Edward W. Said and Joseph Boone's The Homoerotics of Orientalism

Since the passing of Edward W. Said in September 2003, a plethora of books engaging his scholarly and political legacy have cropped up in academe. Ranging from the excellent to the moderately competent, the few that attack Said and his work often belong to that not-so-rare type of monographs whose authors exhibit, or sometimes seem to courageously boast of, their theoretical and empirical illiteracy.¹ Attacks on Said and his oeuvre, of course, predate his untimely death; but in this posthumous era, it is a different crowd of academics, ones who had closely guarded their secret criticisms of Said when he was alive but felt compelled to avow them publicly following his demise.

Criticizing Said's scholarship and politics or the legacy of both certainly has no statute of limitations; however, it is most interesting that some of the recent attacks on his scholarship and politics issue not only from the traditional American (and Israeli) liberal and conservative right wing (ranging from Michael Walzer and Judith Miller to Bernard Lewis and Emmanuel Sivan), or from apologists for Zionist and Israeli colonialism (ranging again from Michael Walzer and Judith Miller to Bernard Lewis and Emmanuel Sivan), but from left–liberal academics and journalists who want to claim an affiliation with Said as they disavow his work and legacy. Some of them, like the proimperialist parvenu Christopher Hitchens, who made a clean break with their leftist anti-imperial past and embraced the more profitable side of a neoliberal imperial power with abandon, had been friends and allies of Said until (in the case of Hitchens, a few months before) his death—what would their proper designation be, one wonders: nouveaux droitistes, neocons, or quite simply neoliberals?

A number of attacks on Said have come from a new corner that is still under construction, one invested in what it calls "sexuality" in "Islam" (or in the "Middle East," or the "Islamicate" world), from a new discipline that dare speak, indeed shout, its name from the high rooftops of academe, namely, "Queer Middle East studies." But before exploring these Johnny-come-latelies, we must turn to the earlier critics of Said in order to grasp the limited innovativeness and the amount of indebtedness of his more recent critics to them.

Said's Orientalist critics had accused him, inter alia, of "demonizing" Orientalists, or indeed the "West" itself (Bernard Lewis, but more recently also Robert Irwin, inter alia), and of ignoring German or Dutch Orientalists (e.g., Maxime Rodinson). While the first claim is baseless given Said's evident attentiveness to the rich multifacetedness of many of the Orientalists he studied, the problem with the second is that neither Rodinson nor his second-rate chorus line ever bothered to demonstrate how Said would have reached different, let alone opposite, conclusions had he subjected the Germans and the Dutch to his critical eye (something he himself had remarked on in responding to his critics in 1985 [Said 1985, 1]), especially as the more recent scholarship of Susanne Marchand has shown that Said would have found very little in the German context that would have altered any of his major findings about French and British Orientalisms (though Marchand, who too often misunderstands Said and Foucault and is hostile to discourse analysis, would argue that Said's view was too totalizing and "binarist" in the German case) (Marchand 2009).

In addition to academic Orientalists, Said's right-and left-wing American and Israeli critics describe/d him as "savage," "angry," and "rageful," indeed as a "terrorist," and his left–liberal academic critics (the Israeli Jewish academics among them were, as Ella Shohat has shown, pioneers in this regard), worried about what they deemed to be his "inflexibility," "fixity," "staticness," attachment to "binarisms" and "dichotomous" thinking, lack of "nuance," and inattention to "subtlety."

Adopting the most right wing of postcolonial scholars, Homi Bhabha, as their patron saint of choice, these leftists celebrated the latter as "going beyond" Said.² But as Shohat has painstakingly uncovered, it is the aversion to Said's anticolonialism and Bhabha's ambivalence about it that...