edward said and the cultural politics of education

Edward Said and the Cultural Politics

of Education

Fazal Rizvia* and Bob Lingardb

aUniversity of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), USA; bUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

This introductory essay to this special issue of Discourse on Edward Said and the cultural politics

of education provides an overview discussion of four inter-related themes representing the wide-

ranging scope of Said’s academic and political writings. The first of these themes relates to his idea

of Orientalism, through which Said sought to describe the relationship between colonial knowledge

and the exercise of imperial power. The second concerns the application of this theoretical work on

Orientalism to his political interventions in the murky politics of Palestine, and the subjugation of

the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. The third theme is linked to the critical role he envisaged

for the intellectual. And the final theme relates to his commitment to the principles of humanism,

democratic criticism and cosmopolitanism, which formed the core basis of his theoretical work and

his politics.

Introduction

No one, I think, can quite grasp the totality of his ambitions*/his voracious reading

in history and politics, in the literatures of Europe, the Americas, and the Middle

East. For me the characteristic gesture of both his cultural and political writing

(which, despite his claim to lead ‘‘two lives,’’ always seemed to me all of a piece) was

the turn from the straight, predictable path, the reversal of field, the interrupted

itinerary. So that, having by many accounts founded the entire field of what is called

postcolonial studies, he immediately set about to critique it, to question its

emergent complacencies and received ideas. His role as spokesman for Palestine

involved similar turns and complexities. He often said he wanted to help bring a

Palestinian state into existence so that then he could play his proper role as critic

and attack it. (Mitchell, 2005, p. 3)

It is now more than two years since the world lost one of its most intelligent,

articulate, and passionate public intellectuals. Throughout his life Edward Said

worked tirelessly, in ways too numerous to list, for marginalized people, not only his

native Palestine, but elsewhere as well. His writings exemplified that rare combina-

tion of conceptual clarity and political commitment. He taught us how to think

honestly and clearly, as well as creatively and critically, about issues of knowledge and

power, of theory and practice and of culture and imperialism. He insisted on the

*Corresponding author: Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign, 1310 S Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/06/030293-16

# 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01596300600838744

Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education

Vol. 27, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 293�308

need to examine political issues historically in ways that were at once local and

global. Imagination played an important role in his theoretical armory. He borrowed

heavily from a range of theoretical resources, from Marxism to poststructuralism,

never assuming that that they provided resources self-sufficient to work through

complex political problems. Indeed, his contribution to the emergence of post-

colonialism as a theoretical perspective needs to be acknowledged, but it is

interesting to recognize that he distinguishes this theoretical approach from that of

post-modernism in his provisional commitment to a continuing Enlightenment

project and a form of democratic humanism. As he put it:

whereas post-modernism in one of its programmatic statements (by Jean�/Francois

Lyotard) stresses the disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and

enlightenment, the emphasis behind much of the work done by postcolonial artists

and scholars is exactly the opposite: the grand narratives remain, even though their

implementation and realization are at present in abeyance, deferred or circum-

vented. (Said, 1978/2003, p. 351)

This is symptomatic of Said’s work in its avoidance of following intellectual fashions,

its provisionality, and its eclecticism working across difference. He believed that the

role of the intellectual involved speaking ‘‘truth to power.’’

Edward Said did not write about education in any direct manner, although issues

central to the cultural politics of education were never too far away from his gaze. He

did mention in an interview that he always learned through teaching and that the

presence of students provoked thinking and learning in a productive mediation

absent from the solitary work of the scholar. This is an important insight for all

pedagogues, wherever their institutional location. Issues of representation, popular

culture, the media, the colonial formations of knowledge, and the institutions of

imperialism were, for example, central in the vast collection of his literary and

popular writings. He viewed formal education as a key institution through which

colonial modes of thinking were produced and reproduced and where postcolonial

aspirations could also be worked towards. Not surprisingly therefore, his work, and

especially his concept of ‘‘Orientalism,’’ has been used liberally by theorists to

address issues of education in both colonial and postcolonial settings, particularly in

respect of policy, curriculum, and pedagogies.

In the immediate aftermath of his untimely death a large number of obituaries and

essays appeared assessing Said’s contribution to contemporary thought. The

collection Edward Said: Continuing the conversation, edited by Homi Bhabha and

William Mitchell (2005), is perhaps the most important of these. However, the

assessment of Said’s work after his death ranged from glowing and celebratory to

critical and even hostile. Said would have expected no less. In the post-September 11

era some critics unjustifiably viewed Said’s work as quintessentially anti-American,

overlooking the fact that he was no less critical of many recent developments in Islam

and spoke out against injustices wherever they originated. Further, he often noted

that he wanted a Palestinian state so he could become one of its major critics. Indeed,

Said rejected essentializing any group, whether it was Islam or the West. He did not

294 F. Rizvi and B. Lingard

always accept for himself the label ‘‘postcolonial,’’ but his foundational ethic was

always constituted by a desire to understand contemporary forms of colonial

discourse and practices and transcend their effects on marginalized people. It is

this commitment to naming and working against the exercises of colonial power in all

its manifestations, including contemporary neocolonial and postcolonial expressions,

that many of his critics did not like.

