle Award and enviably reviewed. There
was a constant stream of fan mail, exemplified by the philosopher and
political activist Cornel West’s letter of 1978, whose exultant tone
caught the feeling among dissident intellectuals, especially
intellectuals of color, all over the world: “You are on the frontier — a
Gramscian frontier.” Surprisingly, the book took several years to become
a scandal.
Said’s sudden global fame had the unfortunate effects that pride often
bestows, and because everyone wanted a piece of him, he took advantage.
His sister Grace complained of a new haughtiness, a “nastiness” that
strained family relations. There were other effects as well: Apart from
the president of Columbia’s office, only Said’s had bulletproof windows
and a buzzer that would send a signal directly to campus security.
In time, the book’s detractors grew as invigorated as its champions. The
assaults came from four angles: First, from contemporary scholars of
Arabic, Islam, or the Near East who believed that Said had recklessly
ventured into a field whose demands on knowledge overwhelmed him;
second, from Pakistani and Arab Marxists who felt that his East-West
line in the sand was undialectical and gave comfort to the Islamic
Right, which was as paranoid as he about a ghostlike, undifferentiated
Europe; and, most hurtful of all, from his mentors in Middle East
studies, who thought his training in literature an obstacle to his
grasping the sheer disciplinary variety of Oriental studies in practice.
A fourth group was ensconced in right-wing think tanks or hostile media
whose task was not only to undermine Orientalism but to erase Said’s
entire career. Their titles betrayed their contempt: Martin Kramer’s
Ivory Towers on Sand (2001), the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq’s Defending the
West (2007), and Joshua Muravchik’s “Enough Said” (2013).
brennansaid-0310-book-grid.jpg
THE CHRONICLE
However incongruous their starting points, most of the critics of
Orientalism kept coming back to the same kinds of points. Daniel Martin
Varisco, an anthropological expert on 13th-century Yemeni agricultural
texts, for example, claimed that Said’s enthusiasm for the role of the
amateur in intellectual inquiry only dressed up his own amateurism when
entering his field half-cocked. For Varisco, Said’s “problem is with
reality, not about it.” Ibn Warraq complained, similarly, of Said’s
“endless postmodern jargon.”
Robert Irwin particularly pushed the assault to the limits in For Lust
of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006). A student of
Said’s nemesis, Bernard Lewis, and a medieval specialist on the Mamluks,
Irwin mocked Said for suggesting that Orientalists could have lent their
services to the empire when the truth was that no one cared what they
had to say. Nor was there the coherence to the field that Said implied;
it was little more than a baggy collection of devotees, bookworms,
librarians, and eccentrics. Irwin and Varisco together added that Said’s
constant recourse to literary examples from Flaubert, Dante, and Greek
tragedy expanded the field of Orientalism to the point of meaninglessness.
Even those who admired Said concurred with some of these accusations:
“As a specialist of English and comparative literature, he is
inadequately versed in the practical work of the Orientalists,” wrote
Maxime Rodinson. The Lebanese Marxist Mahdi ‘Amel — often called the
Arab Gramsci — denounced Said’s gratuitous jibes against Marx and noted
that Orientalism was guilty of attributing unchanging characters to
entire cultures. To make matters worse, some of Said’s former students
revolted.
David Stern felt that a book with the title Orientalism should have
dwelled on the Hungarian Jew Ignác Goldziher, the most important
Orientalist of them all. Alan Mintz worried that Said missed an
opportunity by not making the book about Jews and Muslims together, the
joint Western fantasy objects of Orientalist discourse. Said’s old
confidant Jacques Berque probably struck the most damaging blow when he
implied that Orientalism’s thesis was not so much outrageous as
commonsensical: “Obviously . . . every work, whether of science or art,
reflects the conditions of its composition.” So it was not really news
that scholars of the Victorian era reflected Victorian biases.
Few of these critics, though, knew anything about Said’s earlier work,
and for some, there were personal scores to settle. Irwin, for instance,
left academia to write novels with titles like The Mysteries of Algiers
and The Arabian Nightmare, and his profile was strangely similar, in
fact, to that of Ernest Renan, who is unsparingly dealt with in
Orientalism as a 19th-century popularizer and independent spirit with an
unquenchable hunger for all things Oriental (Irwin briefly converted to
Islam while studying in Algeria). Whether noticing these parallels or
not, Irwin pronounced Orientalism “malignant charlatanry.”
In 1982, Said wrote to Westminster College, Oxford, complaining of
Irwin’s crudely ideological review of his book, his “scarcely veiled
innuendoes about my racial origins.” Bernard Lewis, Irwin’s teacher, was
a renowned Orientalist at Oxford and Princeton, and the one with whom
Said most prominently sparred over Orientalism in the pages of The New
York Times and The New York Review of Books. More than a public drawing
of swords, these encounters were often bitterly personal, in part
because Orientalism portrayed Lewis, along with State Department
intellectuals like Fouad Ajami and, somewhat later, Daniel Pipes, as the
modern descendants of the racialized scholarship his book set out to expose.
It was inevitable that Orientalism’s fame would force a public
confrontation between Said and his detractors. The definitive showdown
took place between Said and Lewis on November 22, 1986, at a meeting of
the Middle East Studies Association in Boston. With the large assembly
room packed, and 600 more attendees outside, many had to sit on the
floor. Said’s animosity was clear from his mischievous humor before the
event, conspiratorially whispering in Arabic to a confidant at lunch, “I
am going to f—— his mother.”
