Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʁ]; January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She is also noted for her lifelong polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
Early years
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the eldest daughter of Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a legal secretary who once aspired to be an actor,[1] and Françoise (born) Brasseur, a wealthy banker’s daughter and devout Catholic. Her younger sister, Hélène, was born two years later. The family struggled to maintain their bourgeois status after losing much of their fortune shortly after World War I, and Françoise insisted that the two daughters be sent to a prestigious convent school. Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child—at one point intending to become a nun—until a crisis of faith at age 14. She remained an atheist for the rest of her life.[2]
Beauvoir was intellectually precocious from a young age, fueled by her father’s encouragement: he reportedly would boast, “Simone thinks like a man!”[3] After passing baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy in 1925, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie. She then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, writing her thesis on Leibniz for Léon Brunschvicg. She first worked with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss when all three completed their practice teaching requirements at the same secondary school. Although not officially enrolled, she sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure in preparation for the agrégation in philosophy, a highly competitive postgraduate examination which serves as a national ranking of students. It was while studying for the agrégation that she met École Normale students Sartre, Paul Nizan, and René Maheu (who gave her the lasting nickname "Castor", or beaver).[1] The jury for the agrégation narrowly awarded Sartre first place instead of Beauvoir, who placed second and, at age 21, was the youngest person ever to pass the exam.[4]
Middle years
Sartre
Sartre was dazzlingly intelligent and was just under 5 feet (1.5 m) tall.[5] During October 1929, the two became a couple and Sartre asked her to marry him.[6] One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a two-year lease".[7] Near the end of her life, Beauvoir said, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry." So they became an imaginary married couple.[8]
Beauvoir chose to never marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre.[9] She never had children.[9] This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes and to travel, write, teach, and to have (male and female - the latter often shared) lovers.[1][10]
A number of de Beauvoir's young female lovers were underage, and the nature of some of these relationships, some of which she instigated while working as a school teacher, has led to a biographical controversy and debate over whether de Beauvoir had inclinations towards ephebophilia.[13][14][15][16]
A former student, Bianca Lamblin, originally Bianca Bienenfeld, later wrote critically about her seduction by her teacher, Simone de Beauvoir, when she was a 17-year-old lycee student in her book, Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée.[17] In 1941, de Beauvoir was suspended from her teaching job, due to an accusation that she had, in 1939, seduced her 17-year-old lycee pupil Nathalie Sorokine.[18] De Beauvoir would, along with other French intellectuals, later petition for an abolition of all age of consent laws in France.[19][20][21]
She Came to Stay and The Mandarins
In 1943, Beauvoir published She Came to Stay, a fictionalized chronicle of her and Sartre's sexual relationship with her students, Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where Beauvoir taught during the early 30s. She grew fond of Olga. Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she denied him; he began a relationship with her sister Wanda instead. Sartre supported Olga for years until she met and married her husband, Beauvoir's lover Jacques-Laurent Bost. At Sartre's death, he was still supporting Wanda. In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, Beauvoir makes one character from the complex relationships of Olga and Wanda. The fictionalized versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young woman. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois.
Beauvoir's metaphysical novel She Came to Stay was followed by many others, including The Blood of Others which explores the nature of individual responsibility, and The Mandarins, which won her the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary prize. The Mandarins is set just after the end of World War II. The Mandarins depicted Sartre, Nelson Algren, and many philosophers and friends among Sartre and Beauvoir's intimate circle.
Existentialist ethics
In 1944 Beauvoir wrote Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics, which inspired her to write more on the subject. This book, Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism. Its simplicity keeps it understandable, in contrast to the abstruse character of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. The ambiguity about which Beauvoir writes clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness.
Les Temps Modernes
At the end of World War II, Beauvoir and Sartre edited Les Temps Modernes, a political journal Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death.
