EDWARD SAID The field of post-colonial studies would not be what it is today without the work of Edward Said. Similarly, he has played a vital role in bringing the plight of Palestine before a world audience. This volume introduces the ideas at the heart of Said’s work, both scholarly and journalistic. Together these ideas make a highly influential statement on the nature of identity formation in the post- colonial world and offer a new understanding of the links between text or critic and their material contexts (‘the world’). The authors ask why this work has proved so important, examining its contexts, implications and impact. With its accessible style, clear explanations of key terms, end-of- chapter summaries and fully annotated guide to further reading, this revised and fully updated edition of a book first published in 1999 is the ideal companion for readers new to Said. Bill Ashcroft teaches English at the University of New South Wales. Pal Ahluwalia teaches Politics at the University of Adelaide. Both have published widely in the field of post-colonial studies. ROUTLEDGE CRITICAL THINKERS essential guides for literary studies Series editor: Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London Routledge Critical Thinkers is a series of accessible introductions to key figures in contemporary critical thought. With a unique focus on historical and intellectual contexts, each volume examines a key theorist’s: (cid:127) significance (cid:127) motivation (cid:127) key ideas and their sources (cid:127) impact on other thinkers. Concluding with extensively annotated guides to further reading, Routledge Critical Thinkers are the literature student’s passport to today’s most exciting critical thought. Already available: Fredric Jameson by Adam Roberts Jean Baudrillard by Richard J.Lane Sigmund Freud by Pamela Thurschwell Edward Said by Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia Forthcoming: Paul de Man Maurice Blanchot Judith Butler Frantz Fanon For further details on this series, see www.literature.routledge.com/rct EDWARD SAID Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia London and New York First published 1999 This edition published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. First edition © 1999 Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia This edition © 2001 Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia The right of Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ashcroft, Bill, 1946– Edward Said/Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Said, Edward W. 2. Politics and literature. 3. Criticism—Political aspects. I. Ahluwalia, D.P.S. (D.Pal S.) II. Title. PN51.A862001 801'.95'092–dc21 00–062747 ISBN 0-415-24777-2 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-24778-0 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-13712-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-18015-1 (Glassbook Format) CONTENTS Series editor’s preface vii WHY SAID? 1 KEY IDEAS 11 1 Worldliness: the text 13 2 Worldliness: the critic 29 3 Orientalism 49 4 Culture as imperialism 85 5 Palestine 117 AFTER SAID 137 FURTHER READING 143 Works cited 157 Index 163 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The books in this series offer introductions to major critical thinkers who have influenced literary studies and the humanities. The Routledge Critical Thinkers series provides the books you can turn to first when a new name or concept appears in your studies. Each book will equip you to approach a key thinker’s original texts by explaining her or his key ideas, putting them into context and, perhaps most importantly, showing you why this thinker is considered to be significant. The emphasis is on concise, clearly written guides which do not presuppose a specialist knowledge. Although the focus is on particular figures, the series stresses that no critical thinker ever existed in a vacuum but, instead, emerged from a broader intellectual, cultural and social history. Finally, these books will act as a bridge between you and the thinker’s original texts: not replacing them but rather complementing what she or he wrote. These books are necessary for a number of reasons. In his 1997 autobiography, Not Entitled, the literary critic Frank Kermode wrote of a time in the 1960s: On beautiful summer lawns, young people lay together all night, recovering from their daytime exertions and listening to a troupe of Balinese musicians. Under their blankets or their sleeping bags, they would chat drowsily about the gurus of the time…What they repeated was largely hearsay; hence my lunchtime suggestion, quite impromptu, for a series of short, very cheap books offering authoritative but intelligible introductions to such figures. There is still a need for ‘authoritative and intelligible introductions’. But this series reflects a different world from the 1960s. New thinkers have emerged and the reputations of others have risen and fallen, as new research has developed. New methodologies and challenging ideas have spread through the arts and humanities. The study of literature is no longer—if it ever was—simply the study and evaluation of poems, novels and plays. It is also the study of the ideas, issues and difficulties which arise in any literary text and in its interpretation. Other arts and humanities subjects have changed in analogous ways. With these changes, new problems have emerged. The ideas and issues behind these radical changes in the humanities are often presented without reference to wider contexts or as theories which you can simply ‘add on’ to the texts you read. