The Lost Worlds of Edward Said
Amid the waning of the humanities, Said turned out to be one of the
last literary scholars with a public presence.
HANNAH ASSOULINE/OPALE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
New Republic, Udi Greenberg
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/udi-greenberg>/April 13, 2021
Exiles often have conflicting feelings about their adoptive society, and
Edward Said was no exception. As a Palestinian in the United States, he
recognized the country’s pervasive racism and violence, but he also knew
its educational system made his career as a renowned and prosperous
thinker possible. His life was indeed filled with paradoxes and
contradictions. He was one of the twentieth century’s most influential
anti-colonial writers, who mostly studied his colonizers’ literature; a
proponent of Palestinian liberation who wrote in English and mostly for
English-speaking audiences. Few statements capture his embrace of such
tensions more than his surprising claim in an interview with the Israeli
newspaper/Ha’aretz/that he was now the only heir to the Jewish tradition
of radical criticism. “I’m the last Jewish intellectual,” he exclaimed.
“You don’t know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now
suburban squires.… I’m the last one.”
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
by Timothy Brennan
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9780374146535>
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $35.00
As comical as this statement can seem, Timothy Brennan’s new biography,
/Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780374146535>,/suggests it captures Said’s
unique place in public life: a Middle Eastern exile who provided an
original explanation for American imperialism, powerfully condemned it,
and successfully reached mass audiences. By telling Said’s life, from
his childhood in British-ruled Palestine to his death in New York in
2003,/Places of Mind/seeks to explain his unique ability to blend
intellectual production and public activism. Impressively researched and
powerfully written, it//charts Said’s many triumphs: his revolutionary
scholarly writings, which became classics and are taught decades after
their publication; his rise as a media celebrity (an unusual fate for an
academic); and his role in making the Palestinian national movement a
source of international fascination. For Brennan, who was Said’s student
and is an accomplished literary scholar in his own right, his teacher
was everything a humanist should be. By embracing his status as an
“outsider”—an exile, a Palestinian, an Arab—he successfully infused
America’s mainstream with new ideas and political visions.
Yet by claiming to be a “Jewish” intellectual, Said was doing more than
placing himself in the company of giants like Franz Kafka or Theodor
Adorno. What he recognized, and what/Places of Mind/sometimes misses,
was the tragedy of his career: how by his life’s end, the causes for
which he fought were ultimately defeated. The Palestinian liberation
movement, whose cause animated so much of Said’s writing, was headed
toward ruin (a reality that he was among the very few to realize). And
the humanities, whose flourishing made his career possible, were
entering a downward spiral from which they show no sign of recovery.
Reflecting on Said’s life, in short, is not only a chance to celebrate
groundbreaking achievements. It is also an invitation to recognize,
soberly, some of our era’s heartbreaking misfortunes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colonialism is a brutal business, and this was certainly true of British
rule in the Middle East. Whenever locals protested the empire’s
authority, as Palestinians did during the so-called “Great Revolt” of
1936 to 1939, British troops responded by demolishing entire
neighborhoods, imprisoning thousands of civilians in concentration
camps, and putting hundreds to the gallows. Like many other
colonialists, however, the British also sustained their rule in the
region by offering alluring opportunities to some of their subjects.
Those willing to cooperate could gain access to British markets, find
jobs in the colonial bureaucracy, and send their children to
European-run schools. These were the carrots that Europe’s “civilizing
mission” dangled in front of its subjects’ noses: Submit to us,
colonialists promised, embrace our language and culture, and maybe, one
day, some of you would control your own fate.
This was the duality that made the young Said. Born in British-ruled
Jerusalem in 1935, much of his childhood took place in the shadow of the
Palestinian national trauma. While his parents, Hilda and Wadie, rarely
talked politics at home, other relatives often protested their people’s
fate. The price of political oppression was even more apparent once
British troops were replaced by the armed forces of the Jewish Yishuv,
which decimated the Palestinian national movement. In 1947, Said’s
parents fled to Cairo, which rapidly became home to many hungry and
dispossessed Palestinian refugees. At the same time, colonialism helped
cushion the Saids from some of this brutality. Not only were they
affluent merchants, but they also benefited from being Anglican, a tiny
minority that enjoyed preferential treatment by British authorities.