Said was and clearly remains a highly controversial figure. His work attrac-

ted*/even demanded*/response, engagement, and criticism. It is in the spirit of this

approach to scholarship that this special issue of Discourse: studies in the cultural politics

of education brings together five original essays, each in their way intended to provide

a reflexive assessment of the relevance of Said’s work to the study of the cultural

politics of education; each seeking to investigate the extent to which his analyses of

colonial and neocolonial discourses and power could help us to think more carefully

and seriously about issues of identity, representation, and cultural exchange; each

attempting to enhance our understanding of the ways in which transnational

configurations of knowledge�/power now affect the contemporary problems of

education. It is in the spirit of continuing the conversation with Said’s work that

this special number of Discourse has been created. As Mitchell (2005, p. 6) observed,

‘‘the ebb and flow of his conversation continues and will continue in the criticism, the

politics, the culture, and the evolution of human thought to come.’’

No overview of his work, no matter how systematic, can fully capture the breadth,

depth, complexity, and sophistication of Said’s scholarship. In what follows we make

a modest effort to discuss four interrelated themes to which he repeatedly returned

throughout his life. While his treatment of each of these themes attracted a great deal

of critical attention, these themes also helped reshape the nature of academic and

political debate about representations of the other, which arguably led to the

formation of the field of postcolonial studies. The first of these themes relates to his

idea of Orientalism, through which Said sought to describe the relationship between

colonial knowledge and the exercise of imperial power. The second concerns the

application of this theoretical work on Orientalism to his political interventions in the

murky politics of Palestine and the subjugation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli

state. The third theme is linked to the critical role he envisaged for the intellectual.

And the final theme relates to his commitment to the principles of humanism,

democratic criticism. and cosmopolitanism, which formed the core basis of his

theoretical analysis and politics.

Orientalism

The idea of Orientalism is central to Said’s scholarship. It would not be inaccurate to

say that his ground breaking book Orientalism (Said, 1978/2003) transformed the

humanities, in that it pointed to a new way of understanding colonialism and the

historical construction of the Orient as an object of Western gaze, variously

represented as alien, barbaric, uncivilized, sensual, or exotic. Orientalism is best

The Cultural Politics of Education 295

understood as a system of representations, a discourse framed by political forces

through which the West sought to understand and control its colonized populations.

It is a discourse that both assumes and promotes a fundamental difference between

the Western ‘‘us’’ and Oriental ‘‘them.’’ It is a manner of regularized interpreting,

writing about, and accounting for the Orient, dominated by imperatives, perspec-

tives, and ideological biases politically marshaled to self-justify imperial conquests

and exploitation. In this sense the Orient is an imagined place that is articulated

through an entire system of thought and scholarship.

Orientalism is much more complex than crude racism. It has a manifest form that

includes information about the Orient that can be acted upon, in policy decisions

and in popular representations. But Orientalism also has a latent form presupposed

in the unconscious certainty about what the Orient is. In Said’s terms it resides in the

normative assumptions through which the Orient is seen as separate, eccentric,

backward, silently different, sensual, and passive, which is always subject to supine

malleability. The Orientals are variously represented as a fixed and unchanging

Other, lacking subjectivity or variation. Their capabilities and values are judged in

terms of, and in comparison to, the West. They are the conquerable, the inferior, or

those in need of Western guidance and patronage. Orientalism thus involves multiple

forms of communicative practice, such as serious travel writing or journalism,

academic or political accounts which are presented to Western audiences as objective

analyses of the colonized populations. According to Said, the discourse of

Orientalism ultimately reveals less about the colonized people than it does about

the perspective and interests of the Western people who study them and seek to

exercise control over them.

In the 19th century scholars, Said maintained, were interested in ‘‘the Orient’’ for

a wide variety of reasons, although chief among these was the fact that colonial

conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This Foucauldian idea of

knowledge as power can be found throughout Said’s critique. By knowing the Orient,

the Western metropolitan centre came to learn how it could dominate distant

territories and cultures not only militarily, economically, and politically, but also

culturally in a range of hegemonic ways. Said argued that while the knowledge

developed by scholars might seem peripheral to imperialism, it was in fact essential to

it, since it provided much of the rhetoric and representation necessary for the

domination of one culture by another. Orientalist knowledge was also essential to the

Western powers to self-justify and rationalize the desire*/indeed the need and

obligation*/to pursue imperial expansion.

