Edward Said: A Memorial Issue

Contents

Edward Said: A Memorial Issue Special Issue Editors Patrick Deer, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat Introduction Edward Said: A Memorial Issue  Patrick Deer, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat 1

Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism  Stathis Gourgouris 11 “What Would Said Say?” Reflections on Tradition, Imperialism, and Globalism   Sura P. Rath 21 Edward Said, Reuben Sachs, and Victorian Zionism  Iveta Jusová and Dan Reyes 35 Edward Said: “The Last Jewish Intellectual”: On Identity, Alterity, and the Politics of Memory  Gil Z. Hochberg 47 The Interference of al-Andalus: Spain, Islam, and the West  Hishaam D. Aidi 67 The Filipina’s Breast: Savagery, Docility, and the Erotics of the American Empire  Nerissa S. Balce 89 The Recourses of Necessity: Repetition, Secular Mourning, and Edward Said’s Inventories of Late Return  Ana Dopico 111 Edward Said’s Lieux de Mémoire: Out of Place and the Politics of Autobiography  Ioana Luca 125

Contributors

Hishaam D. Aidi teaches political science in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is preparing a manuscript on the Moor and al-Andalus in the Hispanic political imagination. Nerissa S. Balce is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches courses on ethnic studies, Asian American literature and film, postcolonial studies, race, and popular culture. She is preparing a manuscript on American imperialism as a visual language and the representation of the Filipino and Filipina savage. Patrick Deer teaches in the Department of English at New York University, where he focuses on war culture, modernism, the twentieth-century novel and film, and postcolonial and cultural studies. He recently completed the manuscript of “Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature.” His published work includes “The Dogs of War: Myths of British Anti-Americanism,” in Anti-Americanism, ed. Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross (New York University Press), and “Defusing the English Patient,” an essay on the film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel commissioned for A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam (Blackwell). Ana Dopico teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is the author of “Houses Divided: Political Imaginaries and Genealogical Fictions,” forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is the critical editor of Jose Marti: Politics and Letters, 2 vols., forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is presently at work on a book about Cuban national culture titled “Cubanologies: Altered States of the Nation.” Stathis Gourgouris is professor of comparative literature at UCLA. His most recent book is Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford University Press).

Gil Z. Hochberg is assistant professor of comparative literature at UCLA, where she teaches courses on Israeli and Palestinian literature and film, postcolonial theory, and the politics of memory. Her recent articles include “The ‘Problem of Immigration’ from a Child’s Point of View: The Poetics of Abjection in Albert Swissa’s Aqud and Farida Belghoul’s Georgette! ” and “ ‘Permanent Immigration’: Ronit Matalon, Jacqueline Kahanoff, and the Impetus of Levantinism.” Her manuscript “In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination” examines the relationship between the names “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literary texts. Iveta Jusová is assistant professor of women’s studies and director of the Comparative Women’s Studies in Europe Program at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. She has published articles on Czech and British women writers and actresses in both U.S. and Czech journals. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, postcolonial studies, and feminist philosophies. Ioana Luca is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bucharest, where she teaches courses in American studies and American literature. She is completing her PhD with a dissertation titled “The Autobiography of Displacement in Contemporary American Literature.” Gyan Prakash is professor of history and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. His recent publications include Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World (1300 to the Present) (Norton). Sura P. Rath is professor of English and director of the William O. Douglas Honors College at Central Washington University. He has recently coedited U. R. Anantha Murthy’s “Samskara”: A Critical Reader and Dialogics of Cultural Encounters: Nations and Nationalities in Periods of Conflict, both published by Pencraft International (New Delhi), and is working on a book on V. S. Naipaul.

Dan Reyes is assistant professor of arts, humanities, and cultural studies and core faculty member with the Individualized Liberal and Professional Studies Program at Antioch University McGregor. With an interdisciplinary background in cultural studies, literary theory, and the design arts, his current areas of inquiry include cultural economies and the negotiation of public culture in a global age. Ella Shohat is professor of cultural studies at New York University. Her books include Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Unthinking Eurocentrism (coauthored), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, and the coedited Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives and Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. She is coediting a volume on the cultural politics of the Middle East throughout the Americas for the University of Michigan Press and finishing two manuscripts— “Flagging Patriotism: Exceptionalism, Narcissism and Anti-Americanism” (Routledge) and “The Culture Wars in Translation” (New York University Press)—coauthored with Robert Stam. Her book Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Introduction Edwa r d S a i d: A M em o r i a l Issu e

This special issue of Social Text pays tribute to the work of Edward Said, an admired colleague and friend. The almost three years since Said’s untimely death (September 25, 2003) have made his achievements and interventions only more relevant. Though his work represents both monumental scholarly activity and tireless public intellectual energy, it refuses to be monumentalized. Instead, in an increasingly bleak political landscape, Said continues to inspire a rich variety of oppositional practices and committed scholarship. As befits his remarkably productive and multivarious career, this tribute offers contributions that cross geographical and disciplinary boundaries, and pursues Said’s stubbornly out-of-place critical practice, which displayed an intense awareness and frequent suspicion of the politics of knowledge. Indeed, for Said, the intellectual was defined by his or her refusal to accommodate to the agendas of state power. As he declared in a 1995 interview collected in The Politics of Dispossession, “The intellectual must maintain a margin of independence and must be an instrument of resurrecting ‘lost memory.’ ”1 This oppositional logic also characterized his ambivalent relation to the disciplinary fields and practices in which his work found its greatest resonances. While Orientalism (1979) was a founding intervention in what came to be called “postcolonial studies,” Said maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the field’s institutionalization within the U.S. academy. Though Said produced a rich body of theoretically sophisticated criticism of the European novel and its relations to colonialism, he remained ambivalent both about the novel as a genre and about the domestication of critical theory within literary studies. While his role as a public intellectual was a frequent inspiration to practitioners of cultural studies, he was apt to proclaim himself, jokingly, a “high culture guy.” Yet this humane, secular critique applied as much to his work on literature, music, or theory as to his tireless advocacy in print and other media of the Palestinian cause. Said’s dazzling erudition was often subjected to his own alienation of the knowledge he possessed, insisting on the need to cross discursive and institutional boundaries, to take up the burden of rigorous theoretical and political challenges, to write from our own displaced positions with precision and clarity. Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press.

Patrick Deer, Gyan Prakash, and Ella Shohat

For well over a decade, postcolonial theory has been visible even beyond the Anglo-American academy. Many articles have invoked Said as preeminent in postcolonial studies, but that field seemed somehow disconnected from public debates about Palestine, where Said’s name has also been prominent. The animosity of some critics since the late 1970s toward Said’s “trilogy” — Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam — reached its paroxysm a decade later. This panicked hyperbole was partially a response to Said’s prominent position as a Palestinian National Council member, one who could legitimately communicate with powerful government officials like George Schultz. But orientalist scholars and die-hard defenders of any and all Israeli policies showed little interest in or knowledge of anticolonial writings and post-structuralist theories — i ntellectual currents at the heart of Said’s contribution. This was in sharp contrast to the way intersecting debates on race, colonialism, and representation helped shape the emerging field of postcolonial studies. Said’s intervention opened up the intellectual and political horizons of English and comparative literature while also powerfully influencing diverse other disciplines. The dissemination of Said’s critique of orientalism, meanwhile, helped transform the field of Middle Eastern studies itself. The impact of Orientalism there is distinct from its impact in postcolonial literary and cultural studies programs, where post-structuralist methodologies are more widely practiced than in Middle Eastern studies departments. At the time of Orientalism’s publication, the critical scholars of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) — many of whom contributed to Middle East Report and the Journal of Palestine Studies — were politically and intellectually allied with Said’s critique. Having themselves challenged the essentialist and Manichaean thesis of “Islam and the West” promoted by Bernard Lewis and more recently by Samuel Huntington, critical scholars over the past two decades gradually came to occupy center stage at MESA. This kind of transformation, it should be noted, was not without precedent in the American academy. It was foreshadowed by another form of area studies — L atin American studies — which had, since the 1970s, produced an impressive corpus of work critical of neocolonial policies and imperial discourses; and where the writings of figures such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Eduardo Galeano, Gundar Frank, Henrique Cardoso, Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Herbert Schiller, and Armand Mattelart played a crucial role, becoming a kind of lingua franca in progressive circles. Said’s own intervention thus should also be seen as part of a larger epochal shift in academia beginning in the late 1960s, with the establishment of ethnic studies and women’s studies programs, and the emergence of diverse critical fields of inquiry — M arxism, third worldism, semiotics,

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feminism. The diverse area studies programs largely bypassed or rejected the post – World War II Department of Defense’s vision of scholarship in the service of Cold War geopolitics. 2 Yet in Middle Eastern studies that shift came later and was much more contested, leading to an array of well-oiled foundations and institutes that began to take aim at the entire field from without. In the post-9/11 landscape of “patriotism” and “homeland security,” hawkish Zionists, neocons, and orientalists found the time opportune to launch the reconquest of what had been up to then “their” ivory towers. The longtime critics of the field of Middle Eastern studies could now enjoy a powerful observation post as self-anointed monarchs surveying from above these “un-American” activities, without having to bother to respond to the rich intellectual corpus on orientalism, Islam, and Israel/Palestine. The current assault on Middle Eastern studies has escalated from the familiar journalistic and pseudo­ scholarly “exposés” to the 2004 congressional hearings targeting the field’s Title VI funding. The names denounced included the usual critical Middle Eastern studies scholars, Said most prominently, yet for the first time an entirely new field of knowledge — postcolonial studies — began to “scan” on the neocon radar. But the case against Middle Eastern studies relies on classic McCarthyite tactics of distortion and misrepresentation. Contrary to the democratic principles of self-representation, the congressional hearing was based on the testimony of a single person, Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute and a contributing editor to the National Review, who represents a narrow neoconservative constituency. But the critics never bother to ask, as Joel Beinin puts it, “whether scholars who study the Middle East might actually know something that would lead them to think that the world is not simply divided between the forces of good (us) and evil (them).”3 In his work as a literary and cultural critic, in Beginnings, The World, the Text, and the Critic, or Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said stood outside the West’s seemingly transparent and beloved narratives and insisted on their complicity with state power and imperial domination. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Said’s lifelong engagement with both the European and postcolonial novel is his sustained skepticism about the genre’s centrality to “modern Occidental culture.” Writing in disarmingly lucid and elegant prose, he was instrumental in making French poststructuralist theory, especially the work of Michel Foucault, accessible to an Anglo-American audience. Yet Said was an early critic of the apolitical formalism of U.S. deconstruction and “American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism”: “In acting entirely within this domain, then, the literary critic effectively confirms the culture and society enforcing those restrictions; this confirmation acts to strengthen the civil and political societies whose fabric



Introduction



Social Text, in a sense, began its career with Said’s work. In the 1979 inaugural issue, the journal published Said’s groundbreaking essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.”

is the culture itself.”4 Thus the literary critic participates in producing a “liberal consensus”: “The formal, restricted analysis of literary-aesthetic works validates the culture, the culture validates the humanist, the humanist the critic, and the whole enterprise the state” (175). A decade later in Culture and Imperialism, Said pursued the same critique of culture defined as a “protective enclosure” for which the price of admission was “check your politics at the door.”5 This self-declared sequel to Orientalism is structured around a critical “counterpoint”: between European novelistic discourse, whose “incorporative, quasi-encyclopaedic cultural form” (71) had intimate ties to the “consolidated vision” of imperialism, and the decolonizing counternarratives of “liberationist anti-imperialism” (279) he locates in the work of decolonizing historians and intellectuals like C. L. R. James, Ranajit Guha, George Antonius, or Fanon and in postcolonial literature. Though its textual analyses remain largely within the orbit of the literary, Said operates here with a strong sense of the self-contradictory genealogy of culture that informs the cultural studies of Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall. Said’s sustained exploration of lateness and endings in the last years of his life, in which the work of Theodor Adorno and the corpus of Western classical music took center stage, was accompanied by a return to the critique of theory and an insistence on the continuing relevance of the humanist intellectual tradition. But this was an engaged, politicized humanism that insisted on its worldly ties, which for Said meant an unwavering commitment to the Palestinian cause. It remained very clear that, for Said, humanism produced an oppositional stance for criticism; just as in his earlier use of Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, this longue durée conception of humanism allowed him to critique the narrowness and aestheticizing tendencies of a liberal or conservative culturalism all too easily compatible with an era of neo-imperialism and permanent war. Social Text, in a sense, began its career with Said’s work. In the 1979 inaugural issue, the journal published Said’s groundbreaking essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” a version of a chapter that would appear that same year in his book The Question of Palestine. Such a move at the time, when it was nearly impossible to utter the word “Palestine” in the public sphere, was vital for the opening up of the debate in leftist academic circles. Two issues later, however, the journal ended up publishing a critical response titled “Never Again? Zionism and the Holocaust.” Describing his dilemma as both a Marxist and a Jew, the author Ronald Aronson applauded Social Text for publishing Said’s “moving and beautiful account,” seeing the publication itself as reflecting “the same process whereby the Palestinians have finally emerged on the world stage as a people.”6 At the same time, however, the article focused on the Holocaust as an answer to the Palestinian perspective, reproducing a rather common

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rebuttal. In many ways the article failed to imagine or dialogue with a Palestinian narrative in relation to Zionism, one that is not always already simply subordinated to the Holocaust. The journal’s decision to publish a response that placed the Holocaust at center stage and marginalized the unfolding history of Palestine in the wake of Zionist settlement was indicative of the anxiety, tensions, and contradictions among leftists about the question of Palestine and Israel. The application of anticolonialist and third worldist analytic paradigms to the Middle East has provoked much debate in leftist circles. Scholarly work on the subject, written from within such critical perspectives, has often been deemed “controversial”; its authors, of diverse ethnic or national backgrounds, often end up having to pay a high price professionally and politically. Although not a monolith, Social Text’s collective courageously introduced a debate into the heart of the intellectual Left but also manifested a certain ambivalence toward that very decision. In the ensuing years, the journal’s editorial focus often reflected this tendency to shy away from addressing Zionism, Palestine, and the Middle East. While Latin American issues were prominent in the journal’s early days, it was not the case for the Middle East, despite the ongoing and devastating U.S. impact on the region. Social Text published a number of essays on the region: Eqbal Ahmed (“What’s Behind the Crises in Iran and Afghanistan,” issue 3, fall 1980), Norman O. Brown (“The Apocalypse of Islam,” issue 8, winter 1983 – 8 4), Barbara Harlow (“Return to Haifa: ‘Opening the Borders’ in Palestinian Literature,” issue 13 – 14, winter – spring 1986), Yerach Gover (“Were You There, or Was It a Dream?: Militaristic Aspects of Israeli Society in Modern Hebrew Literature,” issue 13 – 14, winter – spring 1986), Yerach Gover and Ella Shohat (“In Defence of Mordechai Vanunu: Nuclear Threat in the Middle East,” issue 18, winter 1987 – 8 8); but a shift was long overdue. By the fall of 1988, a special double issue, titled “Colonial Discourse,” included essays on the Middle East framed in relation to the post/colonial debate — t his was clearly a moment of shifting editorial tendencies. Once again Social Text featured Said in its pages. Bruce Robbins conducted an interview with Said on American intellectuals and Middle Eastern politics, while the opening essay took off, as it were, from the journal’s inaugural issue with an essay referencing Said’s early contribution, titled “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.”7 Around this period of the beginning of the first Intifada, the journal also invited Said to speak at a plenary session it organized titled “Resistance and National Liberation in the Middle East” at the 6th Annual Socialist Scholars Conference. 8 Nearly two decades later, and almost three years after his death, Said’s work remains a frequent intertextual reference for contributors to



Introduction



the journal. In the fall of 1994, Social Text dedicated its fortieth issue to Said’s Culture and Imperialism with essays by Bruce Robbins, Mary Louise Pratt, Jonathan Arac, and R. Radhakrishnan, followed by Said’s response to his critics. These various strands in Said’s work inform the contributions to the current special issue of Social Text. Locating Orientalism in the open-ended horizon of Said’s “secular criticism,” Stathis Gourgouris reconsiders the challenge of this now “classic” work to comparative literary studies. Arguing that it continues to provide “a brilliant armory for engaging the institutions and structures of our historical present,” he explores Said’s secular strain of critique on the level of both the “historical-geographical” and the “allegorical-epistemological.” Sura Rath pursues another aspect of the ethical and the political by engaging Said’s politicized, postcolonial humanism in the context of a century of orientalism and U.S. imperialism. Rath explores the seemingly untimely theme of tradition in the name of “a proper archaeology of critical theory” in order to offer one possible answer to the haunting and urgent question: “What would Said say?” Responding to Said’s contribution to literary studies, Iveta Jusová and Dan Reyes offer a reading of Amy Levy’s treatment of Victorian Zionism in her novel, Reuben Sachs; just as Levy is self-consciously responding to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, they contend their own essay offers both counterpoint and extension to Said’s reading of Eliot in Culture and Imperialism. Tracing an arc from The Question of Palestine in Said’s critique of Zionist ideology for its tendency to keep hidden or to disappear “the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militantly oppressive discrimination between Jews and non-Jews,” Jusová and Reyes argue that Levy’s novel offers a gendered critique and an insistence on its historicity qualitatively different from Eliot’s more canonical work. Gil Hochberg looks at the meaning of “Jew” and “Palestinian” in relation to Said’s position on the “peace process.” Contrasting his insistence on the complexity of memorialization with the fixities of national history, Hochberg argues that Said’s perception of Zionism as a form of colonialism — related to yet different from European colonialisms — is directly informed by his views on the politics of memory. Hochberg counterpoints Said’s memory work with Nietzsche’s more ironic critique of “excessive memory” and contends that “if the call to forget (‘and go on’) is associated with the advocacy of separation and a politics of partition, Said presents memory as the only valid means for creating an inclusive Israeli-Palestinian society.” This special issue of Social Text also offers perspectives that expand the range of Said’s work. In a wide-ranging historical analysis of the sta-

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tus and struggle over “al-Andalus” and the Moorish presence in Spanish culture and historiography, Hishaam Aidi extends the work of Middle Eastern studies to the Iberian peninsula. Given special urgency by the 3/11 attacks in Madrid, current debates over the relationship between Spain and its Arab minorities are located in a longer history of Spanish colonialism, Catholicism, orientalism, and anxieties over national identity and Europeanness. As both emergent democracy, economic success story, and bastion at the borders of “Fortress Europe,” Aidi argues, Spain, in its long history of ties to the Islamic world, has found itself at the cutting edge of the current so-called culture wars. Nerissa Balce extends Said’s work in a different direction by analyzing the visual culture and erotics of U.S. imperialism in representations of the Filipina. In the vein of feminist critical readings of imperial discourse (Anne McClintock, Ann Laura Stoler), Balce traces a “porno-tropics” that figures colonialist representations of indigenous femininity in the “imperial archipelago” of the Philippines. Reading travel literature, photography, and imperial ethnography with a postcolonial eye, Balce seeks to imaginatively reconstruct the violence of American rule in the Philippines since 1898, connecting this eroticizing, subjugating visual archive to the current imaginary of the era of globalized exploitation, migrant labor, and sex tourism. The last two contributions to this issue explore Said’s own experiments in visual culture and autobiography. Taking as her point of departure After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), Said’s collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, as well as his reportage on returning to Palestine, Ana Dopico traces a Saidian inventory of secular mourning and “late return.” Her essay explores how Said’s “humanistic narration of besieged nationalism and resilient national character” integrates Palestinian politics, “working against their segregation and dispersal.” Dopico connects this insistence on the making of an inventory, and on literal and symbolic rituals of mourning and burial as part of humanist practice, to Said’s lifelong, seldom melancholy, dialogue with the work of Giambattista Vico and Gramsci. In the closing essay, Iona Luca considers Said’s more recent exercise in autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), as a lieu de mémoire in which different temporalities, personas, and histories create a space to coexist. The urgency of this effort at personal and historical reconstruction was heightened not only by Said’s illness but also by the vicious, mendacious pseudoscholarly attacks on his credibility as a personal witness to the violent uprooting and exile of the Palestinian people. Reconstructing the reception of Out of Place, and paying particular attention to its representations of childhood, Luca explores the memoir’s dangerous “double edge,” its intense representation of people and places as “moments . . . turned



Introduction



The war on Iraq has confirmed the truth of Said’s arguments.

away from the movement of history and then returned, through personal recollection, to the pages of his memoir, thus becoming a Palestinian ‘site of memory’ so much feared and criticized by his opponents.” Edward Said carried out his persistently critical work with such great passion and determination that his work stands as the model of oppositional criticism. This Social Text special issue offers examples of the diverse and complex critical commitments that Said’s work continues to inspire. By oppositional criticism we do not mean the sort of sniping and finger wagging that often occurs in the name of politics, but something more profound and trenchant. It is an order of criticism that emerges uncannily from the way Said engages with texts, not as a political add-on, not as an ideological adornment that can be attributed to a sociological outside, but as readings that gain oppositional force by outlining the historical location of texts, by underscoring their geographical notations, by bringing into view the worldliness of representations. It is perhaps because Said practiced this kind of oppositional criticism with such force that we were lulled into thinking that the orientalist discourse had been backed into retreat. His Orientalism, after all, inaugurated a whole tradition of scholarship that challenged orientalist scholarship. But Said returned again and again to connections between authoritative representations and empire. In articles and books, including Culture and Imperialism, he resolutely and vigilantly reminded us of the tenacity and ever-changing forms of imperial knowledge and power. The war on Iraq has confirmed the truth of Said’s arguments. There was something very infuriating and depressing about the praise heaped on Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002). As we know, Lewis was a central figure in the ties forged between the warmongering crew of the American administration and orientalists. His role brought into view the vital role that orientalist thought has played in unleashing the imperial intervention by the United States. Orientalism stands at the center of imperialist aggression; the war is orientalism by other means. It is a brutal assertion of the claim that “we” know who “they” are; “we” know that the Arabs will use weapons of mass destruction, but the Israelis can be trusted; “we” know that military force must be applied to secure Iraq’s compliance with UN resolutions, yet Israeli violations of UN resolutions on occupation and illegal settlements require no action but only understanding and sympathy. Ironies abound and half-truths are heaped upon half-truths: invasion was redescribed as liberation, and the killing of civilians was rationalized in the name of civilization. How do we square the manufactured image of the war as liberation with the reality of American and British guns pointed at terrified

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Iraqi children kneeling on the ground, their cheeks caked with dust, hands raised, whimpering with fear? Where do we turn when confronted with this ugliness of the war on the Orient? Here it is once again instructive and inspiring to turn to Edward Said. Through his work as a scholar, as a critic, as a political commentator, Said asked insistently: Who speaks? For what and whom? How does an intellectual articulate his or her various objects of affiliation? What is his or her place in the West? Or in the third world? What is the specific contribution and intervention to be made by the intellectual, displaced from a “native” culture, and at odds with the metropolitan culture and society? He challenged established authority and identity with these questions, and chalked out a culture of criticism composed through critical affiliations and appropriations. Out of this acute sense of the intellectual’s worldliness and affiliations, there emerged his haunting question: “When will we resist?”