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with picking out selected ideas or using what comes to hand— indeed, some thinkers have argued that this is, in fact, all we can do. However, it is sometimes forgotten that each new idea comes from the pattern and development of somebody’s thought and it is important to study the range and context of their ideas. Against theories ‘floating in space’, the Routledge Critical Thinkers series places key thinkers and their ideas firmly back in their contexts. More than this, these books reflect the need to go back to the thinker’s own texts and ideas. Every interpretation of an idea, even the most seemingly innocent one, offers its own ‘spin’, implicitly or explicitly. To read only books on a thinker, rather than texts by that thinker, is to deny yourself a chance of making up your own mind. Sometimes what makes a significant figure’s work hard to approach is not so much its style or content as the feeling of not knowing where to start. The purpose of these books is to give you a ‘way in’ by offering an accessible overview of these thinkers’ ideas and works and by guiding your further reading, starting with each thinker’s own texts. To use a metaphor from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), these books are ladders, to be thrown away after you have climbed to the next level. Not only, then, do they equip you to approach new ideas, but also they empower you, by leading you back to a theorist’s own texts and encouraging you to develop your own informed opinions. Finally, these books are necessary because, just as intellectual needs have changed, the education systems around the world—the contexts in which introductory books are usually read—have changed radically, too. What was suitable for the minority higher education system of the 1960s is not suitable for the larger, wider, more diverse, high technology education systems of the twenty-first century. These changes SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE call not just for new up-to-date introductions but new methods of presentation. The presentational aspects of Routledge Critical Thinkers have been developed with today’s students in mind. Each book in the series has a similar structure. They begin with a section offering an overview of the life and ideas of each thinker and explaining why she or he is important. The central section of each book discusses the thinker’s key ideas, their context, evolution and reception. Each book concludes with a survey of the thinker’s impact, outlining how their ideas have been taken up and developed by others. In addition, there is a detailed final section suggesting and describing books for further reading. This is not a ‘tacked-on’ section but an integral part of each volume. It opens with brief descriptions of the thinker’s key works and concludes with information on the most useful critical works and, where appropriate, websites. This section will guide you in your reading, enabling you to follow your interests and develop your own projects. Throughout each book, references are given in what is known as the Harvard system (the author and the date of a work cited are given in the text and you can look up the full details in the bibliography at the back). This offers a lot of information in very little space. The books also explain technical terms and use boxes to describe events or ideas in more detail, away from the main emphasis of the discussion. Boxes are also used at times to highlight definitions of terms frequently used or coined by a thinker. In this way, the boxes serve as a kind of glossary, easily identified when flicking through the book. The thinkers in the series are ‘critical’ for three reasons. First, they are examined in the light of subjects which involve criticism: principally literary studies or English and cultural studies, but also other disciplines which rely on the criticism of books, ideas, theories and unquestioned assumptions. Second, they are critical because studying their work will provide you with a ‘tool kit’ for your own informed critical reading and thought, which will make you critical. Third, these thinkers are critical because they are crucially important: they deal with ideas and questions which can overturn conventional understandings of the world, of texts, of everything we take for granted, leaving us with a deeper understanding of what we already knew and with new ideas. No introduction can tell you everything. However, by offering a way into critical thinking, this series hopes to begin to engage you in an activity which is productive, constructive and potentially life-changing. WHY SAID? Edward Said is one of the most widely known, and controversial, intellectuals in the world today. He is that rare breed of academic critic who is also a vocal public intellectual, having done more than any other person to place the plight of Palestine before a world audience. His importance as a cultural theorist has been established in two areas: his foundational place in the growing school of post- colonial studies, particularly through his book Orientalism; and his insistence on the importance of the ‘worldliness’ or material contexts of the text and the critic. This insistence placed him, for a time, outside the mainstream of contemporary theory, but has been soundly vindicated as the political and cultural functions of literary writing have been re-confirmed. Why read Edward Said? No other cultural critic has revealed so powerfully how ‘down to earth’ theory really is, for it comes to being in some place, for a particular reason, and with a particular history. This is nowhere truer than in Edward Said’s own theory. For whether he is talking about English literature, about the complexities of texts and how they are formed, about the ways in which the West exerted power over the Oriental world, about the functions of intellectuals in society, or even about music, his own place as an exiled Palestinian intellectual is constantly inflected in his work. A second reason to read Said is linked to this: for a distinguished academic and American citizen, this identity as a Palestinian is extremely paradoxical and demonstrates just how