#edward said

[junglejim4322]

Pdf of The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

[kropotkindersurprise]

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once - there has to be a limit” - Edward Said

[sivavakkiyar]

Woah cool time. Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile & Other Essays as a very readable pdf. It contains a lot of his casual critical essays, a lot of him at his best. It can be a fun and educational one to just kinda poke around in v exciting

[hatikvah-shalom]

Have you are/are you going to read anything by Edward Said? From what I hear he’s not a total hack, and as an academic I feel like I should read it for completionism (my academic parents already have some of his books, so I wouldn’t even be buying them), but like. I know anything he has to say is gonna be laced with antisemitism

I’ve only read Orientalism, and it was several years ago; I found and revised some of my old notes if you want a brief overview:

- It does not acknowledge that for most of European history, the Eastern Other was represented by the Jews and the Romani, which would be more useful to understanding modern European Othering than reaching back to Aeschylus and trying to impose modern racial concepts on ancient Athens and Persia.

- It invents a new and largely superfluous word for racism; Orientalism is structurally identical to most other forms of racism, and Said is parroting what many black American thinkers had been saying for decades, but presenting it as his own new idea, which gets annoying very quickly.

- Said is a literature professor trying to establish a theory of sociology primarily out of European classic novels. I don’t entirely disagree with this approach — I believe that literature is an important reflection of any society — but it would be stronger if there were a precedent that went beyond literary theory. His scope in the book is (among ten other abstractions) to bring literary theory into the decolonial framework, but I think it would be more useful if there were an actual pre-existing sociological foundation that it drew on, rather than inventing the social theory out of literary criticism. He’s outside of his jurisdiction here, and it hurts his writing.

- This is a personal pet peeve, but he’s very openly an academic disciple of Foucault and mimics his writing style, which I find tedious. Like Foucault, he is addicted to word vomiting every thought and counter-thought in his mind; it takes him pages to say what really ought to be a single paragraph, and Said doesn’t even have the excuse of writing in French.

- He takes issue with Western academia encouraging its scholars to separate their works from the politics of their life — as a professor at Columbia University, he had an enormous impact on the culture of campus activism in the US — and while I don’t entirely disagree with him on the political events of one’s life contributing to their academic work, his approach to this is very frustrating, considering he outright lies about the events of his life to further his political ambitions.

- His focus in writing the book is on the “intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies” that went into the “making of an imperialist tradition like Orientalism,” including “philology, lexicography, novel writing, and lyric poetry.” I love classic literature, and I have a deep regard for it, but I can’t justify taking a social theory as large and broad as Orientalism and basing a good chunk of it on the poetry of Lord Byron and the first twenty years of Victor Hugo’s work (he uses Hugo as a pillar of Orientalism — which is fair; Hugo renovated his Paris townhouse to look more Japanese, and wrote Notre Dame and Les Orientales with clear contemporary prejudice, so there’s a lot to work with, but I am frustrated that we limit Hugo to the first twenty years of his work and ignore his later writings which would influence many progressive writers that Said draws from, especially Sartre and Foucault).

- Said flattens English, French, and American culture into a monolith when it comes to their interactions with and understanding of the Middle East, which I find frustratingly vague and unhelpful, like the rest of this book.

- Large swaths of the book are French quotes without translations. In fairness, much of it is elementary French and fairly easy to parse out if you have a basic French background, but it is a bit of a barrier.

- He tries to create a clear through-line from Aeschylus’ play The Persians, to Shakespeare, to the boom of European interest in the Middle East following the Napoleonic Wars/Greece’s War of Independence, to modern American wars. This is a much bigger task than he is prepared to take on, and it falls apart even before he tries to categorize anti-Turkish bigotry and anti-Indian bigotry as the same social ill. I do sympathize with the trouble of biting off more than you can chew in a thesis statement, but Said only doubles down on the broadness that undermines his argument; his ambitions are much greater than his skill.

