After Said: Postcolonial literary studies in the twenty-first century ed. by Bashir Abu-Manneh (review)

This volume is a "humanistic critique"¹ because it, in its three interrelated constellations, not only discovers the quintessence of Edward Said's multidimensional intellectual and political interventions in the change of literary criticism and political theory for the enrichment of postcolonial studies but also exposes the inherent limitations of his works.

The first part proves Said as a distinct postcolonial theorist for his different kinds of humanism, elaborative scope of Orientalism and the exilic effects on his critical thoughts. Bashir Abu-Manneh, editor of the volume, in the introductory chapter, sketches a mirrored reflection of Said's political humanism. He argues that Israel's decisive victory in 1967 war helped Said ignite a new kind of ideological nationalism, which celebrates and fosters the valuable cultural qualities of human beings without any religious bias and challenges the artistic and textual culture of the imperial power for imposing silence on humanism. Similarly, Conor McCarthy in the second chapter considers Said a philological humanist because Said learns to consider fictions as "willed intentional acts" which finally come out in the texts through a reciprocal interplay between the internal world and external world of the author. This consciousness in this interplay endows the author with a self-conscious didacticism, which develops methodological guidelines for all criticisms. Then, Vivek Chibber ascertains the two diametrically opposite legacy of Orientalism for critics in postcolonial studies. For instance, there are two kinds of Orientalism: latent and manifest. Latent Orientalism is basic essence and concept, which as a discourse has been in practice since Homer. When this latent Orientalism undergoes a change to meet the demands of time, it becomes a manifest Orientalism. Latent Orientalism is internalized as a cultural orientation in the West, giving them a civilizational hierarchy and a sense of improving the East. Gradually, it takes a transition from these objectives to an ambitious project of colonization. After this argument from Said, two groups of critics emerge regarding the comparative significance of two kinds of Orientalism in the colonization process. Seamus Deane considers Said's Culture and Imperialism as the last echo of European intellectual humanism because it discloses the undercurrents of imperialism and imperial resistance simultaneously in the texts through the "contrapuntal method." However, Eric Auerbach and Karl Marx consider this racial representation in the texts as one kind of European modern realism and a part of capitalism respectively. Edward Said considers Auerbach's modernism and Marx's capitalism as the parts of the globalizing imperialism. Thus, Said tries to persuade the American academy to include the globalizing imperialism in the syllabus of Western academia; otherwise, it will be a defective syllabus. Chapter Five, written by Keya Ganguly, explores how the exilic situation begets the quality of innovation, discipline, critical consciousness and surviving capacity in Edward Said; it even endows him with a political consciousness in his representational strategies. These strategies show one kind of resistance through defiance to the power in the texts.

The second part elucidates the Saidian intellectual legacy to the political theory of empire, and shows the existential crisis of postcolonial literature against world literature. Lauren M.E. Goodlad in Chapter Six revisits the nineteenth-century novel Mansfield Park by Jane Austen engaging the "contrapuntal approach" of Said and discovers in the novel a relationship between the "worlded," which is the contemporary materialistic reality, and "worlding," which is the way of judging the novel in terms of the existing realities. Consequently, this novel has been a simultaneous awareness of the idea that imperialism and its resistance as a world system have been functioning in this world since the nineteenth century. Just like Goodlad, Jeanne Morefield, in Chapter Seven, recognizes the worth of Said's contrapuntal style to turn the reader back to empire in political theory and uses this style to analyze the existing American imperial power in this world. In Chapter Eight, Joe Cleary shows the struggles of the postcolonial criticism against its own constitutive limitations after 9/11 because...