In the contemporary era, Said suggested, many Orientalist discourses persist. The

depiction of ‘‘the Arab’’ as irrational, menacing, violent, untrustworthy, anti-

Western, and dishonest, have clearly evolved over the years, but their foundational

impulse remains. Orientalism appears to have become institutionalized, he argued, in

both ideologies and policies supported by the institutions built around them. He said

that:


for every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power,

considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system

now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab

Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the

affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute

truth backed by absolute force. (Said, cited in Department of English, Emory

University, 2006)

In the revised edition of his book Covering Islam (Said, 2002), published after

September 11, he argued that the Orientalist focus on Islam in American and

Western media is now characterized by even ‘‘more exaggerated stereotypes and

belligerent hostility.’’ What this shows is that the Orientalist legacy has not entirely

disappeared and its resources are readily called upon in the exercise of power.

The significance of Said’s discussion of Orientalism not only lies in his analysis of

the complex and vital relationship between literature, politics, and culture, but also

in his methodological innovation. Using Foucault, he insisted that the Western

textual representation of the Orient is an example of the Western ‘‘will to power’’ over

others and that it is inextricably linked to the material realities of political and

economic domination. However, in asserting this thesis, he espoused a form of

Western humanism that accepts as unproblematic a secularist cosmopolitan world

view grounded in Western enlightenment philosophies. Indeed, he paid little

attention to the work of non-Western colonial writers. A number of his critics have

pointed out that Said’s attempts to reconcile Foucault, Gramsci, and Western

humanism are deeply problematic. He joins together Foucault’s ideas on knowledge

and power and Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, alongside appeals to notions such as

‘‘human experience’’ and ‘‘human reality,’’ which are located in a philosophical

tradition of which both Foucault and Gramsci are critical (see Kennedy, 2000).

In the end, Said appeared to work with a highly abstract and generalized view of

humanity and its potential to do good. But this abstraction led him to say very little

about class and gender factors influencing the structures of Orientalism. In

Orientalism Said discussed the West’s feminization of the Orient and Western

men’s textual and real exploitation of Oriental women, but disappointingly does not

explore the implications of this discussion for his humanism and for recognizing the

extensive diversity of the discursive practices that might be referred to as Orientalist.

In this omission he misses the opportunity to make his approach more sensitive to

various different historical specificities relating to the West’s relationship with the

East. This leaves him open to the charge by conservative humanities scholars, such as

Bernard Lewis, that the discourse about the Orient is much less dominant and

unified than he often states or implies and that Said fails to provide a non-coercive

alternative to Orientalism. Much more seriously, Said appeared to work with a

duality that suggested that power, speech, and representation are located exclusively

with the colonizers, while the colonized appear powerless, silent, and objectified.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, Said’s analysis of Orientalism represents a major

innovation in the analysis of Western textual practices about the Orient. It provides a

highly plausible account of how colonialism would not have been possible without a


range of discursive practices and cultural institutions. It points to the powerful role

that hegemony plays in processes of colonial subjugation, which requires, at a general

level, the consent of the colonized people, expressed through their general

acceptance of the hegemonic discourses. It underlines the importance of under-

standing such discourses within the broader context of the power configurations that

they often help reproduce. As Ashcroft and Ahluwalia (1999, p. 83) pointed out, the

‘‘essence of Said’s argument is to know something is to have power over it, and

conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms.’’ The discourse of

Orientalism is thus constituted by the terms in which the West understood the

Orient, and which continue to determine the academic and popular representations

of the Middle East even today.

The Question of Palestine

There is an essential continuity between Said’s theoretical work on Orientalism and

his political activism regarding the question of Palestine. Although Said lived and

worked for most of his life in the USA, his convictions about the plight of the

Palestinian people were deep and were based on his emotional roots, particularly his

affection for his aunt Nabiha, who, after 1948, devoted her life to working with

Palestinian refugees in Cairo. He felt deeply about the Palestinian refugees, displaced

by the exercise of what he viewed as colonial power. He provided a passionate

account of the injustices that accompanied the formation of the modern state of

Israel, and he sought to ‘‘write back’’ a counter narrative to the commonly held image

of the Arab as terrorist, who had little respect for human life, both of others and their

own. He showed how the Israeli state and the USA used Orientalist vocabulary to

dismiss the legitimate claims of the Palestinian people for their autonomy.

The key to understanding the Palestinian question, according to Said, lay in the

ways in which the Jews grasped the idea of their homeland. Israel, it was assumed,

rested on a sense of divine promise, but this metaphysical abstraction implied that

the Palestinian existence lay, from the beginning, outside both Jewish and European

conceptions of a state of Israel. The persuasive power of this abstraction was aided by

the discourse of Orientalism, which suggested that the Palestinian people were

responsible for their derogation and indivisibility. They were not only portrayed as

uncivilized and violent, but also as intruders in lands that belonged to the Jewish

people by divine right. In this hegemonic narrative Israel is still constructed as the

Occident and Palestine as the Orient, and that peculiar character of colonization is

uniquely justified through the notion of a redemptive occupation, the fulfilment of

God’s promise to the Jewish people alone.

