Said sought to develop a model of the public intellectual that would enable academic workers to pursue a state of being he labeled “amateur-ism,” a willingness to speak on issues of public concern outside of the their areas of scholarly expertise—demonstrating that such issues would not be ceded to the cult of expertise dominating so many debates in the public sphere (Said, “The Public Role…”).2 Although he held no formal training in Middle East Studies, Said established imself as a reputable commentator on the Middle East (seeSaid, “U.S. and the Conflict…”). He experienced “the punishing destiny of a Palestinian living in the West,”
and he used that experience to write movingly about the pain of Palestin-ian dispossession at the hands of the imperial powers. In a response to the Gramscian call to trace the cultural influences upon the construction of his subjectivity, Said brought an autobiographical component to his public intellectualism as he sought to understand his unique condition as an “Ori-ental” writing back, so to speak, against the Western discursive mecha-nisms that reduces Middle Eastern peoples to caricatures and stereotypes.
Whether writing about the insidious ways Orientalism and Zionism ac-crete discursive authority for their political goals through a slow process of negating the remnants of the Palestinian presence, or denouncing intellec-tuals in the Arab world for continually blaming the West for the region’s many problems (petty dictators, lack of economic development, lack of religious toleration, abuse of human rights, restriction of the women’s movement, etc.), Said sought to arrest the tendency among humanists to leave the field of political battle to pundits and media personalities intent upon reducing human experience to the binary of “us and them,” seeking instead to highlight the discrepant experiences that bind human beings to one another.
This constant prodding, one might even say goading, was disturbing to many because it was a persistent reminder that academic professionals
2 The essay is reproduced in Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism.
could be so much more than academic professionals in the context of the public sphere, if they would only push themselves to leave their petty fief-doms of professional concern and venture into the realm of the political.
For those who chose not to develop their professional life in this way, Said’s ruminations about “speaking truth to power” may have created a cognitive dissonance of sorts. What is the proper way for an English pro-fessor, for example, to become engaged with issues of international sig-nificance when her professional training has equipped her to interpret po-etry? Said’s point was that such interpretative training enabled radical in-tellectual engagement with ideas, communities, and constituencies in the world.
There was also a less-than-hidden indictment in texts such as The World, the Text, and the Critic, as Said seemed to heap scorn upon his fellow literary theorists, suggesting that they had essentially given up in the wake of the “Rise of Reaganism” with its emphasis on free markets, laissez faire capitalism and deregulation (“Opponents…”). Critics were content to pursue arcane hermeneutics and irrelevant invocations of the post-human.3 As Said suggests, the 1980s represented the time of the liter-ary critic’s departure from the political scene, as the critic gave up the field of struggle to politicians, generals, and policy intellectuals; realizing per-haps that she was no longer really relevant to the burning debates about culture, imperialism, and resistance politics. Said’s great refusal to accept this predicament positioned him against the reigning sentiments within the Modern Language Association, which seemed to subscribe to a politically correct version of public intellectualism, while avoiding stands on difficult issues such as Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Said’s constant reminders about the importance of affirming human agency seemed to irritate those who counted themselves among the post-structuralists, who argued that human agency and subjectivity were limited and conditioned by institutions, language, as well as one’s race, sex, and class, and that the belief in the prospect of meaningful human action was naïve. His seeming dismissal of Derrida and Foucault created a minor scandal within the profession, with allegations that Said had misunder-stood both thinkers (“The Problem of Textuality”). Said had to hold on to the prospect of human beings exerting their agency in the world to trans-form it; otherwise, he was would have been left with the prospect that
3 Said discusses Northrop Frye’s The Great Code, Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah, and others in the final chapter of The World, the Text, and the Critic. Also, see the special issue of Boundary 2 on “The Problems of Reading in Contemporary Amer-ican Criticism.” Of note here are the contributions by Donato, Logan, Warner, and Crites.
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pression was somehow natural, perhaps metaphysical, a simple part of the world humans inhabit. That was a sure route to despair.