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 183. 2. For more on reading Said’s Orientalism in the context of the changing academic landscape since the late 1960s, and its impact on the “traveling” of Said’s work into the debates over the Middle East, see Ella Shohat, “The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation,” ed. Rashid Khalidi, special issue, Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 3 (2004): 55 – 75. 3. Joel Beinin, “The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse,” Social Text, no. 75 (2003): 125 – 4 0. 4. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 175. 5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xiv. 6. Ronald Aronson, “Never Again? Zionism and the Holocaust,” Social Text, no. 3 (1980): 60 – 61. 7. Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, nos. 19 – 2 0 (1988): 1 – 35. 8. Along with Edward Said, the speakers were Amiram Efrati (MAPAM Party, Israel), Sheila Ryan (Middle East Report), Yerach Gover (Social Text), with moderator Ella Shohat (Social Text), Borough of Manhattan Community College, 9 April 1988.



Introduction



Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism

I have considered Edward Said’s work at length on various occasions in Stathis Gourgouris the past, concerning problems of nationalism or comparative literature, Theodor Adorno, Jean Genet, or music, while more recently Said’s concept and practice of secular criticism, which underlies the framework of this essay as well, for reasons that will become apparent at the end.1 But on this occasion I want to focus my remarks on Orientalism as such, not only because this is the proper celebratory gesture but also because, at the dire historical moment we inhabit, the problems posed by this remarkable book are more trenchant than ever. This historical fact, in itself — bearing, that is, the full force of an unknown future contingent on this present — poses an important political but also methodological problem. All works bear the mark of their social and historical emergence, but the great works, the works we return to time and again, often uncertain as to why, bear within this mark — at a secondary, perhaps subliminal level — t he capacity to speak to the future, our present. This is not to say that they are works for all time, and therefore timeless in the typically canonical way of configuring the classics. On the contrary, they are works that inhabit the many folds of time, as acutely incorporating the time of their emergence as also remaining open, by virtue of conception, of attitude, of methodology even, to the various indeterminate and unknown times of what lies ahead, of what will become present before them, or better yet, of what sort of present they will reemerge in and occupy many times over — i n short, the future in which they will again come to be present and be counted. This is precisely what lends texts their worldliness, as Said has argued repeatedly, a notion that also underlies the overall framework of my remarks. The point here is that a work that engages critically with the world around it opens the door to a consistent historical assessment of one’s position in the world. This means a multifarious orientation to past, present, and future, all at once. Said has explicitly argued that “all criticism is postulated and performed on the assumption that it is to have a future”2 — a profound comment that makes entirely explicit the fact that critical thought, while engaging in an interrogation of present structures Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

and institutions, must always care to envision things that may not be in fact presently visible. In other words, critical thought is not merely interrogative or disintegrating thought; it is also imaginative, daring thought, committed to a human project of transformation, of self-alteration, of refiguring and reconceptualizing existing things that otherwise seem unmovable, unalterable. In this respect, being attuned to the demands of the present moment is precisely to understand that all moments, even when things look most desperate, uncertain, and inscrutable, exist in a historical flux — i nformed as much by past events and structures in ways that may not be immediately apparent, as also, more significantly (because we tend to shy away from considering it), by an open horizon to the future, a horizon of possibility that our present action sets forth. Thinking critically, which to my mind is tantamount to thinking politically, is thus to be alert to a long-term and open-ended historical field, whose contours reach far beyond what is presently perceptible. This is why a project of critique — a political project — must have built into it an opening to the future, to a present elsewhere in time and place, even if inevitably unable to account prescriptively, preemptively, or providentially for such a future. I am hardly suggesting, in other words, that a political project needs to be a prophetic project. In fact, it is precisely the presumed certainty of prophecy that a political mind exposes and undermines. Orientalism is precisely such a project. Though essentially propelled by an analytical, disintegrating glance on historical and geographical structures embedded and institutionalized in dominant discourses and practices, and though self-critically aware of the trappings of facile projections and resolutions, Orientalism provides us with a brilliant armory for engaging the institutions and structures of our historical present. This armory consists of a specific mode of interrogation, which I understand to exist in two registers. I will call the first historical-geographical and the second allegorical-epistemological, and will use them as the double framework for the brief comments that follow. The first pertains to the fact that both orientalism and the Orient it produced were (and are) real social, historical, and geographical entities. Though phantasmically conjured and produced, orientalism and the Orient are institutions that have structured and affected — a nd continue to structure and affect — actual societies in their entire dimensional range: surely economic, political, cultural but also psychic, semantic, imaginary. The second register pertains to the fact that, in the analysis of these specific historical-geographical structures, Said’s argument in Orientalism also enabled us to constitute a mode of interrogation about a whole slew of problems out of which orientalism and the Orient emerge as a symptom. Namely, Said’s argument reconfigured

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our way of engaging basic problems such as the politics of knowledge; the worldly reality of texts and discourses; the representation of power; the production of truth and falsehood; the concrete (though not quite tangible) force of the imagination; the denial of the constitutive encounter with the other. It is important to understand that both these registers are, in the first instance, constitutively intertwined. Namely, the broader epistemological and allegorical register is as real and historical as the one that pertains to actual social times and spaces. Conversely, a profound allegorical and epistemological force animates and surely exceeds the explicit boundaries of the social dimensions that are easily recognizable in the specific histories and geographies of orientalist practices. One need only consider how complex and ubiquitous — i ndeed, practically limitless — is the racist prejudice that configures the Arab as terrorist, which permeates the social and political imagination in America, with very real and brutal consequences. In the second instance, both these registers, intertwined as they are, are fundamentally political in nature. By this I mean: they are both determined by, but also determining of, a whole complex of relations of power and violent contention, a social dynamics of domination, antagonism, and resistance, which has been linked from the outset (that is, from when orientalism emerged as a bona fide discipline in the nineteenth century) to a vast network of colonialist and, later, imperialist practices. The tremendous anxiety and animosity that Said’s book continues to provoke in certain quarters are certainly due to the immanent political stakes of its object of inquiry, despite the fact that most critiques from such quarters compulsively displace their source of animosity to the author himself. In this debate over the merits and faults of Orientalism since its publication, one thing often forgotten was something entirely elementary: that orientalism did not in fact pertain to some ideology (in the pejorative sense of the term), some delusional abuse of reality, but was rather, since the beginning of the nineteenth century in the European academy, an institutionalized discipline with an undisputed field of inquiry, a highly specialized vocabulary, a whole hierarchy of knowledge, highly demanding training (particularly from a linguistic point of view), as well as a gradually mounting tradition of experts, specialists, and authorities of all kinds, who governed the field with the typical conservative entitlement of self-recognized privilege that has characterized academic structures since time immemorial. To say that one is an orientalist was at one time no different than to say one is an archaeologist or a philologist or an ethnologist, and carried with it the same “scientific” authority. To ignore this fact, or demean it for whatever “ideological” reason, is to miscalculate the oftendecisive authority of various orientalists in the programmatic dismantling



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Orientalism did not in fact pertain to some ideology (in the pejorative sense of the term), some delusional abuse of reality, but was rather, since the beginning of the nineteenth century in the European academy, an institutionalized discipline with an undisputed field of inquiry.

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of a whole lot of societies and cultures, conducted at the highest level of state policy in the last two centuries. No doubt, the fact that an orientalist had a specific, though somewhat roughly circumscribed, geographical field of inquiry lends orientalism, of all the nineteenth-century’s human sciences, a peculiarity that should not be minimized. (The only other such instance is the field of classical studies, though in what ways the two are and are not comparable I will address in a moment.) But this geographical peculiarity is played out specifically in the direct complicity of orientalist knowledge in the colonialist project. I quote Said’s succinct remark: “Orientalism was a scientific movement whose analogue in the world of politics was the Orient’s colonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe.”3 What keeps this analogy, however, from being merely rhetorical is that, as Said painstakingly describes, this acquired and accumulated Orient, though pertaining to the lives of real people in real time and space, was nonetheless already constructed as such, as Orient — a nd this is precisely what Said means when he speaks of “imaginative geography” — by the unquestioned and unrestrained expertise of orientalist discipline in a laboratory-like atmosphere that unabashedly erased from its domain of research the actual presence of human life. The essential drive for this erasure was due to the philological imagination, which animated the orientalist discipline more than any other force, except possibly for the colonialist drive itself. It is well known that, like Michel Foucault, Said underscored the intrinsic methodological affinity of philology with anatomy. We might want to remember here Ernest Renan’s confessional depiction of his practice: “What we are to do here is a delicate thing, somewhat akin to vivisection. We are to treat the living as we ordinarily treat the dead. We will set upon this with a cold indifference [ froideur], with absolute impartiality.”4 In the sense that orientalism depended so gravely on the philological filtering of culture through the tools of comparative linguistics, Renan’s comment exemplifies a widespread attitude that, entirely bereft of self-critique, served as its methodology. The second thing that is equally forgotten in the various critiques of Orientalism since its publication, and which is equally elementary, is that Said’s extensive unfolding of the history of this discipline was also, simultaneously, an exposition of the philological edifice of anti-Semitism, in which, of course, Renan’s work was at the forefront. The irony in the fact that various Zionist critics of Orientalism routinely call its author an antiSemite should first be measured against their self-perpetuated disavowal of the banal realization that the categories “Semite” and “Semitic” are entirely of orientalist construction in order precisely to justify the superior achievements of Indo-European civilization — m ilitary conquest, colonialist expansion, cultural and economic development, and, of course, racist

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exclusion. I quote from Orientalism: “Of itself, in itself, as a set of beliefs, as a method of analysis, Orientalism cannot develop. Indeed, it’s the doctrinal antithesis of development. Its central argument is the myth of the arrested development of the Semites.”5 But in addition to this mind-boggling disavowal, such charges serve as a reminder of their vehemently produced and strenuously guarded monopoly of the content of anti-Semitism, 6 a rhetorical monopoly that consistently bankrolls the latter-day orientalist vilification of Islamic culture and Arab societies in the last thirty years, all in the service of the imperialist machinery of the United States. In this case, as in many others — for example, the Arab nationalist critique of Said, according to which his depiction of the Orient as a construction by the orientalist industry is considered to be itself an imperialist project, which is an absurd and gratuitously contortionist position — what is effectively denied and silenced is the fact that the field of contention is entirely political and that the politics involved pertain to the highest stakes: no less than the uncompromising divide between adherence or resistance to imperialist domination in its multifarious manifestations over time. In my own process of thinking along the lines of such political stakes, one of the earliest lessons of Orientalism was how Said’s reading method enabled me to perceive the subtle colonial underside of the discourse of philhellenism and the institution of classics in the nineteenth century. As I argued extensively in Dream Nation, European philhellenism and the whole corpus of Altertumswissenschaft on which it was epistemically based were orientalist in essence.7 Though the adoration of Greek antiquity, which is traditionally taken to be the foundation of the “West,” seems the polar opposite of the allure of oriental exoticism, both share not merely the same social imaginary that generates them but also the same tools of the trade. Orientalists, after all, were engaged in the comparative study of Greek and Sanskrit in order to orchestrate Indo-European superiority over the Semitic languages. But more than that, both orientalists and philhellenists were engaged in similar cadaverous approaches to culture. Next to Renan’s confession I quoted above, we might want to place François-René Chateaubriand’s own confessional response, during his Grand Tour of the Orient, to an Ottoman bey: “He wanted to know why I was traveling, since I was neither a merchant nor a doctor. I replied that I was traveling in order to look at people, and certainly at the Greeks who are dead.”8 That the only Greeks present in the Orient are dead Greeks should hardly signify some East-West divide. For next to the ruined traces of the origins of Western civilization, which presumably feed Chateaubriand’s voyeuristic necrophilia, stands a whole queue of living cultures — Turks, Jews, Armenians, Arabs, and most certainly Greeks, who are, in the gaze of this highly cultured Frenchman, most assuredly dead.



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Though the adoration of Greek antiquity, which is traditionally taken to be the foundation of the “West,” seems the polar opposite of the allure of oriental exoticism, both share not merely the same social imaginary but also the same tools of the trade.

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This is not the occasion to rehearse the entire argument conducted on the basis of this colonialist scopic economy of various European travelers and philologists in the nineteenth century, who combined their desire for exotic orientalia with their eyewitness confirmation of the Greek miracle — which signified, incidentally, a simultaneous confirmation of its historical extinction — except so as to underline in what other sense philhellenism was fueled by an orientalist logic, particularly insofar as it played an actual concrete role in modern Greek nation-building. Philhellenism shows the same double (or, I would also say, duplicitous) logic of orientalism precisely in the sense that the philhellenist idealization of the dead ancients serves to efface from the animus of history the presence of the living moderns — who in one single gesture are thus rendered the actual dead, while the ancient ancestors are reanimated and reemerge, by an extraordinary process of creative mimesis, to serve as the living sources of much of Europe’s national-cultural imagination (the German case being the most complex and most widely discussed). For, even if we restrict philhellenism’s domain of imperiousness over the antique culture alone, its power consists in the essential orientalist gesture of representing the other culture by, in effect, replacing the other culture with those selfgenerated, projected images of otherness that the “West” needs in order to envision itself: those self-produced mirrors of itself. (I am advantageously using here the double meaning of the German verb vertreten: to represent, to replace.) In the case of a modern nation of Greece struggling to extricate itself out from under the weight of this extraordinary idealization of its ancestral culture — t he West’s “colonization of the ideal,” as I have defined philhellenism’s task to have been — t he experience of philhellenism is positively punishing and debilitating in essence: it is an orientalist experience, an orientalization. Though there is certainly a historical and geographical proximity between the objects of philhellenism and orientalism, the cursory connection I just sketched illustrates also the other register of Said’s argument that I mentioned at the outset: the allegorical-epistemological. Given the extensive discussion this dimension has seen and the constraints of this essay, I offer only a couple of comments in this regard, which I consider crucial to a way of reading Said’s entire corpus and the demands he makes of us as readers and political thinkers that ultimately go beyond Orientalism. As Said has pointed out numerous times, the critique of the orientalist industry resides at the heart of the question of representation: What does it mean to represent another culture? What does it mean to say an other culture? How is otherness (or difference) articulated — which is always to say, to some degree, how is otherness constructed? The history of orientalism, particularly since Said’s meticulous interrogation, demonstrates

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the epistemological difficulty of claiming to represent an other without in effect replacing this other with one’s projection — a projection that is always autoscopic: literally aiming at oneself, self-centered, self-directed, self-enclosed. The political and psychological dimensions of this difficulty have been discussed extensively in the last decades, forming the backbone of much of what is called “theory” in the humanities and social sciences, where discourses of the other and deliberations on otherness came to achieve a certain disembodied autonomy, often to the detriment of the actual social and historical referents of otherness, those living in the boundaries of dominant definitions in the real world. This “catachresis of otherness” actually demonstrates that the lessons of Said’s Orientalism were not very well learned.9 Though Said certainly has been one of the pioneer thinkers in terms of the politics of otherness, he has always insisted on a flexible dialectical entwinement of the broad allegorical uses of the concept of the other with a precise historical and geographical orientation (I use the term deliberately) toward discourses and conditions that produce others in real social situations. Otherness, for Said, is never disembodied; it is never a pure philosophical concept. In fact, I would argue, it is precisely in this dialectical understanding of otherness that the epistemological impact of Orientalism resides, beyond the scope of its object of inquiry. Contrary to what certain critics think, Said has been consistent in this respect — f rom Orientalism to the late essay Freud and the Non-European, where his appreciation of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism consists in recognizing that Freud’s story (his “historical novel”) turns on the figure of the stranger, the other, at the core of any identity formation, any national foundation, even in the exclusionary entitlement of monotheistic religion. In this respect, Said has always been a nonidentitarian thinker, arguably for him the crucial legacy of Adorno. So he was able to see early on, and surely since his earliest meditations on Fanon, that the self-exoticism of marginal identities, the fetishism of the concept of otherness that has characterized a certain strain of radical theory in recent years, is essentially nothing less than the most basic nativism, a blatant but most of the time unwitting, because uncritical, self-orientalization. This sort of thinking, this dialectics of nonidentity, cannot be achieved unless one is committed to what Said has named “secular criticism.” Even in its initial formulation, presented in an essay that became part of The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Said’s position was groundbreaking. At the glorious heights of literary theory, Said had already understood that this development to which he had been a major contributor was showing tendencies of a “neo-religious” nature, a certain metaphysical and antihistorical dogmatism covered over with the rhetoric of antihumanism. The



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Secular criticism is a profoundly historical mode of thought that nonetheless defies a systematic theory of history.

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introduction of the task of secular criticism into the practice of theory showed in what sense Orientalism, published just five years earlier, had already registered a secular-critical praxis insofar as it exposed the orientalist industry as a massive means of production of metaphysical notions about real societies and real histories. On the one hand, then, secular criticism may be seen as an analytical method, a means of exfoliation, as Said is fond of saying, of allegedly transcendent forms and attitudes in the social and human sciences, which orientalism in fact exemplified in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, secular criticism provides a more incisive way of bringing theory to the realm of praxis, insofar as praxis addresses the incapacity of theory to confront the contingent, the unpredictable, the accidental — h istory as such. Secular criticism is a profoundly historical mode of thought that nonetheless defies a systematic theory of history. This might be one way to understand why Said’s thought has been charged in recent years with antitheoretical tendencies. In a sense, the ones making the charge may be right but not entirely cognizant of why. The worldliness of Said’s thinking demands a skeptical attitude toward already constituted discourses and retains an open horizon to the unpredictability of history and praxis. Insofar as it wrestles with historical realities, this mode of thought confronts institutional foundations not by means of symptomatic or retrospective explanations and certainly not by a priori theoretical notions. But there is also a crucial last element that must be underlined. Said’s uncompromising secular thinking does not aim at the mere critique of religious or theological discourses or modes of cognition. Secular criticism, as I understand it, is only symptomatically a mode of thought antithetical to religion. That is to say, we must liberate the secular from the strict opposition to the religious — which in our era means we must take away from the religious the agency of determining what is secular — a nd seek instead, in the secular, another epistemological mode that points to whatever is open to contention and critique, interrogation and doubt; to what has no genuine need for transcendental structures because the finitude of life and the world is insurmountable and thus conditions of existence become more precious than promises of salvation; to what prefers instead to consider conditions of transformation in the real worldly domain of selves and others instead of the fantasy of otherworldly solutions. Secular thinking, in this respect, is political thinking — which, to my mind, means above all remaining alert to the discourses and practices of power that shape our lives daily and, nowadays, on a global scale. These practices consistently seek to pass unnoticed, they seek to mystify, because the ones in control, no matter how cynical and arrogant they are — a nd in

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the last few years we have seen unprecedented arrogance and cynicism by the leaders of this country — a re always wary of people asking questions, resisting spoon-fed values, rejecting conventional beliefs. We cannot forget that one lesson of Said’s Orientalism is that an extraordinary industry was put together to produce images, representations of cultures and societies chosen for domination and exploitation by colonialist and later imperialist powers. This industry is still in existence, though not quite in the same form. One no longer proudly claims he is an orientalist. He might say he is an archaeologist or a Middle East expert. He might be the editor of the New Republic, an informant for Campus Watch, or the spokeswoman for the Pentagon. Whatever the case or the form, the orientalist industry is still in full force, and its direct and shameless collaboration with imperialist politics abounds. This is something we should not forget and we should not be afraid to expose. This resistance to amnesia, this fearlessness, is Edward Said’s urgent intellectual legacy.