At the same time, the ideology of Zionism, Said insisted, deployed the classic

colonialist strategy of the civilizing mission, arguing that Palestine was mostly

unoccupied or was inhabited by a few nomadic Bedouins, who were assumed to be

incapable of representing themselves and had to be represented instead by the Israeli

state. In The question of Palestine (Said, 1979, p. 9) Said said that the Western


narrative sees Israel as ‘‘a land without people, for a people without land,’’ and that

the creation of Israel is the rightful compensation for the centuries of persecution of

the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Said’s description of Israel as a colonial

state challenges the hegemonic Western narrative that rests on a combination of a

number of assertions, including the meta-narrative of ‘‘progress’’ and the ‘‘civilized

world,’’ a metaphysical belief in the divine promise, coupled with the idea of Palestine

as a largely unoccupied land and a narrative of the Jews as victims.

Despite claims of anti-Semitism leveled against him, Said did not deny that Jews

had historic claims to Palestine. His objection was to the Palestinian dispossession

that accompanied such claims. His interest was in explaining the problematic

character of their origins in the persecution of European Jews and the impact on the

Palestinian people of the Zionist idea on the European conscience. Said recognized

that Israel’s exemption from the normal criteria by which nations are judged owes

everything to the Holocaust. However, he could not see why this legacy of trauma

and horror should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who were

‘‘absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity,’’ of their

rights. ‘‘The question to be asked,’’ he wrote in the Politics of dispossession (Said,

1994b, p. 19), ‘‘is how long can the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust be

used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for its

behaviour towards the Palestinians.’’

Said’s critical gaze was not restricted, however, to the Israeli state and its use of

colonial tactics to silence and make invisible the rights of the Palestinian people. He

was equally critical of the Arab regimes and their leaders. He was often unsparing in

his criticism of their repressiveness and their failure to provide social justice and

development for the majority of their populations and their failure to fully support

the Palestinian struggle. Said was no less critical of the Palestinian governance

structures to which he briefly belonged as an independent member of the Palestine

National Council (PNC). Using his authority as an independent intellectual, Said

avoided taking part in the factional struggles, but rather made strategic interventions.

Rejecting the policy of armed struggle as impermissible, he was an early advocate of

the two state solution, implicitly recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Later he became a

major critic of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for their misuse of power

and their oppression and exploitation of their own people.

The Role of the Intellectual

Said’s political activism around the Palestinian question demonstrated the role he

saw for the intellectual. Indeed, he borrowed heavily not only from Foucault and

Gramsci and critical theorists such as Adorno and others, but also from much recent

feminist theory to argue for a new logic for the Palestinian question in which

‘‘difference’’ did not entail ‘‘domination’’ (Said, 1994a, p. 100). The future he

imagined for Palestine was as a democratic and secular state which could relate to the

Israeli state as an equal partner in the global community of nations. This vision, he


said, can only be realized if intellectuals and others exercise critical sense, memory

and scepticism. For Said, the idea of critical sense consisted of the ability to go

beyond the special interests of the experts and be prepared to be self-reflexive of their

relations to power. He thus drew a fundamental distinction between power elites and

the critical sense that intellectuals are able to bring to political deliberations.

Borrowing a term from Adorno, Said rejected all forms of ‘‘identitarian thought,’’

which render stable identities based on such affirmative categories as nationality,

tradition, language, and religion. Instead, he favoured those patterns of thinking that

are connected to marginal, alienated, and anti-systemic forces, what he called

‘‘secular criticism’’ freed from the restrictions of intellectual specialization. He

advocated what he called ‘‘amateurism in intellectual life,’’ a need for the

intellectuals’ actual and metaphoric ‘‘exile from home,’’ so that intellectual work

can recover its connections with the political realities of the society in which it occurs.

This requires the intellectual to be committed to maintaining a dialogue and open-

mindedness and to articulate a principled critique in order to seek some influence

over public opinion. This involves keeping some distance from official or institutional

bodies, so that the intellectual is able to ‘‘speak truth to power.’’ In this sense Said

denied an absolute distinction between the politically implicated and disinterested

objective dimensions of intellectual work. In his view, both are essential*/to be of the

world and to provide a critical commentary on that world.

In his Reith Lectures, published as Representations of the intellectual (Said, 1994a, p.

84), he insisted on the need to take ‘‘a risk in order to go beyond the easy certainties

provided us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from

the reality of others.’’ For Said the main problem with contemporary criticism was its

functionalism, which paid too much attention to the text’s formal operations, but far

too little to its materiality and its political context. Instead of treating the text in its

idealized and essentialized form it is more important, according to Said, to analyze

how, as a cultural object, it is ‘‘sought after, fought over, possessed, rejected, or

achieved in time,’’ and its authority is secured (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 1999, p. 17).

