At the “Rendezvous of Victory”

Edward Said and Critical Decolonization consists of the essays written in English originally published in a special issue on Said’s work in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (Vol. 25, 2005), which also included a number of essays in Arabic. Two aspects of this collection of essays are especially worthy of note: its global scope—the contributors live in and write from the perspective of various places in the world (the U.S., Britain, India, Japan, Holland, Mexico, and Egypt)—and its inclusion of substantive discussions of Said’s posthumously published controversial book Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and of a number of the essays that were incorporated in On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006) after his death. In this limited space, I cannot, of course, do justice to the illuminating global scope of the essays and the diversity of topics pertaining to Said’s work they explore. It will have to suffice to say that, as a whole, this volume of essays offers the American reader, all too receptive to the global hegemony of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the provincialism of the “universality” of Western historiography, a third-world perspective on Said’s polyvalent, cross-disciplinary writing—on imperialism, Orientalism, literature, music, humanism, theory, the university, the intellectual, exile, Freud, Adorno, Rushdie, Palestine, and the Middle East—that often estranges the image of Said that has been produced by both his friends and enemies in the Anglophone world. Since this topic is too vast to address adequately, I will restrict the following comments to that which, as an attuned follower of the local and global reception of Said’s work, interests me in what these most recent essays have to say about his complex and highly controversial relationship to poststructuralist theory and to Michel Foucault’s thought in particular.

One of the constants in these essays, especially the ones written by Arabs, is, as I have noted, a welcomed shift of perspective that views the world about which Said writes from postcolonial eyes. This results in quite new and provocative readings of the relationship between his work and that of his affiliated contemporaries such as Theodor Adorno, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, and Eqbal Ahmad (the essay by Fadwa Abdel Rahman on Said and Achebe is exemplary in this respect), and between the local world (American or Western or “humanist”) and the global world (particularly Middle Eastern) he straddles. (See, for example, Mustapha Bayoumi, “Reconciliation without Duress: Said, Adorno, and the Autonomous Intellectual.”) But at the same time, there is a marked tendency in these essays, despite gestures to the contrary, to represent Said—the American-Palestinian who was educated almost entirely in Ivy League schools and whose intellectual perspective was formed under the tutelage of continental theory (not simply German and French, but also English and Italian)—as fundamentally a Palestinian or, more generally, as an Arab. They thus tend to undermine, in fact, what they acknowledge rhetorically—that the exilic Said rejects identity politics whether this politics is Western or Palestinian or Arabic—and thus to deflect attention away from what I take to be Said’s major and abiding legacy to the intellectual life of our fraught global age: his undeviating commitment, utterly dependent on the rejection of the violence-producing metaphysical principle that identity is the condition for the possibility of difference, of the “whole consort [of humanity] dancing together contrapuntally.”

To put this general limitation in another way, what I find disabling vis-à-vis the pursuit of this polyphonic global ideal in a number of the essays in this otherwise useful collection is the tendency, following too literally Said’s often expressed reservations, to put his “postcolonial” critical practice in a binary opposition to Foucauldian “discourse” and poststructuralist theory in general. This literalism is, for example, epitomized by Yumna Siddiqi’s reduction (in “Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism”) of Said’s enormously complex view of Foucault’s thought to a simple condemnation of the latter’s “Eurocentrism” on the basis of his having said little about the world outside France and Germany, thus obscuring the patent...