Notes This essay was presented as a lecture during the colloquium, “Edward Said’s Orientalism: The Silver Jubilee,” held in Edward Said’s honor (and in his presence) at Columbia University on 16 April 2003. In commemoration of this special occasion, I thought it proper to keep the oral integrity of the paper, except for minor interventions for clarification and bibliographical reference. 1. See Stathis Gourgouris, “Transformation, not Transcendence” in “Critical Secularisms,” ed. Aamir Mufti, special issue, boundary 2 30 (2004): 55 – 8 0; and Gourgouris, “The Late-Style of Edward Said,” in “Edward Said and Critical Decolonization,” special issue, Alif 25 (2005): 37 – 45. 2. Edward W. Said, “The Future of Criticism,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 171. 3. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Reflections on Exile, 202. The echoes of the archlanguage of conquest and capitalist expansion in the use of the words acquisition and accumulation are purposefully allusive. 4. Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (1882), in Discours et conférences (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1922), 278; my translation. 5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 307. 6. This is a huge discussion, but obviously anti-Semitism is a category produced simultaneously with the category Semite — t he two are linked in an irrevocable coincidence, marked with the core elements of the orientalist imaginary, including its delusional self-ascription of secularity. I have in mind here Gil Anidjar’s work, and particularly his most incisive exposure of the problem in “The Semitic Hypothesis (Religion’s Last Word),” in tRACEs: Race, Deconstruction, Critical Theory, ed. David Theo Goldberg, Kim Furumoto, and Dragan Kujundzic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2006).



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7. See Stathis Gourgouris, “The Punishment of Philhellenism,” in Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 122 – 54. 8. François-René Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris, in Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 808; my translation. 9. See “On the Catachresis of Otherness,” in Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 267 – 82.

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“What Would Said Say?” R efl ec t i o n s o n Tr a d i t i o n , I m p er i a l i sm , a n d G lo b a l i sm

Lately there has been much loose talk about tradition. Whether the rise in the desire to revive “tradition” as a conceptual framework for one’s political, religious, or sociocultural convictions and action derives from the parallel rise of political conservatism in the United States and the United Kingdom, two powerhouses of the postmodern West, and of religious fundamentalism in Asia, the Middle East, and even in the United States; whether the revival of tradition publicly manifests a worldwide private and innate urge to restore memory to a position of prominence in public life, especially in the sophisticated jockeying for strategic positions of power in global relationship; whether the evocation of tradition is a postmodern ethical action prompted by classical principles of Platonic virtue — t hese are debatable questions at best, and I will stay away from that debate in this essay. What concerns me here are three current issues that Edward Said’s cultural critique both highlights and recuperates: (1) the nature of the traditions invoked, and the evolution of the framing of this invocation; (2) the selective amnesia that colors the collective memory underlying the individual theorizations of traditions; and (3) the tasks of a proper archaeology of critical theory if these traditions are to be useful in the future. The question “What would Said say?” serves to frame these issues in a postcolonialist, postnationalist rhetoric by drawing on Said’s quarter-century-old exposé of orientalism, though it returns no romantic reply. Experientially, what Said says of orientalism applies well to our epistemic understanding of tradition. Paraphrasing his description of orientalism, we might say that, broadly speaking, tradition, too, is “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts”; it is “an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction . . . but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but maintains”; it represents a “certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different world.”1 In common thinking, tradition is equated with manners and morals of our past, with our origins (genesis) and roots, and with our Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

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explanation of the present moment as a continuum of historical forces through time. The socioscientific evolutionist philosophy of the early and mid-nineteenth century, essentially a “restoration history” project, centered on a recarved, redressed, rewritten history; later, the Naturalists wrestled with it, nostalgically hanging on to an elysian vision of an Adamic past and stoically grieving over an imagined separation between human and nature, never questioning whether there really had been a “death” or whether the elegy they were singing merely lamented the loss of a fantasized world. Matthew Arnold, haunted by Victorian England’s schizophrenia, its crisis of faith, built a massive facade of binary forces of culture and anarchy, peddling his “touchstone” test, saying that a poet’s work may be measured by comparing it to selected passages from the sanctified tradition of the classic writers; 2 T. S. Eliot cleverly repackaged his tradition together with individual talent in his effort to patch up the expanding schism between old Victorian preaching and the modernist aesthetic practice. 3 Across the Atlantic, in response to the chaos and confusion of Europe, the American New Critics strategically developed an aesthetic of textual autonomy by dislocating the work from its time and place, yet for many of the key players in the New Critical tradition (Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Andrew Lytle, and all Agrarians), 4 this sanitized aesthetic theory had to be negotiated with their political and economic positions about the South and its social structure of racial segregation, and vice versa. In fact, a whole new genre of American literature born after the Civil War has struggled relentlessly for nearly 140 years to keep alive a future with the failed anatomies of a lost past. As early as 1916, Randolph Bourne called upon America to shed its fake “melting pot” national mythology and embrace transnationalism because “it is not the self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but [the] fringes.”5 His call was prophetic; the nation must acknowledge the fringe contributions if the country is ever going to be a global leader: “America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism — belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe — is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations.”6 Soon after, in 1918, Van Wyck Brooks, one of the cultural nationalists of the period, was calling upon Americans to forge a “usable past” the same way as Carlyle had put one together for England and Michelet for France.7 Alan Trachtenberg aptly notes that “as Brooks envisions it, the creation of a ‘usable past’ fulfills the critic’s social function” as it “compels him to frequent self-examination, in order to prevent his complying with the

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patterns of conformity of his own day,” and “calls upon him to perform a creative task, an invention of a past in light of the needs of the present.”8 In a deconstructed reading, then, Brooks needs a past to implode it from within and lay a foundation for a present. Constructions of American national identity have continued during the hundred years since those prelapsarian early years of the twentieth century, every generation crafting its own image of an imagined nation and dying to expand it, protect its borders, and ultimately reject it. What to do with a past that hangs like a dead albatross from one’s cultural neck that cannot be forgotten or ignored? What to do with those cracks and bumps and detours on the highways and byways of national history that seemed smooth from a safe retrospective distance? The answer: a virtual history that can be modified after periodic tastes. This is the more dangerous, if less obvious, abuse of tradition: its political manipulation, its potential to skew generational intellectual paradigms of knowledge through silent processes of excision and redaction. In the American context, historically, tradition is constructed as a gene pool of neoclassical, neo-Western, hegemonic cultures and peoples, its foundation laid upon an uncomfortable compromise of the classical, pagan Greek philosophy and the forever self-reinventing Christian theology, dating back to Augustinian confessions and Thomistic metaphysics. Essentially, it has been exclusionary; beginning in a common origin but culminating with a clinical separation, yet it masquerades as universal truth. The New Critics sanitized the reconstruction of the South with twisted histories not only of the Northern Yankees, the outside others, but of their own women and African American people, and rationalized the institutionalization of an indefensible social practice with sanctimonious platitudes from ethics, theology, and democratic dogma. Questions about these constructions of tradition and their uses have been raised. In “The Unities of Discourse” (The Archaeology of Knowledge), for example, Michel Foucault points to the complicity of tradition in obfuscating truth or even in stifling the very process of an objective individual inquiry: Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin; tradition enables us to isolate the new against a background of permanence, and to transfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals.9



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According to Foucault, we must rid ourselves of “a whole mass of notions” that diversify the theme of continuity. Among these are the notions of tradition as well as the notions of influence, of development, of evolution, and of spirit — a ll of which offer “ready-made syntheses . . . groupings that we normally accept before any examination . . . links whose validity is recognized from the outset.” In the chapter “Tradition and the Female Talent: Modernism and Masculinism” in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar parody T.S. Eliot’s high-serious tone to critique the very notion of a monolithic tradition that has systematically purged itself of bodies of writing that varied from the dominant dogma and sometimes even challenged the mainstream.10 In “The Formation of the Intellectuals” Antonio Gramsci charts the very process by which traditions give rise to superstructures that impose social and political hegemony and produce subaltern intellectuals: “The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.”11 What really is this tradition, then? Merriam -Webster’s dictionary notes that the word is derived from Latin traditio meaning “action of handing over.” Following are its four listed meanings: (1) “an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)”; (2) “the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction”; (3) “cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions”; and (4) “characteristic manner, method, or style.” But the dictionary also refers us to the word treason, which shares the etymology of tradition. Derived also from traditio, treason means “the betrayal of trust: treachery”; “the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family.” Both words are etymologically related to the Latin root tradere, which gives us the word traitor: one who betrays another’s trust or is false to an obligation or duty; one who commits treason. People who opt to preserve and protect their collective cultural secret from public exposure must move between the Scylla of zealously withdrawing from public scrutiny into the warehouse of history and the Charybdis of surrendering their authentic soul to a predatory false signifier. Hence tradition is a sought-after commodity for controlled transmission of knowledge. In a curious way it masks its own exposé, reformulating its dominant features and shape from time to time and place to place, balancing its act between ubiquitous presence and conspicuous absence.

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As the mass-market demand for reified images of tradition grows, so do the techniques of reproduction, leading to the paradoxical problem of sacrificing one’s uniqueness in the interest of wider distribution. Walter Benjamin addresses this subject in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “One might generalize by saying that the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domains of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”12 The result? According to Benjamin, “These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind,” because the “uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of a tradition,” even though “that tradition itself is alive and extremely changeable.”13 Yet, without the replenishment of memory provided by mechanical reproduction, we are confronted with vacancy, blankness, absence. As an essence of cultural identity, tradition holds the abstract this-ness in the fields of material re-formation and change. The connection between tradition and traitor may seem tenuous at first, but will be clearer as we begin to examine the traditions of orality and literacy and the reasons for a culture’s choice to remain oral and not record its documents in writing. Because of the pervasive desire among many groups to protect their generic “secret” from public display — t he African Americans, the Native Americans, the women, the natives in postcolonial cultures are cases in point — t he lack of a visible/ legible/lisible tradition is often construed to mean absence of a tradition. Tradition is therefore also something that needs preservation, its core secrets kept intact and away from dissemination. Therein lies the innate paradox of tradition: what is shared by a large public, practiced in daily life, and intuitively passed along to successive generations in expansive circles of existence must also simultaneously protect its identity by withholding its élan vital from those who fall outside its perimeter. Said’s formulation of the West’s obsessive misconceptualization of the East offers a brilliant exposé of these cultural constructions and deconstructions at work. A “sample thesis statement” on multiculturalism in a recent freshman textbook by Gilbert H. Muller and Harvey S. Wiener illustrates the urgency of this resuscitation of ethnic identities: “Multiculturalism supports the preservation of differences among people of diverse cultures rather than urging them to replace their ethnic identities with one single ‘American’ identity.”14 Muller and Wiener of course encourage the student to contest and debate the point of view underlying the statement, but the language mirrors the mind-set of many. A second mode of exclusion of select groups is erasure and absence,



“What Would Said Say?”

As the massmarket demand for reified images of tradition grows, so do the techniques of reproduction, leading to the paradoxical problem of sacrificing one’s uniqueness in the interest of wider distribution.

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which paradoxically makes presence conspicuous, and its methods are manifold. First is the name change of people. Anglicization of African names, a common practice among slaveholders in American history, castrates, mutilates, and silences a body of history, erasing the past and paternity (the family chain) and disfiguring the “hoarded genealogy of the tribe” as well as scarring personal identity. The white-black genealogies of the McCaslins, the Sutpens, and the Compsons in William Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha are replete with curious histories of people who have no history; incest escapes their boundaries of social taboo, because some lives exist outside time and tradition. With their secret corridors of incest and miscegenation, Faulkner’s novels reverberate with slave characters who suffer the imposition of new names after their masters. The irony is that the reversal of anglicized names back to African ancestral ones, as Alice Walker shows in “Everyday Use,” appears faddish or politically expedient or socially protestant — Muhammad Ali and Kareem AbdulJabbar come to mind. But misleading constructions of the past are not unique to the United States. A commonly practiced act of cultural excision is religious conversion, whether it follows a Christian crusade or an Islamic jihad. In Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, V. S. Naipaul indicts the Arab Islam for making nihilistic and neurotic demands on its converted people: “Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his.”15 True, Islam insists on total erasure of the convert’s past, as though one becomes a Muslim ex nihilo, but what Naipaul says of Islam may be equally true of all converted people, even those touched into redemption by the blessed hands of a Mother Teresa or a Billy Graham or a Benny Hinn. The Muslim mullahs cannot claim monopoly on conversion of people; Christian evangelism boasts an equal share of the market. The practice of changing place-names in the colonized countries serves as a reminder of the colonial paranoia toward the power of cumulative pride of place in localism. The common British habit of anglicizing place-names in India, for instance, masked England’s paranoia of pockets of insurgency inspired by local history and tradition. In my home state of Orissa, one of the last Indian states to fall under colonial rule, placenames were changed for various reasons: Katak became Cuttack (phonetic failure of English to negotiate Oriya vowels), Brahmapura became

26 Sura P. Rath

Berhampur (failure to negotiate Oriya consonants), and Dhuanchhai (“Smoke Shadow”; now Bhanjanagar) had become Russelkonda, a hybrid term constituted by pairing the name of an insignificant British official — a revenue collector or a missionary — w ith an appetite to preserve his name by naming a village after himself and the generic Telugu name for a trading post. Thus Russell desired to leave behind in India his progeny, a memorial marker of the colonial conquest of which he was a part, his “child” of the final few colonial years when England was increasingly aware of its impotent political hold over India. As Said points out in Culture and Imperialism, “Never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won.”16 After the overt repression of free speech and writing of the native thinkers and writers through censorship or other government policy, covert suppression of the distribution of native texts is the next desperate act of a colonial power. Managed control of the publishing industry, on the one hand, and clever manipulation of educational curricula, on the other, which lead to curricular exclusion of the works of the native writers in a colonized country, not only erase the past but silence the future as well. The newer generations, even the ones educated at the secondary and postsecondary level, grow up with the naive conviction that there is no native intellectual history or literary tradition. Naipaul openly rejects Trinidad, his home country, for its lack of a dominant culture that a writer needs to write. The immigrant colonial society has bred in Trinidad, he says in The Writer and the World, “the pathetic philistinism of the renonçant (an excellent French word that describes the native who renounces his own culture and strives toward the French).”17 In India, “this philistinism, a blending of the vulgarity of East and West — t hose sad dance floors, those sad ‘Western’ cabarets, those transistor radios tuned to Radio Ceylon, those Don Juans with leather jackets or check tweed jackets — is peculiarly frightening. A certain glamour attaches to this philistinism, as glamour attaches to those Indians who, after two or three years in a foreign country, proclaim that they are neither of the East nor of the West.”18 Derek Walcott has accused Naipaul of “the final mimicry”: “To achieve absorption into what is envied not because that absorption is the dissolution of individuality, the sort of blessed anonymity that Hinduism teaches, but because it is only the vain mutter of ‘I have survived.’ ”19 But Naipaul’s bitter critique of India in An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilization, I would argue, hides his veiled anger at himself for the fact that the cultural tradition that planted in him the seed of his passion for writing has allowed itself to be violated so brutally through generations of



“What Would Said Say?”

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invaders. In their own ways Walcott, George Lamming, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, C. L. R. James, and other Caribbean writers compensate for the loss of their African ancestry with, as Brathwaite puts it, “a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into present and future.”20 Through this movement, he claims, “we become ourselves, truly our own creators, discovering word for object, image for the word.”21 His trilogy — Rights of Passage (1967; present wasteland), Masks (1968; quest for the past), and Islands (1969; journey to Africa) — echoes this quest for and consequent exploration of the past as a necessary means to move toward the future. Mimicry is a mechanism of silence, signifying conscious and willful absence, a tacit method for radical conformity. Yet Jacques Derrida argues in Dissemination that the mime does not imitate or copy some prior phenomenon, idea, or figure but constitutes — some might say performatively — t he phantasm of the original in and through mime. 22 If tradition is that vehicle for the voices of the past, where do we go to retrieve the silences? Where do we turn to recover the space erased into blankness? How do we fill the gaping holes on the smooth surface of history? Saint Augustine reminds us in Confessions, “The woman who had lost her groat sought for it with a light; but unless she had remembered it, she would not have found it.”23 If memory is important to the fulfillment of desire in the quest for self-knowledge, where do we search for that which is forgotten, if not in memory? Is the forgotten history a part of the landscapes of memory, or is it some kind of absence, an emptiness and vacancy in an unhinged world? How do we get out of this miasma? One way out of the “long groan that underlines the past,” albeit a somewhat romanticized and lyrical view of the restoration of shattered pieces of history, is offered by Walcott in the Caribbean context: Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. 24

Modern cultural studies (ethnic studies, feminism, postcolonialism, gender studies) provide other examples of a successful struggle against

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a seemingly invincible tradition. By challenging their dominant tradition and questioning their exclusion from it, they have opened Pandora’s sanctimonious boxes and let the genie out of the bottles of hegemony masquerading as infallible truth of traditions. If tradition is to be restored in its total inclusiveness as a tool for building a future less narcissistic than the past, there needs to be a search for traditions, and not just the vocal, visible dominant tradition that parades its own semantic freight. Such an effort will require forensic recovery of faint lines that often only hint at an unfamiliar and unrecognized shape. It will require a reconstruction of the past, a new archaeology, for what history has forgotten may amount to be much more than what it has recorded. I have discussed elsewhere the debilitating effect of colonialism on the native/local cultural artifacts and literary tradition of a nation, for the colonial history slyly foregrounds the ordinary and the insignificant imports at the expense of the truly great indigenous literature, and far more dangerous and far longer lasting than the political subjugation of a people is the psychological and intellectual subalternism fostered by colonialism through institutional structures of production of ideas and thought. 25 Fortunately, the twentieth century has placed more questions on our plate than it has answered, and it will be incumbent upon the next century to negotiate its terms of engagement with these questions. Said’s views, howsoever offensive they may sound to some ears, awaken us to this task, even though the world has changed between the time that prompted his remarks and now. Said describes in one of his recent essays a concrete example of a new global reality, when he was “a Palestinian patient in a Jewish hospital being taken care of by an Indian doctor and Irish nurses.”26 I offer an example of my own, somewhat more involved and complicated: a few years back I taught an introductory course on the cultures of India at a public university in the southern United States. The class included a student whose parents were a Palestinian Christian from Israel and an American Southern Baptist; he did a project on comparative religion: the concept of god in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. After his graduation he went to work as a purchase agent with a multinational corporation where his supervisor was from Mexico and his business client was a New Yorker from India. His company’s major export clients were in Southeast Asia and South America. If we take him one more step into the fast-approaching future, we might say that his company is negotiating outsourcing its purchasing and marketing operations to Chile, and my student must either move to Santiago to train and supervise the local workforce or look for another job. This student’s experience represents the postmodern global reality for many college graduates entering the job market today in America. In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism Said focuses on similar



“What Would Said Say?”

If tradition is to be restored in its total inclusiveness as a tool for building a future less narcissistic than the past, there needs to be a search for

traditions.

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cultural changes in the European past “that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans, who now confront large nonwhite immigrant populations in their midst, and face an impressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard.”27 Said’s interest lies in tracing the impact of European imperial history on the postcolonial late-twentieth-century cultural history, but what he sees as the consequences of those cultural changes since Conrad and Dickens has a poignant implication for the cultural changes we witness at the end of the twentieth century. “The point of my book is that such populations and voices have been there for some time, thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century.”28 If the English novel as a literary genre owes its emergence in the early eighteenth century to the desire for literary self-representation by the rising middle class, which in turn was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution and its system of efficient production and subsequent offer of leisure time to the working class, history will one day record the long-range, irreversible consequences of the Indian diaspora of the late twentieth century. However, the early signs of cultural change are already here, and my point is to focus on some of them with Said’s postimperial, postcolonial insights on history. As a diaspora intellectual, Said navigates between comparable points of fatal attraction. As a student trained in American schools and as a teacher working in the United States, he was the privileged beneficiary of an intellectual tradition that he passed on to generations of students at Columbia University, a tradition founded in the discovery and dissemination of truth and in an honest interpretation of history. As an immigrant child from a family displaced from his Palestinian homeland, he has also been the privileged beneficiary of a postcolonial insight, a perspective that sometimes escapes the Westerner and other times the Westerner escapes by choice. Said’s talent lies, I believe, in the deftness of piloting his ship of ideas and opinions, in balancing the burden on his head without losing sight of the course of his voyage, and in the temerity and determination to make the invisible visible, to find the tools to pry open the closed eyes of his peers. Not surprisingly, he fits the exact definition of a teacher in the oriental tradition: the true teacher pries open the eyes of those blinded by the darkness of ignorance with the scalpel-lotion of his or her self-knowledge.

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The analogy is of noninvasive surgery, a tactical penetration with clinical accuracy, but it is one instance where the student gains richer vision by losing her or his clouding cataracts. Said’s reputation across the globe as a scholar speaks for itself. The hallmark of his writing is its syllogistic reasoning, its lucid exposé of the substratum layers of textual meaning and political motivation, and, above all, its revelation of the web of colliding and colluding interests that bind discourse with power. Like Foucault, a scholar he both respects and critiques, Said reads all texts as inseparable from culture; in fact, unlike many of his colleagues, all distinguished scholars in their merit, he has never misrepresented or even understated his own political affiliations and interests. “How can you know the dancer from the dance?” asked W. B. Yeats; “how can you separate the scholar/intellectual from the society,” asks Said. In his 1 June 2000 essay “My Encounter with Sartre” in the London Review of Books, he makes this basic point in indicting Sartre and Foucault for their silence: For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time. Yet he seemed neither infallible nor prophetic. On the contrary, one admired Sartre for the efforts he made to understand situations and, when necessary, to offer solidarity to political causes. He was never condescending or evasive, even if he was given to error and overstatement. Nearly everything he wrote is interesting for its sheer audacity, its freedom (even its freedom to be verbose) and its generosity of spirit. 29

One might easily say the same things of Said himself. But he follows that admiration for Sartre with “one obvious exception”: Sartre’s failure to take the same courageous position on Palestine as he had on Algeria and Vietnam. Even at the meeting in Paris, Said says, “Sartre’s presence, what there was of it, was strangely passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely nothing for hours on end.” And then Said’s disappointment at the silence of the intellectual: “I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor [Pierre Victor], and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already celebrated Egyptian leader [Anwar Sadat].”30 One could not accuse Said of a similar silence on current political causes; whether we agree or disagree with his private conviction and public position, his voice was audible and his presence visible. Even those who remain at odds with his political views respect his



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intellectual interrogation of critical issues and his logical summation of perspectives. In theory and in practice, he was and remains a symbol of American diversity. And for this gift he will forever keep us in his debt.

