Edward Said's world

Edward Said's world

Ismat Harabi/Text

Wang Liqiu / Translator

Esmat Elhalaby, “The World of Edward Said,” Boston Review , May 13, 2021, http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/esmat-elhalaby-world-edward-said . Translated with permission of the author.

Esmat Elhalaby, American historian, postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. His research field is the history of modern West Asia and South Asia, focusing on the relationship between Arab intellectuals and South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine , India, and the Formation of the Global South. India, and the Making of the Global South ).

Wang Liqiu, a native of Maitreya, Yunnan, holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Politics from the School of International Relations, Peking University, and is currently a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University. Translated "Introduction to Said" (by Bill Ashcroftpal Aluwalia, Chongqing University Press, 2020 edition).

The portrayal of Said as the consummate New York intellectual ignores the fact that he is in a global (and, specifically, Palestinian) anti-colonial struggle.

Timothy Brennan: Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35(cloth) .

On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein died in his New York apartment. Forty-one years before that, Hussein was born in Musmus, a small town not far from Nazareth. Politics "lost its impersonality and its brutal demagoguery" for Hussein, according to Edward Said. Hussein "just asks you to remember to look for real answers, never give up, and never be fooled by pure mediation," Said said of his close friend. Hussein was sharply critical of his society and its rulers (a map of the Middle East with the words "Thinking is forbidden here" in Arabic on his wall) and a staunch supporter of the Third World. In one of his early poems he declared, "I am from Asia/The land of fire/Forge of freedom fighters".

Another friend of Hussein's, the Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad, said Hussein lived "in New York like a Palestinian town." Hussein was born in 1936, about the same age as Said. Had the dislocations in life not burdened him as much—he died alone in his apartment, a lit cigar set a mattress on fire as he fell into a deep sleep—he would probably have spent more time with Said in Manhattan. Live for decades.

Although born in different circumstances, both Hussein and Said were in close contact with each other because of the pressing needs of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle. Hussein, a Muslim from a peasant family who didn't go to college, was a skilled translator of Hebrew and an extremely astute writer. Like the more famous poets Mahmoud Darwish and Samih Al-Qasim, Hussein, a Palestinian citizen in Israel, first met his Arab in Europe. fellow Palestinians, historian Maha Nassar writes in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World ( 2017) There are vivid records. In 1966, Hussein came to New York. There, he made a career as a writer, but was not happy until 1972, when he traveled to the Arab world to find work with fellow Palestinians. First in Beirut, then Egypt, and finally Damascus. But if he had been the PLO's spokesman at the United Nations at the time of his death, the political environment would have sent him back to New York.

Meanwhile, Said, an Arab Puritan, came from an urban bourgeois family and was deeply embedded in the academic institutions of the English-speaking world. He came to New York as an assistant professor of English at Columbia University, and by then he had been studying in the United States for ten years, first at a boarding school in Massachusetts, then at Princeton and finally at Harvard. At Harvard, Said earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the life and writings of Joseph Conrad.

Undoubtedly, Said's influence was profound, but he was not alone. Any intellectual history of the second half of the twentieth century must account for the multitude of settlers, exiles, and immigrants from Asia and Africa who propelled anticolonialism around the world. Said's life is also closely intertwined with many friends, comrades and fellow travelers, who are committed to the cause of Palestine and the liberation movement of the Third World.

Indeed, what angered so many throughout Said's life was his involvement in global political movements—his often open refusal to listen to America's imperial way of life. Before the recent overhaul, liberal journals like the New Republic and Dissent regularly ran columns attacking Said's mind and personality. But the clichés of Irving Howe and Leon Wieseltier will never catch up to Said. Said embodies Franz Fanon's "Last Prayer" in Black Skins, White Masks (1952): "Body, please always make me a questioner!"

