- Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid
No book of recent times by a Western-based academic working in the humanities has made so much impact as Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978, one indication of which is the huge literature it has generated and provoked, both admiring and (increasingly) critical, across a whole range of disciplines. Varisco’s book is the first to undertake a comprehensive reappraisal of Orientalism in the light of all that has subsequently been written about it. Although recognizing that Said’s book was in its time stimulating and pathbreaking, Varisco mounts a sustained and unrelenting assault on what he insists was Said’s flawed methodology, his skewed handling of literary evidence, his lack of adequate historical knowledge, and his distorted and tendentious conclusions. This book will enrage Said’s many admirers and win the applause of his many detractors. Either way, it is an important and impressively documented work, which deserves a wide audience.
Sir David Cannadine is Whitney J. Oates Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and honorary professor at the University of London. His many books include Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History, Class in Britain, In Churchill’s Shadow, Mellon: An American Life, and, most recently, Making History Now and Then.