Reading Orientalism
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Reading Orientalism

Said and the Unsaid

Daniel Martin Varisco

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Reading Orientalism

Said and the Unsaid

Daniel Martin Varisco

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About This Book

The late Edward Said remains one of the most influential critics and public intellectuals of our time, with lasting contributions to many disciplines. Much of his reputation derives from the phenomenal multidisciplinary influence of his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's seminal polemic analyzes novels, travelogues, and academic texts to argue that a dominant discourse of West over East has warped virtually all past European and American representation of the Near East. But despite the book's wide acclaim, no systematic critical survey of the rhetoric in Said's representation of Orientalism and the resulting impact on intellectual culture has appeared until today. Drawing on the extensive discussion of Said's work in more than 600 bibliographic entries, Daniel Martin Varisco has written an ambitious intellectual history of the debates that Said's work has sparked in several disciplines, highlighting in particular its reception among Arab and European scholars. While pointing out Said's tendency to essentialize and privilege certain texts at the expense of those that do not comfortably it his theoretical framework, Varisco analyzes the extensive commentary the book has engendered in Oriental studies, literary and cultural studies, feminist scholarship, history, political science, and anthropology. He employs "critical satire" to parody the exaggerated and pedantic aspects of post-colonial discourse, including Said's profound underappreciation of the role of irony and reform in many of the texts he cites. The end result is a companion volume to Orientalism and the vast research it inspired. Rather than contribute to dueling essentialisms, Varisco provides a path to move beyond the binary of East versus West and the polemics of blame. Reading Orientalism is the most comprehensive survey of Said's writing and thinking to date. It will be of strong interest to scholars of Middle East studies, anthropology, history, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and literary studies.

