{"id":17036,"date":"2020-05-21T22:03:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-22T03:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/?p=17036"},"modified":"2020-05-24T22:05:55","modified_gmt":"2020-05-25T03:05:55","slug":"the-worlds-of-edward-said","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/2020\/05\/21\/the-worlds-of-edward-said\/","title":{"rendered":"The Worlds of Edward Said"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rashid Khalidi: Said\u2019s alienation and worldliness were at the heart of the complexity and richness of his work; they lent him a sharper awareness of and sympathy for other cultures and stirred inside him a pointed disdain for the placid provincialism and monoglot lack of reflection among many leading figures in the American academy. Although he shared the class and educational background of many of his peers, he insisted that we see beyond the parochial bounds of the ivory tower and the self-referential culture of the West. While this critical attitude was expressed most saliently in Orientalism, it characterized much of Said\u2019s mature work, both critical and political. In one of his last offerings, \u201cThe Return to Philology\u201d (on what he called this \u201cmost unmodern\u201d branch of learning), his erudite analysis is informed by a sense of the larger stakes of the specific political moment: the war in Iraq and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright\u2019s casual dismissal in 1996 of the thousands of Iraqi deaths in that decade as a result of US-mandated sanctions.

Said deftly interlaced philosophy and literature with political critique. Although his political writings could be blunt, even scalding, he most often wielded a sharp scalpel in his criticism and did so with elegance and \u00e9lan.

[\u2026] As After Said and the Selected Works reveal, Said was not only politically committed; he never really stopped arguing. His vision remained, to the end, both worldly and alienated. He insisted that we see past our own national or parochial cultures in order to better understand them. He called on us to expand the narrowness of our moral and political imaginations and to see the world in its entirety as our common home. As an exile as comfortable in New York as in Beirut, Cairo, Paris, or London, he infused his literary style with a cosmopolitan ease and his often urgent politics with a cosmopolitan humanism\u2014a humanism that remains a potent antidote to the cloistered and often nationalist chauvinism that seems to be ascendant even in an age of global crises.

Said\u2019s internationalism and cosmopolitan humanism are perhaps his most important legacies. Human life and its challenges\u2014whether they be pandemics, climate change, perpetual war, or neoliberal policies that impoverish the many to enrich the few\u2014force us past the confines of national or cultural boundaries. One can only imagine how Said would have responded to the malign forces that have sabotaged the effective handling of these ongoing crises. As Saree Makdisi proposes in \u201cOrientalism Today,\u201d \u201cthe most appropriate thing\u201d in the face of such folly \u201cwould be to read Edward Said all over again, as though for the very first time.\u201d More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rashid Khalidi: Said\u2019s alienation and worldliness were at the heart of the complexity and richness of his work; they lent him a sharper awareness of and sympathy for other cultures and stirred inside him a pointed disdain for the placid provincialism and monoglot lack of reflection among many leading figures in the American academy. Although … Continue reading The Worlds of Edward Said<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17037,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036\/revisions\/17037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}