Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium

Abstract

Between the appearance of Orientalism in 1978 and Culture and Imperialism in the spring of 1993, there have been some interesting and paradoxical years. Edward Said has done a great deal of political writing about the Palestinians and American foreign policy, and he has become a public figure in a sense that would apply to very few literary critics, however respected. But he has not had the sort of public influence he desired. American policy toward the Middle East has remained grimly consistent, as has the quality of public discourse about the world of nations. Where Said's influence has been overwhelming, on the other hand, is among academic disciplines-a domain that he has often been tempted to dismiss as specialized, professionalized, politically unpromising. This has invited other paradoxes. How is it that Orientalism, which insisted so strongly on the uninterrupted, unrelieved pervasiveness of Orientalist tropes in Western culture, should be so passionately acclaimed and imitated in large sections of the Western academy? How is it that pointing out the complicity of culture with imperialism could also serve to reinvigorate the study of culture and, for that matter, provoke students of culture into a campaign of disciplinary imperialism in which they colonized the territory of other disciplines? How is it that this could be, as I think it often is, a good imperialism? And how is it, finally, that pointing out the complicities of knowledge with power could serve to demonstrate, as I think it has, the dignity and value of intellectual work, the labor of thought that is absolutely irreducible to any social collectivity to which either its subject or its object might belong? These questions suggest that Edward Said has in large part created the audience by which he is now enjoyed-which is also the audience that now questions and contests him, the contest being an indispensable part of the enjoyment. The fifteen years that separate Culture and Imperialism from Orientalism have perhaps inevitably prompted an orgy of stocktaking about the direction of Said's career and about the direction of colonial and postcolonial studies, fields he did so much to get started and to shape. The contributions gathered here, which were originally presented at the convention of the Modern Language Association in Toronto in December 1993, were an effort to have a share of the fun. That is probably all the introduction they need.