Yet many critics of Timothy Brennan's new biography of Said, "The Mind of No Home," took the opportunity to tame the late Palestinian writer. In their pen, Said was even described as the representative of the New York intellectuals who often mocked him. In the London Review of Books, Adam Schatz goes to great lengths to argue that Said is "as much like Gramsci or Fanon as Susan Sontag". The Sontag who rejected Said's (and many others) urgent pleas in 2001 and insisted on accepting the Jerusalem Prize! [1] And thinking about this honestly - what sets Said apart from those all-American figures is his devotion to the Palestinian cause, and his conscious identification with the world's anti-imperialist cause - On the contrary, the comments show a tenacious Orientalist attitude. Schatz, as editor of Said's journal Nation , is familiar with Said's vision and politics, yet he lazily resorts to Orientalist tropes, describing Said as a "" People who wear a Burberry suit without a hijab". On " New Statesman ," Thomas Meaney breathed out at the end of his remarks "In addition to his extensive book collection and his vast collection of classical music recordings, the Old The Dominion Foundation Chair in Humanities also has a map showing the current position of the Israel Defense Forces.” And it is precisely this practice of juxtaposing culture or something distilled from the symbolism and practice of political action that Said has always opposed. To explain Said's life, it must be acknowledged that he participated in a community of intellectuals, activists and martyrs for whom the commitment to Palestine, to the ideal, is not only not ironic but essential.

In A Homeless Mind, Brennan does best when he addresses directly the themes, arguments, and circumstances of Said's substantive work. He is sensitively aware of how the political judgments that have long shaped Said's work (even those before Palestine and the Third World) have become his chiefly expressive cause. From this perspective, Brennan's book is a rich intellectual history that summarizes the content of Said's major works, traces the conditions under which they were created, and charts their impact. In detailing how specific conversations and venues stimulated Said's writing, and discussing the nature of Said's unpublished poems, novels, and essays, Brennan breathes new life into the crowded field of Said studies vitality.

Said's 1975 book, The Beginnings: Intentions and Methods, was well-received in literary criticism circles. Noting the book's reading of high modernist literature and its interpretation of Vico and Foucault, one of Said's early students said it was "a bit like a teacher's book". Brennan said, "Even those who did not take his classes testify in the book his style of guiding impromptu communication in seminar classrooms." Said's 1983 collection of essays "The World, Texts, and Criticism" Home"—a book that Brennan paid particular attention to, thinking it—"is a teacher's book, but much more sober and much more violent". In the essays included in this book, especially in its three central essays on contemporary literary and cultural criticism practice, Said thoroughly critiques various literary theories, such as Jacques Derrida and The theories of J. Hillis Miller, which by the 1980s had taken over the liberal arts departments. For Said, who has been drawn into university culture and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, it is clear that "left-wing" theories are "far from having a real political role". Said wrote, "If a visitor from another world accidentally hears the so-called old critics say that the new critics are dangerous, he will surely be perplexed. Who are they dangerous to the regime, the visitor asks? Mind? Or authority?"

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The first question to be answered by Said's biography is, how did a Palestinian come to New York to teach literature at the university? The holocaust ( nakba ) triggered by the founding of israel in 1948 continued to break up the Palestinians and drive them to various places But since the nineteenth century, when capital forced its way into the Ottoman Empire, triggering a series of profound social and political changes in the Middle East, the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean have been migrating to the Americas.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a period of intense intellectual fermentation, often referred to as the nahda , or arabic cultural revival. This period saw an explosive growth of newspapers in the Arab world, European texts were rapidly translated and interpreted, and new styles of writing, new ways of political assembly, and new visions of social order emerged - nahda to today The Arab world has laid a preliminary institutional and intellectual foundation. Those Arabs who emigrated also remained inextricably linked to their compatriots in the Levant who were working to revive Arab culture, publishing their own Arabic-language periodicals (such as New York's al-Funun ). ), writers like Khalil Gibran and Amin al-Rihani contributed to these journals.

During World War I, some immigrated to the United States to escape military service in the Ottoman Empire. Among them was Said's father, Wadi, who later joined the US military to fight the Germans in France. Vardy's wartime service earned him and his family U.S. citizenship and instilled in him a deep love for America. Wadi’s daughter, Jean Said Makdisi, recalled in her 1990 memoir, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir , “on the Fourth of July. That day, we’d go to the U.S. Embassy for a picnic, eat hot dogs and popcorn walnut biscuits, and watch the square dance.”

