Edward Said's "Culture & Imperialism"

So classic, I guess, because it isn't as obvious as I thought.

& haha fad!

another victory for close reading.

(i read it waiting for a shrink while massively depressed at Toronto Western, so this might have made me like it more

Reading this now and enjoying it. The idea of 'contrapuntal' reading and the music analogies work nicely in thinking about taking a more interdisciplinary or broader interpretive approach to reading (the canon or otherwise).

The book must have come across much more forcefully upon its publication as an intervention into the debates on the status of the canon, the (relative) novelty or at least intensification of pundits appearing on TV (or wider media outlets) to talk about foreign policy (e.g., Iraq), and what comes across as more rigidly defined specialization in language and comp lit departments (?).

Despite that, it's surprisingly aged well and provides a fruitful way of reading/re-reading.

@MediocreDave
A colleague had to teach a class last week with Edward Said on the curriculum and was advised that, given the current 'situation', it would be better to brush over that bit and focus on other things. Everyone loves a decolonial syllabus as long as it doesn't feel at all relevant

this feels crazy

i taught Said to high school seniors a couple of years ago. seniors at a selective, expensive private school whose parents are American ruling class elites!

to censor Said is to erase an entire field of study! are they coming for Fanon next?

...i guess probably

Probably. One isolated incident but interesting how it's happening now, when these texts are needed the most...

it's so ugly to just be like: that dude is Palestinian; don't teach him. doesn't sound like it's even about his thought.

that's racist and also so fucking typical of an academic culture which prides itself on entertaining "radical ideas" in a "makes you think" kind of way but shuts them down immediately (in spite of the wishes of most students and staff) as soon as they threaten to become less abstract than the administration is comfortable with. decolonization can only ever be a metaphor in these conditions. institutional responses to BLM have had a lot of this sort of attitude.

I haven't read that book yet so I don't know how much about Palestine specifically is in there but I wouldn't be surprised to hear the same thing said for Orientalism too (which is relevant in a relatively more oblique way) because both Said's work and ethnicity are just too difficult to deal with right now from an administrators' POV.

Culture and Imperialism is about lol Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad. Orientalism also not explicitly about Israel, though its schema are eminently applicable, particularly to the Western view of Palestinians and other Arabs.

Culture and Imperialism's one of those books that Changed My Life.

it's a great book

Said was also a babe, importantly

it feels to me, in the United States, that this is a moment of Western liberals (and conservatives, I guess, but fuck 'em) finding the existence of Palestinians inconvenient. it makes me helplessly furious.

xps they're coming for "post-colonial studies" in general and have been for a while - there has been an effort to link any critical analysis of colonialism with antisemitism and hatred of european civilisation. those two concepts are constantly and ahistorically being brought together by people who know more straightforward celebrations of colonialism are a bad look. they've had some success with this strategy- Germany in particular fucking loves it for painfully obvious reasons.

Edward said's [back] about hassan nasrallah; pic.twitter.com/X3OSNNts8D

— Irhamkashmiri (@Mirza__Irham) September 29, 2024