Notes An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2003 conference of the Forum on Contemporary Theory in Jaipur (India) with support from the Central Washington University Faculty Development Fund. 1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 12. 2. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in Criticism: Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Davis Anderson, 4th ed. (New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2000), 333 – 53. See also Samuel Lipman, ed., Culture and Anarchy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 3. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Kaplan and Anderson, Criticism, 404 – 10. 4. See Lewis Simpson, ed., I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). 5. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1916, 86 – 97; rpt. in Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Wiley, 1976), 152. 6. Ibid., 153. 7. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial, 11 April 1918, 337 – 41; rpt. in Trachtenberg, Critics of Culture, 165 – 71. 8. Ibid., 165. 9. Michel Foucault, “The Unities of Discourse,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (New York: Blackwell, 1998), 421. 10. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Tradition and the Female Talent: Modernism and Masculinism,” in Kaplan and Anderson, Criticism: Major Statements, 684 – 95. 11. Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectual,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 1143. 12. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Rivkin and Ryan, Literary Theory, 283. 13. Ibid. 14. Gilbert Muller and Harvey S. Wiener, eds., The Short Prose Reader, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006). 15. See V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (London: Picador, 1981), xi. See also Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (New York: Random House, 1998). 16. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xii. 17. V. S. Naipaul, The Writer and the World (New York: Knopf, 2002), 6. 18. Ibid.

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19. Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 131. 20. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Timehri,” in Is Massay Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. Orde Coombes (New York: Doubleday, 1974). Quoted in The Empire Writes Back, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 145. 21. Ibid. For other postcolonial views on a transformative, generative history, see Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History,” Paul Carter, “Spatial History,” and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial and the Artifice of History,” all in The PostColonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2001), 355 – 8 8. 22. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 23. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Mentor, 1963), 228. 24. Walcott, What the Twilight Says, 69. 25. See Sura P. Rath, “Romanticizing the Tribe: Stereotypes in Literary Portraits of Tribal Cultures,” in Diogenes 148 (1989): 61 – 77; Rath, “Home(s) Abroad: Diasporic Identities in Third Spaces,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 9 (1999): 7 – 23; and Rath, “Post/Past Orientalism: Orientalism and Its Dis/ Reorientation,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 16 (2002): 45 – 62. 26. Edward Said, “My Encounter with Sartre,” London Review of Books, 1 June 2000, 11. 27. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xx. 28. Ibid. 29. Said, “My Encounter with Sartre.” 30. Ibid.



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Edward Said, Reuben Sachs, and Victorian Zionism

This essay is intended both as a specific study of interconnected moments in nineteenth-century British literature and as an opportunity to explore the cultural and political imagination of a people and its sites of production, reproduction, or transformation. Taking our cue from Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979), especially his engagement of George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), we ask what we might come to expect of literature for what it might tell us about both the cultural-historical contexts from which it arises and the world in which we live today. A number of Said’s assertions, in light of recent developments in the Middle East, warrant continuing attention. His reading of Eliot provides a way for inquiring into how the Western literary tradition, and in particular the late-nineteenth-century British literary scene, has helped create and circulate dispositional expectations that alternately would conform to or vary from the sociopolitical realities they inhabit. While in Said’s appraisal Eliot contributes to the former strand (framing quintessential dominant features of the liberal imagination of her time), we suggest that the narrative presentation of divergent and dissenting vantage points can inform our current understandings as well. From Said’s compelling insights on Eliot and how elements of nineteenth-century Zionism’s heritage became and continue to be embedded in the Western liberal imagination, we move to our own reading of Eliot’s somewhat lesser-known Anglo-Jewish compatriot, Amy Levy (1861 – 89). Levy’s writing, influenced not only by her problematic position as an emancipated woman in a largely patriarchal Anglo-Jewish community but also by Eliot, offers an interesting counterpoint to the latter’s romanticized filiation with the Zionist ideal. In Levy’s Jewish novel Reuben Sachs (1888), we find an interesting alternative strand of nineteenth-century literary speculation about the “Jewish question” and, by extension, the question of Palestine.

Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

Iveta Jusová and Dan Reyes

Zionism, the Durability of Denial, and Said’s Reading of Daniel Deronda While taking care not to dismiss the realities of anti-Semitism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Said is likewise emphatic that critical questioning about the political and ideological heritage of Zionism should not be simplistically conflated with anti-Semitism itself. In The Question of Palestine, Said succinctly describes a fundamental tension endemic to Zionist ideology’s insistence upon being played out in a material world of sociohistorical realities that it stubbornly denies: “Zionism in the postindustrial West has acquired for itself an almost unchallenged hegemony in the liberal establishment discourse. . . . in keeping with one of its central ideological characteristics, Zionism has hidden, or caused to disappear, the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militantly oppressive discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.”1 Almost a quarter century after Said’s observations, we feel compelled to question their continuing relevance. More than two decades of fruitful postcolonial scholarship might lead one to hope that the old-style mythopolitical imaginings underwriting much of what Said worries about in his book have by now produced some modicum of collective educative progress. Yet, as we look today at the world around us — at seemingly intractable conflict between the Palestinian people and Israel as well as between the West and the Arab world, at the media representations that never tire of mining old stores of prejudice — recent events tend to confirm Said’s conclusions. Despite every opportunity to know better, the media has filled the early moments of the present century with caricatures of the “Arab type.” The earlier simplistic prejudicial theme of the exotic unknown (examined in Said’s Orientalism) has given way to a preoccupation with the menace such a culture might present to the West’s notion of civilization. Contemporary political rhetoric simultaneously conjoins mentions of the “Arab world” and “threat” while insisting that the people of this world remain lodged in the nineteenth-century stereotype of uncivilized, bumbling masses. Displays of political will, of resistance to the West, are typically explained away as the products of a people led astray by evil, despotic rule. Meanwhile, the curiously durable Zionist mythology of entitlement that Said pointed to in his work continues to be played out today as a matter beyond question (at least in the United States), as a cultural ideal of the Western fundamentalist imagination that somehow retains its allure despite the ever-present reality of the world of violence surrounding efforts to enforce its realization. Despite the gap between nineteenth-century

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speculations (largely from afar in respect to authors like Eliot) about pursuing the Zionist dream and the immediacy of a half century now of more or less continuing military struggle to root and shore up this notion through a Jewish state in Palestine, there still regularly remain displays of the power of ideological expectation to trump experience and sensation in the material world. Said turned to Daniel Deronda, the first English novel to introduce “fully Zionist characters,”2 to help explicate the heritage and tradition of certain dispositions toward Zionism in the Western liberal imagination, both in relation to its own ethical investments and in its disregard of those whom that ideology’s materialization inevitably affects. This choice draws upon a line of reasoning familiar to literary and cultural historians for some time now. Late modernity’s present dilemma arguably shares with the Victorian culture of the late empire a preoccupation with its own apparent unrootedness. Eliot’s flirtation with the Zionist ideal as a counterpoint to what she saw increasingly as ideological bankruptcy on the part of the materially oriented British culture of her own time stands out as striking today — not as an entirely foreign modality of attitude and aspiration but perhaps for its naïveté about the related issues that the author fails to address. Said aptly illustrates how Eliot’s otherwise well-intended liberal ambition allowed her so easily to overlook her own systematic racism toward those who could not be readily assimilated to the Eurocentric worldview; 3 in the process, prospective Western readers are challenged to examine what shared baggage the cultural politics of today might entail. We are inclined to agree that today one would dismiss many of Said’s cautions and warnings only at significant hazard. Yet, as we assert that our world continues to bear out the urgency of his concerns, we suggest that consensus is seldom if ever perfect and that while a tragically flawed liberal hegemonic view may in fact dominate contemporary public consciousness, it does not necessarily erase its alternatives and counternarratives. The nineteenth-century context, of which Said identifies Eliot as exemplary representative, was not without its own share of dissenting perspectives. It is in this context that we suggest that a closer reading of Levy’s work, and particularly Reuben Sachs, may be useful.

Said aptly illustrates how Eliot’s otherwise well-intended liberal ambition allowed her so easily to overlook her own systematic racism toward those who could not be readily assimilated to the Eurocentric worldview.

Amy Levy, Tactical Irony, and Marginal Ambivalence Said offers several compelling insights into the motivations behind Eliot’s highly enthusiastic portrayal of the Zionist movement, including a consideration of the limits of the author’s experience and an appreciation of the movement’s likely actual consequences. Levy’s treatment of the Zionist



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question promises to reveal distinctions and divergences simply on the basis of this author’s location within the circles of Anglo-Jewry of her time. Whereas Eliot afforded herself a certain broad-wash sentimentalism in her depictions of Zionist-oriented Talmudic culture, life as a nineteenth-century woman within such a community is beyond her outsider’s grasp. Levy, as a Cambridge-educated, Anglo-Jewish, middle-class woman writer, 4 found herself both well situated to enjoy certain benefits of her family’s financial success and increasingly confronted with the rising prevalence of anti-Semitism in 1870s and 1880s London. Her family’s success in the context of an expanding middle class provided Levy with the opportunity and skills to interpret the convergence of cultures within which she lived. Her position specifically within the Jewish community afforded her an understanding of how the Victorian narrations of nation and race both impacted upon and distorted understandings of the real people upon which they were made to bear. We might in this regard be tempted to consider Levy as the ideal insider to counter sympathetic interlopers like Eliot, although Levy’s position was more complicated than such a representation might suggest. Caught between the expectations of both the Jewish and Anglo communities — both of which she tended to identify with and each of which tended in its own way to relegate her to its margins — L evy’s status as a hyphenated woman appears to have complicated her difficult sense of identity. Standing between her family’s and her own full realization of the advantages and privileges entailed in the British colonialist project was the insistent reminder of their simultaneous Jewish status marking them as outsiders and suspect. Perhaps more than anything, these combined tensions, which at neither extreme encouraged the author to explore the possibilities of self-determination as a woman, situated Levy favorably for developing a critical perspective toward both the Anglo and the Jewish worlds. Before ending her own life at the age of twenty-eight, Levy produced a varied body of work — poetry, short stories, essays, and several novels, including her masterpiece, Reuben Sachs. Reuben, a twenty-seven-year-old Anglo-Jewish barrister with political ambitions, is the pride of his prominent family. In Reuben’s determination to “marry money,”5 even if that means forsaking his beautiful but poor relative Judith Quixano, the woman he loves, the novel adopts a fairly conventional primary dramatic thread. Judith eventually goes on to accept the marriage proposal of a wealthy but foolish alternate suitor, Bertie Lee-Harrison (a recent convert to Judaism), entering into a relationship ominously compared by the narrator to that of Gwendolen and Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. In due time Reuben’s materially obsessed and clannish family finds its narrative punishment in Reuben’s sudden and premature death of overwork.

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Meeting with popular acclaim upon its initial appearance and quickly going into a second edition, 6 Reuben Sachs presents a scathing critique of upper-class Anglo-Jewry’s presumed abandonment of idealism for gross materialism, as well as of that community’s stifling patriarchy. Given that the novel garnered severe censure in the Anglo-Jewish press of the time for its presumed anti-Semitism,7 the question at least might be raised as to how much the work’s popularity rested upon its apparent confirmation of the biases of its largely Anglo audience. Indeed, Levy’s text rehearses many of the conventional Jewish stereotypes that abounded in fin de siècle English literature, lingering extensively, for instance, upon narrative descriptions and appraisals of Reuben’s appearance and mannerisms, underscoring their presumed “quintessential Jewishness.”8 To this day, Levy’s unsympathetic depictions of the Anglo-Jewish culture have led some scholars to view this text as an example of Jewish self-hatred.9 Such an interpretation, however, tends to discount the possibility that more complex motives were behind the author’s narrative and personal strategy.10 Looking at this work a bit more broadly — a nd considering the author’s penchant toward critical skepticism and irreverent ironic engagement of conventions, biases, and normative constraints — we view Levy as offering her readers an occasion to reexamine both priorities and attitudes circulating in the public consciousness of her time. Levy’s irreverence, while portraying Anglo-Jewry in what could be described as a harsh light, is equally hard on Anglo culture. Her quarrel is with the strictures of convention that bind the Jewish and Anglo communities together and simultaneously hold them apart in relations of misapprehension about both self and other. While a full reading of Reuben Sachs is beyond the scope of this essay, consideration of several pertinent dimensions of the context of intention from which the novel was produced is important for understanding Levy’s choices. Beyond the author’s conflicted personal and cultural identity and her general tendency to treat otherwise difficult subjects with irony, Levy’s own awareness of the crisis faced by the Anglo-Jewish community with rising anti-Semitism and of the particular status of this novel’s more or less transparent address to Daniel Deronda offers important interpretive signals. From Levy’s vantage, Eliot’s Jewish novel seems to have appeared to affirm the fundamental inability of Anglo culture to truly understand both its own colonialist biases and, even when sympathetically disposed, other cultures. Levy, while appreciating Eliot’s good intentions, saw her effort as inadequate for a realistic and relevant rendering of the challenges facing the Anglo-Jewish people. Although Eliot’s novel was lauded in the Anglo-Jewish press, Levy’s 1886 article “The Jew in Fiction,” published in the Jewish Chronicle, concluded: “But which of us will not acknowledge



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For someone like Levy, caught in the real-world struggles of both an internally divided and an externally opposed Anglo-Jewish community, Eliot’s simplistic portrayal of the noble, ascetically oriented Jews appeared as a potentially destructive distortion.

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with a sigh, that the noble spirit which conceived Mirah, Daniel and Ezra, was more royal than the king? . . . As a novel treating of modern Jews, Daniel Deronda cannot be regarded as a success; although every Jew must be touched by, and feel grateful for the spirit which breathes throughout the book.”11 The Jewish types that Eliot so favorably parades about in Daniel Deronda come across as convenient, if well-intended, inventions, fabricated to provide the counterpoint of an ethical higher ground against which to judge what Eliot saw as the increasingly morally bankrupt materialism of mainstream British culture. For novelistic purposes such tactics do make a certain amount of sense. But for someone like Levy, caught in the real-world struggles of both an internally divided and an externally opposed Anglo-Jewish community, Eliot’s simplistic portrayal of the noble, ascetically oriented Jews appeared as a potentially destructive distortion. Particularly with Levy and her family’s position as relatively progressive Reform Jews, and her own stake in exploring the possibilities of liberated womanhood, the Zionist unanimity presented and endorsed by Eliot, as well as her apparent consent to relegate Jewish womanhood to its subser­ vient place of obedience under the tutelage of patriarchal authority, would figure to Levy as disturbing viewpoints. In these respects, Levy had a number of axes to grind with Eliot and her version of the Jewish novel. While Levy’s own caricatures of a materialistically preoccupied AngloJewish community can be read prospectively in several ways, many of her choices pointedly criticize the British incapability to experience crosscultural encounter beyond the frame of their own preconceptions. Bertie, the suitor for Judith’s unhappy consolation marriage, constitutes both a satirical reversal of the British conceit about the virtue of their proselytizing and colonizing practices,12 and a commentary on the inauthenticity of Eliot’s presumption about her own Daniel’s prospect of embodying the essence of Judaism on the basis of late-in-life self-discovery. After a series of conversions shows that Bertie “has a taste for religion” (205) but apparently little understanding of the choices he makes, his self-disclosure sharply cuts at the common projection of Anglo-British culture about the rest of the world “awaiting conversion” and its “civilizing” influence. The ineffectuality of the converted Bertie, who neither is personally reborn nor finds a real community that would match the unfounded expectations that he brings to it, casts a questioning light on the prospects for Eliot’s Daniel ever truly finding satisfactory personal and political resolution through the unlikely and overly poetic fate of awakening prepared for him by his author. By extension and association, Levy calls into question both the heroic Daniel and the sad satire, Bertie, as counterfeits of sorts. Within the world of Reuben Sachs, Levy quite conspicuously mobi-

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lizes her women characters in a manner again at divergence with Eliot’s tactics. Levy’s narrative suggests her objections to how Eliot’s obedient Jewess Mirah serves as little more than a passive foil to Eliot’s spirited but flawed gentile heroine Gwendolen Harleth and as a reward to Daniel for his eventual “correct” choice. Sacrificed in this exchange is the question of the Jewish woman’s control over her own fate, relegated to a subservient handmaiden’s role for the Zionist adventure elsewhere. Interestingly absent from Levy’s remarks, and from a novel so otherwise rife with satirical allusions and counterparts to the characters of Daniel Deronda, is any reference or address to Eliot’s Leonora Alcharisi, Daniel’s mother. Despite her relatively limited presence in the novel, Leonora, who has gone to extraordinary lengths to forsake Judaism as an unwanted bondage and burden for both herself and her son, certainly appears to counter the Zionist enthusiasm that so much colors other Jewish characters’ lives in Eliot’s story. At the same time, it is worth noting Leonora’s role and positioning in the story. Making her brief confessional appearance late in the narrative to clarify and elucidate Daniel’s mysterious past, Leonora is introduced to the reader in the waning moments of her life, still unrepentant perhaps, but of fading resolve. Her initial presentation — she is first seen apart and alone, at a distance from across a large room, draped in black lace — has something of a funereal hint to it. Described as “a Melusina who had ties with some world which is independent of ours,”13 Leonora has a “strangeness” that suggests a certain ghostliness to her presence, a haunting aligned with her purpose as harbinger of things already past. And perhaps this would in part explain Levy’s inattention to this character: that in essence, as far as her role in the story, Leonora is the Past, a modality that Eliot relegates to a time gone by. Instead, Eliot celebrates the Future, the province of Daniel, Mirah, and their newfound compatriots with their Zionist aspirations. With Levy both intent upon being the master of her own fate and yet ambivalent at best to the question of Zion, her choices in undermining expectations about the “Mirah” type seem clearly motivated. Her own protagonist, Judith, will not be rewarded for her compliance; rather, she remains trapped by the conventional role she has consented to (whether by obligation or choice). Akin to Daniel’s approving appraisal of Mirah that she “seems capable of submitting to anything when it takes the form of duty” (494), Levy’s Reuben thinks to himself of Judith in one of his reveries, “so sweet, so teachable!” (241). There will, however, be no noble Daniel for Judith, nor the promise that traditional life choices would guarantee a Jewish woman’s fulfillment and happiness. In contrast to Mirah, whose feminine submissiveness and uncritical loyalty to what she recognizes as the traditions of her people are narratively rewarded by her marriage to



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[Levy’s] novel represents the notion that Anglo-Jewry should leave their English homes for Palestine as absurd.

