Edward Wadie Said (1935‐2003) was born a Christian Palestinian Arab, but attended British schools in Jerusalem and Alexandria. Expelled from the latter, he was moved to a prep school in Massachusetts, his father having won US citizenship through service with American forces in the First World War. There he excelled, later attending Princeton, followed by postgraduate studies at Harvard. For 40 years thereafter he worked in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, later becoming a visiting professor at many prestigious North American universities, and a Reith Lecturer for the BBC. A gifted pianist himself, Said wrote on music too, and with Daniel Barenboim set up the Palestinian/Israeli West‐Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999.
This “dictionary” consists of 33 overlapping articles or short essays on people, terms and concepts (some of the latter invented or coined by Said) which are key to the understanding of Said's work. These are cross‐referenced by the simple expedient of bold print, so that one is constantly invited read another entry. In this review I use capitalisation rather than bold to indicate the range of material covered, but all the quotations below are from Radhakrishnan. Although Said had begun as a critic of English literature, “Practical criticism had morphed into literary theory; literary theory into critical theory; and finally, theory had come into its own as its own autonomous domain” – and Said's writings similarly expanded in scope, but with an always critical and sometimes controversial perspective.
Not surprisingly, with his background, Said was interested in choices of identity, or Affiliation, which to him transcended one's inherited filiation (as an Arab, Christian, etc.). In this he resembles his role models Eric Auerbach, who wrote Mimesis as a refugee in Istanbul, and Joseph Conrad, on whom Said wrote his PhD thesis. Said was thus himself an example of a Specular/Border Intellectual (in Abdul JanMohamed's phrase). While fully aware of the hardships of real exile (as with the Palestinians), Said also saw that Exile could provide a perspective that rose above the restrictions of filiation. It could be cultivated as an intellectual condition, rather like Between‐ness, which Said saw as the true place of criticism, Between the Scylla of (national) culture (“It's un‐American”) and the Charybdis of (academic) system, e.g. the ‐isms currently in fashion.
As for the role of the Intellectual, Said saw the term as virtually synonymous with that of “critic”; while some wanted to retire the concept, Said stood by it. He contrasted it with (mercenary) Professionalism, since “thanks to excessive specialization and heedless exponential professionalization, professionals have stopped professing anything at all”. In the same way, in The World, the Text and the Critic (1984), he opposed the claims of deconstructive Theory, which he saw as lost in the world of the Text, devoid of context and history, and lacking that sense of Worldliness that is both a connection with the real world and a characteristic of democratic Humanism, another concept that Said continued to hold, but for him a more humane and inclusive, self‐reflexive humanism.
In his argument with structuralist theory, Said took issue with what he called its Linguicity, or “lingua‐centricity”, in which “Structure becomes the be all and the end all, the summum bonum of all that is, as though what is not covered by structure is not part of reality. Historical traces […] complicatedly overlapping and intersecting narratives are flattened out in the name of the universality as well [as] the universal intelligibility of structure and its essential ‘lingua‐centricity’”. Likewise, “Said unabashedly retrieves Style aesthetically, politically, and theoretically” from the “impersonal discursivity” of the theorists, and also rescues Philology – “which elegantly and with complexity braids together history and language” – from those who would consign them to the dustbin.
The role of the committed public intellectual is to Speak Truth to Power, an example of the Oppositional Criticism/Consciousness that Said both espoused and practised. In his later work (Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004) Said also spoke of Democratic Criticism, the free exchange of ideas: “Language that mystifies, or is obscurantist in the name of expertise, is unethical and undemocratic”. In his essay on Traveling Theory Said aimed “to demystify the hermeticism that has grown up around theory and to render theory vulnerable to historical processes as they happen […] the truths of theory are neither sovereign and monolithic, nor are they autochthonous to a particular place […] Said's crucial insight here is that all theory travels”. In his essay “The virtuoso as intellectual”, Said similarly contrasted this false professionalism with Virtuosity, as exemplified by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932‐1982), whose virtuosity was not just the flashy wizardry that dazzles but ultimately alienates the audience: “virtuosity is intellectual and democratic”. Said wrote an essay on “Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision” and took from musical counterpoint (two melodies in harmony) the idea of Contrapuntal Criticism: “What contrapuntal analysis does in the first place is to get rid of the sovereign text” with only one voice and one perspective; “contrapuntal analysis brings together […] recognition, reciprocity, relationality, and antagonism”.
Thus a European novel can reflect both Culture and Imperialism, to quote the title of Said's 1993 book: “Said's uniqueness lies in his critical insistence that the world of the text and the world of Imperialism are flip sides of the same coin […] In the works of Austen, Dickens, and other authors, literature happens not in isolation from the politics of colonization and empire building”. Said is probably best‐known for his 1978 book Orientalism – Western (mis)understanding of the “East” – which also launched the notion of Postcoloniality, so that we now have courses on postcolonial (not Commonwealth or Third World) literature.
However, in his discussion of Centrism (which Said saw as inevitable, but as something to be aware of and to rise above), Radhakrishnan looks askance at Said's suggestion that “because Conrad is uncompromisingly Eurocentric […] he is able to […] constitute himself as an inaugural point of reference for all postcolonial writers to come”. He also questions the relationship of postcolonial writing to the West, as discussed by Said in his essay with the punning title Voyage In, which became part of Culture and Imperialism. Said's viewpoint could be illuminating, however, as when he saw Yeats as one of the first poets of decolonisation, an aspect ignored by many critics.
Another of Said's role models was the Italian humanist Giambattista Vico (1668‐1744), who reinforced his belief that history is (hu)man‐made, and not a manifest destiny or a chosen people's covenant with a deity – no “transhistorical essences”, except of course in that these can influence human behaviour, as in Nationalism (Said was critical of Palestinian and Arab leaderships) and (needless to say) Zionism. Vico was much in Said's mind when he wrote his book on Beginnings: “doctrines that sound so mighty and axiomatic as though they were transcendent truths independent of context emerge from specific historical beginnings” in the real world. An agnostic, Said thus espoused Secular Criticism, as in his treatment of Narrative: “Narratives, from Said's perspective, are nothing if not secular”. Everyone, including the Palestinians, should have “permission to narrate”, and not be prevented from telling their own stories. Likewise, Said held on to the concept of Representation: “Representations are worldly, historical, secular performances that cannot pre‐know their own truth”. Thus Palestinians and Israelis need to recognise each other's self‐representations: “Contrapuntal representation is what Said is after”.
As can be seen from the above, Said was a subtle and courageous thinker whose work is still, perhaps even more, relevant today. Radhakrishnan, like Barack Obama a former student of Said, is an Indian‐American academic, the author of titles such as Between Identity and Location: The Cultural Politics of Theory (2007), a poet in and translator from Tamil – and so is well‐placed to interpret Said. This book is an excellent introduction to the variety and complexity of Said's work (as Radhakrishnan points out, Said was not interested in constructing some monolithic system), and will no doubt be of interest to those more familiar with his work too.