Said’s father supplied office materials to the British (which ran the
formally independent Egypt), and Said was sent to study in the elite
schools of British missionaries. Nothing demonstrated colonialism’s
contradictory imprint on his family more than his regal first name,
Edward, which his mother chose because she admired the Prince of Wales—a
fact that Said bemoaned his entire life.
When Said’s parents sent him to the U.S. at age 15, he would find a
similar pattern of simultaneous subjugation and inclusion. In his years
as a student, first at an elite prep school in New England and then at
Princeton, Said was alienated by the other students’ oppressive
self-absorption. Almost all white, they were confident in the
superiority of their Anglo-Saxon heritage and considered Arab culture
primitive. As he put it in a note uncovered by Brennan, “to be a
Levantine” in the U.S. meant “not to be able to create but only to
imitate.” At the same time, the postwar U.S. system of higher education
provided remarkable opportunities. After Princeton, Said enrolled in
Harvard’s graduate program in European literature, and in 1963, he was
hired as a professor at Columbia. Ivy League prestige, as it often does,
opened many doors, and Said quickly learned how to prosper in the world
of U.S. letters. He published a book on Joseph Conrad, built ties to the
New York literary world, and begancontributing essays
<https://www.thenation.com/authors/edward-w-said/>to magazines like/The
Nation./For all the whiteness and Euro-centrist ethos of American
academia, Said cherished his success in it. To his parents’ dismay, he
preferred to spend most of his summers in New York, feverishly churning
out academic writings.
These paradoxes of imperial power do not get much attention in/Places of
Mind,/and its first chapters say frustratingly little about the colonial
Middle East or the Cold War U.S. This is a missed opportunity, as the
similarities between the two systems would later become crucial to
Said’s intellectual and political agenda. Most important, both the
British and Americans elevated certain minorities (Christians in the
Middle East, Jews in the U.S.) to justify their subjugation of others
(Muslims under British rule, Black people and other people of color
under white U.S. hegemony). The two cultures also similarly viewed their
elites’ culture as universal, a sacred trust they had to bestow upon
humanity. Both British and American elites were therefore eager to
demonstrate that “outsiders” like Said, who appreciated the brilliance
of Western culture, could join their club, as long as they fully
assimilated and “overcame” their non-Western origins. It is likely that
these parallels informed Said’s later insistence that the U.S. emulated
European empires. And it is clear that his effective navigation in both
inspired his later claim that colonialism was not just oppressive but
also creative, that hegemonic cultures could possess a certain allure
even for their victims.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Said’s career up to the mid-1960s was headed in a predictable direction.
Groomed by and for WASP institutions, he was on the path to become a
footnote in their history, yet another scholar who studied the European
canon and reproduced elites in his teaching. But the convergence of two
revolutions, one intellectual and one political, soon upended this
trajectory. Harnessing their energies, Said went on to produce one of
the twentieth century’s most important intellectual events.
In its most impressive chapters,/Places of Mind/reconstructs Said’s
participation in these two revolutions. The first was
post-structuralism. Under the influence of philosopher Jacques Derrida,
a group of French scholars launched blistering attacks on Europe’s
intellectual traditions. Even after the Enlightenment, they claimed,
Europe remained obsessed with enshrining hierarchies and binaries
(between men and women, “primitive” and “civilized”); the most urgent
task was to dismantle those. While Said is not always associated with
this school today, he was among the first to embrace it in the
English-speaking world. He took part in the early conferences on
post-structuralism in the U.S. and was one of the first to utilize its
concepts in his writings. He borrowed especially from Michel Foucault
and his provocative depiction of the link between knowledge and power.
Artists and thinkers, Foucault claimed, were rarely individuals who
challenged authority. Most of the time, they reproduced and reinforced
their society’s structures of authority, making them seem natural and
even benevolent.