The question of the worldiness of the text lies at the heart of Said’s work. Said

distinguished between the worldliness of speech and texts, noting how the former

carries its context within it, while the latter does not. This then raised a number of

critical questions for textual analysis: how do we read the text? who addresses us in

text? who is silenced? how is the text used to exercise power? and how is the text

implicated in materialities of dispossession, injustice, marginality, and subjection?

Issues concerning the role of the public intellectual are consistent themes in all of

Said’s work, both popular and theoretical. He wss disdainful of the contemporary

practices of literary criticism, which he accused of ‘‘having given up the world for the

aporias and unthinkable paradoxes of the text’’ and for having ‘‘retreated from its

constituency, the citizens of modern society, who have been left to the hands of ‘free’

market forces and multinational corporations’’ (Said, 1983, p. 4). For Said this has

resulted from a failure to recognize how the ‘‘world,’’ the ‘‘text,’’ and criticism are

inextricably linked and how the work of the critic is bound up with the affiliations of

the critic’s worldliness. He was convinced that intellectuals can make a difference and


that secular criticism, freed from its rigid professional affiliations, can have

transformative possibilities. The power of resistance, he sais, lies in the ability of

the intellectual to ‘‘write back’’ to imperial power, to read contrapuntally, to speak

truth to justice, and to understand that while intellectual work cannot provide global

truths, it can challenge injustices.

Somewhat paradoxical in Said’s work was the position from which he spoke and

‘‘wrote back.’’ Said’s writings drew heavily on his sense of being an outsider, an exile.

Like Joseph Conrad, the subject of his first published book (Said, 1966), he retained

an ‘‘extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality,’’ which

enabled him to deploy a kind of double vision in his readings of the English novel,

discerning both textual beauty, but also naming the often invisible colonial impulses,

and seeing in it the potential to challenge the Western hegemony that would erupt

during the post-colonial era. So while some writers, such as Chinhua Achebe,

dismissed Conrad as a racist, Said saw such reasoning as amounting to intellectual

amputation. According to Said texts were not inherently unacceptable, but could be

used to open up dialogue and better understand how their discursive and material

dimensions worked together to produce particular effects.

Nowhere is this commitment to openness more apparent in Said’s work than in his

Culture and imperialism (Said, 1993). In it he was most articulate about his contention

that intellectuals are not theoretical machines, but are themselves inflected by the

complexities and contingencies of their own location in the world. Consistent with

this conviction, Said sought in Culture and imperialism to articulate an alternative to

what he saw as the insularity and parochialism of intellectuals, as well as the

academic trend toward needless jargon and obscurantism. He suggested a view of

cultures, histories, and literatures as inherently hybrid, forged out of overlapping and

interdependent traditions of thought and practice. Any constructions of purity of

categories are fictions, power/knowledge manifestations. To understand this hybrid-

ity, he proposed the adoption of a musical term for literary criticism, arguing that

literary works should be considered contrapunctally. By contrapuntal criticism Said

suggested European culture needed to be read in relation to its spatial and political

relations to empire, as well as in counterpoint to the works that colonized people

themselves produced in response to colonial domination.

According to Said (1993, p. xxix) a contrapunctal reading is necessary ‘‘partly

because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure;

all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.’’

Although the notion of hybridity in Said’s work was left relatively untheorized, it was

highly generative in drawing attention to the interrelation of culture and politics, and

especially to the politics of imperial domination and to its continuing legacy. Mary

Louise Pratt (1992, p. 3) characterized contrapuntal reading as involving a continual

movement back and forth across the ‘‘activated imperial divide.’’ Said saw himself as

occupying a position across this divide, an intermediary position between theorizing

Western intellectuals and formerly colonized people suspicious of generalizing

Orientalist narratives. Said regarded his own work as that of an exile who ‘‘belonged

to both worlds without being completely of either the one or the other’’ (Said, 1993,


p. xxx). For him exile was not simply a state of deprivation, but also a privileged

condition that enabled him to see multiple perspectives that needed to be reconciled

in some principled fashion. In an homologous way he also saw the dangers and

potential re-invigorations in theory which travelled both temporally and spatially.

Following Adorno, Said also believed that the intellectual could, or at least should,

never be at home in the world.

