Comments on: Edward Said as Masonry

By: sepoy

sepoy — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:41:21 +0000

Irwin’s book – Dangerous Knowledge – is something that an over-eager Young Republican at a R1 institute would have written. It is chock full of the most ridiculous arguments against the hegemonic Said, all buttressed with thrilling ‘profiles’ of Orientalists.

It has to be said, that far more stringent critiques of Said have emerged from within postcolonial scholarship than all the Irwins, Warraqs and Variscos put together. They should pick up a book written after Said.

By: zunguzungu

zunguzungu — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:21:52 +0000

What I find interesting about the article (which isn’t as bad as it could be, I’ll admit, but still fairly vacuous) is the notion that postcolonial studies (or engaged leftist criticism more generally) is some kind of structure held together only by the examples of figures like Said, and if *he* can be sufficiently tarred, then the whole thing will collapse around him. The same way with showing that De Man was a nazi collaborator: it was ultimately relevant as a way of tarring the larger “movement” he was involved in (if you can call it that), to the point of even finding its way into Derrida’s obit, as I recall. But its a fallacy to think that Said’s sloppiness has anything to do with the virtues or failings of the larger project that he became a standard bearer for. To think that it would seems to me to be a product of Irwin’s sloppiness, but it’s a common kind of sloppiness on the right.

By: phoenixcomplex

phoenixcomplex — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:56:18 +0000

Actually, I don’t think the article is all that bad. But this is awfully disingenuous:

Gérôme’s “Snake Charmer” was, according to Nochlin “a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology”. But why Gérôme should have wanted to produce such a document is not clear. Moreover, the painting is set in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The picture was completed in around 1883, when neither France nor Britain had any colonies in the Middle East, except for a British coaling station at Aden.

Oh sure: French and British colonial interests in the Middle East just popped up completely out of nowhere after 1883; before that, most of Europe was pleasantly indifferent to Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Middle East, an area of no strategic importance to colonial powers in Africa, India and Southeast Asia. They reluctantly colonized the Middle East after World War I, because it looked like no one else was going to do it and they felt kind of bad about beating the Ottomans. Take that, Said, you big idiot! Why can’t you stick to facts?

OK, in conclusion: I am tired of the TLS and its rhetoric. I guess bringing uncharitable counter-rhetoric against it isn’t much help.

By: phoenixcomplex

phoenixcomplex — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:32:56 +0000

I gave up on the TLS last year (link within that post is worth reading). I'm pretty sure Irwin is or was at some point their Middle East editor, and I imagine they'd seriously worry about subscriptions dropping if he failed to write the obligatory approving review of new anti-Said books. It's a market niche. In fact I read Irwin's book last year, too, and it's not bad, as far as my limited knowledge allows me to determine -- the history of academic orientalism is highly entertaining. He has an obnoxious writing style that reminds me of Richard Dawkins, and about as much sensitivity to nuance; and he likes his honorifics, like "the great Persian scholar Sir X..." It's worth reading for the details. But if he wants to have the influence in literary studies that Said did, he's nuts. Also: Said's dictum that we examine our own ideological agendas with regard to the Middle East insidiously demands that we stop regarding the Middle East with unapologetically ideological agendas! Therefore, terrorists.