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and grew up in British-ruled Egypt and British-ruled Palestine. Drawing on Said's private documents and more than a hundred interviews with friends and family, Brennan details the rich literary and musical life that Said encountered as a young man in Cairo, in his 1999 memoir, " In Misfits, Said also described this world. Had he been born a generation earlier, Said would likely have been an important last member of the nahda generation caught up in imperial fury and Arab modernity. He would stay at home, mingling with the intellectuals who frequented the bars of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Those Arabs - for example, Palestinian/Iraqi writer, artist and intellectual Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Lebanese writer, historian and diplomat George Habib Anthony George Habib Antonius, Lebanese-British historian Albert Habib Hourani, Palestinian politician Musa Al-Alami and Palestinian historian Wa Walid Khalidi (Khalidi narrates their circumstances) – would read TS Eliot by candlelight, write history or novels during work hours, or give to London, Paris and Washington Write an eloquent but doomed appeal for the right to self-determination. Hourani wrote in 1957, "Baudelaire said that the heart bears fruit only once. " If this is so, then the fruit of my heart will always be inscribed with what happened in Palestine. Imprint." But after 1948, Hulani withdrew from the political activities he was passionate about when he was young, and took up a post at St. Anthony's College, Oxford University, and became a veteran of the study of Middle East history in the English-speaking world.

Others (like Albert's brother Cecil Hourani) continued to actively develop the political and academic institutions of the Arab world's newly created nation-states. Brennan records in detail Said and some of these nahda 's younger representatives, notably with the American University of Beirut (AUB, formerly the Syrian Puritan College founded by American missionaries in 1866). [Syrian Protestant College], a key venue in the history of Arab thought) with those associated. Among them was Charles Malik. Said was influenced by him in his early years, and he also happened to be Said's cousin. Marek, who was born in philosophy, studied with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg and completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1937. But he was also an important Lebanese diplomat. Brennan's erudite and skilful account of why Marek's existence was so important to the young and aspiring Said. But Malik later turned into a combative Cold Fighter, a Christian chauvinist and madly anti-communist, for which Said denied his early mentor. Later, Said wrote, Malik "was one of the great intellectual lessons of my life."

Also at the American University of Beirut is the Syrian-born, Princeton-educated historian Constantine Zurayk. Zurek's fame stems largely from his 1948 book The Meaning of Disaster ( Ma'na al-Nakba ), which sought to illustrate the loss of Palestine from the perspective of the Arab past and future of Palestine. During his time at the AUB, Zurek also worked to develop modern teaching methods, as chronicled by historian Hana Sleiman. Zurek is a close friend of Said's wife Marianne. During his frequent trips to Beirut after his marriage, especially during the 1972-1973 academic year when he taught at the American University of Beirut, Said often consulted with Zurek. According to Brennan, Zulek became Said's "main source of influence" during this period.

But it didn't take long for Said to be attracted to a new generation of Arab intellectuals who had largely abandoned the reformist politics and partisan styles of Zulek's likes. These Arab writers—“rebels, zealots and others,” according to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s classification—are anything but monolithic in attitude and politics. In journals like Literature ( Al-Adab ), The Road ( Al-Tariq ), Poetry ( Shi'r ), Dialogue ( Hiwar ) and Position ( Mawaqif ), Arab intellectuals A revolt against the script of liberal political action nahda has been fostering, and the traditional formal style of Arabic literature, especially poetry. Said began to read and correspond with many of these thinkers (including Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Syrian philosopher Sadiq Al-Azm).

In the 1970s, as he became increasingly involved in the political and literary revolutions of the Arab world, Said's intellectual and political energy began to pour into a critique of imperial knowledge, a trend that followed in 1978 with his most famous book. "Oriental Studies" was published and reached its climax. In what is essentially an intellectual history, Said describes and critiques the "ideological fictional system" of Orientalism, which until then had not caused any controversy. By citing major scholarly and literary works in the field of Orientalism produced by the French, British, and American empires from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, Said argues that Orientalism became the skeleton that underpinned the political and economic conquests of those empires .

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The publication of Oriental Studies aroused heated discussions. One of its harshest critics is Azm. Said had a heated debate with him. Azim sent a critical review of Orientalism to the Arab Studies Quarterly , of which Said is one of the editors. Said wrote in response to Azm saying, "I am a skeptic and in many ways an anarchist, I don't believe in laws or systems or anything else that suppresses your mind, gets in your way, as you do. Stupid writing." "Marx to you is Khomeini in the eyes of Khomeini's followers," he continued, "you are in fact the Khomeini of the left, and my heroes, Gramsci and Lukács, it will never be like you." Azim responded amicably, asking to either keep his comments word for word or not at all. But Saeed, fretful, agreed to publish the 40-page comment on the condition that his response be sent too.

