The enigmas of exile: reflections on Edward Said

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Notes

‘Orientalism was a book,’ wrote Chatterjee many years after its publication, ‘which talked of things I felt I had known all along but had never found the language to formulate with clarity. Like many great books, it seemed to say for the first time what one had always wanted to say’ (see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Own Words,’ in Michael Sprinker (ed.) Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 194).

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992; Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Random House, 1978.

Edward Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, edited with an introduction by Gauri Viswanathan, London: Bloomsbury, 2004.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 209, 264.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 320.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 388.

Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

In an interview given in 1993, Said revealed that he had been ‘turned off by Martin Luther King, who revealed himself to be a tremendous Zionist.’ In a previous interview given to the well‐known journal Social Text in 1988, King is mentioned alongside Reinhold Niebuhr and Roger Baldwin as a ‘powerful advocate of the Jewish state’ (see Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 209, 327).

There is no mention of King's alleged Zionism in any of these well‐known biographies: Stephen Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., New York: Mentor Books, 1982; King: A Critical Biography, New York: Praeger, 1970; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Cited in Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 456.

The New York Times ran a correction the following day, stating that Said had flung the stone at an Israeli guardhouse, which was in any case half a mile away.

See Christopher Hitchens, ‘Edward Said,’ Slate, 26 September 2003. Available online at: http://slate.msn.com/id/2088944/.

Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, New York: Pantheon, 2002.

For one moving and nuanced account of Said's warm admiration for Barenboim, see Tania Tamari Nasir, ‘No ordinary concert,’ Al‐Ahram Weekly Online, 4–10 September 2003. Available online at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/654/feature.htm.

Tariq Ali, ‘Remembering Edward Said, 1935–2003,’ New Left Review, 24 (November–December) (2003): 59.

See, e.g., Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, London: C. Hurst, 1996.

On the subject of ‘popular music,’ Said remarked, in an interview published in 1992, that he did not ‘obviously’ accept ‘all the hideously limited and silly remarks made about it by Adorno,’ while conceding that it did not speak to him in the same way as it did to his interviewer or to his children. ‘I’m very conservative that way,' Said admitted. Said's response to the arresting suggesting that the tradition of Western classical music was an ‘unproblematic refuge of greatness’ for him is an uncharacteristic silence, followed by an assertion about the ‘persistence’ of the Western classical tradition (see Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 145). I know of only one essay, and a relatively uninteresting one at that, by Said on lowbrow culture — in this case, on the Tarzan movies of Johnny Weismuller (see ‘Jungle Calling,’ in Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 327–336).

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 132–133.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 137, 271.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 390.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 139.

Said, Reflections on Exile.

Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992; the chapter on Said was also published as ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 27(30) (1992): 98–116.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 456.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 454.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 237.

Said, ‘On Lost Causes,’ in his Reflections on Exile, pp. 544–546.

Said, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ in his Reflections on Exile, p. 172.

Said, ‘Introduction,’ in his Reflections on Exile, p. xxxiii.

See, e.g., Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 126–128, 217.

Said has written that more than once he was brought to the recognition that Conrad had been ‘there’ before him (see Said, ‘Between Worlds,’ in his Reflections on Exile, p. 556).

Said, ‘Through Gringo Eyes: With Conrad in Latin America,’ in his Reflections on Exile, p. 277.

Said, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ p. 179.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 56.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 99.

Quoted in Said, ‘On Lost Causes,’ p. 553.

Said, ‘Reflections on Exile,’ p. 184.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 224–225, 240–241.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 78–79, 129, 389. Said admits that the ‘oppositional’ quality of Vico's work, ‘his being anti‐Cartesian, anti‐rationalistic, anti‐Catholic,’ appealed to him (p. 78).

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 222.

Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 176.

Edward Said, ‘Thoughts on Late Style,’ London Review of Books, 5 August 2004, pp. 3, 5–7.