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CIAO DATE: 07/04
Spring 2004 (Volume XXXIII, Number 3, Issue 131)
From The Editor
Essays In Honor of Edward W. Said
The Intellectual Life of Edward Said by Joseph Massad
This essay examines Edward Said’s philosophy of intellectual life and what an intellectual vocation entails. Said’s major contribution, Orientalism, is discussed in light of his own concept of "traveling theory" and its impact on various disciplines, especially postcolonial studies. Said’s views on Palestine and the Palestinians are also elaborated and contextualized in his own oeuvre. Finally, the essay discusses Said’s interest in musical performance and attempts to read his work “musically,“ showing how all his interests are part of a larger whole that constitutes his intellectual legacy
Edward Said and Comparative Literature by Timothy Brennan
Between 1969 and 1979, Edward Said redefined American comparative literature, coining phrases, supplying a new critical pantheon (Vico, Schwab), and, above all, devising a method. Falling between generations and facing two different kinds of continental émigré—one philological, the other textualist—Said outmaneuvered the latter by reinterpreting the former. In a two-pronged move, he unleashed an arsenal of arguments against both new critical formalism and its latter-day avatars in “theory.” With these arguments, his authority was penetrating and atmospherically felt as he chipped away at the edifice of traditional comparative literature by emphasizing the situatedness of form and the transitive intelligence of humanist intellectuals.
Edward Said and Anthropology by Nicholas B. Dirks
Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, it has been virtually impossible to study the colonial world without explicit or implicit reference to Edward Said’s charge that the sources, basic categories, and assumptions of anthropologists, historians of the colonial world, and area studies experts (among others) have been shaped by colonial rule. This article charts Said’s influence on anthropology, tracing both anthropology’s engagement with colonialism and the frequently ambivalent (and sometimes defensive) responses within the field to Said’s critique. The article also considers the larger terrain of Said’s engagement with the field, from his concern about its “literary” turn of the 1980s to his call for U.S. anthropology explicitly to confront the imperial conditions not only of its epistemological inheritance but also of its present position. Though Said’s direct writings on the discipline have been limited, the article concludes that anthropology has not only learned a great deal from Said’s critique, but has become one of the most important sites for the productive elaboration and exploration of his ideas.
The “Postcolonial” in Translation: Reading Said in Hebrew by Ella Shohat
The essay focuses on the “travel” of various debates—orientalism, postcolonialism, postzionism—between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the “translation” of Said’s ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Said’s work is engaged in its contradictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined include: the nature of the “post” in the concepts of the “post-colonial” and “post-Zionism”; the problem of “hybridity” and “resistance” in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo-American academy, of the “subaltern” intellectual.
Edward Said’s Intellectual Legacy in the Arab World by Sabry Hafez
This article discusses Edward Said’s intellectual legacy in the Arab world. After examining Said’s own cultural influences, the trajectory of his early academic career in America, and his “re-orientation” towards his Arab identity and culture following the 1967 war, the author focuses on the reception of his works in Arab intellectual circles. Though Orientalism was initially misperceived through the frame of identity politics, his theoretical writings exerted a steadily growing impact on Arab criticism, particularly by offering a way out of its methodological dependency on the West. The author suggests that Said’s final role as an oppositional intellectual “speaking truth to power,’ which reached beyond the Arab intelligentsia to a broader audience, may in the final analysis be his most lasting contribution.
A Musical and Personal Collaboration: Daniel Barenboim Talks about Edward Said by Rashid Khalidi
Report
Return to Rafah: Journey to a Land Out of Bounds by Jennifer Loewenstein
This personal account by an American woman returning to Rafah after several years illustrates the extreme conditions that characterize daily life in the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip and the difficulties getting in to witness what is happening.
Recent Books
Kimmerling and Migdal: The Palestinian People: A History reviewed by Saleh Abdel Jawad
Fleischmann: The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920–1948 reviewed by Islah Jad
Rubenberg: Palestinian Women: Patriarchy and Resistance in the West Bank reviewed by Julie Peteet
Said: Freud and the Non-European reviewed by Neville Hoad
Barsamian and Said: Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said reviewed by Bashir Abu-Manneh
Kimmerling: Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians reviewed by Peretz Kidron
&Acute;lvarez-Ossorio and Barreñada: España y la cuestión palestina [Spain and the Palestine question] reviewed by Ferran Izquierdo Brichs
Little: American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 reviewed by Lawrence Davidson
Boyne: The Two O’Clock War: The 1973 Yom Kippur Conflict and the Airlift That Saved Israel reviewed by Donald Neff
Boykin: Cursed Is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat versus the Israeli General, Beirut 1982 reviewed by Philip C. Wilcox, Jr
Arab Views
Quarterly Update On Conflict And Diplomacy
Settlement Monitor
Documents and Source Material
International
A1. UN Sec.-Gen. Kofi Annan, Report to the UN General Assembly concerning Israel’s Construction of the Separation Wall in the Occupied Territories, New York, 24 November 2003 (excerpts)
A2. British House of Commons International Development Committee, Report on Development Assistance and the Occupied Territories, London, 5 February 2004 (excerpts)
Arab
B. Fatah Cadres, Letter of Resignation from the Movement Addressed to PA President Yasir Arafat, n.p., 7 February 2004 (excerpts)
Israel
C1. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Speech Outlining a Unilateral “Disengagement Plan,” Herzliya, 18 December 2003 (excerpts)
C2. Revisionist Historian Benny Morris, Interview on Zionism, the 1948 Expulsions, and the Clash of Civilizations, Jerusalem, n.d
C3. Israeli Air Force Pilot Yonathan Shapira, Testimony on Duty in the Occupied Territories, n.p., n.d., (excerpts)
United States
D1. U.S. Congress, Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (PL 108-175), Washington, 12 December 2003
D2. Wall Street Journal, “Bernard Lewis’s Blueprint: Sowing Arab Democracy,” New York, 3 February 200
D3. State Department, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2003: “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” Washington, 25 February 2004 (excerpts)
Chronology
Bibliography of Periodical Literature