The second project that Said joined, and for which he became especially
famous, was the Palestinians’ renewed struggle for self-determination.
After the shock of the 1967 war, which initiated Israel’s military rule
over large Palestinian territories, Palestinian activists and leaders
sought to make their cause the center of international attention. They
appealed to international institutions and launched multiple violent
attacks on Israel to keep their struggle in the headlines. While Said
had little personal interest in returning to Palestine (by that point he
considered his exile a permanent condition), he joined this campaign and
quickly became its most prominent international figure. He published
fiery essays that compared the Palestinian struggle to other
anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa and helped launch
organizations that called for an end to the West’s support for Israel.
His eloquence and rare status as a Palestinian at the center of U.S.
letters made him into an icon. Palestinian politicians and leaders, some
of whom he met in person during a prolonged academic stay in Beirut,
sought his advice; in 1974, he helped edit and translate Yasser Arafat’s
historic address to the United Nations, the first by any Palestinian
leader in that forum. Three years later, Said became a member of the
Palestinian National Council, the coordinating organization of the
Palestinian national movement.
Bringing these two projects together was hardly an obvious undertaking.
Post-structuralism’s philosophical musings, with its notoriously
impenetrable jargon, seemed worlds apart from the blood and sweat of
daily Palestinian resistance. Yet in his monumental/Orientalism
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780394740676>/(1978), Said fused these two
projects to provide a new understanding of Western attitudes toward the
Middle East. Drawing on his own experiences as a beneficiary and victim
of colonialism, Said claimed that Europe’s colonial domination in the
Middle East did not rely merely on military or political might. Rather,
it was a vast intellectual project, in which countless scholars and
novelists voluntarily rushed to explore, interpret, and explain why
Europe had to dominate the “Orient.” Said further argued that the
Orientalist project was in fact foundational to Europe’s own
self-understanding. As Europeans sought to define themselves as
rational, industrious, and self-controlling, they simultaneously
identified the Orient’s people as emotional, lazy, and pathologically
obsessed with sex.
Said, in short, exposed how knowledge and art worked in the service of
oppressive power.
This claim about colonialism’s centrality to Europe’s identity would
have been enough to make/Orientalism/an intellectual bombshell. But Said
went even further, using his literary study to explain the aggression of
modern American diplomacy. Said argued that the collapse of formal
European empires after World War II did little to diminish the
orientalist mindset. Rather, orientalism continued to flourish in the
U.S., where journalists, artists, and scholars conflated their country
with a “civilization” that they contrasted with the Middle East’s
alleged primitivism and fanaticism. Indeed, Said maintained that U.S.
diplomacy in the region, and especially its unwavering support for
Israel, reproduced Europe’s earlier racism, arrogance, and myopia. U.S.
diplomats and their Israeli allies inherited the view of Arabs as
inhuman and thus dismissed their political demands as emotional and even
animalistic outbursts. Said’s most scorching invective was directed at
Middle East specialists like Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, whom he
acidly described as the intellectual foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism.
Their writings about the Arabs’ supposed fanaticism, he wrote ina
related essay
<https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/08/12/orientalism-an-exchange/>,
provided “not history, not scholarship, but direct political violence.”
Said, in short, exposed how knowledge and art worked in the service of
oppressive power. And in so doing, he forever transformed the meaning of
the word/orientalist/: Rather than a term for a scholar of the Middle
East, it now became an adjective describing a racist and paternalist
worldview.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Orientalism/’s sweeping claims could hardly leave readers indifferent,
and Brennan masterfully traces both the admiration for and backlash to
Said’s masterwork. Conservative commentators predictably dismissed Said
as an ignorant trespasser who failed to understand the West’s greatness
as he downplayed the orient’s failings. Ina lengthy review
<https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/06/24/the-question-of-orientalism/>,
Lewis lambasted the book as “insouciant,” “outrageous,” and “reckless,”
inaugurating a rhetorical dual with Said that would continue for
decades. Even more sympathetic readers highlighted the book’s
limitations. Scholars like the French historian Maxime Rodinson noted
that/Orientalism/was far too sweeping in approach. The study of the
Orient, he noted, was a diverse field, and many of its proponents hated
empire. Other supportive readers questioned the book’s focus on ideology
and representation. Wasn’t colonialism ultimately driven by economic
exploitation? The critique that stung the most came from Arab and
Pakistani Marxists, who lamented that Said unintentionally strengthened
Muslim conservatives. The Syrian philosopher and activist Sadiq Al Azm,
for example, argued that by depicting European knowledge as hopelessly
tainted, the book “poured cold water” on the effort to popularize
Marxist ideas in the Middle East and bolstered lazy anti-Western
sentiments.
