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Abdirahman Hussein, who began this work in the University of
Tennessee as a doctoral programme, went on to develop it over
years of sustained research into a full-length intellectual
biography in which he argues that more than Orientalism,
it is Beginnings that is central to his philosophy and
method: "The Palestinian experience informs all his texts,
not simply those which deal explicitly with the catastrophe of
1948." As he remarks in his interview with Imre Salusinsky,
"My background is a series of displacements and
expatriations which cannot be recuperated. The sense of being
between cultures has been very, very strong for me. I would say
that’s the single strongest strand running through my life:
the fact that I’m always in and out of things, and never
really of anything for long." It is for this reason that
his methodology has no respect for traditional boundaries
between genres, modes of inquiry and areas of intellectual
combat; he can with extreme felicity jump from Heart of
Darkness to Verdi’s opera working always against the
grain, a contrapuntal strategy at deconstructing the underlying
cultural as well as imperialist ambitions and strategies of
western powers, of canon-formation and exclusionary knowledge.
Various critics
like Bruce Robbins, James Clifford and Abdul R. JanMohamed have
been fascinated by Said’s "aversion to resolution or
synthesis," and James Clifford who sees his in-between
zones as "ambivalence" or "confusion between
several incompatible designations." However, what underpins
these views is the deep diasporic sense of being an exile that
has obsessed Said in his writings, a sense of dispossession and
banishment which a Palestinian life symbolises, "a life
that is scattered, discontinuous, marked by the artificial and
imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the
dislocations and unsynchronised rhythms of disturbed time."
What is
interesting in his writings is a Nietzschean anti-humanist
suspicion of truth which stands opposed to his deep humanism
that lies behind his studies of the relationship between Islam,
the Arabs and the Orient on one side and the European cultures
on the other.
Many like Dennis
Porter and Aijaz Ahmad have found certain flaws in his thesis in
Orientalism which puts across a systematic and unitary
attitude of the West to the East whereas the fact is that there
are innumerable contradictions within specific western
discourses. This is, in fact, in the words of James Clifford,
"his blindness to historical complexity."
Nevertheless, his trilogy starting with Orientalism and
going to The Question of Palestine and then to Covering
Islam are projects taken up as a sincere activist who is
concerned about the question of Islamic (mis)representation in
the western media and the political struggle for
self-determination that has been integral to an ongoing
Middle-East politics.
After the Last Sky
and Blaming the Victims also take up accounts of
Palestinian struggle and suffering. The East-West relationship
is further dealt with in Culture and Imperialism where he
again revisits western texts like Mansfield Park, Heart
of Darkness, Kim and The Outsider, all to make
his case against the western canon. But because of the
accusation that he is concerned mainly with western texts, Said
makes sure that he takes up the Subaltern School of historical
criticism, the fatwa against Rushdie and the Gulf war in
the chapters at the end of Culture and Imperialism.
However, it lacks coherence as the various chapters had been
written as single essays over a long stretch of time.
Hussein’s book
examines all these issues and will evoke an interesting debate
among students of postcolonial theory and literatures and those
who are keen students of one of the major literary and cultural
theorists of our time. The politics of theory and criticism that
it deals with is the concern of both students and teachers who
see a certain self-promoting agenda in the Euro-American
imperialism and its "divine self-legitimation."
Hegemonic intentions and the geography of imperialism are here
countered through the destruction of foundationalism and
building a case against western reason as intentionality and its
oppressive ideological currency.
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EDWARD
Said’s sustained engagement with modern, literary and cultural
theory, especially his concern with French theory, occurs in Beginnings:
Intention and Method. Here he seeks to align the theories of
Foucault, Barthes and Derrida with cultural theory and earlier
manifestation of humanism found so elaborately in the works of Vico.
What is common between Vico and the structuralists, according to
Said, is "a post-Enlightenment loss of faith in origins, hence
a secular view of the role of the writer in modern society: ‘The
state of the mind that is concerned with origins . . . is
theological. By contrast . . . beginnings are eminently secular, or
gentile, continuing activities’." However, the Foucauldian
notion of power and knowledge remains central in his deep concern
with secular criticism that is further developed in The Word, the
Text and the Critic.