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Daniel (the most desirable male in Eliot’s novel), Levy’s Jewish community encourages Reuben, Levy’s Daniel equivalent, to abandon Judith for his own professional ambitions, regardless of how deserving she seems to be. In this respect, while Judith’s primary narrative role may be an ironic unsettling of presumptions conventionally attributed to her type, Levy’s novel is not in any direct way a hopeful story, especially in respect to the verdict it presents on the prospects for Anglo-Jewish womanhood.14 Opposing Eliot’s representation of the modern (male and female) Jews’ ambitions and desires, and going to considerable lengths to debunk the notion of an Anglo-Jewish cultural unity underwritten through a homogenous unchanging adherence to Hebrew tradition and faith, Levy also portrays her characters as disinterested in the project of the Jewish resettlement in the Middle East. Resisting the idea of an easy solution on any front, Levy is certainly by no means prepared to endorse and enlist retreat into a reconstituted Israel as panacea. Her novel represents the notion that Anglo-Jewry should leave their English homes for Palestine as absurd. “Did he [Bertie] expect to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labeled Palestine?” (238), Esther, a crucial if minor feminist character in the novel, cries disapprovingly. As a retort to the ill-informed interloper Bertie’s disappointment over the Anglo-Jewish community’s failure to live up to Eliot’s idealized characters, this comment, of course, serves other purposes as well. While a number of Levy’s other writings tend to bear out her appreciation of the situation of Anglo-Jewry at the fin de siècle, they provide less than an explicit position on the Zionist movement. Levy’s 1888 translation of “Jerusalem,” the eleventh-century philosopher Jehudah Halevi’s poetic tribute to the “city of the world, most chastely fair,”15 suggests that she was aware of the strong feelings Palestine, and specifically Jerusalem, could stir in the Jewish people. Considered alongside her earlier poetic address of these same issues, the narrative engagement of Zionism played out in Reuben Sachs suggests that Levy (as was common among AngloJewry of the 1880s and 1890s) experienced a continuing struggle with such matters. Levy’s caution toward the Zionist movement is likely to have been influenced and informed through her personal and family affiliation with Asher Myers, a close friend of her father. As editor and manager of the Jewish Chronicle between 1878 and 1902, Myers facilitated and to some extent also shaped Zionist debate, which would seem minimally to have helped familiarize Levy with the competing positions on Zionism. Under Myers’s leadership the paper regularly endeavored to report objectively on activities of the growing Zionist movement while “open[ing] its columns to Jewish anti-Zionists.”16 As David Cesarani has pointed out, Myers

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himself appreciated Zionism as an understandable response to a growing anti-Semitic climate in Europe but did not endorse a Jewish state in Palestine. Instead he argued that “the battle against antisemitism must be fought in Europe, not in Asia.”17 A connection with Myers would provide Levy with the opportunity to appreciate the difficulties of equating a satisfactory response to maintaining a vital Jewish community (in the land of an anti-Semitic oppressor) with a Zionist solution as the necessary or desirable outcome. If Levy’s rejection of Zionism in Reuben Sachs might seem in the end quite unequivocal, it would, however, be misleading to infer on Levy’s part an anticolonial sensibility in any way driven by consideration for the contemporary inhabitants of Palestine. It would be something of a leap — a nd we are inclined to believe an unfounded one — to suggest that Levy’s Jewish novel is more sensitive to the Palestinians than Eliot’s book. And while we would like to hold that there is a qualitative and significant difference between the two approaches, they appear, along otherwise contrasting tracks, to confirm Said’s observation about the novel’s (perhaps inescapable) location as cultural-historical institution. This further bears out Said’s assertion that “Western writers until the middle of the twentieth century . . . wrote with an exclusively Western audience in mind even when they wrote of characters, places, or situations that referred to, made use of, overseas territories held by Europeans.”18 Eliot and Levy, while differing on the question of Zionism, would appear to have converged in constraining the question to a European frame of reference. In his reading of Eurocentric flirtations with the notion of Zionism in Daniel Deronda, Said has, of course, already clearly underscored what he observed as the “total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants of . . . Palestine” in Eliot’s enthusiastic support for Mordecai’s mission.19 Despite Eliot’s favorable remark about “oriental people” in her letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 20 Mordecai’s speech on Palestine as a land that needs to be “redeemed” by the Jews from its “debauched and paupered conquerors,” as well as his stereotypical references to “the despotism of the East” (595), all remain uncontested in Daniel Deronda. 21 Eliot’s Zionism thus participates in, and perpetuates, the dominant Victorian imperialist perception of the “oriental people” as backward and irrelevant. In this way, the novel manifests Said’s project of locating the rise of Zionism in the context of nineteenth-century European (and particularly British) colonial expansion, and in the context of the Victorian discourse of orientalism, which viewed the inhabitants of the Middle East as inferior and inconsequential and the land occupied by them as vacant and available for European appropriation. 22 It was this attitude toward the natives of Palestine, an attitude constructed and disseminated not only by British



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scholars, travelers, and colonial administrators but also centrally by British novelists, that made possible the Zionist project’s insistence that Palestine offered a land without people for a people without a land. 23 But where Eliot’s Mordecai waxes with insensitivity and even racism in remarks about the contemporary occupants of Palestine, Levy’s book perhaps illustrates the limitation of extra-European imaginative capability (at least in respect to Victorian novelistic discourse) by failing to mention them altogether. The skeptical light cast on the question of Zion through Reuben Sachs, while standing in clear contrast to the idealism propelling Eliot’s rendition of the same, does not include in its motivations any unambiguous recognition of, or concern on the author’s part for, the people then already inhabiting Palestine. Similarly, while on more than one occasion in Reuben Sachs Levy manages to dismiss other ventures in foreign lands also as foolish practices, 24 her complaint points toward the irrelevance of such ventures as distractions presumably from real issues at home. Levy’s reluctance toward the narrative of transformative possibility through colonial reach (that Eliot attempts to mobilize) does not, in the end, appear driven by any sort of full-blown anticolonial consciousness. The possibility of an extra-European frame of view emerging in Reuben Sachs thus remains mitigated by the persistently absent other. Still, while it is worthwhile to note how both Levy and Eliot comment on the problems of their time and cultural location mostly in relation to how those might affect their own personal circumstances, Levy’s adoption of skepticism at the juncture where Eliot instead opts for fantasy’s indulgency appears to us an advantageous and instructive alternative. And while neither author appears to articulate a frame of view outside the constraints of empire, Eliot’s moralistic assertive idealism might represent additional hazards, which stand complicit in the ongoing justification of expansive disregard in the interchangeable names of progress, profit, and salvation at home. Levy’s approach to the challenges of a cultural politics of domestic coexistence not readily resolved by a change of geographic venue does seem at least to stand as a buffer against a rush to ethnocentrist dominance abroad as a ready and reliable response to difficulty at home. Dismissing the idea of Jewish resettlement in the Middle East as absurd and endorsing those in the Anglo-Jewish community who would insist on Britain as their home, Levy avoids setting her characters on the path that so frequently leads to taking up what Said defines as the role of “colonial oppressors.”

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Conclusion In the end, both Daniel Deronda and Reuben Sachs appear on some level lodged in the culture and collective imaginations of their time. Whether through oversights and shortsightedness facilitated by Eliot’s enthusiasm for the Zionist project as a renaissance for rootedness and a life of feeling, or the skepticism Levy would bring through her own experience and position to the same, both authors notably shared a limited appreciation of the real consequences of the grand social experiment being played out upon a crowded globe presumed partially vacant for convenience’s sake. Just as Said looks to derive a lesson from Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, we believe that the present circumstances of our world demand that we consider our actions in the broader context of their consequences, not just in terms of the politics of the place we inhabit but as they impact upon the others with whom we share this world. What is understandable in the situation and circumstances of our literary predecessors is no longer acceptable today. Returning to their cultural contexts, we would like to suggest that an educative occasion can be found in our reading of Levy and Eliot, which should today be appreciated as part of the legacy of Victorian Zionism.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), 57. 2. Hani al-Raheb, The Zionist Character in the English Novel (London: Zed Books, 1985), 10. 3. Said, Question of Palestine, 65. 4. For details on Levy’s life, see Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). 5. Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs, in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861 – 1889, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 197. All subsequent references to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 6. Bryan Cheyette, “From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy, and the Post-Emancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880 – 1900,” Jewish Historical Studies 29 (1988): 260. 7. For an overview of contemporary reviews and parodies of Levy’s novel in the Anglo-Jewish press, see Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Jews, Gender, and Genre in Late-Victorian England,” Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 314 – 17. 8. Reuben is described as follows: “He wore good clothes, but they could not disguise the fact that his figure was bad, and his movements awkward: unmistakably the figure and movements of a Jew” (200). 9. Along similar lines to those theorized by Sander Gilman in Jewish SelfHatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 11.



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10. In this respect, we tend to agree with Linda Hunt Beckman, who reads Reuben Sachs as an “exploration of the theme of Jewish self-hatred” rather than as being driven by it (Amy Levy, 162). Similarly favorable is Cheyette’s interpretation of Reuben Sachs as a novel that pioneered a new genre of the Anglo-Jewish novel of revolt (“From Apology to Revolt,” 260). 11. Amy Levy, “The Jew in Fiction,” Jewish Chronicle, 4 June 1888, 13. 12. As Michael Ragussis reminds us, Mirah’s character needs to be viewed in light of Daniel Deronda’s overall objective to denounce the pressures on Jews from Victorian Christian proselytizers (Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995], 234 – 99). 13. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 469. All subsequent references to this book appear parenthetically in the text. 14. This view of the position of women in fin de siècle Anglo-Jewish circles is consistent with Levy’s argument in her 1886 essay “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day,” published anonymously in the Jewish Chronicle. Here, Levy laments that as far as Anglo-Jewry is concerned, “the position of single women, so rapidly improving in the general world, is a particularly unfortunate one” (Complete Novels and Selected Writings, 525 – 26). 15. Amy Levy, “Jerusalem,” in Complete Novels and Selected Writings, 405. 16. David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841 – 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86. 17. Quoted in Cesarani, Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 86 – 87. 18. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 66. 19. Said, Question of Palestine, 6. 20. While Eliot’s letter stressed that “towards the Hebrews we western people . . . have a peculiar debt,” it also mentioned: “Not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable. . . . There is nothing I should care more to do . . . than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.” Quoted in al-Raheb, Zionist Character in the English Novel, 64. The original quotation is in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 469. 21. See Said’s analysis of Mordecai’s speech in Question of Palestine, 64. 22. Ibid., 56 – 82. 23. “What were to become institutional Zionist attitudes to the Arab Palestinian natives . . . were more than prepared for in the attitudes and the practices of British scholars, administrators, and experts who were officially involved in the exploitation and government of Palestine since the mid-nineteenth century” (Said, Question of Palestine, 79). 24. From the dispatching of Reuben’s brother to an “obscure colony” (caricaturing here the popular British tradition of dispensing with younger or unsuccessful sons by sending them off overseas) to the portrayal of Bertie’s self-absorbed blabbering about adventures in Asia Minor (as he fails entirely to perceive the inattention and annoyance with which his remarks are met), colonial adventure in Reuben Sachs stands as the mark of the fool and the irrelevant.

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Edward Said: “The Last Jewish Intellectual” O n I d en t i t y, A lt er i t y, a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f M emo r y

It is more rewarding — a nd more difficult — to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally about others than only about “us.”  — E dward Said, Culture and Imperialism How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

A Jewish-Palestinian In an interview with the Israeli daily Ha-aretz published in August 2000, Edward Said concluded a discussion about home, belonging, and exile with the somewhat surprising announcement: “I am the last Jewish intellectual . . . the only true follower of Adorno.” As a clarifying statement he added: “Let me put it this way: I am a Jewish-Palestinian.”1 That Theodor Adorno’s views on dialectical history, displacement, and exile greatly influenced Said is a well-known fact, but his statement draws attention to other, not less significant points: first, that Said, an outspoken critic of Zionism, has always been careful not to conflate Zionism and Judaism and has, accordingly, always stressed the importance of distinguishing between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. 2 Furthermore, in frequently emphasizing (as in his words: “I am the last Jewish intellectual”) his adherence to what he associates with a certain historical “Jewish position,” Said seems to radically differentiate, even oppose, Zionism (as a ethnonational ideology) to Judaism, or at least to a critical Jewish sensibility as observed in the writings of Adorno, Hannah Arendt, or more recently Zeev Sternheel, Uri Avnery, and Ilan Pappe. The other point to be made about Said’s statement — a nd it is this point that I focus on going forward — has to do with the second part of his announcement: “I am a Jewish-Palestinian.” With these words Said effectively scandalizes his readers not only because “they know” he is not (officially speaking and “on paper”) Jewish but also, and more significant, because of the juxtaposition of “Jewish” and “Palestinian.” The hyphenated identity Said proclaims collapses the structure of oppositional differ-

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ences without, however, erasing difference itself: “Arab” or Palestinian no longer appears in opposition to “Jew”; neither Jew nor Palestinian vanishes into the other. It is this keeping-in-difference inseparability of the Jew and the Arab that Said emphasizes in his various writings about memory and the politics of memory in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In attending to this inseparability and closely examining the relationship between this notion and Said’s strong belief in the constructive power of memory, I wish to explore Said’s unique, productive, yet often overlooked or inadequately simplified understanding of the central role memory plays not only in shaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also as a leading force in what he recognizes as a possible, indeed the only possible, way out of this conflict. If much has been written about Said’s fervent dedication to preserving and documenting Palestinians’ memories against the erasure of this past by the massive colonial enterprise of Zionism, very little attention has been paid, so far, to how Said further challenges this task by repeatedly pointing at the limits of any “national memory,” which as such can appear coherent only on the basis of a preceding process of exclusion and an active forgetting of the other. Thus if it is true that for Said the most immediate concern is to fight the erasure of the Palestinian past by the Zionist rewritings of history, it is important to note that this task, while clearly central, is only part of what Said views as an even greater healing process to be sought through memory. The other aspect of Said’s writings on memory deconstructs the nationalist-rivalry model altogether, in resituating the collective memories of both Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, in a historical continuity and as part of a shared political, ethical, and psychological sphere, which goes beyond their current political enmity. It is only by exploring both these aspects of Said’s writings on memory and the relationship between them, I suggest, that we can truly grasp the immense ethical implications of Said’s investment in memory as a means for political intervention.

The Battle of Memories The contemporary political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which at times is referred to as the “Israeli-Arab conflict” and sometimes even as the “Jewish-Arab conflict,” has everything to do with questions of ownership. Like most national conflicts, it is articulated primarily in terms of a “territorial battle”: a war carried out in the name of rights of possession over land. Such “rights,” however, are themselves a matter of memory. Thus, in an essay published a few years after he left Israel

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in 1969, the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is best understood in terms of a “battle of memories” between the Israeli-Jewish memory, which bases the Jewish possessive relationship to the land on texts and archaeology, and the Palestinian memory, which, he suggests, preserves an organic connection to the land by a people who “know the time of the rain from the smell of the stone.”3 Other writers and scholars, among them Azmi Bishara, Anton Shammas, Imil Habibi, Ella Shohat, Ilan Pappe, and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, in addition to Said himself, have since discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in similar ways, emphasizing memory’s role in shaping the terms of this conflict and its public image. Of course, articulating national conflicts as a battle of memories is in itself not unique or limited to the Israeli-Palestinian context: “The destruction of the collective memory of the Other through the construction of one’s own is a central element in the formation of [all] national identities,” as Gur-Ze’ev and Pappe remind us.4 What does, however, seem to be a distinctive aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian battle of memories is that this battle is articulated not only in terms of different qualities (types) of memory or narratives of original ownership (i.e., “who was here first”) but also in terms of suffering and victimhood (i.e., “who has suffered more”). It is, then, competing memories of suffering over and above any other memories that seem to stand at the center of the battle, making it particularly potent. Gur-Ze’ev and Pappe describe the outcome as a tragic mutual negation: “Each side sees itself as a sole victim while totally negating the victimization of the Other” (93). Darwish, on his part, stresses how the visible Jewish history of suffering erases the Palestinian memory of loss, becoming, in his words, “the condition for Palestinian forgetting.”5 “Armed [with the] legend and the uniform of the victim,” Darwish writes elsewhere, “the Israeli empties the Palestinian memory of its ties to the Arab place, history and space.”6 Said, in agreement with Darwish, draws attention to the inequality of the Israeli-Palestinian battle of memories by reminding us that while the history of suffering experienced by the Jews (a long history of antiSemitism culminating in the Holocaust) has no direct link to the Palestinians or the history of Palestine, the Palestinians’ past and current suffering (their dispossession, enforced exile, and continual oppression) is a direct outcome of the Zionist-Jewish occupation. But Said further distinguishes between the conflict’s origins and the present state of affairs, which he describes in a manner that seems to bridge Darwish and Gur-Ze’ev and Pappe’s positions. Thus, while Said acknowledges that the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians are “two unequal communities of suffering,” he asserts that the main obstacle to a peaceful agreement between the two is their



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present mutual indifference to each other’s suffering: “The two people [are closed] to each other: most Palestinians are indifferent to and often angered by stories of Jewish suffering. . . . conversely most Israelis refuse to concede that Israel is built on the ruins of [the] Palestinian society.”7 Elsewhere Said similarly accounts for the current state of the conflict in terms of radically irreconcilable adverse narratives and a “forgetting of the other”: “They think they won independence and that the means were just. We recall that the land we left and the territories we are trying to liberate from military occupation are all part of our national patrimony; they think it is their Biblical fiat and diasporic affiliation. Today, by any conceivable standards, we are the victims of the violence; they think they are. . . . each of us thinks of separation, perhaps even of isolating and forgetting the other.”8 Observing the current state of affairs in Palestine/Israel, one does not need much imagination to see how the desire of most Israelis and Palestinians to exist in radical separation from each other — to exist, that is, through the “forgetting of the other” — is further translated into a growing dependency on a politics of revenge. The repeated transformation of suffering (past as well as present suffering experienced by both Israelis and Palestinians, albeit to different degrees) into acts of revenge is manifested in the already-too-known cycle: targeted assassinations, long sieges, house demolitions, and many other daily humiliations are followed by suicide bombings, which in turn are followed by more targeted assassinations, and so forth. Today, maybe more than ever before, the two communities are enclosed, each attached to its own narrative of suffering, invested in revenge and denial of the other. This dynamic brings to mind Nietzsche’s infamous account of ressentiment. For Nietzsche, any identity modeled on, and invested in, its own condition of suffering is bound to further perpetuate and inflict suffering on others. Such, he writes, is the logic of ressentiment: the “instinctual” need to sublimate one’s own suffering by transforming it into the suffering of another: For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, more exactly an agent; still more specifically; a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering — i n short, some living thing upon which he can on some pretext or another vent his affects, actually or in effigy: for the venting of his affects represents the greatest attempt on the part of the suffering to win relief. . . . this alone constitutes the actual psychological cause of ressentiment. . . . a desire to deaden pain by means of [savage] affects . . . to drive [one’s own pain] out of consciousness at least for the moment.9

Nietzsche’s own solution for such an unhealthy yet, as he claims, instinctual process of pain displacement lies in his notion of forgetting. Forget-

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ting, he writes, is the only means through which both individuals and societies can defeat political stagnation and lead a healthy life based on balancing the minimal necessary amount of memory required in order “to be” with the adequate amount of forgetting needed in order “to live.”10 I present Nietzsche’s position here as a paradigmatic model mainly because his analysis of ressentiment along with his broader criticism of memory and his promotion of forgetting have greatly influenced current writings on memory, identity, and politics. Thus, for example, Wendy Brown relies heavily on Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in arguing that the formation of political identities, which are based on an attachment to suffering and injustice, runs the danger of perpetuating “self subjection” and promoting “not only a psychological but a political practice of revenge, a practice that reiterates the existence of an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury” (73).11 Linda Bishai, on her part, follows Nietzsche in suggesting that forgetting is “necessary for [all] societies trying to overcome the scars of intense violence and conflict.” Such societies, she notes, must give up the desire to explore the truth for its own sake. Instead they should explore “a new path for the future by ‘forgetting themselves,’ and becoming [new societies].”12 And, finally, William Connolly draws on Nietzsche’s critical account of memory to emphasize the political efficacy of forgetting for opening new social spaces from which new configurations of the future and new social identities may emerge so as to transgress the perpetual attachment to suffering, allow change, and promote the process of social “becoming.”13 Well aware, like these other critics, of the dangers in submitting to memory and forming collective identities based on the investment in suffering and unredeemed loss,14 Said seems more suspicious of promoting forgetting, which he associates with limited liberal politics. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he tells us, “it is unacceptable simply to say (as do many Zionist liberals) that we should all forget the past and go on to separate states.” This investment in forgetting, he adds, “is as insulting to Jewish memories of the Holocaust as it is to Palestinians who continue their dispossession at Israel’s hands.”15 If Nietzsche and his followers warn us against excessive memory, which is associated with the inability to explore new possibilities of being in the future, Said associates similar dangers with forgetting. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he suggests, forgetting involves not only the amnesia about the Jews’ past suffering or the Palestinians’ current suffering but also the denial of the historical connection between these two narratives of loss: “The simple fact is that the Jewish and Palestinian experiences are historically, indeed organically, connected: to break them asunder is to falsify what is authentic about each. We must think our pain-



Edward Said: “The Last Jewish Intellectual”

If Nietzsche and his followers warn us against excessive memory, which is associated with the inability to explore new possibilities of being in the future, Said associates similar dangers with forgetting.

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ful histories together, however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future.”16 If the call to forget (“and go on”) is associated with the advocacy of separation and a politics of partition, Said presents memory as the only valid means for creating an inclusive Israeli-Palestinian society. And while his words were written to protest the promotion of forgetting and the accompanying principle of separation (separating the past from the present as well as the Arab from the Jew), they carry equal importance as a criticism of the current dominant politics of memory as used and abused in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Use and Abuse of Memory It is by now no secret that the Zionist leadership has systematically mobilized the memory of the Holocaust to gain exclusive control over the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The memory of the Holocaust has played a major role in establishing the Zionist nationaltheological narratives of mi-galut le-geula (“from exile to redemption”) and mi-shoa le-tkuma (“from the Shoah to resurrection”), and it continues to be used retrospectively to justify contemporary political injustices and violence carried out by Israel on Palestinians.17 Said has written much about manipulating and instrumentalizing memory in The Question of Palestine and later in The Politics of Dispossession, suggesting that “probably the most serious psychological obstacles preventing close and fair political scrutiny of Palestinians’ loss is the heavy emotional pressure of the Holocaust.”18 In these texts as in many others, Said argues that Israel exploited the Holocaust for political purposes. He convincingly demonstrates how Zionism reshaped the notion of Jewish redemption, mobilizing a nationalist discourse that more or less directly justified the dispossession of Palestinians as part of a modern narrative of Jewish revival after World War II. However, Said has followed this astute accusation with criticism of some Arab intellectuals and right-wing politicians, whom he accuses of being blind to the Jewish traumatic collective memory and the impact of fear this memory continues to have on Israelis and other Jews. “One is as impatient with Israeli posturing about ‘psychological security,’ ” he writes, “as with recent Arab efforts to enlist people like [the Holocaust denier] Roger Garaudy in order to cast doubt on the six million victims. Neither advances the cause of peace, or of real coexistence between the people whose share of historical suffering links them inextricably.”19 Elsewhere he writes, in a more pragmatic tone, that by denying or minimizing the gravity of recent Jewish suffering, Arab intellectuals directly harm Palestinians’ interests:

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There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. . . . The history of the modern Arab world . . . is disfigured by a whole series of out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the holocaust is an obfuscatory created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency. Why do we expect the world to believe our suffering as Arabs if we cannot recognize the suffering of others, even [if they are] our oppressors? 20

One can, of course, explain Arab intellectuals’ denial or marginalization of the memory of the Holocaust in terms of anger and bitterness, for it was the Arabs (or Palestinians) who were made to pay a still-unrecognized high price for crimes committed by others. Never blind to this unfairness, Said has nevertheless repeatedly called to put an end to the fatal battle of memories, demanding that both sides realize that their memories of loss are not mutually exclusive but rather historically related and politically inseparable. This, of course, does not mean that Said has ever accepted the history of the Jewish people as an excuse for their dispossession of others. Far from this, Said has repeatedly emphasized that as victims of anti-Semitism, Jews have no right to inflict suffering on others who bear no responsibility for that historical injustice. What this does mean, however, is that Said has held to, and promoted, a very difficult political and ethical position, one that recognizes the Palestinian oppression and fights to end it without, however, demonizing the Israeli-Jewish oppressors. Indeed, referring to both oppressed and oppressors as “two communities of suffering”21 or “two communities of fear,”22 and further emphasizing the trajectory of trauma that binds them together, Said undermines the validity of more common, crude and schematic, historical accounts (surprisingly shared by both Zionists and anti-Zionists, albeit in different ways), which attempt to radically separate the past from the present as well as the suffering of one people from that of the other. Thus the suggestion that Jewish suffering and victimhood ended in Europe and replaced, in 1948, with the emergence of a “new Jew” — t he “triumphant recovered nationalist,” according to the dominant Zionist discourse, or the “oppressive European colonizer,” according to many anti-Zionists — is rejected by Said, who insists that the traumatic history of European Jews cannot be placed entirely outside the history of Palestine under the Zionist occupation but must be understood in a direct relation to it. Accordingly, Said emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and exploring the connection between the Jewish tragedy and the Palestinian catastrophe, a connection that makes the question of Palestine a particularly complex one.



