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  • Remembering Said
  • Ania Loomba

All of us are the poorer for having lost Edward Said, whose commitment to global justice was as passionate as his commitment to ideas and literature. I didn't always agree with him, but his political and intellectual work opened up new vistas for the study of global relations, past and present, especially for those of us who were simultaneously the products of colonial education, the beneficiaries of the anti-colonial struggle, and the inheritors of a neo-colonial world. The term "postcolonial studies" (which Said's work helped bring into existence) was riven with the contradictions between the present day's rupture from the past and continuities with it—were we indeed inheriting newly liberated worlds, or witnessing the continuation of older inequalities in new and frightening ways? Himself continually accused of a commitment to high Western art, and of insufficient attention to third world resistance and agency, Said remained skeptical of the field that he had supposedly founded. In an interview with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and myself in New Delhi, in 1997, he said that he did not belong to that world of postcolonial studies because "I care very much about the structures of dependency and impoverishment that exist, well certainly in this part of the world and my part of the world and in all parts in what is now referred to as the global South."1

Many of his critics faulted Orientalism for suggesting that Western representations of the East had nothing to do with its reality, but for Said, the whole point of indicating a divorce between images and reality was in fact to emphasize the political nature of that distance, and the embeddedness of such images in the structures of colonialism. In the same interview, he described postmodernism as a "kind of provincial atavism of a very unappealing sort" whose great problem was to divorce the question of representation from any purchase in the real world—"to say 'well, the media always lies, we know that,' and to say that we know that representations are always just representations. My interest is in the more pernicious forms of these relationships, where actual lives, actual identities, actual political destinies are distorted and destroyed by a process of this sort."

That's why for Said there was no contradiction between his interest in Western classical music and literature on the one hand, and the political world, although he also valued being one step removed from the political process. "I have," he told us, "become in my late years, I suppose, partly because of my illness and partly because of other things...very involved in a different view which is—you know, Adorno is very important to me now—the idea of trying to maintain a certain kind of tension without resolving it dialectically, as a sort of witness, a testimonial to what is happening . . . that seems to me to be something worth trying." It was this commitment to the idea that intellectuals must bear witness that made Said such a valuable presence in our troubled times. He reminded us that as teachers and students, we need to strive to be more than merely professional—we have a much larger responsibility as intellectuals. The role which Said exemplified is going to become increasingly difficult to play in the coming years, but also increasingly necessary if the university is going to remain a site of intellectual freedom and dissent.

But I have also been re-engaging with Edward Said's work in the last few years as a scholar of early modern Europe. It is especially ironic that Said's Orientalism deals with the same geographical spaces that are now being used to "re-orient" perspectives on early modern global relations. Revisionist work on the European Renaissance now routinely opens by criticizing Said for his suggestion that an opposition between the West and the Orient has animated "European imaginative geography" from the Greek times till the present. Such an opposition, it is true, does not accommodate the complicated relations between European Christians and a variety of Eastern (especially Muslim) societies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when, instead of dominating the East, Europe feared...

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