Sexuality, existentialist feminism, and The Second Sex
The Second Sex cover
Chapters of Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) were originally published in Les Temps modernes,[22] in June 1949. The second volume came a few months after the first in France.[23] It was very quickly published in America as The Second Sex, due to the quick translation by Howard Parshley, as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with the French language, and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message.[24] For years Knopf prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, declining all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars.[24] Only in 2009 was there a second translation, to mark the 60th anniversary of the original publication. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first integral translation, reinstating a third of the original work.
Beauvoir anticipated the sexually charged feminism of Erica Jong and Germaine Greer. Algren was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir later described her American sexual experiences in The Mandarins (dedicated to Algren, on whom the character Lewis Brogan was based) and in her autobiographies. He vented his outrage when reviewing American translations of her work. Much material bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death.
In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of The Second Sex, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that this also happened on the basis of other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.
The Second Sex, published in French, sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the Hegelian concept of the Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. The capitalized 'O' in "other" indicates the wholly other.
Beauvoir argued that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal. She said that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. Beauvoir said that this attitude limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they were a deviation from the normal, and were always outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". She believed that for feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.
Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.
A critical essay, "Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe", was written by Suzanne Lilar in 1969.
A new translation of The Second Sex for the first time gives access to the entire text in English, as Irene Gammel writes in a Globe and Mail review: "The single most important advantage of this new translation is its completeness, combined with the translators' courage to transpose Beauvoir's existential language, thereby giving readers a sense of Beauvoir's channelling of Hegel, Marx and others."
Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about her travels in the United States and China, and published essays and fiction rigorously, especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging.
In 1980 she published When Things of the Spirit Come First, a set of short stories centered around and based upon women important to her earlier years. The stories were written well before the novel She Came to Stay, but Beauvoir did not think they were worthy of publication until about forty years later.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave Les Temps Modernes. Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with Merleau-Ponty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the journal's editorial meetings in her flat and contributed more than Sartre, whom she often had to force to offer his opinions.
Beauvoir also notably wrote a four-volume autobiography, consisting of: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance (sometimes published in two volumes in English translation: After the War and Hard Times); and All Said and Done.
In the 1970s Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement. She signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a list of famous women who claimed to have had an abortion, then illegal in France. Some argue most of the women had not had abortions, including Beauvoir, but given the secrecy surrounding the issue, this cannot be known.[citation needed] Signatories were diverse as Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's sister Poupette. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France.
Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age) is a rare instance of an intellectual meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about age 60. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie Des Adieux (A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre's last years. In the opening of Adieux, Beauvoir notes that it is the only major published work of hers which Sartre did not read before its publication. She and Sartre always read one another's work.
After Sartre died, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare the feelings of people in their circle who were still living. After Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted daughter and literary heir Arlette Elkaïm would not let many of Sartre's letters be published in unedited form. Most of Sartre's letters available today have Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions but mostly the use of pseudonyms. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary heir Sylvie Le Bon, unlike Elkaïm, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren.
Since her death, her reputation has grown. Especially in academia, she is considered the mother of post-1968 feminism. There has also been a growing awareness of her as a major French thinker and existentialist philosopher.
Contemporary discussion analyzes the influences of Beauvoir and Sartre on one another. She is seen as having influenced Sartre's masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, while also having written much on philosophy that is independent of Sartrean existentialism. Some scholars have explored the influences of her earlier philosophical essays and treatises upon Sartre's later thought. She is studied by many respected academics both within and outside philosophy circles, including Margaret A. Simons and Sally Scholtz. Beauvoir's life has also inspired numerous biographies.
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, (1998)
Translations
Patrick O'Brian was Beauvoir's principal English translator, until he attained commercial success as a novelist.
Philosophical Writings (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2004, edited by Margaret A. Simons et al.) contains a selection of essays by Beauvoir translated for the first time into English. Among those are: Pyrrhus and Cineas, discussing the futility or utility of action, two previously unpublished chapters from her novel She Came to Stay and an introduction to Ethics of Ambiguity.
