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  • Wada’an to a Jewish Palestinian
  • Ephraim Nimni (bio)

Edward Wadie Said died on 25 September 2003, leaving behind a powerful legacy in literature, politics, music, cultural studies and the Israeli Palestinian conflict.1

Both, the genesis and powerful legacy of his work can be found in the perennial insider-outsider tension that characterised much of his existential and intellectual experience. This is manifested in his diasporic demeanour and quixotic battles; from culture to imperialism and in bringing truth to power, and from Orientalism to Palestine. Much like Antonio Gramsci, in Tom Nairn’s words, Antonu su Gobbu2, Said was the product of a most peculiar Western periphery, the victim of the victim, an existential wandering Jew made homeless by the Jewish state. Yet, as one of the most prominent English literary critics of his generation and honoured professor in a leading US University, he also was a pointed gift of the periphery to a metropolis that admired and hated him, but one that invariably learned from him.

No summary of his multi-faceted legacy, that of an intellectual giant of his generation and political activist, can do justice to his seminal contributions to music, literature politics and the study of ideology. Orientalism (1979) is perhaps the epochmachend book, one that inaugurated the burgeoning discipline of Post Colonial studies. Before Said, Orientalism was the discipline that described with the authority of scientific speech the society and culture of Arab and Middle Eastern societies, after Said, it became a discipline that said more about the hopes, fantasies and expectations of Western observers, than about the societies it attempted to describe. In Said’s words,

[I]t has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world. To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands”, an Oriental professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendour, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use the list can be extended more or less indefinitely.3

The book cover, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting, “The Snake Charmer,” (1883), presumes to represent the Orientalist spirit. Gérôme, after a few visits to Egypt, became a French “expert” in the oriental mind, but his painting of a Mosque courtyard shows an obscene scene antithetical to the teachings of Islam. Perhaps not coincidentally, a contemporary of Gérôme, a Paris agent of Czarist secret police wrote the other famous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the same years as Gérôme painted the “Snake Charmer”. Both conspicuous Orientalist forgeries designed to cement a dichotomous border we/they and dehumanise the exotic “Semitic” other.

The theme of Orientalism is skilfully developed further in Culture and Imperialism4, introducing the theme of exile that is so prevalent in Said’s writings. Culture and Imperialism expresses the vast erudition of its author. It is an enormous book that discusses the intermingled histories of imperialism and its subordinate peoples, and develops a critical awareness of imperialism as a typology of resistance. The key arguments meticulously explain how Western cultural forms overcome their own parochial settings by being placed in the dynamic global environment created by imperialism, with its familiar dichotomies, north and south, metropolis and periphery. Advancing an argument reminiscent of Gramsci’s La Questione Meridionale, Said explores the idea that Western cultures (French, British and North American) universalised their cultures by creating an Hegemonic Bloc that incorporated the peripheries. Here, Said also begins his systematic reflection on the theme of Diaspora as a by-product of the postcolonial experience.

However, for Said no culture remains shielded from the colonial encounter. The intermingling and mutual influence of cultures is developed in The Clash of Ignorance, Said’s brilliant demolition of Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations.” Said argues,

Certainly neither Huntington...

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