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THE COMPAKATIST REVIEW ESSAYS PAUL BOVE, ed. EdwardSaid and the Work ofthe Critic: Speaking Truth to Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 317 pp. Edward Said's fabulous academic career seems a dream for our time. Schooled in the literary canon, adept of high modernism, he became a respected critic and a professor at an Ivy League university; but his most important work, Orientalism, changed forever, as we say hopefully, notjust an academic field—the academy's way of looking at a body ofwriting—but also the structure ofpresumption in the public sphere. Now, after Orientalism, it has come to be taken for granted that the most enlightened attitude toward non-Western cultures is one that allows them to speak for themselves rather than to be spoken for. It is not that ideas of Western superiority have been vanquished but that the structure ofunquestioned superiority from which the Oriental other was portrayed has been identified as an ideological stance, whose history and lineaments should be examined. But as ifsuch public influence were not enough, as ifthe fundamentally liberal and enlightenment vision of Orientalism and of Culture and Imperialism required a more radical and partisan supplement, this eminent professor and public intellectual is also a notorious political activist: eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause, yet unremitting critic ofthe conduct ofPalestinian leaders and their Israeli counterparts. As a public intellectual figure in a city where political candidates regularly seek to outvie each other in expressions oftheir support for Israel, Said has been reviled as a supporter ofterrorism. "Nimble, mercurial, and tirelessly up-to-date," writes Mustapha Marrouchi, Said "has nipped from one burgeoning topical issue to another, turning up wherever the action is, like a cross between a father figure and Mr. Fixit" (227). Though meant as a compliment, these straining formulations evince the difficulty ofcapturing Said: ubiquitous public intellectual, political figure, Palestinian exile and outsider , yet also a consummate insider in literary and cultural studies, not just the founder ofpostcolonial theory and criticism, but also President ofthe Modern Language Association ofAmerica. Finally, the political activist is also an extraordinarily accomplished pianist and writer on music. For the Wellek lectures in literary theory at the University ofCalifornia at Irvine, Said surprisingly took music rather than postcolonial theory as his subject. EdwardSaid and the Work ofthe Critic: Speaking Truth to Power is a collection of essays about his work that doubles as afestschrift. Two very rich, wideranging interviews with Said, by Jacqueline Rose and W.J.T. Mitchell, are followed by nine essays by critics from different fields and different parts of the globe that survey the myriad aspects of Said's career and accomplishments, and if the book seems a miscellany, it is because ofthe range ofSaid's achievements. Two further essays do not discuss Said but are inspired by his example: Barbara Harlow's "Sappers in the Stacks: Colonial Archives, Landmines, and Truth Commissions" asks whether massacres occurred and were covered up in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Crimea, Egypt, South Africa, and the Congo; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Race Before Racism" reads Jack Forbes's Black Africans andNative Americans as a ground-breaking achievement comparable with Said's Orientalism. Three essays, by Lindsay Waters, Jim Merod, and Ralph Locke, deal Vol. 26 (2002): 139 REVIEW ESSAYS with music, especially Said's Musical Elaborations and the centraliry for him of aesthetic experience. Five essays focus on Said's work on imperialism and orientalism, broadly conceived: Rashid Kalidi explores his impact on the treatment of the Palestinian question in the American media; Kojin Karatani discusses how the aestheticization ofcultures obscures colonialism; Mustapha Marrouchi, in much the longest essay ofthe collection, vigorously defends Said and critiques his critics, especially Homi Bhabha and Aijaz Ahmad, in an eloquent assessment and defense ofSaid's achievement ; Aamir Mufti, approaching Said through the place ofErich Auerbach in his work, shrewdly articulates Said's distinctive vision ofa secular criticism and political cosmopolitanism. At a time when the fate ofthe great secularization project of the European enlightenment is being decided in the postcolonial world, Said's secular cosmopolitanism, pursued "in the interest and from the perspective of all those who would be minoritized" by...

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