Le Roi est Mort. Vive le Roi!

By R. Bennett Samuels | Monday, November 17, 2003

Edward Said, though often considered the founder of postcolonial studies, never liked to limit himself to such arbitrary distinctions as academic tradition, literary genre, or social sphere. He particularly confounded the conventional separation of academia from politics. While Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, for example, he concurrently served on the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile of the PLO, until he left the organization in 1991, calling the agreement reached at Oslo between Israel and Yasir Arafat "an instrument of Palestinian surrender," and "a Palestinian Versailles."

On a more theoretical plane, moreover, he claimed, with countless other faddish theorists of his generation, that pretenses of intellectual impartiality really only served as smokescreens to obscure the complicity of knowledge, whether in the guise of poetry, scholarship, journalism, or any literary form whatsoever regardless of context, with existing structures of power.

Given his penchant for blurring lines between disciplines, therefore, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences made a fitting venue for a tribute, presented October 27 by the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, to a late professor of English literature.

The program, entitled Reflections, consisted first of a video of short interviews and vignettes, produced by French public television and al Jazeera shortly before his death last month from Leukemia. In a series of short scenes, Said plays the piano, Said drives a car through the streets of New York, Said discusses the American media in his office at Columbia, an Italian edition of Orientalismo ostentatiously posed on the bookshelf behind his shoulder.

For the second 45 minutes of the program, faculty and one Bangladeshi student, Sajid Huq '04, ascended the rostrum to give personal testimony about the impact of Edward Said on their own lives. History professor Gene Garthwaite met Professor Said at the Metropolitan Opera some years ago, for example, while Professor Don Pease of English attended a seminar under him at Northwestern University in 1982.

In the video a grizzled and rather emaciated Said explained, "The idea behind my book in Orientalism is to seek out the origins and the coherence of descriptions of the Orient that began to appear in Europe in the end of the eighteenth, early nineteenth century, that were different from the descriptions of the Orient that had appeared before." He stated his thesis more strongly in Orientalism, published in 1979, however, claiming that since the Enlightenment, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."

For centuries before Said, however, orientalism primarily denoted the European study of the languages and literatures of the Near and Far East, in the same way as the Classics continue in the Western democracies to embrace the study of the languages, literatures, and histories of Ancient Greece and Rome. The redefinition of the term as an ideology of Western supremacy to justify domination of the East, though, served Said in several important ways.

The association of an entire academic discipline with colonial oppression first, by delegitimizing the trustworthiness of traditionally trained orientalist philologists, critics, and historians, opened the commentary on Eastern matters to amateurs, such as, for example, Professors of English at Columbia. As Said argued in 1981, "Knowledge of the academic variety does not progress," and "I think we should open knowledge to the non-expert."

Thus the emcee for Reflections, Professor of French and Italian Marianne Hirsch, in her opening address of the night, accordingly attempted to spin this major defect of Said as a virtue. "The intellectual today," she argued, "has to be an amateur and for him amateurism is literally the desire to be moved not by profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers." Working in this fashion outside tradition, however, Said liberated himself from the troublesome constraints of rigorous method.

As Martin Kramer criticized him in Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, "To argue his point, Said amassed widely diverse examples from literature and scholarship, in a pyrotechnic display of erudition that refused all discrimination among genres and disregarded all extant hierarchies of knowledge," while "He ignored the mass of evidence, including texts crucial to any history of literature or scholarship, that stood in the way of his polemical thrust."

The thesis of Orientalism, finally, delegitimized all work of Western scholars dealing with the East. "For a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality," Said claimed early in his most famous work, "that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second."
The implication was that only individuals from the Orient could write about the Orient. Born in Palestine before the establishment of Israel, yet having spent most of his youth in Cairo and his entire adult life and higher education in the United States, Said could foreswear contamination by Orientalist prejudice.

The assertion that only the product of a culture can comment on that culture fits into the current academic vogue of cultural studies, where racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual orientation supersede the importance the individual in the determination of identity, the creation of art, and the formulation of thought.

Chair of the Department of Government M. Anne Sa'adah, therefore, in her encomium of Said, attacked current American foreign policy toward the Middle East by calling the President of the United States an Orientalist. "However little attention George W. Bush may have devoted to his own studies," she said, "he is the product of a social and cultural framework called Orientalism."

The identity of the racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual identity of the debater matters, in short, rather than the substance of the debate,and the ad hominem attack thus becomes a legitimate tactic for intellectual argument. In the course of her time at the podium, for example, by similarly calling Samuel Huntington of Harvard an Orientalist, Sa'adah dismissed his argument without considering its content.

In so doing, she merely followed the example of her master. Following the publication by Huntington of his influential article "The Clash of Civilizations?" in 1993, Said, in a characteristically personal attack, accused him and "the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis" of Princeton of "a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance," for "presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization."

Said questioned such binary oppositions as East and West, Orient and Occident, Islam and Christianity. In arguing that the West had constructed an Oriental "Other" for the purposes of subduing, dominating, and exploiting it, however, Said , to use the lingo of his acolytes, constructed a Western bogeyman of his own. Perhaps the irony escaped him, or Dr. Said continues to con his faithful at Dartmouth from beyond the grave.

Le Roi est Mort. Vive le Roi!

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