Humanism and Democratic Criticism

Humanism, I strongly believe, must excavate the silences, the world of memory, ofitinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind oftestimony that doesn’t make it onto the reports but which more and more is aboutwhether an overexploited environment, sustainable small economies and smallnations, and marginalized peoples outside as well as inside the maw of themetropolitan centre can survive the grinding down and flattening out anddisplacement that are such prominent features of globalization. (Said, 2004b, pp.81�/82)

But where might these principles that work across difference come from? Ultimately

for Said these principles involved the transcendence of nationalism and other

certitudes of affiliation and the redefinition of Western humanism. In his last book,

Humanism and democratic criticism, Said (2004b) returned to a theme that defined his

critical humanist perspective, but now in a highly charged political atmosphere

following the tragic events of September 11 and its aftermath. With his faith in

humanistic and democratic principles undiminished, he maintained that these values

were more urgent and necessary than ever before. He argued that humanistic

education need not necessarily be Eurocentric and gender blind and that it is possible

to develop a more critical democratic form of humanism that rests on the principles

of self-knowledge and self-criticism and an awareness that comes from learning

about other peoples, ideas, and traditions. In this way he argued for a need to

revitalize the humanities, where learning is no longer ahistorical, but plays a key role

as an instrument of political and cultural transformations. On this revitalization of

humanism it is worth quoting Said himself, in a response to criticism of his

conjoining of poststructuralism and humanism:

I believed then, and still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in thename of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience ofEurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism thatwas cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the greatlessons of the past. (Said, 2004b, pp. 10�/11)

Said believed that the so-called humanities crisis rested on a misconception that

there was a basic conflict between established traditions and our increasingly

complex and diversified world. This position, he argued, failed to recognize that

today’s canonical knowledge was mostly produced by the radical thinkers of the past

and that, by its very nature, human progress requires an epistemic disposition to

question, upset, and reform. In an increasingly interdependent world, he insisted,


humanistic education was needed to develop our own critical perspective on our

shared intellectual heritage, while at the same time engaging with other perspectives

that are so often dismissed as irrelevant and impossible to translate. In this way he

denied the thesis of cultural incommensurability and insisted that cultural change

was impossible without critical engagement with other cultures (Said, 2004a). While

agreeing that humanism indeed provided an ideological framework responsible for

racism, sexism, and Western imperialism, Said nevertheless insisted that humanism

need not imply a conservative approach to knowledge and that a critical relational

humanism has the potential to address issues of global injustices.

Said was thus both critical of traditional humanism, and saw in it the potential to

articulate a set of progressive principles that were not only integral to an

understanding of culture and society, but also integral to providing the tools of

global conviviality. Unlike Samuel Huntington (1996), he refused to divide the world

into hermetically sealed civilizations, and he regarded Huntington’s thesis as

politically very dangerous in a paper with the characteristically ironic title, ‘‘clash

of ignorance.’’ He focused instead on the political dynamics of global interconnec-

tivity and interdependence and on the hybridity produced by colonialism. According

to Said the challenge facing us now is to unify aspects of one or more cultures and to

oppose elements in them which are inimical to the principles of freedom and self-

expression. He deplored the lack of any effective critical and democratic discourse in

the American academy, which he attributed partly to the compartmentalization of

academic life around discrete disciplines, to the deep specialization of disciplines,

and to the separation of theory and practice. He saw as urgent the task of providing

alternative readings and interpretations from a perspective that did not pretend to be

Archimedean, but rather which is located within contemporary political realities.

In this intellectual task Said found the resources of humanism particularly helpful,

but insisted that these resources needed to be reworked. He defined humanism as

‘‘the exertion of one’s faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and

grapple with the products of language in history, other languages, and other

histories’’ (Said, 2004b, p. 4). Denying the distinction between humanist and

critical education, Said saw in critical humanism not a way of affirming what is

already known, but an intellectual process and practice that questioned and

reformulated what is often presented in a canonical and commodified form, with

the kind of codified certainty that is represented, for example, in the phrase ‘‘the

classics.’’ His view of humanism thus championed democratic criticism based on the

epistemic virtues of reflexivity, relationality, and engagement. This view underlined

the need for intellectuals to drop their obscurantist tendencies and become more

involved in public life, but in so doing to remain at a tangent to power.

Said and the Cultural Politics of Education

As we have already noted, Said did not write anything specifically about education,

apart from comments on the significance of pedagogy to his thinking, his thoughts on


the role of the intellectual, on the university as an important public space for

democratic discussions, and on the significance of developing a disposition of

criticality in all our students. On pedagogy and thinking Said noted:

I’ve been teaching now for almost forty years. And I’ve always learnt during the

actual class. There’s something that eludes me when I read and think without the

presence of students. So I’ve always thought of my classes not as a routine to go

through but rather an experience of investigation and discovery. (Said, in

Viswanathan, 2001, p. 280)

This is an important insight for all pedagogues about the imbrication of teaching and

learning and which implies a respect for the other, in this case the student, and the

rejection of a didactic one-way pedagogy.

Said’s theoretical and political interventions have other implications for thinking

about the cultural politics of education. Since education was a central site for the

exercise of colonial power, both in the metropolitan centre where it was through

education that the legitimizing discourses of the colonial adventures were justified,

and in the colonial societies, where education provided the structuring mechanisms

of asymmetrical relations of power. It involved a cultural politics through which the

colonial subjects were both named and represented. It was in and through

educational institutions that students came to first accept as natural and inevitable

the links between colonial power and knowledge. Beyond this level of generality,

however, there is still much to learn about the role of schools and universities in the

Orientalist strategies for knowing and dominating the colonized world and about the

ways in which Orientalist legacies continue to inform the ways knowledge about

cultural others is still organized and disseminated, as well as resisted and contested.