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Information

Year
2017
ISBN
9780295741642
Subtopic
Anthropology
Edition
2
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Berlinerblau (1999:xii).
TO THE READER
2 Menocal is referring to Dante, but I think her comment applies equally to Said’s Orientalism.
3 O’Hanlon and Washbrook (1992:163) refer to postmodern writers’ penchant to question the power in all knowledge systems except their own.
4 W. J. T. Mitchell (2005a:366).
5 A. Ahmad (1992:160). John Mackenzie (1995b:91) is compelled to remind critics that “most of his contemporary political positions are also mine. But I do not see that such sympathies should neuter my critical faculties.” B. D. H. Miller (1982:284) finds it difficult and embarrassing to criticize Said because of who he is: a Palestinian intellectual. Julia Kushigian (1991:111n2) confides that Said both inspires and encourages her in another direction.
6 Halliday (1999:200–201). A similar sentiment is expressed by Mackenzie (1995b:92).
7 Behdad (1994a:11). Madeleine Dobie (2001:16) travels with Behdad’s course correction, but only to a point.
8 Majeed (1992:4).
9 Sayyid (1997:49n1): “I am very aware of my intellectual debt to Edward Said and his work, and any disagreements that I express in the following pages should be seen in the light of my acknowledgement of Said’s influence in opening up these horizons for me.”
10 Holmlund (1993:2).
11 Kramer (2001:22). Apart from repeating criticism already well known, Kramer offers no original insights on Orientalism. Although there is much to criticize in the large corpus of Said’s work, simply dismissing it as ideological garbage renders Kramer’s work virtually unusable. I devote space here to his political polemic in order to distance it from my own critique of Said’s rhetoric, methodology, and thesis. As Richard Bulliet (2004:99) observes, Kramer writes “a bitter book devoted to disparaging the entire Middle East Studies enterprise.”
12 Kramer (2001:32), who proceeds to argue that Orientalism gave a “step up” to Arab and Muslim scholars who thought they were “unspoiled” and “entitled” to university positions. Who hired them, if not members of the establishment?
13 Ibid., 39. It appears that in Kramer’s view a scholar cannot be Arab and American at the same time. Does this mean it is not possible to be Israeli and American at the same time?
14 Ibid., 84.
15 Ibid., 46.
16 Ibid. Kramer finds “irony in the fact that the Beirut hostage-holders of Islamic Jihad should have offered Said’s Covering Islam as reading to their captive audience of hostages.” I see little irony in this irascible ipse dixit that would blame an author who without hesitation condemns terrorism in the very book mentioned.
17 Ibid., 47. “Just as ironic was the fact that Said—who had stoked the fires of suspicion in the Muslim world—had read Rushdie’s book in manuscript and failed to see the risks in publishing it.” It is not ironic but pathetic that a political scientist specializing in the Middle East could claim that these fires needed stoking by a book from an American secular scholar. I leave out of this list the sub[tle]plot that conjures Said’s supposed sway over Middle East studies as complicit in not targeting Osama bin Laden from the start as a major threat and for the malicious claim that Said deserves part of the blame for the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
18 Ibid., 45.
19 Ibid., 44. At times Kramer views the few and largely marginalized pro-Palestinian voices, so clearly ineffectual in shifting American foreign policy, as spouting an anti-Semitic demagoguery that might be called Protocols of the Dispossessed Against Zionism.
20 Ibid., 32. As Ella Shohat (2004:56) notes, Kramer and a few other vociferous critics had for the first time scanned post-colonial theory on the “neocon radar.”
21 Kramer (2001:36–37). Rather than questioning the ability of experts as such to “predict” politics or economics, Kramer uses the same rationale to describe quite different paradigms. One of the more bizarre claims in Kramer’s grab-baggage is that “the Middle Eastern studies ‘establishment’” had already been abandoned by right wingers in American foreign policy at the same time that it “came under assault from the left” (2001:87). It is not clear who was minding the store. Nor is it clear whom Kramer was reading. In almost any political science text of the late 1960s or early 1970s the handwriting was on the wall that “The Middle East is in a state of ferment,” observed James Bill and Carl Leiden (1974:220). Ironically, post-colonial critics have applied a similar un-Nostradamus litmus test to earlier Western Orientalists (Horsley 2003:22).
22 Makiya (1993:317–318). He is seconded in a rambling and derivative personal attack on Said by Ibn Warraq (2002). Gordon (1989:95) makes a similar point that Said and other anti-Orientalists “encourage a sort of self-justifying apologia that has been detrimental to self-criticism.”
23 Makiya (1993:324). Said (1994a:345) dismisses Makiya as one of Bernard Lewis’s “epigones,” yet fails to respond to the specifics of Makiya’s critique. Ahmad Dallal (1994:89) echoes Said in describing Makiya’s critique as a “quite irrational, attention-seeking desire to malign Arab and Islamic culture.” Thus, in a most un-Foucauldian manner, an author’s ascribed intention negates the need to discuss what is being said.
24 Sardar (1999:76).
25 Ibid., 74.
26 Ibid., 67.
27 Ben Jelloun (2002:item #28). Similarly, as reported in a Seattle Times interview (quoted in Amireh 2002:292), the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi calls Said “an arrogant intellectual who has a westernized interpretation of the Middle East.”
28 Majid (2000:26). In an earlier piece, Majid (1998:341) states: “Few Western(ized) scholars have questioned the validity of secularism as a global project, although it is well known that the concept is the intellectual product of a specific moment in European history.”
29 My position here is similar to that of fellow anthropologist Michael Gilsenan (2000:158), who admires Said’s courage as an advocate for Palestinian rights without feeling a need to defend Said’s arguments about Oriental studies or anthropology. Similarly, J. J. Clarke (1997:8) is critical of Said’s narrowness, but makes it clear that this “does not by any means imply a total rejection of Said’s attitude of suspicion towards orientalism or his attempts to politicize it.”
30 The phrase is from Dallmayr (1996:134).
31 Marrouchi (1997:72). Patrick Williams (2001:xxvii) faced a similar problem in deciding what to include in his massive compilation of critical excerpts on Said, because many of the critiques exemplify a “Said-as-straw-man syndrome.”
32 Turner (1981:110).
INTRODUCTION
1 Said said this to describe structuralist découpage or couper épistémologique.
2 Prakash (1995:206).
3 Doniger (1999:943).
4 James Rice (2002:223) comments: “This is a time when seemingly every academic volume, paper, and conference panel uses Said’s critical framework as the de rigeur point of departure, a trope—positive or negative—for any critical exercise embracing Asia, at least through the lens of culture or any of its manifestations.” As Stuart Burrows (1999:50) observes, “It is almost inconceivable to imagine someone receiving a humanities PhD today without having come to terms with Said’s legacy.”
5 The prepared remarks of Lewis, Said, Leon Wieseltier, and Christopher Hitchens were published in Viswanathan (2001:291–312).
6 Although anthropologists appear first in Said’s (1979:2) lineup of generic Orientalists, the virtual absence of anthropology from Orientalism is an indexical fact. If anthropology is to be [em]bedded with Orientalism, I ask that the bedsheets covering all suspect Orientalists receive a fair airing.
7 A minimal list, extending into the 2000s, would include: Ansell-Pearson et al. (1997), Aruri and Shuraydi (2001), Ashcroft and Ahluwalia (1999), BovĂ© (2000), Hart (2000), Sprinker (1993), and Williams and Chrisman (1994), not to mention Valerie Kennedy’s (2000) biographical account. More than two dozen interviews with Said have been published by Viswanathan (2001); see also Bayoumi and Rubin (2000:419–444), Jarah (1999), Levine (1999), Rose (2000), Rushdie (1991), and Williams (2001). The interview with David Barsamian (Said and Barsamian 1994) is partly available in Arabic translation in al-Bahrayn al-Thaqafiyya (Kazim 2001:89–103). A major bibliography of Said’s works is available online (Yeghiayan 2001), but Marrouchi (2004:245–297) has surpassed all with his database of books, articles, and reviews by Edward Said from 1966 to 2002. Much relevant commentary is posted at the website called “The Edward Said Archive” (www.edwardsaid.org). The extensive literature by Said and about Said—it is often a challenge to find a post-colonial study that does not mention Said at some point—can also be entered through the excellent bibliographies compiled by Valerie Kennedy (2000:162–173) and Yasmine Ra...

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