These misgivings, however, did little to diminish/Orientalism/’s impact
on the international republic of letters. Appearing in 30 languages, it
was widely celebrated as a fresh and sophisticated assault on Western
arrogance, one equal to anti-colonial classics like Frantz
Fanon’s/Wretched of the Earth
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780802141323>/(1961). “Here for the first
time,” Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi wrote, “was a book by one of
us telling the empire basically to go f— itself.” In a world reeling
from the manifold disasters perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam,
understanding the connections between Western self-righteousness and
violence seemed more urgent than ever. Said helped inspire the work of
countless literary scholars, philosophers, historians, and political
scientists who mapped colonialism’s intellectual legacies in the
present. He was the founding figure of what in the 1980s became known as
“postcolonial studies.” The impact of this intellectual project spilled
beyond academic circles. After/Orientalism,/theater programs, museum
catalogs, and Hollywood films began to adopt less Western-focused
perspectives.
According to Brennan, Said in fact infused the humanities with renewed
significance. Works like/Orientalism/and/Culture and Imperialism
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780679750543>/(1993), which expanded its
insight to more novels, demonstrated the centrality of literature and
art to political discourse. Said turned the traditional Marxist view of
culture on its head. He claimed that novels and images were not mere
expression of social domination but their very heart; they informed how
journalists covered world affairs, how citizens thought about politics,
and how politicians enacted policies. Countless students and scholars
came to view the study of stories, movies, and representation as
political action, and journalists the world over courted Said, endlessly
asking for his take on political matters.
/Places of Mind/’s last chapters trace Said’s rising prominence to the
position of celebrity. As a testament to his triumph, they catalog the
mind-numbingly abundant prizes and honors he received, describe his
never-ending stream of interviews on radio and TV, and depict his
collaborations with many famous artists, such as the conductor Daniel
Barenboim. Yet along with the rapid ascent came frustration. Said’s
publications may have made a splash, but they were unable to materially
advance the Palestinian national cause, which suffered defeat after defeat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For Said, stories were essential to the struggle for Palestinian
self-determination. If Americans so enthusiastically lavished Israel
with weapons and supported its cruel occupation, he claimed, it was not
out of some hard-nosed calculation, but because they bought into a
particular narrative, one in which persecuted Jews had heroically
defeated their evil Arab neighbors. According to Said, this story was
sustained not only by relentlessly pro-Israel politicians, magazines,
and TV shows but by the fact that Americans were rarely exposed to
Palestinian perspectives. Said noted that this was true even for those
who were deeply critical of Israel’s actions. Noam Chomsky’s /Fateful
Triangle <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781608463992> /(1983), for
example, condemned U.S. diplomats and Israeli politicians for enabling
the horrific massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon, but it, too, relied
on Western sources and did not include Palestinian testimonies.
Alongside his campaign against the orientalist tradition, Said therefore
launched an effort to open new spaces for Palestinians in the Western
imagination. As he wrote in the essay “Permission to Narrate
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n03/edward-said/permission-to-narrate>”
(1983), the task was to forge “a socially acceptable narrative” that
would allow people to empathize with Palestinians and view them as
fellow humans. Venturing beyond European literature, Said sought to
integrate Arab perspectives into the Western literary canon. While most
of his academic work remained focused on English and French authors, he
also began studying Palestinian writers like Mahmoud Darwish and helped
facilitate their translation into Western languages. And he collaborated
with photographer Jean Mohr on/After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780231114493>/(1986), a collection of
images and short texts that depicted Palestinian people in everyday
activities.