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Between the Jewish Tragedy and the Palestinian Catastrophe Expressing his hopes for a future of coexistence of Israeli Jews and Palestinians in Palestine, Said has argued that the events of 1948 and the continual implications of the Zionist occupation of Palestine must be analyzed by focusing on the (tragic) connection between the collective memories of suffering of both Jewish and Palestinian people. Such collective memories, Said has noted, are not, and should not continue, to be discussed as two separate, competing, or negating experiences but must be resituated and treated as memories of loss in a continuous trajectory: There is a link to be made between what happened to Jews in World War II and the catastrophe of the Palestinian people. . . . neither [experience] is equal to the other; similarly neither one nor the other excuses present violence; and finally, neither one nor the other must be minimized. . . . but unless the connection is made by which the Jewish tragedy is seen to have led directly to the Palestinian catastrophe by, let us call it “necessity” (rather than pure will) we cannot co-exist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering. . . . the only way of rising beyond the endless back-andforth violence and dehumanization is to admit the universality and integrity of the other’s experience. (my emphasis)23

In light of this quote, it is particularly surprising to find out that not only conservative Jewish thinkers but also liberal critics, including respectful, scholarly leftist thinkers such as Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, have accused Said of overlooking the history of Jewish suffering in writing about the Palestinian question. 24 But if Jewish critics have accused Said of minimizing the memory of Jewish oppression, some prominent Arab scholars have made the opposite criticism. For example, a 1981 review of The Question of Palestine published in the bulletin of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine accuses Said of making “unwarranted concessions to Zionism” in directing attention away from the imperialistic nature of Zionism by situating it in relation to and as an outcome of the history of anti-Semitism in Europe. 25 More recently, Muhammad Jabir al-Ansari has accused Said of confusing “theory” or ethical ideals with “politics.” Said’s idealistic and humanistic approach, al-Ansari suggests, diverts attention away from Palestinian and Arab political interests by overemphasizing the historical impact of the Holocaust and its relevance to current Arab and Palestinian affairs. 26 The clash between these two opposing criticisms clearly illustrates the ideological barriers and political affiliations that have systematically lead various critics to misrepresent or perceive only bits and pieces (to which they respond alarmed) of Said’s theoretically sophisticated

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and ethically informed views on memory and politics, and on the politics of memory in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Joseph Massad offers a more attentive interpretation of Said’s position, defending Said in the face of Arab criticism but still implying that Said is misguided in linking the Holocaust and the Palestinian catastrophe. The two events, Massad argues, are “in fact” historically disconnected and no link between them can be made “except rhetorically.”27 To support this argument Massad notes that “Zionism had sought to dispossess the Palestinians and establish its state long before the Jewish holocaust” (62); that only one-third of the Holocaust survivors have actually settled in Palestine; and that there is no indication that the Holocaust had significantly influenced the UN’s support for the 1947 partition of Palestine. Making the link between the Holocaust and the Nakba, Massad concludes, is in truth submitting to “Israeli and Zionist propagandists” who cynically use the Holocaust to assert Israel’s right to exist, thus drawing attention away from the current suffering of Palestinians. While Massad never explicitly accuses Said for falling, like “many Palestinians and Arabs,” into this “Zionist ideological trap” (53), he does seem to associate any attempt to bring back the memory of the Holocaust into the analysis of Zionism with Zionist interests alone. This perspective leads him to eventually read Said’s words as reflecting not the critic’s own coherent and thoughtthrough opinion but an act of reconciliation: “An attempt to navigate the ideological waters between Zionism’s insistence on linking the Jewish holocaust with the establishment of the Jewish state and the Palestinian and Arab popular insistence on rejecting the coupling, if not rejecting the reality of the holocaust altogether” (65). If such an interpretation is clearly reasonable (especially in light of Said’s representative status in the West), it nevertheless seems to undermine the significance and originality of Said’s insightful vision of the relationship (“to be made”) between the two people’s narrative of loss, a relationship he bases primarily on his understanding of the living force of memory. What needs to be noted, then, is that unlike Massad and others who base their arguments about the disconnect between the Jewish tragedy and the Palestinian catastrophe on quantitative and factual historical details (e.g., number of survivors who settled in Israel or who, on arrival, served in the Jewish army), Said bases his argument on a more “fluid” understanding of history, one particularly tuned to the lingering psychological effects of traumatic memory. Accordingly, he suggests more generally that it is impossible to frame suffering or clearly outline its temporal or spatial borders: “There is never a term or time period for suffering. You can’t say suffering begins here and ends there. It goes on. . . . There’s no calendar for when it begins and when it ends.”28 With these and similar assertions Said reminds us that any attempt



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Said, while clearly acknowledging the European orientalist and imperialistic sources of Zionism, nevertheless insists that Zionism differs from all other European colonial movements and that this difference must be taken into account.

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to separate past sufferings from present loss or, in particular, the tragic history of Jews in Europe from the following success of Zionism and its detrimental effects on Palestinians, while possible in theory and on paper, carries little relationship to the way we actually experience “history.” This difference between the two thinkers further informs their perceptions of Zionism’s relationship to colonialism. While both agree that Zionism is a form of colonialism, they seem to differ on its exact nature. For Massad, the Jewish tragedy is framed in a particular time and place: it belongs to the history of Jews in Europe, and, as such, it has no direct implications for the situation in Palestine where Zionist Jews turned from victims to victimizers by adopting a European colonialist settlement model along with its orientalist approach to the East. Said, while clearly acknowledging the European orientalist and imperialistic sources of Zionism, nevertheless insists that Zionism differs from all other European colonial movements and that this difference must be taken into account: “Whether we like it or not,” he writes, “the Jews are not ordinary colonialists.”29 The anomaly of Zionism is itself an outcome of the historical circumstances out of which the Zionist ideology emerged, both as a Europeanbased ideology aligned with other Western colonial movements and as a (national) response of an oppressed people to years of persecution. Without acknowledging this convoluted background, Said seems to suggest, one cannot possibly understand the success of Zionism (as a colonial, imperial, and national movement) as well as the immense complexities involved in solving the Palestinian problem, for which, to borrow Ella Shohat’s words, “anti-colonialist discourse [is] at once applicable and non-applicable.”30 Thus, even if, as Massad correctly observes, there is no direct causal relationship between the Holocaust and the Zionist occupation of Palestine (clearly one historical event does not necessitate the other), Said seems to suggest that it is nevertheless impossible to understand the full implications of the question of Palestine without situating it in relationship to both modern European imperialism and the Jewish history of oppression in Europe. Taking this history into account does not necessarily mean accepting the Israeli “package deal,” to use Massad’s words, or shifting attention away from current Palestinian suffering toward past Jewish suffering. For Said it primarily means better understanding the power and appeal of Zionism (which, while clearly preceding the Holocaust, gained serious momentum among world Jewry only after the war) as well as its ethical and political limitations, not only as a colonial project but also as a separatist ethnonational ideology. In Said’s various writings on Palestine, Zionism, and the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, then, one finds that from his early text The Question of Palestine to his later attacks on the Oslo Accords and the peace agree-

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ments, he has focused on what he describes as a convoluted meeting that takes place in Palestine among the colonial enterprise (the colonial foundations of Zionism), the modern belief in nationalism (seen as the most viable solution to Jewish suffering), and the Jewish question (the long history of anti-Semitism mainly in Europe). Said’s careful analysis, far from reducing the question of Palestine to any pregiven anticolonial or national resistance formulas, draws attention to the uniqueness of the Palestinian case, which he argues must be approached with the full realization of the complexities involved in the fact that in Palestine the colonial reality is inevitably complicated by its encounter with the Jewish question. Accordingly, he insists that any attempt to understand, much less solve, the Palestinian problem must involve the understanding of “what it means to be the victims of the paradigmatic victims of the twentieth-century . . . and what it implies for the meaning of ‘Jew’ and ‘Palestinian’ in the latter decades of the twentieth century.”31 It is this intimate relationship between the question of Palestine and the Jewish question that leads Said to firmly conclude that any attempt to find a political solution in the Middle East must directly and simultaneously attend “both questions.”32 Only by attending both questions and the complexity introduced by their “meeting,” Said argues, can we assure that the defiance of Zionism will not simply result in the replacement of “one Zionist dream with another,”33 but would rather follow a more radical rejection of all national-separatist and exclusivist modes of existence. It is in relation to this critical approach to national separatism that we must understand Said’s position on the link (“to be made”) between the two people’s memories. This link is not only a matter of historical accuracy or political pragmatism but also an expression of Said’s understanding of the desired ethical relationship between self and other (and more specifically between Arab and Jew), a relationship that reflects the psychological process of identification that situates the self in relation to an other as other, and by the same coin brings this structure of oppositional identification to collapse.

Between Arab and Jew “There can be little doubt that the collective memory [of the Holocaust] and the burden of fear it places on all Jews today is not to be minimized,” Said writes, an observation he accompanies with the following comment: “As an Arab in particular I find it important to comprehend [the Jewish tragedy] and collective experience in as much of its terrible concrete detail as one is capable: this act of comprehension guarantees one’s humanity



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and resolve that such a catastrophe should never be forgotten and never again recur.”34 With these words Said presents a politically charged ethical commitment that situates the self in an ethical relationship to the other based on one’s own self-identification: “As an Arab in particular I find it important to comprehend . . . [the Jewish] collective experience.” Such a content-specific ethical demand differs quite radically from what Darwish has described as “a certain Jewish abstract ethical position towards ‘the Other’ that overlooks the particularities or characteristics of any specific [self or] other.”35 A crude example of such ethical abstraction is found in the words of the renowned Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who in a rare occasion was asked to make a connection between ethics and politics, and more specifically between his own ethical-philosophical notion of the “other” and the political relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The interview took place in 1982, following the massacre in the Palestinian-Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Levinas was asked whether according to his understanding, the Palestinian is the Israeli’s “other above all?” To this he answered: “My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor . . . what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy. . . . Then we face the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong. . . . There are people who are wrong.”36 Levinas’s answer seems to radically separate ethics and politics as well as the other (with whom the self has an ethical relationship) and the enemy, a category that empties ethics. It is precisely this radical separation between politics and ethics, alterity and enmity, I suggest, that Said confronts in his commitment to the memory of the other’s suffering, even if it is that of “your enemy.” In Said’s politically charged and content-specific ethical demand, one may conclude, differently from Levinas, that for the Jew, and the Israeli Jew at that, the Palestinian Arab is indeed the “other above all” and that, as such, it is with and in relation to that other that the Israeli Jew ought to establish an ethical relationship, beginning with the comprehension of the Palestinian collective experience of loss “in as much of its terrible concrete detail as one is capable.” Of course one must further distinguish between the two current positions: that of the Israeli Jew and that of the Palestinian. The two peoples’ struggles are at present radically different, and their survivals are unequal. Such an inequality must be translated into concrete political acts on the part of Israel, including a full recognition and compensation for the violence it has continuously displayed on Palestinians. While Said directs attention to such important matters in several texts, he

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does not hesitate to accompany this pragmatic political discussion with a description that repositions Jews and Arabs or Israelis and Palestinians, not only as oppressors and oppressed or opponents with radically different political interests but also as social entities that cannot be easily identified but in relation to each other. Indeed, what Said emphasizes is that the very condition of differentiation, separation, and antagonism that characterizes today’s relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinians results in a paradoxical dynamic of codependency and mutual identification: No, the Jews are not a chosen people, but Jews and Arabs together, one as oppressor and the other as oppressed, have chosen each other for a struggle whose roots seem to go deeper with each year, and whose future seems less thinkable and resolvable each year. Neither people can develop without the other there, harassing, taunting, fighting; no Arab today has an identity that can be unconscious of the Jew, that can rule out the Jew as a psychic factor in the Arab identity; conversely, I think, no Jew can ignore the Arab in general, nor can he immerse himself in his ancient tradition and lose the Palestinian Arab and what Zionism has done to him. The more intense the modern struggles for identity, the more attention is paid by the Arab or the Jew to his chosen opponent, or partner. Each is the other. 37

From “each is the other” (1974) to “I am a Jewish-Palestinian” (2000), 38 then, Said’s words repeatedly emphasize, indeed, perform, the drama of identification that binds the Jew (or the Israeli) and the Arab (or Palestinian) together, making it quite literally impossible to set them and their recent histories of oppression apart. If memory is never fully or only one’s own, for it always necessitates others, as Maurice Halbwachs tells us, 39 we can better understand Said’s insistence on memory as the site of ethics and politics: a means for rethinking identity in terms of an encounter with alterity; a reminder of the presence of the other within the self. To continue to speak about the rivalry between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians in terms of a battle of memories between two enclosed, antagonistic, and independent narratives of loss is to overlook or forget the central role the other plays (as a psychic factor) in the becoming of the self. It is against this forgetting that Said repeatedly attempts to open the political discourse to include not only the current reality in which the two people already appear and function as two radically separate historical entities with opposed political interests but also the “forgotten memory” of their becoming by means of repressed identification and enforced separation.



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From “each is the other” (1974) to “I am a JewishPalestinian” (2000), Said’s words repeatedly emphasize, indeed, perform, the drama of identification that binds the Jew (or the Israeli) and the Arab (or Palestinian) together.

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A Different Logic of Difference Adamantly criticizing the Oslo peace process, Said, “like all [of those] who said that Oslo would be a catastrophic failure, was labeled ‘antipeace’ and, by vicious extension, ‘pro-terrorist.’ ”40 Such accusations are of course ridiculous. Said, maybe more than any other Israeli or Palestinian public figure, has always called for reconciliation and ultimately coexistence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Said’s rejection of the U.S.-supported peace process must, then, be contextualized and understood as part of his broader criticism of “the principle of separation and partition,” a principle that, he notes, “has governed Middle Eastern politics [ever] since the end of World War II until the present including the peace process.”41 Indeed, if Said opposes the Oslo agreements, it is, above all, because these agreements seek to establish a new reality in Palestine/Israel based on enforced forgetting: the forgetting of the wrong done to the Palestinian population at the hands of Zionism as well as the forgetting of the two peoples’ current inseparability: The peace process must be demystified and spoken about truthfully and plainly. Palestine/Israel is no ordinary bit of geography: it is more saturated in religious, historical, and cultural significance than any place on earth. It is also now the place where two peoples live inextricably linked lives, tied together by history, war, daily contact, and suffering. To speak mindlessly about “separating” them is nothing less than to provide prescription for more violence and degradation. (397 – 9 8)

In the years following Said’s early prediction of the Oslo agreements’ failure (“I am convinced the [peace process] in its present form will not stand the test of time” [398], he writes in 1995), we have witnessed nothing but the horrid growth of violence, mutual hatred, intolerance, and indeed “degradation.” The Gaza Strip is, in actuality, nothing but an overcrowded jail; the West Bank, a collection of bombarded towns and torn-apart refugee camps surrounded by Israeli military bulldozers and Jewish settlers; and Israel itself, self-enclosed by fences, checkpoints, and walls, has become a massive prison hosting an anxious population consumed by its fears of all neighboring others. From his earliest writings on the question of Palestine to his latest criticisms of the post-Oslo reality, Said has repeatedly urged Israelis and Palestinians to come to terms with “reality,” to realize that “neither Israeli Jews [nor] Palestinians . . . will go away.”42 If the two peoples are to have a future, it cannot be achieved by means of “exclusivism and separatist nationalism,”43 but must be based on a different and “more creative” logic

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of differences, one that acknowledges differences but does not enforce a “policed separation of populations into different groups.”44 Said’s selfdeclaration, “I am a Jewish-Palestinian,” is a clear example of what such a creative logic might mean. For it is Jewish Palestinians and Palestinian Jews, among other shades, configurations, and names of identity, that must not be erased and made forgotten by a chauvinistic national politics of memory, as materialized today in the still-standing illegal security fence, built to enforce separation, unjustly divide the land, and forcefully manipulate history. “Go across borders,” Said has advised us, “go across but do not enforce the line of separation.”45 “Going across,” I conclude, is indeed the only means we have for coming closer to what Said has envisioned as a mutually beneficial encounter yet to occur between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, who are, together, the people of tomorrow’s Palestine: “Unhappily, the question of Palestine will renew itself in the all too well known forms. But so too will the people of Palestine — A rabs and Jews — whose past and future ties them inexorably together. Their encounter has yet to occur . . . but it will occur, I know, and it will be to their mutual benefit.”46

Notes All translations from sources in Hebrew or Arabic are mine. I thank my colleagues and friends Aamir Mufti, Gabriel Piterberg, Saree Makdisi, Keri Kanetsky, Todd Presner, and Ruth Ramot for their suggestions on this essay. 1. Edward W. Said, “Zekhut ha-shiva sheli,” interview by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, 18 August 2000, rpt. as “My Right of Return,” in Powers, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 443 – 58. 2. Said discussed these sensitive issues already in the late 1970s, decades before the relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism began to receive serious critical attention from American thinkers. In The Question of Palestine, for example, Said writes: “To write critically about Zionism in Palestine has never meant, and does not mean now, being anti-Semitic; conversely, the struggle for Palestinian rights and self-determination does not mean support for the Saudi royal family, nor for the antiquated and oppressive state structures of most of the Arab nations” (The Question of Palestine [New York: Times Books, 1979], 59). 3. Mahmoud Darwish, Yawmiyyat al-huzn al-‘adi (Journal of Ordinary Sorrows) (Beirut: Markaz al-Abhath, Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyyah/al Mu’assash al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Dirasat wa-al-Nashr, 1973), 64. 4. Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and Ilan Pappe, “Beyond the Destruction of the Other’s Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue,” Theory, Culture, and Society 20 (2003): 93. That national imagination is constructed on selec-



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tive memory and active forgetting is one of the main points that Ernest Renan makes in his informative essay “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 8. This point is further elaborated in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) and is reexamined by Bhabha’s appreciative yet critical readings of both Renan and Anderson in his essay “Dissemination” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139. 5. Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, al-Rasa’il (The Letters) (Haifa: Dar Arabisk, 1990), 110. 6. Mahmoud Darwish, “Zehut ha-headrut” (“An Identity of Absence”), Mifgash 7 – 8 (1987): 46. 7. Edward W. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 185. 8. Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limits (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 7. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Holingdale (1887; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 127. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (1873; rpt. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Educational, 1957), 5 – 12. 11. Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73. 12. Linda Bishai, “Forgetting Ourselves: Nietzsche, Critical History, and the Politics of Collective Memory” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Political Studies Association, London, 10 – 13 April 2000), 16, www.psa.ac.uk/ cps/2000/Bishai%20Linda.pdf. 13. William Connolly writes that the process of becoming “proceeds from inchoate suffering and hopes that are not crisply defined until a new identity has been forged through which to measure those injuries retrospectively” (Why I Am Not a Secularist [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999], 56, my emphasis). 14. Commenting on an essay by the Israeli historian Yehuda Elkana, who advocates forgetting to save Israeli society from continually reliving the Holocaust trauma, Said notes that “no society should be in the grip of the past, no matter how traumatic, or allow instances of collective history to determine attitudes in the present.” See Yehuda Elkana, “Bi-zkhot ha-shikhecha” (“In Favor of Forgetfulness”), Ha-aretz, 2 March 1988; and Edward W. Said, “Methods of Forgetting,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 14 – 2 0 October 1998. 15. Edward W. Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 15 November 1997. 16. Ibid. 17. For more on this manipulation, see Gur-Ze’ev and Pappe, “Beyond the Destruction,” 93 – 108; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Dan Dinar, “Kontingentiyut mits‘taberet: al ha-historiya shel ha-tsiduk ha-atsmi ba-siach ha-yisraeli” (“Accumulative Cognition: On History and Self-Justification in the Israeli Discourse”), Alpaim 12 (1996): 36 – 38; Joseph Massad, “The Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (2000): 52 – 67; Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, Destroying the Others’ Collective Memory (New York: Lang, 2003); and Yair Auron, Makhov ha-daat: sugiyot be-hora’at