Fraser, M., 1999. Identity Without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
Hélène Rouch, 2001–2002, Trois conceptions du sexe: Simone de Beauvoir entre Adrienne Sahuqué et Suzanne Lilar, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, n° 18, pp. 49–60.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best-known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
Biography
Smith briefly studied at City College of New York, studying biology, experimental psychology, and philosophy. She then earned her B.A. (summa cum laude) in 1954 and her Ph.D. in 1965, both from Brandeis University.
From 1961 to 1973, Smith taught at Bennington College. She accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. In 1987 she joined the Duke University faculty, and also joined Brown University in 2003.
Smith has also occupied numerous short-term and honorary posts. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Scholarship and work
Smith is a well-known writer, most particularly for her 1988 work on critical theory, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. In this work, she attempts to situate the various liberal, conservative, and other views of "values" within her "metametatheory" of contingencies, an economics-influenced theoretical approach. She uses her theory to address literary, aesthetic, and other types of values, attempting to discern whether any objective standards may be applied.
Other works include Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, and an edition of Shakespeare's sonnets; she has published numerous books and articles on language, literature, and critical theory.
In recent years she has been doing considerable work on science and the humanities, including Scandalous Knowledge and her 2006 Terry lectures at Yale, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory. Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies. Her works reflect an interest in a range of issues, including queer performativity; experimental critical writing; the works of Marcel Proust; non-Lacanianpsychoanalysis; artists' books; Buddhism and pedagogy; the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein; and material culture, especially textiles and texture.
Drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of Michel Foucault, Sedgwick uncovered what she claimed were concealed homoerotic subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. Sedgwick argued that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture would be incomplete or damaged if it failed to incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. She coined the term "antihomophobic."
Noted works include "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," and "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," which was heavily criticised for the "scandalous" interpretation it took.[1][2]
Sedgwick's oeuvre ranges across a wide variety of media and genres; poetry and artworks are not easily separated from the rest of her texts. Disciplinary interests included literary studies, history, art history, film studies, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, women’s studies and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) studies. Her theoretical interests have been synoptic, assimilative and eclectic.[10]
Her work may be best suited to literary students who can cope with, make up their own minds about, and appreciate Sedgwick’s sometimes elaborate prose. She was fond of neologisms, and of extending the meaning of existing words and phrases in new directions. In her own estimate, her style of writing cannot be called easy to understand or clear in meaning, either.[11] Sedgwick was not without her critics, however. Elizabeth Kantor,[12] for example, suggests that Sedgewick's scholarship is seriously lacking, as when she "find[s] some slight similarity between a Jane Austen novel and another text, and then argue[s] from the other text."
Sedgwick’s writing is supposed to make the reader more alert to the "potential queer nuances" of literature, encouraging the reader to displace their heterosexual identifications in favour of searching out "queer idioms."[13] Thus, besides obvious double entendres, the reader is to realise other potentially queer ways in which words might resonate. For example, in Henry James, Sedgwick was said to have observed that words and concepts like ‘fond’, ‘foundation’, ‘issue’, ‘assist’, ‘fragrant’, ‘flagrant’, ‘glove’, ‘gage’, ‘centre’, ‘circumference’, ‘aspect’, ‘medal’ and words containing the phoneme ‘rect’, including any words that contain their anagrams, may all have "anal-erotic associations."[13]
Sedgwick drew on the work of literary critic Christopher Craft to argue that both puns and rhymes might be re-imagined as "homoerotic because homophonic"; citing literary critic Jonathan Dollimore, Sedgwick suggests that grammatical inversion might have an equally intimate relation to sexual inversion; she suggested that readers may want to "sensitise" themselves to "potentially queer" rhythms of certain grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical, and generic sentence structures; scenes of childhood spanking were eroticised, and associated with two-beat lines and lyric as a genre; enjambment (continuing a thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break) had potentially queer erotic implications; finally, while thirteen-line poems allude to the sonnet form, by rejecting the final rhyming couplet it was possible to "resist the heterosexual couple as a paradigm", suggesting instead the potential masturbatory pleasures of solitude.[14]