If Said’s words still resonate today, it is because the evils he helped
expose are as powerful as ever.
Yet readers largely ignored/After the Last Sky/and similar projects,
and most certainly did not lavish it with the prizes and honors that
were showered on/Orientalism//./They were mostly interested in the
analysis of the West’s colonialism; oppression’s victims were an
afterthought. Said was painfully aware that this part of his work had
limited impact, and during the 1980s and 1990s he became progressively
despairing about the prospects of Palestinian liberation. “The road
forward is blocked,” he ruefully wrote, “the instruments of the present
are insufficient, [and] we can’t get back to the past.” His gloom only
grew after the Palestinian leadership signed a tentative peace agreement
with Israel in 1993 (the so-called Oslo Accords), which Said predicted
would not lead to statehood but to deepening occupation. By the end of
his life, he was politically isolated; his books were even banned in the
Palestinian Authority over his criticism of Yasser Arafat’s
authoritarianism.
Said’s high hopes for literary studies—that they would lead the
expansion of the world’s political options—also proved fleeting. Said’s
career, in fact, was not only a rare exception but also a product of
broad intellectual sources. It emerged from the 1970s and 1980s, when
debates about the literary canon roiled institutions of higher learning
and figures like Paul de Man and Alan Bloom were famous. But by the
early twenty-first century, the humanities began to decline. Students
were beginning to abandon them, a trickle that would soon become a
flood. In such a world, Said was quickly becoming a monument for a
passing era. He was one of the last literary scholars to gain the
public’s attention; when he lamented being the “last Jewish
intellectual,” he in part recognized he was not likely to be followed by
others. His increasing alienation from his adoptive country was
reflected in the location of his grave. At his request, it stands not in
New York, where he spent most of his career, but in Beirut, where he was
only an occasional visitor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
If Said’s words still resonate today, it is because the evils he helped
expose are as powerful as ever. In the two decades since the 2001
attacks, orientalist sentiments have only intensified: Western
politicians still treat Muslims and Arabs as fanatical terrorists, and
Western media still perpetuate those narratives. As historian Maga
Nasserrecently noted <https://www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians/>, of
the thousands of pieces run by/The//New York Times/and/The Washington
Post/on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, barely 1 percent were written
by Palestinians. The grip of orientalism on U.S. knowledge production
has in fact only tightened since Said’s passing. In 2002, the historian
Daniel Pipes, who began his career with a campaign
against/Orientalism,/founded the organization Campus Watch, which
hastargeted scholars
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/01/13/middle-east-studies-under-scrutiny-in-us/eca8f354-8e2e-40e7-a80a-0c5b8c5845cf/>who
express sympathy with Palestinians. Thecase of Fresno State University
in California
<https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/fresno-state-cancels-a-middle-east-studies-professorship-after-pressure-from-right-wing-pro-israel-group/>was
probably the most on-the-nose expression of Said’s lasting relevance. In
2016, the university’s leadership posted a job ad for its newly created
Edward Said chair in Middle Eastern studies, only to abruptly call off
the search by summer of 2017.
Just like his life, Said’s legacy is a paradox. His ideas are relevant
exactly because their political impact was limited: The vast campaign he
launched in scholarship, the media, and political activism could not
dislodge orientalist bigotry. Similarly, Said looms so large in the
humanities because a career like his is now hard to imagine. Rather than
blazing a path for other literary scholars to become influential
political commentators, he turned out to be among the last humanists
with a public presence. Those who share in his quest for a more equal
and humane world still face the question that always vexed him: If one
has a humanist story to tell, how to make others listen?
Udi Greenberg
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/udi-greenberg>@udi_greenberg
<https://twitter.com/udi_greenberg>
Udi Greenberg teaches at Dartmouth College and is the author of/The
Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the
Cold War
<https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691159331/the-weimar-century>/(2015).
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