As part of this insistence that social change can be initiated by human beings working with one another in the world, Said sought to establish with master conductor Daniel Barenboim a collective effort between Pal-estinian and Israeli youth to create a traveling orchestra called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which performs throughout Europe and the Mid-dle East. This effort captures how Said viewed the field of cultural produc-tion, as a space for bringing people—who are alienated from one another because of differences produced by geography, religion, political affilia-tion, and language—together through art. That musical performance en-ables cross-cultural exchange among a group of young people separated by walls, borders, checkpoints, the ethnic exclusivism of Zionism, and the aspirations of the Palestinian people searching for a state of their own, speaks to the capacity of people to transcend the limitations of their filia-tive origins and to embrace affiliafilia-tive beginnings. If it is the case that anti-Semitism and Orientalism spring from the same discursive well, we must, then, recognize the Palestinian Arab as the new Jew. Orientalism, as anti-Semitism’s “secret sharer,” configures the Palestinian Arab as the new vulnerable whose liquidation and removal is at the heart of the Zionist project. Comparing the discrepant experiences of Palestinian Arabs living under Israeli occupation to those of Jewish displaced persons at the end of World War II can promote an understanding of the commonality of human suffering.
In assessing the gravity of Said’s explorations and theorizations about the role of the public intellectual, while deciding upon how Said’s legacy must become a part of that exploration and theorization. Indeed, we must evaluate how Said created new conceptualizations of what it means to be an intellectual in a basically depoliticized society. Some recently books and edited collections have attempted to do just that by situating Said’s critical legacy within a number of different disciplinary domains and by extending that legacy to a variety of social concerns that will undoubtedly trouble us for some time to come4. The complexity of Said’s thought can be measured in several ways. First, Said’s Beginnings—written in the 1960s—seemed to sketch out the full dimensions of Said’s critical pro-gram, which he enacted through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Said wished to bring a diverse group of thinkers—such as Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Fou-cault, and Derrida—around to questions of how human agency could be
4 See Sokmen and Ertur, Waiting for the Barbarians,Radha Radhakrishnan, His-tory, the Human, and the World Between, and William Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said.
obtained and enacted in oppressive social circumstances, although each of these thinkers was considered anti-humanistic and skeptical about human agency. Second: the problem of human agency became, in the midst of immensely important world events of the 1960s, central to Said’s projects.
Although Said’s political transformation took place early in his academic career, it was during the 1967 Israeli-Arab Six-Day War in fact when he came to consciousness as an Arab-American. One can trace a political urgency in Said’s Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam, in which he seemingly predicted the current situation in the Middle East. The demonization of Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, in the intellectual and media discourses of the 1970s clearly played a role in mo-bilizing the general public’s sentiments against the Palestinian liberation movement and the PLO as the movement’s representative. Increasing gas prices, an oil embargo, the Iran hostage crisis, and the killing of Israeli athletes by Palestinian fighters at the 1972 Munich Olympics contributed to the Western belief that Arabs—particularly Palestinian Arabs—were inscrutable, uncivilized, irrational, and committed to the use of violence in the service of extremism.
As Jack Shaheen documents in his book Reel Bad Arabs, the hundreds of movies that Hollywood produced in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s depicting Arabs as the epitome of evil made Washington’s task of portraying the Arab world as a bastion of corruption and villainy, where U.S. interven-tion was necessary, that much easier. Said viewed with increasing skepti-cism the U.S.’s involvement in the Middle East, sensing and expressing his concerns about the prospects of an impending catastrophe in the region with the escalating arms race between Israel and its Arab neighbors (see Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs). Third, Said realized that any attempt to repre-sent a people, a territory, or a conquest within a discourse involved im-mense metaphysical machinery—bringing together power, knowledge, and truth—to simplify what is a complex human reality. For all these rea-sons, Said was ahead of his time.