Sedgwick encouraged readers to consider the "potential queer erotic resonances" purportedly able to be found in the writing of Henry James.[15] Drawing on and herself performing a "thematics of anal fingering and ‘fisting-as-écriture’" (or writing) in James’s work, Sedgwick put forward the idea that sentences whose "relatively conventional subject-verb-object armature is disrupted, if never quite ruptured, as the sac of the sentence gets distended by the insinuation of one more, qualifying phrase or clause" can best be apprehended as either giving readers the vicarious experience of having their rectums crammed with a finger or fist, or of their own ‘probing digit’ inserted into a rectum. Sedgwick makes this claim based on certain grammatical features of the text.[15]
Sedgwick published several books considered "groundbreaking" in the field of queer theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993). Sedgwick also coedited several volumes and published a book of poetry Fat Art, Thin Art (1994) as well as A Dialogue on Love (1999). Her first book, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), was a revision of her doctoral thesis. Her last book Touching Feeling (2003) maps her interest in affect, pedagogy, and performativity. Jonathan Goldberg is currently editing her unpublished late essays and lectures, many of which are fragments from an unfinished study of Proust.[16] According to Goldberg, these late writings also examine such subjects as Buddhism, object relations and affect theory, psychoanalytic writers such as Klein, Tomkins, D.W. Winnicott, and Michael Balint, the poetry of C. V. Cavafy, philosophical Neoplatonism, and identity politics.[17]
[edit]Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
Sedgwick summed up her basic argument in Between Men in a Epistemology, a later work. Between Men was supposed to demonstrate "the immanence of men’s same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature…"
The book focused on the putatively oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural system where male-male desire could become intelligible only by being routed through nonexistent desire involving a woman.
Sedgwick’s "male homosocial desire" referred to all male bonds, including, potentially, everyone from overt heterosexuals to overt homosexuals. Sedgwick coined the neologism "homosocial," which was supposed to be a rejection of the then-available lexical and conceptual alternatives to challenge the idea that hetero-, bi- and homosexual men and experiences could be easily differentiated.[18] She argued that these three categories could not actually be readily distinguished from one another, since what might be conceptualised as "erotic" depended on an "unpredictable, ever-changing array of local factors."[18]
One reviewer asserts that the structures of "homosocial desire" that Sedgwick is said to uncover in the book are so "omnipresent" in Western literature, and so often read through other ideological screens, that "we should beware."
"Homosocial" is a neologism meant to be distinguished from "homosexual" and connotes a form of male bonding often accompanied by a fear or hatred of homosexuality.[19]
Sedgwick's inspiration for Epistemology came from reading D. A. Miller’s essay, ‘Secret Subjects, Open Subjects’, subsequently included in The Novel and the Police (1988).
In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argues that "virtually any aspect of modern Western culture, must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." According to Sedgwick, homo/heterosexual definition has become so tediously argued over because of a lasting incoherence "between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority ... [and] seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities."
In 1991, Sedgwick was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently wrote the book A Dialogue on Love. Sedgwick recounts the therapy she undergoes, her feelings toward death, depression, and her gender uncertainty before her mastectomy and during chemotherapy. The book incorporates both poetry and prose, as well Sedgwick’s own words and her therapist’s notes. Though the title connotes the Platonic dialogues, the form of the book was inspired by James Merrill’s "Prose of Departure" which followed a seventeenth-century Japanese form of persiflage known as haibun. Sedgwick uses the form of an extended, double-voiced haibun to explore possibilities within the psychoanalytic setting. In particular, those that offer alternatives to Lacanian-inflected psychoanalysis, and new ways for thinking about sexuality, familial relations, pedagogy, asthma, and love. The book also reveals Sedgwick's growing interest in Buddhist thought, textiles, and texture.[citation needed]
Touching Feeling is written as a reminder of the early days of queer theory, which Sedgwick discusses briefly in the introduction in order to reference the affective conditions—chiefly the emotions provoked by the AIDS epidemic—that prevailed at the time and to bring into focus her principal theme: the relationship between feeling, learning, and action. Touching Feeling explores critical methods that may enrage politically and help shift the foundations for individual and collective experience. In the opening paragraph, Sedgwick describes her project as the exploration of "promising tools and techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy."