Professor Edward Said
SOPHIE BASSOULS, SYGMA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Said in 1980
In fact, Lewis appeared to have lost the encounter, evading questions
about his scholarly independence and jesting lamely about popular Middle
East stereotypes. Because Western travelers to Arabia, he quipped, were
obsessed by the unbridled sexuality of the sultans’ harems and travelers
from the East found Western women licentious, it is a mystery the two
sides did not get along better. His debate second, the New Republic
literary editor Leon Wieseltier (one of Said’s former students and an
antagonist), proclaimed the evening “a nightmare for me.” Lewis was
Wieseltier’s “brother from another Orientalist planet, saying outrageous
things. I felt horrible, startled, because I am not like that. He gave
the debate away.”
Said’s critics seemed to misunderstand that Orientalism was about an
interlocking system of images that made conquest easier by making the
superiority of Europe seem natural. That Said was supposed to have
overvalued literature, another frequent line of attack, seemed equally
ill-considered. Did readers forget his discomfort in Orientalism with
what he called the “textual attitude” — that is, precisely the
overvaluing of literature? One cannot learn about 16th-century Spain by
reading Amadis of Gaul, he bitingly remarked. On the other hand, Said
turned the tables on his critics on this charge: “The plain fact is that
Orientalists do not know how to read, and therefore happily ignore
literature.”
As for the familiar charge that Said was a postmodernist who believed
there was no reality, he went to great lengths in lectures on the eve of
Orientalism’s publication to attack postmodernism. He was equally
unyielding toward poststructuralism, arguing against Jacques Derrida’s
position that reality “is literally a textual element with no ground in
actuality.” Said disliked Derrida’s writing and thought him a “decadent
thinker, mannerish, a dandy fooling around.” When he declared in an
exchange on deconstruction that “there is no such thing as a ‘real’
Orient,” he meant not that people do not exist in Jordan or Iraq, walk
the land, feel pain, or die. His point was simply that their reality is
inaccessible without shared conceptions communicated by words. This view
would have been common sense to anyone schooled in literary theory.
That said, not all of the book’s supposed weaknesses could be explained
away. Even admirers found Orientalism at times unalert to contradiction,
too willing to corral unlike thinkers into the same camp. For instance,
could any European on Said’s terms ever work cross-culturally without an
entirely dominating disposition? His sarcasm often overwhelmed those
moments when he praised the Orientalists’ sheer range of learning, and
overstatements marred his argument, for example, when he claimed that
“rarely were Orientalists interested in anything except proving the
validity of these musty ‘truths’ by applying them, without great
success, to uncomprehending, hence degenerate, natives.” Such a claim
clashed with his own vignettes of the careers of Raymond Schwab, Edward
Lane, and other scholars whose crime, if anything, was excessive rapture
over the triumphs of the Arab and Islamic past.
Wanting to stake out an indigenous Arab theory that owed nothing to
Europe, Said downplayed the anti-imperial novelty of Western
philosophers and campaigners like Michel de Montaigne, Denis Diderot,
Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Victor Schoelcher. At times he sounded
close to denying that any non-Oriental could ever write an account of
the Orient without identifying with his or her own country’s foreign
policy. In one passage, for example, he declared that one is always a
“European or American first … an individual second.” The risks of such a
comment should have been obvious: There can no longer be an
interpretation that is unswayed by one’s identity. Nineteenth-century
Europeans as a whole, he continued, were “almost totally ethnocentric.”
On the other hand, such rhetoric had a very specific goal. Said’s
overstatements were designed to unleash a purifying indignation in his
readers. Close friends observed that Said knew he ought to qualify his
statements more, but he felt he had to be strong and definite for
political reasons. Subtlety, generally, was his beat, but “he didn’t
want to get lost in it,” as his colleague and friend Michael Wood put
it. Said raised this very point in Orientalism itself. The danger was
that he might end up with “a coarse polemic” so unacceptably general “as
not to be worth the effort”; on the other hand, he might lose track of
the “general lines of force informing the field.”
While he warned against seeing Orientalism as “some nefarious ‘Western’
imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world,” his presentation
had to be blunt enough to be heard. His politics of blame brought a
number of scholars from the former colonies on board and had everything
to do with the book’s international success.
As one hostile critic observed, “It became a manifesto of affirmative
action for Arab and Muslim scholars and established a negative
predisposition toward American (and imported European) scholars.” Having
single-handedly put an institution under a magnifying glass, Orientalism
also gave safe haven to English-department misfits, Latin American
exchange students, and shipwrecked Arab activists in Middle East area
studies. The scholar Aijaz Ahmad, who like others was scathingly
critical of the book from the left, put his finger on the book’s immense
demographic implications: It had opened the doors of academia by giving
power to “the social self-consciousness and professional assertion of
the middle-class immigrant and the ‘ethnic’ intellectual.”
Orientalism’s success had unforeseen consequences. The book’s implicit
call that the formerly colonized tell their own story led logically to
openings for non-white scholars in the academy. Said personally secured
a toehold for postcolonial study’s most vocal partisans. However, the
new wave, mostly upper middle class with political connections, and
steeped in poststructuralist “difference,” had little use for his own
focus on the national liberation movements of the 1940s-1970s. To him,
anti-colonialism meant the creation of states and pitched battles over
policy in the media; to them, it meant to reject “modernity” while
stressing the “in-betweenness” of the postcolonial predicament — a safe
professional gesture during the Reagan-Bush years. Postcolonial
“identity,” in his mind, was uncomfortably reminiscent of the logic of
the communalism he saw tearing Lebanon and the Occupied Territories
apart. Despite Orientalism’s triumph, he spent the last two decades of
his life trying to undo this improvisation on his message, most clearly
by embracing a humanist universalism that then (as now) was quite out of
fashion in the very field he had so enriched and transformed.
This essay is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, Places of
Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
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