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."
Said relates that he found the latter particularly galling, given that his entire project in Orientalism had been to highlight the shortcomings of just such a category of earlier scholars. "The general validity of the point made in Orientalism," he writes, "was now being aimed at me."
In the end he concludes that the positions on either side of him were in effect both caricatures. Given Said's comprehensive range, and ever-present sympathy for the dispossessed and the underdog, it is hard not to side with his humane and tolerant centrist position, and see his critics as, by contrast, wounded and obsessive wolves howling in the night air. That either extreme should be responsible for the education of the young -- as of course they often are -- can only fill an impartial observer with horror.
Said's writings on Joseph Conrad, of which there are several examples here, illustrate this generosity of mind. On the one hand, he maintains, Conrad was writing with what were essentially imperialistic assumptions. But on the other, more than any of his fellow novelists, he perceived the horror and the corruption that the colonial enterprise inevitably involved.
On a less confrontational note, this book contains some wonderful evocations of Cairo in the era of Said's youth. It seems to have been a kind of paradise in which Ancient Egyptian, contemporary European (French and English), and modern Islamic elements coexisted in such a way as to make the city the undisputed capital of the Arab world. In addition to its pleasure gardens and esplanades along the Nile, Said celebrates the city's "adventure, sexuality and magic," its "cohabitation of Islamic, Mediterranean and Latin erotic forms," and senses "a sort of Proustian world replicated in an Oriental city." He affirms that the language he has loved best is Arabic in its spoken Cairo dialect.
This well illustrates Edward Said's own general position, that of an internationalist, but with a special understanding of Middle Eastern, and especially Arab, traditions.
He has unfortunately not been well in recent years, and as a result has, among other things, had to stop playing the piano in public. But if there's a particular combination of perspectives the world is currently desperately in need of, it can't be far removed from the one he here so consistently and persuasively displays.
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