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Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews With Edward W. Said - Hardcover

Said, Edward W.; Viswanathan, Gauri

 
9780375421075: Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews With Edward W. Said
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375421076 ISBN 13: 9780375421075
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Spanning more than thirty years, a collection of twenty-five interviews with the middle Eastern scholar and critic shares his thoughts on a variety of subjects, including politics, literary and cultural criticism, and the Gulf War.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edward w. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), <i>Covering Islam</i>, <i>Peace and Its Discontents</i>, <i>The Politics of Dispossession</i>, <i>Culture and Imperialism</i>, <i>Representations of the Intellectual</i>, <i>The Question of Palestine</i>, <i>Out of Place</i>, <i>The Edward Said Reader</i>, and <i>The End of the Peace Process</i>.<br><br>GAURI VISWANATHAN is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of <i>Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India</i> and O<i>utside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief&

Aus dem Klappentext

r>This important and compelling collection of interviews conducted with Edward Said over the last three decades reveals the eloquent and unique voice of a fascinating figure, who is not only an outstanding cultural and political critic but also, as Nadine Gordimer has written, “among the truly important intellects of our century.”<br><br>In these twenty-eight interviews gathered by Gauri Viswanathan, Professor of English at Columbia University, from publications both here and abroad―Europe, India, Pakistan, the Arab world, and Israel―Said addresses an extraordinary range of subjects, political, artistic, and personal. The passion he feels for literature, music, history, and politics is powerfully conveyed in these interviews, which include Said’s views on the role of the critic in society, the origins of Orientalism, musical performance, the importance of teaching, Glenn Gould, Giambattista Vico, Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, the Gulf War, Israel, the Oslo peace ac

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Preface

This collection of interviews covers the years 1976 to 2000, as well as a wide variety of subjects. Except for the first one, which appeared in the Cornell University journal Diacritics and was a written exchange between the editors and myself, all of these pieces occurred, so to speak, in a face-to-face situation. Necessarily then, they reflect the immediacy of such encounters, the back-and-forth, the informal question-and-answer language, the circling around, making, and remaking of a point or argument, the challenge and counter-challenge of interviewer(s) and interviewee. They have been edited first of all by the journals, newspapers, and magazines that conducted the interviews in the first place and where they originally appeared, second by Professor Gauri Viswanathan and Shelley Wanger, third by me. As such then, they are a composite of direct discourse and later clarification. No effort at all has been made by anyone involved to make these interviews seem more “writerly.” They are therefore principally the records of various occasions, in many different times and places, publications, interviewers (the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, India), and many different situations, moods, and concerns.

Interviews play a role that essays and books do not. Most often in my case, they have arisen as responses to what I have written in my books and articles and, as such, reflect the interests of whoever is conducting the interview. I must say, though, that they have become the steady feature of the life of the publishing teacher and public critic. Wherever I go to lecture or publish a book, I am very grateful that kind and intellectually generous individuals give me the opportunity to answer their questions, on the spot and without preparation. In many ways, interviews are sustained acts of discovery, not only for the person being interviewed but for even the well-prepared interviewer. Thus, it is refreshingly often the case that someone with a long list of carefully written out questions discards the list and proceeds simultaneously and directly to talk to me—from out of our discussion rather than off a page—and then more discovery often does occur, with results that are usually unpredictable. Every situation therefore reflects a specific set of circumstances, and since I have been involved in the public domain as a political activist as well as an intellectual and scholar, all sorts of challenges arise, which I have tried to meet. In any case, it is my hope that despite their informality and relatively wide-ranging nature, these interviews will also answer to the reader’s interests and concerns—at another time, in another place.

e.w.s.
New York,
March 20, 2001


INTRODUCTION
by Gauri Viswanathan

Few authors today are as prolific as Edward W. Said. The author of almost two dozen books, Said has written on a broad array of topics ranging from literary criticism to Middle East politics to opera, film, and travel. His views, marked by an engaging communicative energy, have reached a wide audience through his publications, articles and books, whether the subject is Joseph Conrad, Richard Wagner, or Palestine and the peace process. He is also the subject of several full-length works and anthologies of critical essays; indeed, there are at least a half dozen publications every year on his work, and books offering critical perspectives on Edward Said have become a growth industry in themselves. So much has been written by and about him that one can be
pardoned for asking what new insights a book of interviews can be expected to provide that are not already present in Said’s writings or in works about him.

The answer is simple: The interviews Said gave over the past three decades boldly announce that neither his own books and essays nor those written about him have the last word. The first thing to note is not only the number of interviews Said has given, both to print and broadcast media, but also the number of locations in which they took place, spanning Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. They confirm his presence on the international stage as one of the most forceful public intellectuals of our time, a man who evokes interest in the general public for his passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views, and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination. Dispersed in numerous publications around the world, these interviews have never before been collected in a single book. Together, they reveal a ceaselessly roving mind returning to earlier ideas in his books and articles and engaging with them anew. One measure of the fluidity and range of Said’s thought is his ability to revisit arguments made in his books and essays not merely to defend and elaborate on them but, more important, both to mark their limits and probe their extended possibilities, especially in contexts other than those which first gave rise to them. In other words, Said travels with his ideas as far as they can go, long after they were first articulated, and he applies the same skepticism toward uncritical assimilation of his work as he reserves in general to his now-famous formulation about “traveling theory.” In the essay of the same name, published in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Said argued that theories developed in local contexts tend to lose their elasticity and become diluted in power and meaning when transported elsewhere. In their attenuated form, theories can be no more than strategic methods, with system and procedure taking the place of genuine thought.
The weakened force of traveling theories challenges the conventional notion that one of the ways influence carries its weight is by claiming a general application, erasing distinctions between places and peoples. Such is the power of empire, too, that the “universal is always achieved at the expense of the native” (“Criticism, Culture, and Performance”). It is only when local knowledge can be brought to bear on texts, which are restored to their situations and locales, that readings can contest the languages of universalism and standardization. An example of the productive uses of bringing in the local context is Said’s description of Albert Camus’s use of the cultural discourse of the French Lycée to stall the
rise of an independent Algeria (p. 111). This is an interpretative method Said uses when he reads his own work in response to interviewers’ questions. Extending the critique of universalism to his own work, Said draws attention to the localized conditions of knowledge production affecting one’s understanding not only of the works one studies but also of those one writes. Being interviewed in so many parts of the world, he is invariably asked to respond to the concerns most pertinent to those places and to rethink his own work in relation to those different concerns. Take, for example, the question of Said’s impact on historians of India. He is asked in an interview at Calcutta (“I’ve Always Learnt During the Class”) whether it is not the case that, as a result of his influence on colonial discourse studies, Indian history writing has been “derailed” from its social history agenda. The interviewer’s suggestion is that the writing of Indian postcolonial history might have continued to follow the Marxist trajectory that dominated the school of Indian historiography were it not for Said’s interventions in cultural politics, which diverted the scholarly focus from class analysis to a study of the discursive power of colonial texts and their representations. The interviewer’s question highlights the fact that, in postcolonial societies, there is no commonly agreed-upon approach to decolonizing the...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375421076
ISBN 13 
9780375421075
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
485
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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