^ Yaeger, Patricia S. Review of "Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire." by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, MLN, Vol. 100, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1985), pp. 1139-1144
Edward Wadie Saïd (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd]Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian-Americanliterary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism.[1]Robert Fisk described him as the Palestinians' "most powerful political voice."[2]
Said was an influential cultural critic and author, known best for his book Orientalism (1978), which catapulted him to international academic fame.[3] The book presented his influential ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. Said contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction of Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism and following works proved influential in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East.[4] Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.[5]
Said also came to be known as a public intellectual who frequently discussed contemporary politics, music, culture, and literature, in lectures, newspaper and magazine columns, and books. Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian growing up in a Palestinian Christian family in the Middle East at the time of the creation of Israel, Said argued for the creation of a Palestinian state, equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return, and for increased pressure on Israel, especially by the United States. He also criticized several Arab and Muslim regimes.[6] Having received a Western education in the US, where he lived from his high school years until his death, Said tried to use his dual heritage, the subject of his prize-winning memoir Out of Place (1999), to bridge the gap between the West and the Middle East and to improve the situation in Israel-Palestine. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council for over a decade and his pro-Palestinian activism made him a figure of considerable controversy.[7]
In 1999, Said co-founded with Daniel Barenboim the award-winning West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of children from Israel, the Palestinian territories, and surrounding Arab nations. He was also an accomplished concert pianist.[8] Active until his last months, Said died in 2003 after a decade-long battle with leukemia.
Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935.[9] His father, a US citizen with ProtestantPalestinian origins, was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I. He moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His mother, born in Nazareth, also had a Protestant background[10][11] and was half-Lebanese.[12] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.
Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12.[13] He claims to have attended the AnglicanSt. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem, but this has been disputed.[nb 1] As the Arab League declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. In a London Review of Books article, Said gave a more detailed account of his upbringing:
"With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, al-though I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa."[13]
In 1951, Said was expelled from Victoria College for being a "troublemaker",[13] and was consequently sent by his parents to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place".[13] Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'.[13] Though these themes of interweaving cultures, feeling out of place, and being far from home affected him dissonantly and would echo through Said's work for the rest of his life, Said managed to do well at the Massachusetts boarding school often 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.[13]
Fluent in English, French, and Arabic,[23] Said earned a Bachelor of Arts (1957) from Princeton University, and a Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) in English Literature from Harvard University.[24]
After expanding on his thesis to produce his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Said, swirling with a wealth of ideas which he received from studying the works of Giambattista Vico and others, presented his award-winning second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), a work on the theoretical underpinnings of literary critical projects.[34] Other literary critical texts by Said include The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), and the posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and On Late Style (2006).
Fascinated, like his postmodern influences, with how people perceive things in cultural contexts, and by the effects of society, politics and power on literature, Said is considered a founder of postcolonial criticism. His work on Orientalism is particularly important, but his interpretations of Conrad, Jane Austen,[35]Rudyard Kipling,[36]Yeats,[37] and other writers have also proven influential among critics.
"Orientalism"
Said is most famous for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In his most famous book, Orientalism (1978), Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."[38] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and the US' colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.