A recent collection of essays, entitled Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, attempts to make sense of Said’s career as a pro-fessor of literature, a prominent public intellectual, and, perhaps most memorably, as an activist in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The contributions by Rashid Khalidi and Saree Makdisi assess Said’s fash-ioning of a distinctive intellectual style in his advocacy for the Palestinian narrative in the United States, bringing his commitment to humanism to this effort. Khalidi notes, “When he spoke about Palestine, [Said’s] focus was essentially humanist: this was a problem, he argued, that could not be solved in an annihilationist manner, a problem that admitted of no
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sum solution, a problem that finally had to be resolved by both peoples accepting the humanity of the other” (49). Consistent with this humanist outlook, as Makdisi argues, “… Said’s work offered us the very antidote to which he was referring: interference, transgression, a breaking out of the confines of specialized disciplinary audiences, and speaking to a broader public” (60). Said brought together an enlightened humanist out-look and a committed public intellectualism that disturbed the conven-tional location of the English professor in the research university. How else could he have addressed the Question of Palestine so effectively and in front of so many different audiences? Humanism, as he reminded us during his March 2003 address before the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination League, is “the last remaining resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that have disfigured human history”
(see Said, “Dignity, Solidarity…”). As Makdisi claims, “Thus the idea of Palestine was always, in Said’s work, inseparable from the larger humanist project on which he had embarked, a humanist project that sought to res-cue humanism itself from the larger claims of European imperialism with which it had come into the world” (see Said, “Palestine, and the Human-ism of Liberation”).This project has found an application within contem-porary academic debates about the Middle East.
The intense attacks that have been waged against academic freedom in the wake of 9/11, with Said’s Orientalism being blamed for the supposed anti-Americanism in Middle East Studies, anthropology, area studies, and other related disciplines, signal that it is more important than ever to fend the university as a place of critical intellectualism and as a site de-voted to the open exchange of ideas and positions. In Uncivil University:
Politics & Propaganda in American Higher Education, Tobin, Weinberg, and Ferer claim that,
What could possibly be more horrific in terms of perverting the purpose of multiculturalism than the notion that scholarship has to be based on one’s race, ethnicity, or gender in order to be legitimate? This is partially due to the sad legacy of Saidism, the paradigm put forward by Edward Said that [sic] led to the ideological poisoning of Middle East Study centers and de-partments all over academe (56).
This crudely reductive rendering of Said’s intellectual legacy is unfor-tunately representative of the kind of caricatures that have gained wide circulation in the public sphere, where the construction of a strawperson—
assembled from the arguments of a serious intellectual critic—serves to render serious intellectual debate moot.
As a Palestinian educated in the Ivy League, Said became a professor of literature at Columbia in 1966 and used his privileged position to ques-tion the very knowledge tradiques-tions of which he was a beneficiary. He rec-ognized the uniqueness of his predicament, realizing that the humanistic traditions he had mastered were responsible for subjugating people who looked just like him. The works of the great humanistic tradition, Dante’s Inferno, Pope’s Epistles, or Auerbach’s Mimesis, spoke to the condition of the European subject and did not consider the specificities of the minority positions Said was interested in examining. Herein resides a paradox—
Said became the native informant, translating for his Western interlocutors the secrets of the East, demanding that knowledge and power be held re-sponsible for the human catastrophes they have produced, whether in the context of Indian resistance to British rule or Palestinian resistance to Is-raeli colonization. However, such an observation rubs against the grain of Said’s own thought, as he called for intellectual workers to transcend the markers of class, race, ethnicity, and religion and to recognize the lines of solidarity that bind them. However, he always sought “criticism before solidarity,” a call to reject the easygoingness of belonging to a group, club, party, or organization.
Edward Said deeply believed in the power of human beings to shape the world around them. His continual emphasis upon how agency is cre-ated in concert with traditions or through the making of counter-traditions belied his absolute belief in how people can change oppressive circum-stances through their efforts. Of course, the one situation that was most on his mind, the Question of Palestine is the one situation the no one has been able to change. Said, the Palestinian intellectual, steeped in the learning of the American academy, dismantled the imperialism of the West and ex-posed its effects upon literature, art, and our very perceptions of the world.
How do humans come to perceive the world around them in the multitude of ways that they do? Is it merely happenstance that some perceptions pre-dominate over others? I think Edward Said’s work gives us intelligent ways to think about these questions.