Abstract
The last few years have witnessed a vigorous backlash against Orientalism. Edward Said’s most influential work has been accused of sweeping denunciations of Western scholarship about the Orient as well as knee-jerk anti-Americanism and even covert support for terrorism and radical Islam. His critical stance on Western colonialism and especially Zionism meant that Said was no stranger to abuse and misrepresentation, from Edward Alexander’s coinage of the epithet ‘Professor of Terror’1 to Justus Weiner’s baseless claim that he had invented his status as a Palestinian and a refugee. Said’s argument in Orientalism is, of course, that the purportedly disinterested study of the Orient frequently perpetuates age-old prejudices about the East that make it easier to denigrate the region and justify its domination. However over-determined its reception was by specifically academic and institutional trends, Orientalism’s confrontational tone and its appearance in the late 1970s along with its author’s forthright advocacy of the Palestinians’ national aspirations meant the book was soon caught up in the passionate ideological disagreements surrounding the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, Israel’s accelerating expansionism after the 1967 war and the election of the first Likud government in 1977, and the general audibility of the Arab and Islamic worlds. In short, this was a book pitched into the tented field of political controversy.
A person skilled in the ‘art’ of questioning is a person who can prevent questions from being suppressed by the dominant opinion
(Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 361)
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Notes
Edward Alexander, ‘Professor of Terror,’ Commentary 88, no. 2 (1989), 49–50.
Perry Anderson, ‘On the Concatenation in the Arab World,’ New Left Review 68 (2011), 5–15.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 271. Said engages with Clifford’s arguments very generously in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8–9.
Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto, 1999).
Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), 24.
Neil Lazarus, ‘The Fetish of “the West” in Postcolonial Theory,’ in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 43–64.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1978]), 4.
Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 39.
Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11. I too have argued that Orientalism’s inattention to resistance makes it a somewhat anomalous work in Said’s oeuvre, Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (London: Palgrave, 2011), 166–76.
Neil Larsen, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (London: Verso, 2001), 27.
Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso, 2002), 230.
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992 [1979]), 231–2.
Edward W. Said, ‘The Clash of Definitions,’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Said (London: Granta, 2000), 569–90.
Neil Lazarus, ‘Representations of the Intellectual in Representations of the Intellectual,’ Research in African Literatures 36, no. 3 (2005), 116; Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 93–125.
Erich Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur,’ trans. Maire and Edward Said, The Centennial Review 13 (1969), 12–16.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968 [1953]), 557. See Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 5–9.
Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge, 1965), 21.
Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002), 138.
Bertolt Brecht, Poems: 1913–1956, eds. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1976), 440.
Zachary Lockman, ‘Behind the Battles over US Middle East Studies,’ http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/lockman_interv.html [accessed 10 July 2010] Said’s antecedents include the Egyptian Marxist Anouar Abdel Malek’s ‘Orientalism in Crisis,’ Diogenes 44 (1963), 104–12; Samir Amin’s, Arab Nation (London: Zed, 1978); and Hichem Djait’s, L’Europe et l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (New York: Prometheus, 2007), 11.
Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 254.
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 264; Denis Porter, ‘Orientalism and Its Problems,’ in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (London: Harvester, 1993), 151; Lazarus, “Representations of the Intellectual in Representations of the Intellectual”, 115–16; and Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 129–32.
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), 49–53.
John M. Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Leila Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin de Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); and Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Edward W. Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 110.
Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (London: Granta, 2002).
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2007), 167.
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© 2013 Robert Spencer
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Spencer, R. (2013). The ‘War on Terror’ and the Backlash against Orientalism . In: Elmarsafy, Z., Bernard, A., Attwell, D. (eds) Debating Orientalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341112_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341112_9
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