Ultimately, Azim published his comments in Khamsin , a London-based journal founded by a collective of radical Jewish intellectuals. In the comments, Azm accused Said of unfairly defaming Marx, and later other Marxist critics including Aijaz Ahmad and Mahdi Amel Others have made similar criticisms. Most notably, Azim believed that Said was practicing what he called "reverse Orientalism," that is, essentializing the West in the same way that the Orientalists he criticized essentializing the East. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Azm worried that Said's critique of Orientalism might further reinforce the idea that Islam is inherently opposed to Western ideas, imagery and institutions.

However, it is not only Said who is criticized by Azm. He also criticized other Arab intellectuals, including the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saeed Isber), and Elias Khoury. Azim accused Khuli of being too open to the revolutionary "islamanics," those in the Middle East who were staunch supporters of an Islamic revival.

According to Brennan, he and Said never spoke again after Azm made his comments. In the late 1980s, Azim attacked the entire Palestinian intellectual and political class, including Said, in a paper for the German Islamic studies journal Die Welt des Islams , which he gave The paper proposed a provocative title: "Palestinian Zionism". He likens Said to early Zionist theorists like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Leo Pinsk. In that paper, Azm argued that Said's "idea of Palestine" had clear Hegelian affinities to the "idea of Zionism." In the end, Azim concluded that Yasser Arafat was Haim Weizmann, George Habash was the mirror image of Zevi Jaboutinsky, and Nayef Hawatmeh was Ben-Gurion of Palestine.

Still, among Said's critics, a few concede that Orientalism is only the most recent example of a tradition: it is only the result of land grabbing, labor exploitation, and political domination by the oppressed. It's just self-defense in the face of slander. Indeed, the critique of Orientalism is as old as Orientalism itself. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Arab intellectuals who traveled and studied in Europe, including Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and Rifa' a al-Tahtawi), who criticized, corrected and even satirized the writings of prominent orientalists like Sylvester de Sassi. In the 1880s, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, an influential West Asian Freeway intellectual, also forcefully refuted the French philologist Ernest Renan. Renan's vicious but typical assertion that "Islam is not conducive to scientific progress". During the anti-colonial revolutions, rebellions and uprisings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intellectuals throughout the Ottoman Empire, to be precise, throughout Asia and Africa, also frequently denounced imperial knowledge and its political implications. For the colonized, it is very basic to criticize colonial knowledge. Indian social theorist Pasha Chatterjee also recalled, "For me, a child of a successful anti-colonial struggle, Orientalism was a book that talked about what I always felt I knew. , but couldn't find the words to articulate it...it felt like, for the first time, what I've been meaning to say is being said."

As Said himself admitted, in the decade before 1978, when the structure and attitude of the empire proved to be resilient even after political decolonization, Arab intellectuals who published work in the West They are also launching increasingly fierce and sharp attacks on the building of Oriental Studies. For example, Abdu Latif Tibawi, a well-known Palestinian historian who received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1948 and has since been working and teaching in the UK, published in 1964 a short But the astute research work English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism . A year ago, the Egyptian Marxist Anour Abdel-Malek also published a long essay, “Orientalism in Crisis,” while he was in Paris. exile. Abdul-Malek mainly discusses the "Neo-Orientalism" in Europe and America and the "Eurocentrism" in the humanities and social sciences in general.

Indeed, Said's specific critique of Orientalism is inseparable from the general attack on established institutions and programmes of knowledge production that followed the global mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the midst of endless war and underdevelopment, the practical significance of imperial science became apparent, and the campus became a street. The editor of the short-lived but hugely influential Review of Middle East Studies also acknowledged this fact in 1978: "In our view, many problems in Middle East studies are also regional works.” They admit to benefiting from groups like “the Committee of Concerned Asian scholars,” which rebelled against American Cold War Asian studies during the Vietnam War. Said also gratefully refers to these efforts to "decolonize" knowledge in the final chapter of Orientalism.