So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.[39]
In Orientalism, the book, Said asserted that much western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study,[40] a form of racism, and a tool of imperialist domination.[38]Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,[41] Anouar Abdel-Malek,[42]Maxime Rodinson,[43] and Richard William Southern,[44] Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term that he transformed into a pejorative):[45]
I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact – and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.[46]
Said argued that the West has stereotyped the East in art and literature, since antiquity—such as the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus.[47] Even more so in modern times, Europe has dominated Asia politically so that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that Western scholars could not recognize. Western scholars appropriated the task of exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves, with the implication that the East was not capable of composing its own narrative. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.[48]
Said concluded that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up.[49] In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia.[50] After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.
Criticism
Orientalism and other works by Said sparked a wide variety of controversy and criticism.[51]Ernest Gellner argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe.[52] Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian Empires intervened.[53] Others argued out that even at the height of the imperial era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims.[54] Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.[55]
Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism came from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis,[56][57] and Kanan Makiya addressed what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's Orientalism on the perception and status of their scholarship.[nb 2] Bernard Lewis in particular was often at odds with Said following the publication of Orientalism, in which Said singled out Lewis as a "perfect exemplification" of an "Establishment Orientalist" whose work "purports to be objective liberal scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material".[60] Lewis answered with several essays in response, and was joined by other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.[61]
Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic.[62] According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations in Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans.[63] The critic Robert Irwin writes that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.[64]
Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic "Occidentalism" to oppose to the "Orientalism" of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment; that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.[65] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).[66][67]
Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern".[68] Given Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own arguments that "any and all representations … are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer … [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation" [69] could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism",[70] unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.
Supporters
Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.[71] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship [72] and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics, such as Lewis.[73]Orientalism is regarded as central to the postcolonial movement, encouraging scholars "from non-western countries...to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with 'narratives of oppression,' creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western 'other.'"[74]
Said's continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash,[75]Nicholas Dirks,[76] and Ronald Inden,[77] and Cambodia, such as Simon Springer,[78] and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha[79] and Gayatri Spivak.[80] His work continues to be widely discussed in academic seminars, disciplinary conferences, and scholarship.[4]
Influence
Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting,[81] his supporters praise his influence as liberating.[82]Postcolonial theory, of which Said is regarded as a founder and a figure of continual relevance,[1] continues to attract interest and is a thriving field in the humanities.[83]Orientalism continues to profoundly inform the field of Middle Eastern studies.[4] He was a prominent public intellectual in the United States, praised widely as an "intellectual superstar," engaging in music criticism, public lectures, media punditry, contemporary politics, and musical performance.[74] His breadth of influence is regarded as "genuinely global," resting on his unique and innovative blend of cultural criticism, politics, and literary theory.[4] Barack Obama was among Said's students when Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia in the early 1980s.[84] In May 1998, then Illinois state senator Obama and his wife Michelle sat with Said and his wife at an Arab community event in Chicago at which Said gave the keynote speech. The report in which the Chicago event was included discussed the politician's efforts to address the Palestinian cause, though the writer's dominant theme—in 2007—was that Obama had adopted the Israeli cause and neglected the Palestinian one.[85]
Music
Being not only an avid music lover, but also an accomplished pianist,[86] Said wrote extensively about music, including being the music critic for The Nation for several years,[87] and writing three books on music: Musical Elaborations, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim), and his last book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. In music, Said often saw a reflection of his ideas on literature and history, and he would find real life possibilities in bold composition and performance. A posthumous collection of essays was published in 2007 by Columbia University Press, entitled Music at the Limits.[88][89]
In 1999, Said jointly founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Barenboim. The award-winning youth orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries, and has performed internationally, including within both Israel and Palestine. Said and Barenboim also worked together to establish The Barenboim-Said Foundation in Seville. The government-funded foundation was eventually constituted in 2004 with its purpose being to develop several "education through music" projects. In addition to managing the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim-Said Foundation assists with other projects such as the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine project and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project in Seville.[90]
Politics
Pro-Palestinian activism
Throughout his adult life, Said involved himself in the effort for Palestinians statehood. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council.[91] He was also an early proponent of a two-state solution and, in 1988, voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 1970s.[92] In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. Said's relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad in 1995 that PA leaders banned the sale of his books,[93] but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.[94]
In an article entitled Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, he argued for the legitimacy and authenticity of both the Zionist claim to a land (and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland) and Palestinian rights of self-determination.[95] Said's books on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and The End of the Peace Process (2000).