- Critique of American culture from an Arab perspective is seen as noble, brave, and righteous, and I do think that American society should be criticized often and well, to make it stronger and better. Critique of Arab culture from an American perspective, however, such as the prevalence of honor killings, social prestige-by-conquest, social shunning of nonconformists, and political inability to admit error, are seen as attacks on the Arab people and a slight upon their honor, which does nothing to disprove the claim. I will say— even accepting the role America has played in wreaking havoc on the Middle East — my greatest frustration with Middle Eastern scholarship is how fiercely its leaders fight against internal critique and introspection.

- Most criticism I’ve seen of this book says that Said is a good writer without many original ideas. I found some of the ideas intriguing, especially regarding Europe’s racialization of the Eastern Other, but the gaps, omissions, and misrepresentations in Said’s history were maddening, and I found his writing style to be tedious. He’s known for his later efforts to replace Jewish suffering in the Western consciousness with Palestinian suffering, but I was surprised that he mostly omits the Jews in this book; his audience is Christian, and he caters to a Christian understanding of history. I suspect that Orientalism would not have gained the importance that it currently holds if Said were not a Palestinian* Arab. I also find it frustratingly bioessentialist; while Said is right to criticize the armchair anthropology that runs rampant throughout much of 1800s European literature, he doesn’t ever give a counterexample of a person from the West engaging honestly and respectfully with Eastern cultures, and even modern attempts to do so are read in the worst possible faith. His argument seems to be that Eastern people and Western people are fundamentally incapable of understanding each other, which seems very reactionary to me. It’s an interesting read, but not enough to justify its place in the Postmodern Canon. As literary criticism, it has merit, but as a theory of sociology it falls flat.

*Said is actually an Egyptian Arab, but he claims Palestinian identity on the basis of being born in Jerusalem while his mother was on vacation. He fabricated a backstory of a childhood in Jerusalem and claimed that Jewish philosopher Martin Buber stole his house in 1948, but in actuality Said was raised in Cairo and London and didn’t experience the Nakba. Buber rented an apartment from Said’s aunt in Jerusalem during the 1930s, and never owned the property, stolen or otherwise.

[albertserra]

Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed el-Kurd, 2025.

Edward Said at the border of Lebanon and Israel, July 2000.

[notaplaceofhonour]

You’re telling me for decades Edward Said claimed to grow up in Palestine when he actually grew up in the richest neighborhood in Cairo?

And the pro-coexistence Jewish philosopher Said publicly accused of stealing “his” house after 1948 just rented the basement from Said’s uncle before Said’s aunt had the guy & his family evicted in 1942?

What a fucking grifter.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Are you familiar with Edward Said's work? If so, I would love to read your thoughts on it.

Said was a great stylist, an influential literary critic, and a sloppy, dishonest, hypocritical ideologue engaged in historical revisionism.

Said's central claim in Orientalism is that Western scholarship about the "East" functioned as a tool of domination, flattening diverse societies into a single, inferior "Other." There's definitely insight in that - some Western scholarship absolutely did that, especially in colonial contexts.

But then Said turns around and does exactly the same thing in a mirror.

He collapses centuries of heterogeneous Western thought into a single, continuous project of domination. He treats scholars with wildly different methods, motives, and conclusions as if they’re all engaged in the same intellectual conspiracy, driven solely by power, distortion, and bad faith. It's not scholarship and it's not analysis. It reads like he's grinding an axe forged by an Arab civilizational inferiority complex.

Worse, he routinely misrepresents or selectively quotes sources to fit his hypocritical and dishonest framing. A number of historians and Middle East scholars have documented this in detail. The critique isn’t that he's "controversial," but that he plays fast and loose with evidence, cherry picking what suits his thesis and pretending the rest doesn't exist.

And then there’s the question of agency. In Said's framework, people in the Middle East often appear more as objects of Western discourse than as actors in their own right. That ends up reproducing intellectual paternalism, even as he dishonestly claims to object to it.

So...not a fan.

[ardor-mohr]

“Military occupations have always seemed irreversible, until in fact they are reversed, but it always takes the effort of the colonized to roll back what the colonizers have done. Occupations never ended voluntarily, or just because the more powerful nation wanted it, and have certainly never been the result of a one-sided negotiated settlement initiated and controlled by the dominant power.”

— Edward Said, “Bitter Truths About Gaza”, Peace and Its Discontents (1996)