Although the study of the East still has remnants of imperial designs to this day, it can be said that it has changed dramatically since Said's dissection. Even Middle Eastern studies, a field largely formed in the melting pot of the Cold War, is increasingly critical of its own institutions and origins. Said's book's impact on academia goes far beyond its specific goals. "We feminists fumbled to read Orientalism word for word," later Sandra, an anthropologist who studies Sudan and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies · Hale (Sandra Hale) in 2005 the paper "Edward Said - Accidental Feminist" ("Edward Said - Accidental Feminist") said so. Hale also noted the profound influence of Said's book on gender studies in the Middle East. Like Foucault's "History of Sex", "Orientalism" largely does not mention women, but the critique it initiates becomes a kind of writing of the future (a kind of writing devoted to exposing how empires exploited the Middle East). women came to justify war), as later Lila Abu-Lughod, Laura Nader and Suad Joseph did as scholars have stated.

But Said has never looked at his books solely from an academic point of view. In a letter to Roger Owen, a British historian who co-edited the Review of Middle East Studies with Talal Asad, Saye said De clarified the political significance of his book: "I think that book on Orientalism contributes to the struggle against imperialism." In addition to participating in intellectual events in Beirut, Said is increasingly involved Political struggles organized by Arabs like him living in America. In fact, the first draft of Said's later argument in Orientalism was, in 1968, at the request of his close friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, for a response to 1967 of the disastrous Arab-Israeli war. The book is published by the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), an organization founded in 1967 by a remarkable group of Arab intellectuals, including the philologist Muhsin Mahdi ), radical lawyer Abdeen Jabra and Abu Lukhod himself, a political scientist. Abu Luhoud and Said first met while studying at Princeton, when Said was a senior and Abu Luhoud was a Ph.D. After Princeton, the two Palestinians spent a while in Cairo, during which their relationship deepened. Brennan writes, "The elder Abu Lukhod gave guidance to Said, who he saw as a 'smart', in understanding the political uprisings in the Third World, especially the events that were unfolding in Algeria at the time. Later, Said was also deeply involved in the AAUG and in 1979 co-founded Arab Studies Quarterly (published under the auspices of the AAUG) with Abu Lukhod. The 1967 war emboldened Americans who supported Israel, but it was also a time when Palestinians intensified their political mobilization internationally against Arab governments and Western Israeli supporters. And the U.S. government and Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense League have also stepped up their scrutiny of Said, his colleagues at the AAUG and Arab Americans in general. Surveillance, Harassment, and Threats in America.

By the 1970s, though employed by Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Harvard, Said was considering leaving the United States altogether. In 1974, he wrote to Zurek to ask if he could find him a tenure-track position in Beirut: "Whatever knowledge I have about the Middle East, whatever it is, will be used (on this side) in the service of the American Empire, But why not use this knowledge to serve us ?” Although Saeed did not eventually accept the post of director of research at the Institute for Palestine Studies, his involvement in the Third World continued. In addition to Abu Lukhod, whom he calls his "guru," Said also mingled with prominent anti-war intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Iqbal Ahmed dense. And the great anticolonial theorists (especially Franz Fanon and Aimee Cesaire) have increasingly become his own, along with the Arab humanists and European Marxists he has long cited. The touchstone of thought. Said's writing is also increasingly explicit. "Now, it is time," he wrote in 1977, "to expose and destroy together the whole system of restriction, deprivation, exploitation, and oppression that degrades us and denies our sacrosanct rights as human beings. Our job is to create a true world culture of brotherhood and common cause."

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In tribute to Said's death in 2003, Brennan wrote that Said's "words came to my mind so often that I found it difficult to remember over time the What I knew before I met him—what I said and believed before I met him, and what I copied from him in contrast." Brennan's main interests over the past forty years—from humanism, Philology and Empire, to Giambattista Vico, Erich Auerbach and CLR James - also exposed the mark left by Said.