[I]n all my works I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism.... My view of Palestine ... remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested instead a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war.[96]
A photograph taken on July 3, 2000, of Said in South Lebanon throwing a stone across the Lebanon-Israel border drew criticism from some political and media commentators, some of whom decried the act as "terrorist sympathizing.".[97] Said explained the act as a stone-throwing contest with his son, and called it a symbolic gesture of joy at the end of Israel's occupation of Lebanon. "It was a pebble. There was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away."[98] Although he denied aiming the rock at anyone, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir asserted that Said had been less than 30 feet (9.1 m) from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower when he aimed the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed-wire.[99] While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia University faculty members, some students, and from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Columbia provost issued a five-page letter defending Said's act on the grounds of freedom of expression: "To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Said."[100] Said said that there were repercussions, however, noting that in February 2001 the Freud Society of Vienna cancelled an invitation for him to give a lecture.[101] The president of the Freud Society cited "the political situation in the Middle East and its consequences" as a reason, going on to explain that anti-Semitism "has become more dangerous" in Austrian politics and that the Society had decided on the cancellation "to avoid an internal clash."[98]
Said made a documentary film about Palestine for BBC named In Search of Palestine.[102] BBC was unsuccessful in getting it on U.S. television.[103]
In Culture and Resistance (2003), Said likened his situation to that of Noam Chomsky: "It's very similar to him. He's a well known, great linguist. He's been celebrated and honored for that. But he's also vilified as an anti-Semite and a Hitler worshiper." Said went on to explain:
"For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. We don't want anybody's history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. On the other hand, there's a great difference between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people."[104]
In 2003, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to Fatah and Hamas. Three years later, in January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under FBI surveillance as early as 1971. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.[105]
Criticism of US foreign policy
In a 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.”[106] Said opposed many US foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East and elsewhere. He critiqued US involvement in Kosovo and Iraq under President Clinton,[8] and US support for Israel was a constant topic that he addressed in his activism. Although growing increasingly weak from his battle with leukemia, Said spent many of his last months speaking out against the then recent invasion of Iraq.[107] In an April 2003 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said argued that the Iraq War was ill-conceived:
My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative.... I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. US Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest. The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.[108]
Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a 12 year-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.[109] He was survived by his wife of 33 years, Mariam (née Cortas); a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.[110][111]
Subsequently, several prominent writers published elegies for Said, including Alexander Cockburn,[112]Christopher Hitchens,[113]Tony Judt,[114]Michael Wood,[115] and Tariq Ali.[116]
In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Said's honor.[117]
In 2008, Verso Books published Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, a book of essays by 15 authors, including Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi and Elias Khoury. The book was edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür.[118][119]
A critical memoir, Edward Said: the charisma of criticism, by H. Aram Veeser was published by Routledge in March 2010.
In August 2010, the University of California Press published a large volume of essays by some 29 authors about every aspect of Said's intellectual contributions. Edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations includes interviews with Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, as well as the writings of Joseph Massad, Jacqueline Rose, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Asha Varadhjan, RR Radhakrishnan, Ardi Imseis, Ghada Karmi, Sabry Hafez and many others.
Besides being honored with memberships and posts to several prestigious organizations and institutions, Said was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees from universities around the world.[120] Said was the recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize. He received the Lionel Trilling Award (twice), the first occasion being the first time the award was given. He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award.[121] In 2001, Said received the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and he was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais prize.[122] His autobiography, Out of Place, won him the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature.[123] Said Was named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin in 2003, shortly before his death.
