Edward Said and Critical Decolonization: Revised Edition

292 Pages·2007·1.71 MB·English

by  Ferial Ghazoul (editor)

Edward Said
Critical
Danedcolonization

Edward Said
Critical
Danedcolonization
Edited by
Ferial J. Ghazoul
The American University in Cairo Press
Cairo New York
This edition published in Egypt in 2007 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright ©2007 by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the
American University in Cairo.
First published in a slightly different form as the English section of Alif: Journal of
Comparative Poetics25 in 2005.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 25026/06
ISBN 978 977 416 087 5
1 2 3 4 5 6 12 11 10 09 08 07
Cover photograph of Edward W. Said ©2001 by Annie Leibovitz/Contact Press Images,
courtesy of the artist.
Printed in Egypt
Contents
Preface.................................................................................................7
Remembering Edward Said...............................................................8
Hoda Guindi: “Of the Place”....................................................9
Michael Wood: Desperate Youth............................................12
Andrew N. Rubin: Edward.....................................................15
Ananya Jahanara Kabir: Becoming Minor: On Some Significant
Encounters with Edward Said........................................18
Najla Said: Tribute to My Father.............................................21
Edward W. Said: On the University.................................................26
Stathis Gourgouris: The Late Style of Edward Said.........................37
Moustafa Bayoumi: Reconciliation without Duress: Said, Adorno,
and the Autonomous Intellectual..............................................46
Yumna Siddiqi: Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism.......65
Rubén Chuaqui: Notes on Edward Said’s View of Michel Foucault..89
Richard H. Armstrong: Last Words: Said, Freud, and Traveling Theory..120
David LeHardy Sweet: Edward Said and the Avant-Garde............149
Fadwa AbdelRahman: Said and Achebe: Writers at the Crossroads
of Culture...............................................................................177
Youssef Yacoubi: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad, and Salman Rushdie:
Resisting the Ambivalence of Postcolonial Theory................193
Rokus de Groot: Perspectives of Polyphony in Edward Said’s Writings...219
Daisuke Nishihara: Said, Orientalism, and Japan...........................241
Terry Eagleton: Edward Said, Cultural Politics, and Critical Theory
(An Interview)........................................................................254
Yasmine Ramadan: A Bibliographical Guide to Edward Said................270
Notes on Contributors....................................................................288
I take criticism so seriously as to believe that,
even in the midst of a battle in which one is
unmistakenly on one side against another,
there should be criticism, because there
must be critical consciousness if there are to
be issues, problems, values, even lives to be
fought for. . . . Criticism must think of itself
as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed
to every form of tyranny, domination, and
abuse; its social goals are noncoercive
knowledge produced in the interests of
human freedom.
Edward W. Said
Preface
Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was one of the most respected
academic scholars in the field of literary criticism and cultural studies
as well as one of the most charismatic Third World intellectuals. His
contribution to the theory and practice of decolonization and resistance
to hegemony has been global. His ideas have inspired and moved peo-
ple across borders and in various disciplines.
Writing both for specialists in academia and for average readers
in periodicals and newspapers, Said was able to chart new roads with
his scholarly works and to mobilize world opinion in his more popu-
lar writing and lectures. His background as a Palestinian Arab and his
education in British and American elite institutions gave him a bi-focal
vision and an understanding of the dispossessed as well as the privi-
leged. This book aims at revealing Said’s multi-faceted career and his
complexity and richness as a writer, activist, theoretician, musician,
and above all as a humanist. There are touching testimonies by friends,
relatives, students, and colleagues, which throw light on his personal-
ity. There are articles situating Said in relation to other minds that have
marked his thought in the context of contemporary debates: Theodor
Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Eqbal Ahmad, among
others. An interview with a prominent Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, on
the politics and poetics of Said throws further light on how Said is per-
ceived in leftist circles. Contributors to this book come from the
Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, attesting to the wide interest in
Saidian thought.
Said’s view of the University and its role in society—a subject
that was dear to him—was encapsulated in his commencement address,
delivered when he received an honorary doctorate from the American
University in Cairo in 1999, and reproduced here. An extensive English
bibliography of works written by, and on, Said is provided with the lat-
est updates. This book is based on the English section of the special
issue of Alif(published in 2005). For other articles in Arabic on Edward
Said, consult Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics25.
My sincere thanks to dozens of people in the Alifteam and at the
AUC Press who helped in publishing this book, and in particular to
Walid El Hamamsy, Editorial Manager of Alif, Neil Hewison,
Associate Director for Editorial Programs at the AUC Press, and
Tarek El-Elaimy, Editorial Assistant at the AUCPress.
Ferial J. Ghazoul
7
Remembering
Edward Said
“Of the Place”
Hoda Guindi
I would like to stress at the outset that what I am going to
say is drawn from—probably—collective memories because the
Saids and the Guindis (Edward’s and my families) have been
friends for over sixty years—and through three generations:
grandparents, parents and children, i.e. Edward and his sisters and
us—through all the vicissitudes of life. Even death has not, and
cannot, sever the bonds of friendship.
Elsewhere,1 my sister has written a personal memoir of
Edward’s Out of Placeand thus we share some of the same memories
but have somewhat different interpretations!
I take Out of Place as my point of departure and one particular
sentence from the Preface:
Along with language, it is geography—especially in
the displaced form of departures, arrivals, farewells,
exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging, and travel
itself—that is at the core of my memories of those
early years.2
This struck an immediate chord in my memory; I suddenly realized
that my first memory—perhaps “fictionally historical”—(as I was a
mere tot!) of the relationship between the Saids and the Guindis,
Edward and his two sisters and my sister and myself (there were fur-
ther additions to both families later), were of departures and farewells,
arrivals and welcomes. On this occasion, fortunately, the departure of
the Saids at the time of El Alamein (1942)was followed, not long
after, by an “arrival”—to us, a return.
In the first paragraph of his first chapter, Edward writes of his
“overriding sensation . . . of always being out of place.”3 Ironically,
and perhaps paradoxically, my early memories of Edward are ground-
ed on and rooted in places—for even that first departure is indelibly
associated with a particular place—the lift and stairwell—in a partic-
ular building in a particular district of Cairo: Zamalek.
The Saids and the Guindis were friends and neighbors—we
lived, respectively, on the fifth and second floors of the building—
which meant that there was a continual toing and froing between flats.
9