Edward Said and the Cultural Politics of Education

Abstract

This introductory essay to this special issue of Discourse on Edward Said and the cultural politics of education provides an overview discussion of four inter-related themes representing the wideranging scope of Said's academic and political writings. The first of these themes relates to his idea of Orientalism, through which Said sought to describe the relationship between colonial knowledge and the exercise of imperial power. The second concerns the application of this theoretical work on Orientalism to his political interventions in the murky politics of Palestine, and the subjugation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. The third theme is linked to the critical role he envisaged for the intellectual. And the final theme relates to his commitment to the principles of humanism, democratic criticism and cosmopolitanism, which formed the core basis of his theoretical work and his politics.

Notes

1. The concept of Aboriginalism has been developed in a similar way in contemporary Australian scholarship to understand the ways in which certain forms of abstract as well as empirical knowledge were central to the colonization of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Lingard and Rizvi (1994) have used the concept to analyse the important political work of the Australian indigenous artist Gordon Bennett. Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001) also used the art of Gordon Bennett in their book about Reading and teaching the postcolonial.