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ha-shoah ve-ha-genosayd (The Pain of Knowledge: Reflections on Holocaust and Genocide Issues in Education in Israel and Elsewhere) (Tel Aviv: Open University Press, 2003). 18. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969 – 1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 22. 19. Said, “Bases for Coexistence.” 20. Edward W. Said, “Israel-Palestine: A Third Way,” Le Monde diplomatique, 7 September 1998. 21. Edward W. Said, “Truth and Reconciliation,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 14 – 2 0 April 1999. 22. Said, Politics of Dispossession, 46. 23. “Bases for Coexistence” was first published in Arabic. See Edward W. Said, “Ausus al-ta’ayush,” Al-Hayat, 5 November 1997. 24. See Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 626 – 33. The Boyarins published this response to Said’s essay “An Ideology of Difference,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 38 – 58. While calling for a dialogue with Said, and clearly appreciative of his scholarship and position on the Palestinian question, the Boyarins accuse Said of minimizing the memory of Jewish oppression, anti-Semitism, and the Jewish genocide in writing on the issue of Palestine (see esp. pp. 628, 632). I am purposely referring to the Boyarins’ essay rather than to the many other essays and commentaries presenting a harsher criticism of Said (see, e.g., J. Robert Griffin, “Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said,” Critical Inquiry 15 [1989]: 611 – 25, published in the same volume with the Boyarins), precisely because unlike the conservative or even liberal pro-Zionist critics of Said, the Boyarins are in fact in full agreement with Said on most of his views on the question of Palestine. It is astonishing, then, that not only Jewish opponents but also Jewish supporters of Said fail to fully appreciate his careful historicization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For attentive readings of Said’s views on Jews and Judaism, see Marc H. Ellis, “Edward Said and the Future of the Jewish People,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward Said, ed. Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi (New York: Olive Branch, 2001), 38; and Ella Shohat, “Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of National Narration,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 121. 25. “The Question of Palestine according to Edward Said,” review of The Question of Palestine, by Edward Said, PFLP Bulletin, no. 47 (1981): 25. 26. Al-Ansari’s comments appear in a two-part essay in Al-Hayat: Mohammad Jabir Al-Ansari, “Edward Said: Mur’ajaa am . . . Tar’aju” (“Edward Said: Revision or . . . Fallback”), Al-Hayat, 11 November 1997; and “Israil nita‘aj almuhraqa . . . wa-garudi munhatt?!” (“Israel Is the Outcome of the Holocaust . . . and Garudi Is Degraded?!”), Al-Hayat, 12 November 1997. 27. Massad, “Palestinians and Jewish History,” 63. 28. Edward Said and David Barsamian, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Said (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2003), 180 – 81. 29. In The Question of Palestine, where Said first describes Zionism as a form of colonialism (a radical idea to express in 1979!), he is careful to modify this argument by pointing out that Zionism is also a national movement of liberation. The question, as he presents it in this early essay, is one of “a point of view”: if for the Jews, the establishment of Israel represents a national achievement, for the Pal-



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estinians, the outcome is disastrous. From a Palestinian point of view, then, Zionism is necessarily experienced as a form of colonial occupation and oppression. Over the decades, and in light of Israel’s continual aggressive settlement policy and oppressive military occupation, Said has generally emphasized the colonial nature of Zionism, thus giving voice to the silenced narrative of the Palestinians, the main victims of Zionism. But even so, Said has always accompanied his harsh criticism of Zionism with the recognition of the unique circumstances out of which, and in response to, Zionism has emerged. Thus, while Said certainly systematically rejects the logic of Zionism as a narrative of redemption, arguing that Zionism was essentially a continuation of Western colonialism, he nevertheless continued to draw attention to the fact that the tragic history of European Jewry cannot be ignored if we are to fully understand the past and present appeal of Zionism. There is, in his words, “a connection” between what happened “in Buchenwald, Dachau and other death camps” and the massive Jewish immigration to Palestine, at least in the sense that “there was a felt need” on the part of many Jews to leave Europe and resettle elsewhere (see Said, “My Right of Return,” 448). It is this understanding that leads Said to conclude, time and again, that “Jews are not ordinary colonizers” and that Zionism, accordingly, cannot be sufficiently analyzed by simply comparing it to other cases of Western colonialism. 30. Shohat, “Antinomies of Exile,” 124. Shohat developed the notion of the anomalous character of Zionism in her earlier essay “Anomalies of the National: Representing Israel/Palestine,” Wide Angle 11, no. 3 (1989): 33 – 41, as well as in “Antinomies of Exile,” 121 – 43, in which she convincingly argues that Zionism “has clearly been allied to Western colonial and neo-colonial interests, has deployed colonial-inflected discourse, and has exercised colonialist policies towards Palestinian land and people. . . . at the same time, Zionism cannot be simplistically equated with colonialism or imperialism. Unlike colonialism, Zionism constitutes a response to a millennial oppression and, in contradiction to the classical paradigm, metropolis and colony in this case were located in the self-same place. . . . Furthermore, the land of Israel has always been the symbolic locus of Jewish cultural identity [. . . thus] Israel does not represent a repetition of the classical colonial case of European expansions into America, Africa, and Asia, since the ideology of return to the Motherland . . . in some ways constitutes a departure from traditional colonial discourse” (124 – 25). 31. Aamir Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Bove (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 253. 32. The Palestinian scholar, writer, and politician Azmi Bishara arrives at the same conclusion, stating that “the question of Palestine is intertwined with the Jewish question. This might not be fair or just but it is true. . . . Any attempt to find a political solution in the Middle East must therefore directly attend history as a shared history of these two people” (54, my emphasis). See Azmi Bishara, “HaAravim ve-ha-shoah” (“The Arabs and the Holocaust”), Zemanim 53 (1995): 54 – 72. 33. Said, “Ideology of Difference,” 57. 34. Said, “Bases for Coexistence.” 35. Darwish and al-Qasim, al-Rasa’il, 100. In this context it is worthwhile mentioning Said’s own criticism of Jewish philosophy, which, he argues, com-

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monly fails to address the question of Palestine: “When one considers the broad lines of Jewish philosophy from Buber to Levinas and perceives in it an almost total absence of reflection on the Palestinian issue, one realizes how far one has to go.” See Said, “Bases for Coexistence.” 36. Emmanuel Levinas and Shlomo Malka, “Interview with Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics and Politics,” in The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 294. 37. Edward W. Said, “Arabs and Jews,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 2 (1974): 3. 38. Edward W. Said, The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubi (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 39. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (1950; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 40. Robert Fisk, “Palestinian, Intellectual, and Fighter, Edward Said,” Independent, 25 September 2003. For an overview of post-Oslo Palestinian and Israeli objections to the “two-state solution,” see Naseer Aruri, “Toward a Pluralistic Existence in Palestine/Israel: The Demise of the Two-State Solution,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward Said, ed. Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi (New York: Olive Branch, 2001), 120 – 33. Aruri refers mainly to Said’s views but situates them in dialogue with similar ideas promoted by other Palestinian and Israeli Jewish intellectuals such as Nadim Rouhana, Azmi Bishara, Adel Samara, Meron Benvenisti, Haim Baram, and Ilan Pappe. 41. Said’s criticism of the principle of separation includes not only the reality in Israel-Palestine but also “the notion of homogeneous states [found] elsewhere in the Arab world.” This notion, he writes, “is an expression of a flawed concept of nationalism. It doesn’t answer to the realities of migrant and refugee populations, and of minorities, whether it’s the Kurds, the Shias, the Christians, or the Palestinians. . . . The idea of an Egyptian state for the Egyptians, a Jewish state for the Jews, simply flies in the face of reality” (Said, Edward Said Reader, 430). 42. Edward W. Said, “The Only Alternative,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 1 – 7 March 2001. 43. Said, Edward Said Reader, 397. 44. Said, “Ideology of Difference,” 40. 45. Said, “Israel-Palestine: A Third Way.” 46. Said, Question of Palestine, 238.



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The Interference of al-Andalus Spa i n , Isl a m , a n d t h e W e s t

Of the African American volunteer fighters who heeded the call of the Communist International in 1936 and went to battle Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish civil war, most were galvanized not only by socialist and anti-imperial ideals but also by a Pan-Africanist consciousness that prized Islamic Spain as a glorious era when African civilization extended into Europe. Inspired by Spain’s Moorish past, these black fighters hoped to rescue tolerant, pluralist Spain from the gathering flames of European fascism. Many were thus stunned by Franco’s use of Moorish troops in his anticommunist “crusade,” by the rabid anti-Muslim racism of the Republican forces, and, more broadly, by how the Moor and Spain’s historic relations with the Islamic world figured so centrally in a civil war fought ostensibly for domestic reasons. African American soldiers were so appalled by the hatred of Moors on the Republican side, that some — especially those who were mistaken for Moroccans and shot at by fellow Republican troops — contemplated quitting and returning to the United States. Langston Hughes was particularly intrigued by the racial dynamics of Spain’s “Moorish question.” “I knew that Spain once belonged to the Moors, a colored people ranging from light dark to dark white,” he wrote. “Now the Moors have come again to Spain with the fascist armies as cannon fodder for Franco. But, on the loyalist side, there are many Negroes of various nationalities in the International Brigades. I want to write about both Moors and Negroes.”1 The question of Moorish influence and the so-called Black Legend, regarding Spain’s oriental and African genealogy that had allegedly left the Spaniards a “sensual and inferior race,”2 have preoccupied Spanish intellectuals for centuries, pitting those who proudly or lamentingly concede Islamic influence in Spain and Hispanic civilization against those who deny such vestiges and, in the words of the novelist Juan Goytisolo, prefer to believe in a “clean-shaven Hispanic civilization” (“la afeitada civilizacion hispana”) free of Semitic influence. The memory of the “intrusive” Moorish presence lies deep in the Spanish psyche. And at critical moments in Spanish history — i n 1898 with the collapse of the empire, in the 1930s during the Spanish civil war and its aftermath, in the late 1970s with the end of Francoism and the democratic transition, and in 1986, with Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

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Spain’s accession into the European Union — t he country has gone through moments of painful self-examination about its “qualified Westernness,”3 pondering if it was the eight-hundred-year Muslim presence and Spain’s subsequent cultural and ethnic hybridity that kept the country mired in poverty and despotism as the rest of Europe progressed. The war on terror, the Iraq war, and the 3/11 attacks on Madrid, along with increasing clandestine migration from North Africa and disputes with Morocco over Spanish enclaves in that country’s northern coast, have revived what in Spain is historically called the “Oriental question”: what it means to be so close to the Arab world, and Europe’s “shield” against Islam. The attacks of 3/11 triggered much public agonizing about Spain’s being caught in the cross fire of a clash of civilizations (“in the eye of the hurricane,”4 as one journalist put it), between a strident, retaliatory Western nationalism that seeks to spread democracy in the Middle East and a militant Islamism that targets Spain for partaking in the war on Iraq and views the Iberian Peninsula as a long-lost Islamic dominion, to be regained the way Zionism repossessed Palestine millennia after its loss. The international political situation after 9/11 and 3/11 has brusquely resurrected questions about Spain’s location between Africa, the Orient, and the Western world, with the epoch known as “al-Andalus” appearing at the center of discordant historiographies and “imaginative geographies.” The historian María Jesús Viguera Molins has noted the “conflictual” nature of the “historiography of al-Andalus,” with Spanish historians at different periods of their nation’s history either romanticizing or denigrating the Moorish era; the influence of contemporary politics on their writing was such that, as she put it, myth risks replacing history and the present risks displacing the past.5 Liberal historians often romanticized al-Andalus, while conservative historians saw the Muslim presence as an interruption, an “interference” in an essentially Spanish nation and course of history. Over the past century, imperialism, decolonization, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have polarized interpretations of al-Andalus even outside Spain, with Left-leaning writers across the West adulating the tolerance of Granada and the role of Moorish culture in sparking the Renaissance, but with conservatives seeing the Moors as “enemies of learning” whose insidious influence doomed Iberia (and southern Italy) to centuries of “cultural backwardness.” I begin this essay by discussing Spain’s centuries-old disquiet about the “Islamic interregnum” and show how at critical historical moments, intellectuals have revisited the Oriental question from varying ideological standpoints. Focusing on the twentieth century, I examine how the Spanish state has mobilized the country’s Islamic past and maneuvered the Spanish political and geographic imagination to use the country’s proximity to

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North Africa for different political purposes: to justify colonial incursions into Africa; to rally African and Arab states against the United States, Great Britain, and France after World War II; to demand membership in the European Union by underscoring Spain’s historic role keeping Muslim hordes off Western soil. The Spanish state’s mobilization of history and manipulation of geography richly illustrates Edward Said’s argument about the political power of “imaginative geographies” and how the hardy, seemingly ageless, entities we know as “Europe,” “the West,” and “the Orient” are, at bottom, “ideological confections” whose contents and borders are shaped by conflicting state interests and nationalisms.6 Since 9/11 and 3/11, Spain is again a country facing two directions: searching for a place in the Western world and trying to define its relationship to the Orient, a process that requires the country to reexamine its ties to its historic others — Jews and Moors, two peoples who now have their own states and nationalisms. After Franco’s death, the Spanish state began to reassess the dictatorship’s historic amity with the Arab world and hostility toward Israel, and its leaders are still trying to negotiate a place between American and European approaches to the Orient and their differing visions of the Jew’s and the Arab’s relationships to the West. The current crisis has fractured Spain politically, producing different political blocs, each with a different vision of the country’s position in the West, its relationship with the Orient, and of the Muslim’s and Jew’s places within the Spanish nation. Hughes’s depiction of Spain as an ideological battleground and a country with profound racial and cultural anxieties holds true seven decades hence.

The Spanish state’s mobilization of history and manipulation of geography richly illustrates Edward Said’s argument about the political power of “imaginative geographies.”

Al-Andalus and the Rise of the West The dispute over Moorish influence in Spain touches not only on the issue of Islam in the formation of modern Spain but on broader, equally uncomfortable questions of Spain’s position in Europe and the role of Islamic Spain in the formation of Europe and the rise of Western civilization. Did Andalusia, as claimed by many historians, and Arab and Muslim nationalists, serve as a conveyer of knowledge from the classical worlds of Islam and ancient Greece to Europe above the Pyrenees? Was Islamic Spain an era of cultural efflorescence that helped spark the Renaissance? Historians have bitterly contested this perspective, maintaining that Islamic Spain was neither as tolerant nor as oriental as its champions claim, nor did it have the impregnating cultural influence on the rest of Europe. The Western philosophers who developed the idea of “Europe” drew a continuous line from ancient Greece through



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Rome right up to the Renaissance, largely ignoring the role of the JudeoIslamic centers of learning in Andalusia or Sicily that had translated and contributed to the classical heritage “rediscovered” by these modern thinkers. The ascending Christian Europe was defining itself against the Orient, principally the Arab-Muslim world, and European nationalists were not going to acknowledge a cultural debt to their main adversary. Spain, which had been occupied by Muslims, has been the least willing to acknowledge any substantive Islamic cultural influence. But the possibility of “cultural borrowing” and “reactive adaptation” that may have occurred between 711 and 1609,7 after which the remaining Moriscos of Alpujarras were expelled, has bedeviled Spanish historians for centuries. If between the eighth and eleventh centuries historians portrayed “the Moor” as invariably brutal and menacing, writers from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries began to romanticize the Islamic epoch and produce a literature of “Maurophilia.”8 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Spanish historians began to acknowledge the achievements of Islamic Spain, but insisted that this was the work of people who may have been outwardly oriental but were still ethnically and biologically “Spanish”; Spain, to these scholars, was the product of an unbroken cultural continuity whose origins could be traced back as far as the ancient Celtiberian past. The debate about the Orient’s role in Spain’s formation has been most personified by the acrimonious exchange between the historians Américo Castro and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz. Castro celebrated Spain’s mixed ancestry, arguing that Spanish cultural identity arose in the Middle Ages through the symbiosis of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian elements; Sanchez-Albornoz saw Muslim Spain as an “interruption” to an eternal “Spanish” continuum. Castro argued, in his influential España en su historia, written in exile after Spain’s fall to the fascists, that Spain was not an “eternal” entity but one that came into being after the Muslim invasion of 711 and the interaction of what he called the “three castes” — Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Castro celebrated Spain’s hybridity, emphasizing that Andalusia’s tricultural heritage had influenced figures like Cervantes and, in crossing the Pyrenees, affected the thought of numerous European philosophers.9 In España, un enigma historico, Sanchez-Albornoz replied to Castro that the latter had overstated the impact and misunderstood the nature of the contact between Muslims and Christians, which was fundamentally conflictive and not amenable to positive and creative cultural exchange. He maintained that most of the components of “Spanish” culture are either idiosyncratic or consist of Roman, Gothic, and elements of nonSemitic provenance. If Castro viewed 711 as momentous in the birth

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of Spain’s hybridity, Sanchez-Albornoz saw the Moorish invasion as a national disaster and the principal cause of his homeland’s entrapment in despotism and economic backwardness. He argued that twelve centuries have gone by, and Spain has still not been able to overcome that “tragic” and “fateful” moment of 711. The prolonged military struggle against Islam had drained Spain’s economy and held the country back from the rest of Europe: “Slow-witted, barbaric Africa . . . twisted and distorted the future fate of Iberia, and took it down a path, which cost Spain dear.”10 Sanchez-Albornoz insisted, though, somewhat contradictorily that Islam affected but did not modify Spain; his homeland must not be viewed as a nation with a “hereditary defect,” the “base offspring of a corrupt father,” “an offshoot of Islam,” or “diseased because of an Oriental virus.” Spain is in fact a member of Europe, and in the Middle Ages created and conveyed a vibrant civilization to the rest of Europe, but its sacrificing to shield Europe from the onslaughts of Islam and Africa left it an intolerant and impoverished society.11 Curiously, both Castro and Sanchez-Albornoz saw Spanish imperialism as a response to Islamic expansionism, if not a direct Islamic influence. Castro argued that the myth of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor killer) and his shrine in Compostela, which played a crucial ideological role in the Reconquista of Spain and the conquest of the New World, was itself an Islamic influence, in that it essentially mimicked the idea of a “warrior-prophet” like Muhammad with a shrine and pilgrimage center like Mecca. Castro underlines the importance of this myth in the dialogue between Christian Spain and Europe beyond the Pyrenees, and in the emergence of a European identity, since all over Western Europe Santiago’s shrine was seen as a Christian Mecca (“to face the Mohammedan Kaaba”) and led to the forging of a common European self against a common adversary.12 These arguments about Spanish militarism being a necessary response to jihad, the Spanish Inquisition as a “necessary evil,” the cult of Santiago as the patron saint of “fortress Spain,” and Spain as protector of Europe against Islam have been made by different Spanish leaders in varying political contexts, from Franco’s forays into Morocco to Spain’s participation in the Iraq war.

Franco and the Colonial Imagination The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at a time when European powers were seizing territories in Africa had profound political repercussions in Spain and generated much agonizing about the country’s lesser position in Europe. After 1898



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Throughout the twentieth century, Spain would try to establish control over Morocco — or at least over the frontier with Morocco — to gain acceptance in Europe, where, paradoxically, it was excluded and seen as backward because of its historic ties to North Africa.