In his voluminous writings on the question of Palestine Said clearly showed how

Orientalist discourses persist in the Western and, in particular, American representa-

tions of Islam and in the ways in which the politics of the Middle East is still

discussed through a complex geometry of power designed to maintain Western

influence over this increasingly important region of the world. Said’s incisive analysis

of these issues clearly has a major contribution to make not only in any pedagogic

exploration of contemporary world politics, but also in understanding the dynamics

of cultural exchange, the speed and intensity of which have increased significantly in

the age of globalization. If one of the aims of education is to enhance intellectual

work, then we have much to learn from Said’s discussion of how it might best be

organized so that it takes account of the worldliness of the text and the critic. Said’s

writings on humanism and democratic criticism are equally significant to an

exploration of the cultural politics of education, in that they suggest a set of

pedagogic values that provide a way out of nihilistic critique and relativism and point

to a way in which humanism can be rethought, especially in a globalized world

increasingly dominated by the rampant individualism of the market.

Said gestured towards some possible features of what we might want to call a

postcolonial pedagogy across his extensive oeuvre, but especially in his essay ‘‘On

defiance and taking positions,’’ reproduced in the collection Reflections on exile (Said,


2000). Here Said eschewed a directly political approach to pedagogy and curriculum

and asserted that we need to teach our disciplines or fields to our students whilst also

transgressing disciplinary boundaries, but beyond this and more importantly, he

suggested that we must also teach a disposition of criticality. According to Said our

prime responsibility is to our students and their education, their critical dispositions.

This disposition in his words ‘‘is sense of critical awareness, a sense of scepticism,

that you don’t take what’s given to you uncritically’’ (Said, 2000, p. 502). This can be

compared with his sense of the role of the intellectual as necessarily requiring the

questioning of power rather than its consolidation, which implies a more structuralist

than Foucauldian approach to power. This tension between competing theories of

power, a specific example of the conjoining of the apparently immiscible, is a central

feature of all of Said’s work. James Clifford (1980) commented on this poststructur-

alist/humanist tension in a review of Orientalism when it first appeared. It is this

tension which can be seen, however, to be very productive, as Greg Dimitriadis

suggests in his essay in this special issue.

There are other aspects of Said’s work which carry implications for pedagogy and

curricula, including his emphasis on the importance of the intellectual to function

‘‘as a kind of public memory’’ (Said, 2000, p. 503) and his approach to literary and

musical criticism of reading contrapuntally. Said’s critical humanism, which

recognised commonalities as well as differences across peoples, also provided a

broader frame for curricula and pedagogies in the context of globalization and

postcoloniality. Mass systems of schooling have since their inception been concerned

with the creation of what Benedict Anderson (1983) called ‘‘the imagined

community’’ of the nation. Today schooling also needs to complexify that imagined

community, but also seek to constitute a disposition of what, after Gilroy (2000), we

might call a ‘‘critical planetary humanism,’’ one inflected and nuanced by insights

from postcolonial theory. Said’s work can assist in that project, which will have to

work against many elements of the reparochializing agenda and fear of difference

(Gilroy, 2004) evident in the context of post-September 11.

Now, the papers in this special issue do not deal with education using Said in this

way. Rather, what they do is demonstrate the usefulness of Said’s theories and

concepts for applied analysis of a number of fields of cultural politics, including

education. Thus, Colin Symes in his essay demonstrates how Said’s musical criticism

and musical concepts, such as the contrapuntal and fugue, provide ‘‘analyses,

metaphors and metonyms’’ for his thinking about culture, politics, society, and

identities. Symes also speaks of Said’s ambivalent engagement with the literary

canon, recognizing its strengths as well as weaknesses, particularly its involvement in

power/knowledge work in both its representations and silences. His focus, however,

is explicitly on Said’s musical criticism and tracing the genealogical roots of this

criticism. Symes also positions Said’s work on classical music against the backdrop of

the writings of Adorno and the neglect of classical music by more contemporary

cultural theorists as elitist. Said also offered an implied critique of the absence of the

serious study of music from the contemporary educational curriculum. In the

location of classical music and performance in context Said demonstrated his


protean critical capacities and his central notion that all cultural forms are hybrid in

nature. In this essay Symes manifests his own critical habitus, which aligns with

Said’s disposition of criticality. He also illustrates the usefulness of Said’s work for

critical analysis.