Rubin, Andrew N., ed. Humanism, Freedom, and the Critic: Edward W. Said and After. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.
Notes
^ One critic, Justus Weiner,[14] asserted that Said's formative years were spent in Egypt where his family's business was located, and that Said "probably" did not attend St. George's Academy in Jerusalem, except briefly. There is no official record of his attendance in the school registry books from the period. Weiner said that cast doubt on Said's qualification to contribute to the debate over the dispossession of Arabs before Israel's founding in 1948. Weiner said he did not interview Edward Said. Asked about this, he said that after conducting research that lasted three years, he saw no need to talk to Said about his memories or his childhood: "The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, 'You're a liar, you're a fraud.'" Three journalists and one historian wrote that Weiner's claims are false. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian, who reported telling Weiner that he had been Said's classmate at St. George's, a fact Weiner omitted mentioning [15] In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's,[16] and quoted Said stating, that in 1992, Said had spent much of his youth in Cairo.[17]Amos Elon, biographer of the founders of Israel, wrote in The New York Review of Books that Weiner failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–48, Said "and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains that shortly afterward the family's property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Said and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government's refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth."[18] In reply, Weiner accused Elon of dishonesty, and Hitchens of making himself "into a poster boy for Palestine."[19] Said observed that the publishers of Commentary, a conservative magazine, had attacked him in three long articles and that Weiner's was the third in the series.[20][21]
Said commented that the article about his early life was "undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact."[22]
^ Martin Kramer wrote that "Fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie, whose work Said had praised in Covering Islam, allowed that Orientalism was 'important and in many ways positive.'[58] But, in an interview, Keddie said that she also thought Said's work on Orientalism had had "unfortunate consequences." She continued:
"I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too "conservative". It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So "orientalism" for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan."[59]
References
^ ab Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, New York & London: Routledge, 1990.
^ abcd Stephen Howe, "Dangerous mind?", New Humanist, Vol. 123, November/December 2008
^ Oleg Grabar, Edward Said, Bernard Lewis, "Orientalism: An Exchange", New York Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 13. 12 August 1982. Accessed 4 January 2010.
^ Amritjit Singh, Interviews with Edward W. Said (Conversations With Public Intellectuals Series). Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2004: pp. 19 & 219.
^ Edward Said, Out of Place, Vintage Books, 1999: pp. 82-83.
^ Encyclopædia Britannica Online, Edward Said, accessed 03 January 2010.
^ Ernest Gellner, "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism" (rev. of Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said), Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1993: pp. 3-4.
^ C.A. Bayly Empire and Information, Delhi: Cambridge UP, 1999: pp. 25, 143, 282.
^ Robert Irwin For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006: pp. 159-60, 281-2.
^ Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism", Islam and the West, London, 1993: pp. 99, 118.
^ Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, London: Allen Lane, 2006.
^"Said’s Splash" (Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Policy Papers 58 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001.
^Approaches to the History of the Middle East, ed. Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher, London: Ithaca Press, 1994: pp. 144-45.
^ D.A. Washbrook, "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", in Historiography, vol. 5 of The Oxford History of the British Empire 607.
^ Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32.2 (1990): 383-408.
^ Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
^ Ronald Inden, Imagining India, New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
^ Simon Springer, “Culture of violence or violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and imagining the ‘savage other’ in post-transitional Cambodia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34.3 (2009): 305-319.
^ Homi K. Bhaba, Nation and Narration, New York & London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990.
^ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Methuen, 1987.
^ Democracy Now!, "Syrian ExpertPatrick Seale and Columbia University Professor Edward Said Discuss the State of the Middle East After the Invasion of Iraq", DemocracyNow.org, 15 April 2003. Accessed 4 January 2010.
^ Said, Edward."Resources of hope ," Al-Ahram Weekly, April 2, 2003, accessed April 26, 2007.
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʁ]; January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She is also noted for her lifelong polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
