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Obituary
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The politics of dispossession, belonging, and hope: remembering Edward W. Said.
This article develops a critical appreciation of the work of Edward Said. It seeks to disentangle some of the most important themes in his work in relation to the dilemmas and contradictions of his life, and to assess their political implications. KEYWORDS: Orientalism, dislocation, representation, self-determination, political intellectual.
********** To celebrate the life, work, and legacy of a prominent scholar is not an unproblematic endeavor since there is great temptation in selecting only the positive, the complimentary, perhaps even the mundane at the expense of a rigorous analysis of the real contribution the scholar made to our ways of looking at the world. This can be seen in the many flattering obituaries published since Edward W. Said died on September 25, 2003, after a twelve-year battle with leukaemia. While all have rightly paid tribute to his importance as a critical thinker of global stature, (1) too many who eulogized him never recognized the importance of his ideas enough to take them seriously in their own work when he was still alive. (2) More widely, Edward Said made many enemies in his life, some academic, some political: in the United States, where his fight for the Palestinian cause earned him vicious intellectual and character attacks, in some circles in Israel of course, but also among some Palestinians as a consequence of his disenchantment with the leadership of Yassir Arafat. By eschewing advocacy for a particular side, he effectively antagonized all those who had a stake in the blind acceptance of the idea of "sides." Politically, Said functioned in a triple paradox: he was a US citizen criticizing US foreign policy, a Palestinian criticizing Arab leadership, an intellectual who believed in the right of Israel to exist but who condemned the dispossession of the Palestinians in this process. To some, he was simply wrong; to others he was dangerous. A few even branded him a traitor, and threats on his life were common. In other words, it would be facile but wrong to describe Said as a universally respected man. As a result, my aim here is not simply to eulogize the work of Edward Said, however important he may have been to the development of my own work, and to that of at least some of my colleagues in Middle Eastern studies. I want to untangle some of the most important themes of his work, and the dilemmas and contradictions of his life, as a means to further our understanding of his intellectual legacy, both politically and culturally. This implies engaging with his life, his work, and also his critics. My emphasis will be placed primarily on the political implications of Said's work, but I also hope to allude to some of the themes of his work on literature and music. To begin with however, it is fitting to discuss his roots and upbringing, and the uncommon turns that took him from Jerusalem to the US intellectual Ivy League. An Arab Called Edward Edward Wadie Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, but, as a result of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, he spent much of his teenage y...See the full content of this document
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