Cathryn McConaghy echoes the title of Said’s (1999) memoirs in her essay

‘‘Schooling out of place,’’ which uses Said’s theoretical approaches, particularly his

concept of ‘‘imaginative geographies’’ developed in Orientalism, to reconsider rurality

and teacher mobilities in Australia, specifically drawing on a number of research

projects she has been involved in in New South Wales. In a sense, to paraphrase

McConaghy and her use of Said, she asks the question: ‘‘How can rurality and

teacher mobilities and transience in rural Australia be read otherwise or contra-

puntally?’’ McConaghy also develops the concept of ‘‘Ruralism’’ out of the idea of

Orientalism and demonstrates how this frames the readings most readily available of

the experience of teaching in rural schools.1 Here McConaghy uses the notion of

reading contrapuntally to suggest, a la Said, that such reading focuses on some

specific thing or text and its other, but that it also requires both historical and

geographical sensibilities, including considerations of the relational politics of time

and space. Specifically, the concepts of displacement, exilic identities, travelling

theory, and reading contrapuntally are applied to rural schooling in a most original

and insightful fashion, which indicates the productiveness of the approach offered by

Said.

McConaghy notes the tense sense of loss and pleasure in the exilic experience, as

well as the simultaneous depoliticizing and reinvigorating effects of travelling theory,

and also, we would add, travelling policy. In stressing that everything is political,

McConaghy argues that Said neglects ‘‘typographies of desire.’’ As Leslie Roman

says in her paper in this special issue of Discourse, the exilic experience of refugees

and forced migrants is not materially comparable to the exile of the intellectual, nor

would we add to that of mobile rural teachers. Nonetheless, as McConaghy

demonstrates, the notions of exile and displacement remain useful metaphorical

ones which provide insights into the many contemporary experiences of mobility,

including those of rural teachers in Australia.

Jon Nixon, in his essay ‘‘Towards a hermeneutics of hope: The legacy of Edward

Said,’’ considers the lessons for contemporary scholar-teachers within the academy of

Said’s work, specifically his philological hermeneutics and democratic humanism.

Nixon notes how a contemporary rethinking of the principles offered by Said is very

important, given the policy and market pressures on the democratic knowledge

production and dissemination functions of the university. Drawing on Said, Nixon

suggests that our humanistic scholarship needs to use its authority carefully, be

attentive to texts (being simultaneously receptive and resistant in Said’s terms), and

be respectful of difference, and that we live self-questioning, rather than complacent,

lives as scholar-teachers. We would also note Said’s stance that critical scholarship

requires a slow pace, unlike the soundbite culture in which the academy and its work

are currently situated.


Leslie Roman also writes of Said’s secular humanism and the ways in which it

might be used to create a situated cosmopolitanism as central to a global citizenship

that challenges dominant corporate and marketized forms, which work in reductive

anti-democratic ways and which constitute citizens as merely global consumers. As

Roman suggests, this situated cosmopolitanism is more than liberal multiculturalism

writ large. This is part of that project geared to pursuing the cosmopolitan

possibilities of education referred to earlier.

In ‘‘On the production of expert knowledge: Revisiting Edward Said’s work on the

intellectual’’ Greg Dimitriadis also draws on the humanist insights from Said about

the role of the intellectual and expert versus amateur knowledges and dispositions,

and applies these insights to the academy in a time of academic capitalism and

intellectual retrenchments and, specifically, to the pressures upon Schools of

Education in the USA today. In this way the Nixon, Roman and Dimitriadis papers

are nicely complementary. Dimitriadis observes that Said suggested we need to hold

on to three intellectual dispositions as critical academics, namely the professional, the

amateur, and the reflective activist.

According to Said as academics we have three sets of responsibilities, which work

in tension with each other. These include our prime responsibilities to our students

and to our discipline and the need to defend its autonomy in a way suggested by

Pierre Bourdieu in his work on the autonomy of specific fields. Said also noted our

responsibility as academics to being citizens in the broader world beyond the

academy. Dimitriadis applies these concepts in a productive way to the role of critical

academics in Schools of Education today. Part of the defence of such dispositions is

part of another pressing political project, that of maintaining the university as the one

remaining utopia for democratic thought, argumentation, and knowledge produc-

tion, as suggested by Said. Dimitriadis’s essay on the uses of Said can be seen as part

of his other intellectual and postcolonial work with Cameron McCarthy (Dimitriadis

& McCarthy, 2001), Reading and teaching the postcolonial.

Collectively these papers show the productive relevance of Said’s work in

education and demonstrate the necessity of continuing the conversation with his

work for educational scholars and researchers. In particular, we would see his work

contributing in most productive ways to considerations of the cosmopolitan

possibilities of education and for considerations of postcolonial pedagogies.

Note

1. The concept of Aboriginalism has been developed in a similar way in contemporary

Australian scholarship to understand the ways in which certain forms of abstract as well as

empirical knowledge were central to the colonization of the indigenous peoples of Australia.

Lingard and Rizvi (1994) have used the concept to analyse the important political work of

the Australian indigenous artist Gordon Bennett. Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001) also

used the art of Gordon Bennett in their book about Reading and teaching the postcolonial.


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