'The last Jewish intellectual'

[Englander]

Writers and thinkers from around the world gathered in London last week to pay tribute to the late Edward Said. Frederick Bowie reflects on the legacy of a man who offered the Arab world a new perspective on itself.

14 - 20 October 2004
Al-Ahram Weekly
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/712/cu1.htm



>> The contrapuntal nature of Said's thought was at the heart of last week's conference, Edward W. Said (1935-2003): A Continuing Legacy, organised by the Palestine Society of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and supported by the Sir Joseph Hotung Research Programme in Law, Human Rights and Peace Building in the Middle East. For it was the explicit intention of the organisers, led by Awad Joumaa, to pay tribute to Said not through passive memorials, but by actively and critically engaging with his work.

>> One recurring theme was the role which Said's work, and in particular Orientalism, had played in the creation of a whole new academic discipline -- the field of post-colonial studies, from which Said was always careful to distance himself. Neil Lazarus argued that Said was right to do so, since by dismissing the tools of anti-imperialism as "unhelpful", post-colonial studies had ended up rationalising and adjusting to the failure of the decolonisation process, rather than extending the challenge to it. As Lazarus said, nothing could have been further from Said's own commitment to the possible liberation of the Palestinian people.

>>Other speakers sought to address Said's contrapuntal style less by dissecting it, than by applying it. Tom Paulin discussed Said's lexical debt to Yeats, and gave his own conflictual reading of a sonnet by Gerald Manley Hopkins. Nadia Abul-Haj discussed the play of narrative and counter-narrative in the field of biblical archeology. Joseph Massad, meanwhile, took Said's own conception of "beginning" versus "origin" and used it to investigate both Said's personal history, and the intertwined histories of orientalism and anti-semitism. "Said," Massad argued, "was able to see Zionism as a brand of anti- semitism, which produced the Palestinian as the Jew," while repressing its own intellectual and cultural heritage. It was in this sense that Said was able to tell Ha'aretz towards the end of his life that he considered himself to be "the last Jewish intellectual".

>>As the conference drew to a close, the sense of grief which was never far away throughout the day was woven closely with the challenge of the present and expectations for the future. With Said's death still so close and his loss still so vivid to many of those present, there was little room for naive optimism. Nor did the larger world outside the hall collaborate to provide much cause for hope.<<

[shadu]

1. With a title like that, I knew it was not about Sharon

Interesting piece