Where East meets West

Edward Said made his name in 1978 with Orientalism, a book arguing that the whole corpus of Western ethnography and archaeology concerned with Asia was fundamentally colonial and imperialist in all its assumptions.

When the Victorians penned their learned volumes on the antiquities of Egypt, India or Afghanistan, their apparent objectivity was an illusion. Underneath it lay the unspoken belief that it was the West that was dynamic, evolving, and capable of further change, whereas Oriental societies were museum pieces, endlessly fascinating no doubt, but not containing people inhabiting legitimate, living cultures.

It could be argued that Said came to this vision in part because of his own unusual background. He is the son of Protestant Palestinians, his father's family English-style Anglicans, his mother's American Baptists. His father became a US citizen after World War I, and then returned to the Middle East and took his family to live in Egypt where he had business interests.

Edward Said has said elsewhere that his very name, with its Western and Arab elements, embarrassed his as a child. At home he spoke both Arabic and English, at school (in a Cairo version of an upper-class English private academy) Arabic, English and French. But when he turned out to be an academically outstanding pupil, these mixed origins suddenly became an advantage.

He is now professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, specializing in literature in English and French from the days of empire (the late 19th and early 20th centuries), together with Arabic studies. He can have few colleagues who are equally at ease in these three areas, and this book is a collection of essays covering 35 years where he displays his varied accomplishments.

He's also, as it happens, an able classical pianist, and there is an article here on Glen Gould, the extraordinary Canadian keyboard virtuoso who revolutionized the playing of J.S. Bach. In another piece Wagner, Beethoven and Cage all feature, along with Keats, Conrad, Foucault and Thomas Mann.

More recently, Said has become associated with the Palestinian cause, but the essays here on Arab subjects are not so much concerned with day-to-day politics but rather are scholarly treatments of eminent Arabic writers such as the Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz.

What makes this book so attractive, and so interesting, is Said's centrist position in the "culture wars" that have marked, and sometimes debased, the academic study of literature over the past two decades. On the one hand he has been at the forefront of the movement to uncover hidden assumptions -- racist, sexist and class-based -- in revered European and American classic authors. But on the other he opposes the more radical proponents of this process on several key points.

Firstly, he has little time for what they term "theory" (in fact only the theories of one particular school of thought). Secondly, and surely as a result of this, he doesn't dabble in the academic jargon that disfigures so much contemporary critical writing. These articles, for instance, come from popular magazines such as Harper's and Village Voice as well as from specialist university journals, and Said's writing, though always scholarly, is never impenetrable.

But thirdly, and even more importantly, he resists dogmatic and ideologically entrenched positions, having a mind that appears to be naturally independent and wide-ranging. There is one instance here where he recalls a seminar he was giving in which he was simultaneously attacked by an older scholar who argued for the benefits colonialism had brought to Asia and Africa -- roads, railways, schools and so forth -- and by a female African-American professor for confining his attention largely to the writings of "dead white males."