NEWTON Bouquet – The life, work, and legacy of Edward Said (25 September)
Edward W. Said was a pre-eminent scholar, public intellectual, and globally acclaimed advocate for Palestinian rights, during the late twentieth century and first years of the present one. His influence ranged from literary criticism to Middle East studies to the study of culture, imperialism, and the subaltern. As part of Jadaliyya’s commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of his death on 25 September 2003, we offer this NEWTON bouquet that references Said’s scholarship, political advocacy, and intellectual legacy.
1) Mohammad R. Salama, Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History: Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion since Ibn Khaldun
“I aim to contribute to scholarly understandings of this complex relationship by looking at both Islam`s image in the West and its connection to the rise of modernity and the consequent onslaught of colonialism that Europe visited upon the Arab world, using Egypt as a case study. I wanted to lay bare the constructedness of some central narratives that Europe has used to write its own history as well as the history of Islam—narratives that are still present today.”
2) Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation
“In many ways, the book belonged to a historical moment characterized by a search for the analytic language appropriate for cultural production within the twinned spaces between the national and the colonial and a historical moment wherein Third Worldist discussions were often split around the question of Israel/Palestine.”
3) Rachel Beckles Willson, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West
“A further layer of interest was Said’s own relationship with music. His deep love of western classical traditions led him to write brilliantly about them, but always within a discourse that had its roots in German nineteenth-century idealism. This meant that even while allowing some critical voices in the texture of his writing, he tended to preserve western classical music from truly critical scrutiny: he drew back from recognizing it fully as a worldly and mediated practice.”
4) Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat, Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora
“While Said traces Orientalism back to the post-Enlightenment period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the grand European empires, I resituate Orientalism in relation to Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas in 1492. Orientalism, I argue, was constituted in the Americas before it was applied to the Middle East, part of a historically triangulated relationality between the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.”
5) Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism
“My book shows how the US and Western European countries have fostered and put to work different kinds of “Islams” during the last two hundred years—pan-Islamism, jihadist forms of Islam, and liberal forms of Islam, depending on the period and the tactical and strategic goals they sought; sometimes they foster these different varieties at the same time to serve different agendas.”
6) Jeffrey Sacks, Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish
“My reading follows Edward W. Said’s discussion of philology in Orientalism and the reading of philology pursued by Paul de Man in his essay “The Return to Philology.” Following both of these texts, I’ve tried to think about philology as a practice of translation in the colonies, which reorganizes terms and categories, and which forces an understanding of the past in historical, and historicist, terms.”
7) Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
“Men of Capital destabilizes this scene of self and other not simply by recovering a Palestinian history of profit accumulation, but most importantly by critiquing it. The book takes its cue from Edward Said’s Gramscian injunction for an inventory of traces. This inventory details the nahda as not only cultural and literary, but also as a deeply economic structure of thought and practice.”
8) Greg Burris, The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination
“The book’s theoretical backbone—the notion of “the Palestinian Idea”—is based on my readings of three very different writers: Edward Said, French philosopher Jacques Rancière, and Black radical theorist Cedric Robinson. Together, these three authors form an incredibly powerful cocktail, and my approach to Palestinian liberation is grounded in their work. Armed with these writers’ insights, the book uses Palestinian film and media to explore a range of issues.”
9) Omnia El Shakry, Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East
“First, it can be read by teachers and students to supplement textbooks, in the sense that many of the chapters help contextualize broader historical processes (colonialism, nationalism, decolonization, the Cold War, US foreign policy) within wider historiographies. Authors address both history and our present in ways that are complex and nuanced, and they address specialized topics in greater depth than is possible within a textbook. Second, teachers can use the volume to help prepare their lectures, select assigned readings and audiovisual materials, and create classroom assignments and exercises.”
10) Peter Gran, The Persistence of Orientalism: Anglo-American Historians and Modern Egypt
“I hope colleagues in modern Egyptian studies will read it. I hope the argument about this field as a gate-keeper field will mean something to people marginalized by the rise of the West and the Euro-American storyline about who we are, as Americans. I would like to see our field move in this direction, and away from gatekeeping.”
11) Ayad Al-Ani, The Arabs from Alexander the Great until the Islamic Conquests: Orientalist Perceptions and Contemporary Conflicts
“The book covers the emergence of an Arab sphere of politics, culture, religion, and language before Islam. The presence of Roman Arabs and Foederati living in some of the most significant metropolitan centers of late antiquity laid the groundwork for the Islamic conquests of these areas; without them, the Arab empire would never have been feasible. To describe these groups, the book also focuses on the problems associated with defining the term “Arab” and the concept of an “Arab” culture, language, and script before Islam.”