Like Said, Brennan's work is often hyper-literary, meta-critical in nature, and the themes of much of his work involve the grammar of global politics and the life course of ideas. Brennan also did not shy away from political activism. During the Reagan era, Brennan, a graduate student at Columbia University, participated in protests against U.S. interference in Nicaragua. Imperialism was Brennan's main critique. Next to this, however, is the increasingly marginal field of postcolonial studies, which he often (and occasionally exaggerates) describes as a field in which the increasingly mainstream poststructuralism seeks to confuse imperialist Social and Political Influence, Negative Anti-imperialist Criticism Before It. In that long, chapter on Said in his 2006 book Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right , Brennan argues that those Anyone who thinks that Said is a pioneer in the academic field of so-called "postcolonial studies" is wrong. The methods and motivations of postcolonialism are far from what Said did. In Brennan's view, what Said had to do in Orientalology and other writings was to understand and criticize imperialism. "Many postcolonial studies cite, but are not faithful to, Orientalism," Brennan wrote. "The book's theory went out, but its journey was not smooth."

Under Said's direction, Brennan wrote a study of Salman Rushdie's life and writings. In 1989, just as Rushdie was gaining public attention due to the controversy surrounding his novel The Satanic Verses, Brennan published his first book, Salman Rushdie and the Third World ( Salman Rushdie and the Third World ). The controversy, which came to be known as the "Rushdie affair," led to a swarm of works. A decade of rigorous thinking in the Arab world about secularism, liberalism, imperialism and literature is put to the test as followers of the same religion attack the London-based Indian Muslim for his blasphemous writings. Jayatri Chakravarti Spivak, Aga Shahid Ali, Talal Assad and many other brilliant thinkers jumped into the fray to clarify that they were writing about Rushdie position on use and abuse.

In the Marxist academic journal Social Text , Brennan also quarreled with another of Said's students, Aamir Mufti, over the interpretation and reception of Rushdie's novel. one. To the uninitiated, the language of this debate may seem cryptic. Both the Mufti and Brennan oppose the use of Rushdie's plight against Muslim groups in Europe and America in the name of so-called Western values. For Brennan, though, as a London-based Metropolitan who writes in English, Rushdie himself is involved in mostly Western conversations. Instead, the mufti argued, Rushdie participated in "the struggle for Islamic culture in the late twentieth century." The Mufti believes that Brennan obscures the nature of this global struggle under the guise of anti-imperialistism. And Brennan, in turn, accuses the Mufti (and others like Sara Suleri) of calling out "high theory" and the language of Western academia, using them to talk about "ethnic groups" ” and the fundamentally untenable argument of contemporary imperialism. Brennan concluded, "London's cultural luminaries don't speak for the Bradford factory workers."

While Brennan disdains postcolonial studies in general, there is no doubt that a fleeting passion for work that can be subsumed under the vast umbrella of postcolonialism has been crucial to his career. His angry response to the mufti (which details the breadth of his expertise in the Islamic elements of Rushdie's work) and his contributions (he was the first to explain these elements) ), just to form an irony of the ups and downs of postcolonial studies in literature departments. In the final analysis, postcolonialism never actually solidified into a doctrine, on the contrary, what is more commonly referred to as postcolonialism is nothing more than an interest among practitioners in the many effects of colonialism. This interest goes far beyond mainstream approaches to the humanities and social sciences in general. No matter how inadequate postcolonialism is in dealing with the physical reality of our colonial present, the field is gradually disappearing in American universities and replaced by geographical terms (whether world literature, global history, or "Global English-speaking world") can only be seen as a loss.

In contrast to Brennan's judgment, Said's own understanding of postcolonial studies is much more nuanced because he has always been skeptical of purely academic endeavors. At a university like Brennan where white males are overwhelmingly (in the past, and even more so today), Said readily agrees that "one of the major motifs of postcolonial studies is a and the ongoing critique of patriarchy". At the same time, however, Said is increasingly disturbed by the literary criticism and theory that American literature departments and humanities journals like Critical Inquiry and Diacritics practice and laud. In a 1992 interview, he admitted that he no longer reads "literary criticism (lit.crit.)": "It seems to me that, although ten years ago, I might have been eagerly looking forward to someone at Cornell I've written new books on literary theory and semiotics, but now I'm more interested in books that focus on African history."

Still, there is work in academia that Said applauds. In the postscript to the new 1994 edition of Oriental Studies, he listed Ammiel Alcalay's " After Arabs and Jews: Remaking Levantine Culture ," 1992), Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Moira Ferguson's Surrender to Others : British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834" ( Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 , 1992), hailing them as "rethinking, re-phrasing what was once based on the geography of people. historical experience". Said's own work is also marked by a clear rejection of this differentiation. He refuses to separate literary and historical, material and cultural, and personal and political.

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Said dedicated his eloquent 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, to his late friends Rashid Hussein and Farid Haddad (Palestinian communist, doctor , tortured to death in an Egyptian prison in 1959). To this we can add the name of Kamal Nassir, a brilliant Palestinian lawyer and author who was killed by Israeli agents in Lebanon in April 1973. Said had also dined with him the night before he was killed. The list could go on and on, adding Hanna Mikhail. Mikhail was an accomplished Arab scientist who, after earning his Ph.D. at Harvard, gave up a comfortable career at the University of Washington to join the Palestine liberation in Jordan and Lebanon under the pseudonym Abu Omar Organization, where a career has been achieved. In 1976, Umar was killed at sea during a mission with eleven others from Beirut to Tripoli. In 1994, Said wrote to a friend that "Abu Umar embodies the generous and unconventional principles that prevail in the Palestinian revolution". This is Said's world. He is in New York, but he does not belong to New York. You can't limit his life with the clichés of school fiction and the narrowness of the American literary system.

In the face of endless vilification, sarcasm, and contempt, and while his arguments are constantly being misinterpreted and maligned by critics and opponents, Said has remained unwavering in his commitment to the Palestinian people (it should be noted that Yes, Brennan also dedicated "The Mind of No Home" to the Palestinian people). Even or especially at a time when the Palestinian people have been deserted by their own leaders, Said refuses to accept the status quo or praise expediency. He was surrounded by people who respected his career and who in turn admired and admired them. As Iqbal Ahmed retired from Hampshire College, Said held back tears and delivered the following speech:

I want to... take this opportunity to represent them -- I have no right to speak for them, but I want to try -- to represent the multitudes of refugees, the people living in humble camps, the suffering people on earth (who have already Forgotten by their own leaders and their fellow Arabs and Muslims) said Iqbal was the light that guided them forward, and for that, every Palestinian is grateful to him.

Said's world is certainly not the same as ours. Today, the various institutions of Palestine have completely changed. Unlike Said's PLO in the 1970s, today's Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is no longer a gathering place for those fighting for the liberation of Palestine from all over the world, it has become an occupation for Israel Where administrative services are provided. American universities have also changed. Today, most people who teach in college (even at Columbia) worry about their jobs, housing, and health care. While true left-wing positions remain rare in universities, a growing number of fringe intellectuals—many of them young and active on the streets—are also expressing their disapproval of America’s wars at home and abroad, and its use of imperial language. opposition to the policy.

However, some things haven't changed. Israel remains fervently and belligerently committed to driving the Palestinians from Haifa to Jerusalem to Gaza. The Palestinian anthropologist Khaled Furani commented in 2008 that “for seventy years—but actually longer—[Israel] not only wanted to have more and more of its land , and want to make the Palestinians less and less.” Every day, Palestinians are killed house by house, sometimes block by block, block by block, directly or slowly, driven from their land, deprived of their livelihoods and communities. But what remains unchanged is the will of the Palestinians to resist. "The more the Palestinians persist, the more untenable Zionism becomes," wrote Said in The Question of Palestine. While the vindication of Israel appears increasingly frantic, bordering on despair, to everyone watching, public support for the Palestinian people is still resented by the American university administration and professional political class. So Said's work and example - who is the embodiment of future Palestinian freedom - remains as worthwhile as ever.

[1] Annotation: While the Mayor of Jerusalem handed Sontag the Human and Social Freedom Award, he was preparing to implement the "Sari Nsseibeh-led Al-Quds University's administration and chancellor brought it down" motion. This is of course a serious interference with the freedom of man and society, and in the opinion of many, Nusseibeh deserved the award more than Sontag had it not been for politics. These circumstances, combined with Israel's misdeeds towards Palestine, made Sontag's acceptance of the award seem ironic, hence the appeal to her not to accept it. However, the specific request mentioned here has not been found for the time being.

[2] Annotation: See Baudelaire's poem " Semper eadem ", "Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange/Vivre est un mal."

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