Spain would shift its attention to the European front, and to Africa where it would attempt to carve out a small empire to make up for its lost possessions in the Caribbean, beginning a long-standing practice of trying to dominate North Africa to gain acceptance in the West. The liberal prime minister Conde de Romanones put it bluntly in his memoirs, “Morocco was for Spain her last chance to keep her position in Europe.”13 Joaquin Costa, a noted “Africanist,” as government experts on North Africa were called, and one of the strongest proponents of regeneracionismo, post1898 economic and political regeneration, would explain the 1898 defeat and loss of empire in terms of the Black Legend (“the Africa that has invaded us”), yet still argue that Spain should lay claim to some territory in Africa, since colonizing that continent, specifically Morocco, was crucial to his nation’s return to glory.14 Throughout the twentieth century, Spain would try to establish control over Morocco — or at least over the frontier with Morocco — to gain acceptance in Europe, where, paradoxically, it was excluded and seen as backward because of its historic ties to North Africa. When Miguel Primo de Rivera became leader of Spain in 1923, the anticolonial struggle in northern Morocco was raging, and the “Moroccan question” was one of the most pressing and divisive political issues. Franco, however, adamantly opposed a withdrawal from Morocco and, during the Spanish civil war, would oddly make Spain’s Islamic past and colonial presence in Morocco central to the fascist cause against the “infidel” Republicans. Franco, who had learned Arabic while crushing the Moroccan rebellion in 1921, would lead tens of thousands of Moroccan mercenaries (“tropas mulatas”) in what the generalissimo described as his crusade against the “Red, atheist Republic.” Franco defended the use of Moroccan troops, saying the fascist side was defending Christian values in an alliance with Muslim believers against the “godless” communists. Moorish troops were in fact often baptized before going into battle. If the fascists used the Moroccans both as cannon fodder and as psychological weapons, the Republicans, in turn, revived the centuries-old cry of “Moros en la costa!” (“Moors on the Coast!”), warning of the savage, sexually rapacious Moorish invaders “awaited by virgins in paradise” and describing their side as defenders of Europe against el Oriente.15 Franco’s legitimacy and political ideology were based on a particular construction of Spain’s history and geography. When the United Nations imposed an economic boycott on Spain in December 1946, an isolated Franco would adopt a policy of amity toward the Arab world, aptly named mozarabidad, a term referring to the Christians of Islamic Spain who spoke Arabic and embraced Moorish culture while remaining Christian. Franco’s foreign minister on tour in the Middle East in 1952 made speeches

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about Spain and the Arabs, lauding the “one blood flowing in the veins of Spaniards and Arabs, who share a single culture and a single destiny.”16 Franco presented himself (“Sidi Franco”) to the Arab world as an ally against both the imperial West and a godless Soviet bloc enamored with the Israeli “socialist” experiment in Palestine. This position of a pro-Arab Catholic Hispanic nationalism, however, was laden with contradictions. Franco exploited Spain’s Moorish past, highlighting the country’s mixed African and Arab background to justify various foreign policy initiatives, but simultaneously negated that history by portraying Spain as a purely Christian nation with a messianic purpose. He presented Spain as a defender of Islam against Western (AngloAmerican and French) imperialism as well as communism and Zionism while holding colonies in North Africa (though he made it a point to pay for his Muslim subjects to go to hajj). Franco portrayed Spain as the link between Semitic and Latin peoples, yet refused to recognize Israel in the hope that a pro-Arab policy would allow him to maintain control of northern Morocco and Western Sahara. Gustau Nerín i Abad explains this paradoxical approach by noting that modern Spanish colonial discourse tried to distinguish itself from French and British imperialism by boasting of a supposed “total absence of racist attitudes; lack of economic exploitation of the colonial territories, and presence of mestization.”17 Thus if in Franco’s imperial discourse, Spain was Latin America’s madre patria, in North Africa, colonial officials depicted Spain as “the older brother” (“el hermano mayor”) and its colonial rule as “soft domination” (“el suave dominio”).18 In the 1960s, while continuing to suppress any domestic celebration of Moorish Spain, Franco capitalized on Spain’s “otherness,” the propinquity to the Orient that made the country exotic and distinct from the rest of Europe: “Espana es diferente” became the country’s tourist slogan.19 As one critic astutely observed, “Spanish Orientalism included the Orientalizing of the Other and the assumption of the Self as Other. The paradox is at the heart of Spanish Orientalism, the narrative of a country that orientalizes and indeed colonizes the Other but which is described as Oriental itself.”20 Francoist historians thus celebrated Muslim Spain and Arab-Latin cultural ties when trying to garner Arab support for a policy but would, at the same time, elide the Moorish past and excoriate the Arab world’s “vice and carnality.” But the idea that Arab and Hispanic identity are connected, deployed cynically by the fascist regime, enticed many liberal intellectuals, who after the civil war and especially following Franco’s death would begin to discover “Andalucia” and challenge the prevailing versions of Spanish history. Goytisolo, an implacable critic of Spanish nationalism and Francoist historiographers’ sleights of hand, would argue



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that Arabidad is both an inherent part and the opposite of Hispanidad: “The Moor is part of the Spanish self and its opposite, in the same sense that the shadow is part of the person and its opposite,” so that the nationalists’ call for a pure Hispanidad, for a self-purification, is “suicidal,”21 since the concept of Hispanidad is inextricably bound up with Arabism. This view would gain more popularity after the democratic transition; even King Juan Carlos on a state visit to Fez, Morocco, in June 1979 called for a new convivencia and reminded all of the historical closeness of “Hispanismo” and “Arabismo.”

Democracy and the European Union Spanish intellectuals would revisit their repressed past after Franco’s death, celebrating, even romanticizing “multicultural Andalusia,” and challenging the ancien régime’s ideological certitudes about the country’s homogenous “Western” and Christian identity. Spain’s new leaders would evoke Andalusian convivencia to give historical legitimacy to the pluralistic political system they were now building. With the end of the fascist dictatorship, different regional movements cropped up in southern Spain, anchoring their identity in the Islamic period and demanding autonomy or independence. In 1978 the Front for the Liberation of Andalusia (FLA) emerged, seeking to retrieve its Andalusian heritage (in part, by reviving the syncretic Hispano-Arabic aljamia dialect) and demanding self-determination for Andalusia, which it described as “the last colony of Spain since the loss of the possessions in America and Africa.”22 Other movements would also appear, among them the Comunidad Islamica of Seville, the Sufi order of al-Murabitun led by Aureliano Perez, and Andalucia Libre, which protested the elections for the European parliament in vain, with their slogan “no al Europeismo.” Spain’s new leaders wanted to join the European Union (EU) precisely to rein in the regional nationalisms uncorked by the democratic transition. In 1986 Spain joined the EU and in effect became the gatekeeper of Europe, restricting the entry of immigrants from Africa into the EU labor market. Spain had sought to join Europe for various reasons: to catch up economically, to “lock in” the democratic transition, to provide an overarching identity for Spain, and to once and for all slay the Black Legend about Spain’s debatable Westernness. Regional leaders and figures across the political spectrum supported entering the EU, which was expected to help solidify a coherent national identity. The process, however, would entail a political and cultural distancing from North Africa, though, simultaneously, Spain’s proximity to Islam would help it gain influence in

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the EU. Spanish leaders portrayed Spain as Europe’s defender — t he West’s “security cordon” — against third world masses, and in effect the country went overnight from Europe’s outsider to insider, by selling itself as the bulwark against Europe’s real outsider, Islam. As Helen Graham and Antonio Sanchez explain, “So Spain, in spite of its own long and painful history of underdevelopment, economic emigration, and otherness, far from recognizing a commonality and attempting to integrate the experience of the marginalized into its own self-proclaimedly pluralistic culture, has instead assumed the stance of ‘First World’ Europe. It is almost as if constructing and adopting the same ‘others’ or outgroups as the rest were considered the hallmark of Spain’s membership of the [European] ‘club.’ ”23 But ironically Spain’s rapid economic development and accession into the EU in 1986 only fueled immigration from the Maghreb. Increased immigration in turn led to greater resentment of immigrants from South America and Africa, but especially toward Muslims, and would tap old questions about Jews and Moors and their place in the modern Spanish nation.

For Spain, 1992 was a year of nostalgia, anxiety, and denial.

Spain and the Semites: From 1492 to 1992 For Spain, 1992 was a year of nostalgia, anxiety, and denial. The quincentennial of 1492 offered Spain an opportunity to show that it had arrived on the world stage and joined the West. The first Arab-Israeli peace conference kicked off the commemorations in Madrid in late 1991, reminding the world of the country’s special relationship with Jews and Arabs, and was followed by the Universal Exhibition (Expo) in Seville and the Olympic Games in Barcelona. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 sealed Spain’s integration into Europe, bolstering the nation’s Western image, but that same year Spaniards also had to revisit the Inquisition and the discoveries of 1492, by which their country led the rise of the West. The figure of Christopher Columbus was celebrated, but not much was said officially about the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews (referred to as “la partida,” the departure), or about the ensuing genocides in the New World; the conquest of the Americas was euphemistically referred to as “el encuentro” (the encounter). Instead, the Spanish state held a series of ceremonies to reconcile with both Jews and Muslims. The Arab-Israeli peace conference, a major exhibition at the Alhambra, the opening of a mosque in Madrid where King Juan Carlos declared that Arabic culture “has a special place in our heart” were all meant to display Spain’s new relationship with the Arab world. In 1992 the Spanish monarch also reconciled with the Jewish community in Madrid’s synagogue, and in Toledo, in a ceremony named “Sefarad 1992.”



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Franco’s relationship with Spanish Jews had been complex. To help his international image, Franco had made certain goodwill gestures to Jews of Spanish descent, such as his 1968 evocation of the expulsion edict of the Catholic kings, but he did not, as is commonly believed, grant Sephardic Jews a right of return. It was only in 1982, four years after a democratic constitution was issued guaranteeing freedom of religion, that a law was passed granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492.24 In October 1990 the heir to the throne, Felipe, prince of Asturias, appealed to Sephardic Jews with the following words: “In the spirit of harmony of contemporary Spain, and as heir to those who signed the expulsion decree 500 years ago, I welcome you with open arms and great emotion.”25 But no apology or right of return was granted to the descendants of Moriscos expelled, as was evident to many Moroccan intellectuals, especially those from the former Spanish protectorate zone and the current Spanish enclaves in northern Morocco. The Spanish Moroccan author Mohamed Chakor has traced how the Spanish view of the Jew and Moor evolved from 1492 to 1992. Historically, both the Moor and the Jew were “otherized” in the Spanish imagination, with towns named Matamoros (Moor killer) existing in Spain (and across Latin America), and a village called Castrillo de Matajudios (Jew killer) near Burgos. Chakor wonders why Spain granted Sephardic Jews an apology and issued an appeal to return (in 1982, reiterated in 1992), but has not been so forthcoming with the descendants of Moors expelled in 1492. In an article penned for Spain’s Jewish community, he contemplates the discrepancy: Law 158 of July 3 1985 regarding foreign residents and citizenship in Spain has not been generous to the Moroccan community. Article 23 of the legislation makes it easier for Iberoamericanos, Portuguese, Filipinos, Andorrans, Ecuato-Guineans, Sephardic Jews and Gibraltarians to work, reside and acquire [Spanish] citizenship, etc. They are seen to have a historical link to Spain. The door is open to the Moroccan Jew from Tetuan [a former Spanish possession in northern Morocco] to enter Spain while his Muslim counterpart faces an almost closed door. [Even] Filipino Muslims are granted rights that Moroccans colonized by Spain are denied. Why discriminate against Moriscos and Andalusians who were expelled from Spain and then lived under the Spanish protectorate in Morocco? The antiMoorish prejudice appears clearly even in legislation. Stereotypes can be amusing, but not when they affect matters as fundamental as human dignity and the right to work. 26

Human rights activists have in fact pointed out that in 1992, when Spanishspeaking Jews were being invited to “return,” further measures were put

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in place to restrict naturalizing North African immigrants. 27 The selective right of return seems to indicate that Spain is adopting not just the same out-group, as Sanchez and Graham suggest, but also the same in-group as other Western states. In March 2005, Moroccan intellectuals were again puzzled by King Juan Carlos’s refusal to apologize to descendants of Moriscos while on a trip to Morocco to renew the historic Hispano-Muslim convivencia strained by the Madrid bombings. (Both Morocco and Spain base their self-image on Andalusia’s convivencia; André Azoulay, adviser to the Moroccan monarch, is fond of saying, “Morocco is not a land where civilizations clash, but where civilizations meet.”) Descendants of Moriscos expelled in 1501 gathered in Tetuan, the old Spanish capital in northern Morocco, where they were expecting to meet with the Spanish king, but at the last minute the sovereign canceled his visit to that city. The historian Muhammad ibn Azzuz Hakim, who led the campaign for the descendants of expelled Moors, said, “We want moral reparations for the wounds we suffered. Mentally, we feel linked to the same customs and history. Spanish traditions are ours too. I have traced more than 7000 surnames in this town which derive from Spanish names.” The snub was particularly poignant coming on the heels of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s refusal to apologize for Spain’s use of toxic gas to quell a rebellion in the northern Rif region of Morocco in 1921. 28 Again, Moroccan writers have pondered this preferential treatment, why Spain apologized to descendants of Sephardic Jews but not to their Muslim counterparts. Some say fears of a demographic onslaught are unfounded, since an apology and right of return do not have to be extended to all Moroccans but, as with the Jewish “returnees,” only to those who can demonstrate descent from those expelled. Others think that the Spanish authorities prefer Jewish returnees because they can be more easily assimilated than Muslim immigrants, who are “socially disruptive,”29 while others see the apology and right of return as the result of Spain’s entry into the club of Western states, which requires reconciliation with the Jewish community and adopting the same in-group as other Western powers.

Palestine, Israel, and al-Andalus Ella Shohat has argued that the different places that the Moor and Jew now occupy in Spanish political discourse, and the different political treatment they received in 1992, was “largely rooted in present day Middle Eastern politics” and in the Zionist separation of Arab and Jew. For centuries, both Muslim and Jewish poets eulogized Andalusia, but “in contemporary Pal-



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estinian poetry Andalusia is not simply a closed chapter of Arab grandeur, for it allegorizes Palestine.”30 In other words, Muslim authors have historically lamented the fall of Andalusia, always uttering the prayer, “May Allah return it to Islam,” but after World War II, and with the loss of Palestine, al-Andalus would gain a larger symbolic and political dimension. One reason the Jewish lament for Andalusia is now viewed sympathetically in the West, while the Muslim lament for al-Andalus is considered dangerous and irrational, is because it is tied to Palestine and seen as a symptom of the Arabs’ “corrosive irredentism for Islamic lands long ago taken by the sword and then lost by the sword.”31 Historically, nostalgia for Andalusia existed in both the Arab-Muslim and Jewish imaginations, but the Arab lament would become more political after the Zionist conquest of Palestine and take an ominous jihadist turn in the late 1980s. Sadly, for the past half century, most scholarship about Islamic Spain seems to view al-Andalus through the prism of contemporary conflicts. Within Arab and Islamist discourses, the different interpretations of al-Andalus that exist are “ideologized,” with secularists underlining al-Andalus’s “pan-confessional humanism” and Islamists contending that it was a strict adherence to sharia that led to the rise of Islamic Spain and secular decadence that led to its ignominious downfall. A similar polarization of views exists in Jewish writing about “Sepharad,” one side extolling the “Golden Age,” the other speaking of “dhimmitude” and Arab intolerance. After World War II and the outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Spanish leaders and intellectuals who reached out to the Arab world, speaking (sincerely) of a common Moorish past, were Left-leaning, pro-Palestinian, and anti-imperial thinkers of whom Goytisolo is the most prominent. On the other hand, the more conservative authors, like Sanchez-Albornoz, who denied all ties to the Orient, were old-fashioned anti-Semites who rejected all Semitic influence on Spain and were contemptuous of Arabs and Jews. (A pro-Zionist Spanish historiography had not yet appeared.) Sanchez-Albornoz’s anti-Semitism, his claims of Spanish Jewry’s dubious loyalties and stranglehold over the medieval economy, has been widely documented. 32 The effort to distance historic Spain from both Jews and Moors is still heard today among Sanchez-Albornoz’s intellectual descendants, such as the historian Serafin Fanjul, a strong critic of the idea of a “multicultural Andalus.” Fanjul argues that the intolerance of Muslims and Jews is evident in their scriptures, in Koranic exhortations against the infidel and the Jewish notion of “chosenness,” which he considers as the “Hebrews’ contribution to racist thought.”33 Likewise, the historian Jose Martinez Sanz opines that the expulsion of Jews in 1492 and Moriscos in 1609 generated homogeneity and allowed Spain to become a “first world power.”34

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But Spain’s accession into the EU in 1986 and her recognition of Israel that same year revealed another vein in Spanish thought, one identified by Shohat and Chakor, which views Jews as fellow Westerners and Israel as an outpost of the West. From this perspective, Jews settling in Spain came to be seen as “returning natives,” while Moroccan immigrants were still viewed as intruders and invaders. This conceptual change, which accompanied Spain’s entry into the West, can be elucidated by referring to what the critic Gil Anidjar has termed the “Semitic hypothesis,” wherein Spain in 1492 invented the Semite as a racial category to describe both Jews and Moors, the internal and external enemies of Christian Spain. To distinguish Europeans from both Jews and Arabs, European thinkers often lumped the latter two under the label “Semite,” a category and enmity that would be projected globally onto the Orient and the New World but that would be disassembled after the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, in a conceptual-political move that brought the Jews into the West and transferred all (negative) notions of Semitism onto the Arab “other.”35 Edward Said identified this aspect of colonial thought — “ this process of conversion,” noting that “the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West,” and “the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something else into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes to be the sake of the Oriental.” One instance of such intellectual gerrymandering was the post – World War II bifurcation of the Semite into Arab and Jew, and the latter’s subsequent incorporation into the West. In Said’s words, “The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.”36 Anidjar dates the intellectual origins of this bifurcation to the end of the nineteenth century, when European colonial discourse began to separate the Jew from the Arab. For instance, with the infamous Cremieux Decree of 1870, the French colonial state conferred citizenship upon Algerian Jews claiming that they were of European ancestry, distinguishing them from the Arab and Berber majority, who were seen as a “subject race,” so that to this day in French public discourse, the Algerian Jew is often confused with the pied-noir settler. Zionism’s calls for a pro-Western Jewish state — i n particular, Theodor Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state in historic Palestine that would serve as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism” — accepted and built upon this imperial conceptual split of Jew and Arab, with the Jew being of the West and the Arab as its “other.” Spain’s integration into the EU and the West, and changing political circumstances — Spain’s recognition of and establishment of relations with Israel in 1986, and the rise of the “global



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Spain’s accession into the EU in 1986 and her recognition of Israel that same year revealed another vein in Spanish thought which views Jews as fellow Westerners.

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Islamic menace” — would lead many Spanish conservatives to warm to a Jewish presence in Spanish history, accepting the idea of Jews as an in-group and the Arabs as the West’s other.

“A Moorish Reconquista?” When Bernard Lewis cautioned last year that by the end of the century, “at the very latest,” the European continent would be “part of the Arabic west, the Maghreb,”37 he was voicing the profound demographic fears of many Europeans. Spain’s angst about Muslim immigration and a “spiritual reconquista” intensified after 9/11, as was seen in the controversy surrounding the construction of the mosque in Granada in July 2003. City officials initially took issue with the symbolic location in the area of Albaicin, between a church and a convent, and across a ravine from the ramparts of the Alhambra. The city’s Catholic Association also feared that the Muslims’ goal was to build a mosque higher than Granada’s church, which commemorates the taking of the city from the Moors, and so the mosque was eventually scaled down to half its proposed size. Many conservative political and religious leaders in southern Spain, who had been witnessing the changing complexion of Andalusia with alarm, deemed the mosque’s opening a provocation. Spanish conservatives were particularly worried that many North African migrants were settling in the same areas that the Moriscos had been expelled from centuries earlier — t hat is, in Valencia, Catalonia, Murcia, and pockets of Aragon, Andalusia, Extremadura, La Mancha, and Madrid — a nd fueling hysterical warnings of an Islamic Reconquista. 38 In fact, groups were opposed to the mosque’s construction at Albaicin, partly because during the Islamic era, the space was the Muslim quarter, home to the very poor (albaicin is Arabic for “downtrodden and hopeless”), and now Spaniards were watching in dismay as Moroccan immigrants poured into that area. The growing Muslim community of Andalusia, made up of immigrants and Spanish converts, has also begun to flex its political muscle, as seen in its efforts to challenge the long-standing custom of celebrating 2 January, the public holiday of “La Toma” (The Capture), the day Moorish Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs in early 1492. Local Muslim leaders and some renowned intellectuals (like the late Carlos Cano) proposed that the occasion be turned into a ceremony celebrating Granada’s Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures to breathe life into the city’s historic convivencia. This suggestion was met with fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and demonstrations from right-wing parties, as was the more recent demand by Spanish Muslims to hold Friday prayers in Cordoba’s

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Mezquita-Cathedral, once one of greatest mosques of the Maghreb. One columnist angrily denounced the conservative Popular Party’s passivity in face of Maghrebi immigrants, who were possibly “Saracen Reconquerers” (“Reconquistadores Sarracenos”), and quoted an Andalusian archbishop who claims that Muslim immigrants are given “petrodollars” to breed fast, so as to gain a demographic majority in Andalusia. 39 The carnage of 3/11 obviously inflamed passions and fears about los Moros even further. Spaniards realized that — whether because of Aznar’s foreign policy or Islamist millennialism — t heir country was caught in the “clash of fundamentalisms” and that militant Islamists have more than a passing interest in Spain and Andalusia. Spanish journalists have unearthed Islamist maps showing Spain marked in green. Many Spaniards were aghast when Zacarias Moussaoui, the twentieth hijacker arrested in the United States, was granted the right to represent himself in court, and his first demand was “the return of Spain to the Moors.”40 The period since 3/11 has been painful and polarizing, with the country’s divisive Moorish past at the heart of the current crisis. Spaniards, it appears, are being confronted with their Islamic and imperial history at every turn. Commemorations of the quincentennial of Queen Isabelle of Castille’s death broached discussions about the tragedy of 1492 and drew some embarrassing remarks from intellectuals saying the expulsions were a necessary evil. Last year’s celebrations of the quadrennial of Cervantes’ Don Quixote also educed many unsettling hypotheses on the Arabic influences on the text and the author’s putative Muslim origin. So, once again, the Oriental question has Spain politically fragmented. As Florentino Portero, a Spanish political commentator observed, although 3/11 was a catastrophe, “what happened March 12 and 13 is what really changed the country. Spain has never been so polarized, with two distinct political blocs that cannot communicate with each other.”41 Prime Minister Zapatero’s decision to scrap the Aznar government’s plan to make the Catholic curriculum mandatory in public schools (a feature of the Franco era that the Popular Party wanted to reinstate), along with his initiative to fund the teaching of the minority religions of Islam, Judaism, and Protestantism, has raised the hackles of the Catholic Church and other conservative groups. Spain’s leading archbishop, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, denounced the new socialist government, saying its policies were taking the country back to medieval times, when Muslim invaders swept across the Strait of Gibraltar.42 Reflecting this fraught political climate, a flurry of books has appeared in the past year, some lauding, others excoriating, al-Andalus. In his recently released Islam’s Routes in Andalusia (Las rutas del Islam en Andalucía), Emilio González Ferrín, a prominent Arabist at the University of



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Seville, calls on Europe to retrieve Andalusia’s heritage and denounces the demonization of al-Andalus, noting that there is no link between the epoch known as al-Andalus and contemporary conflicts about class and economic dislocation. “Al-Andalus is not culpable of the terrorism carried out by certain Islamists,” he insists.43 Yet last year also saw the publication of César Vidal’s Spain Faces Islam: From Muhammad to Bin Laden (España frente al Islam: de Mahoma a Ben Laden), which sees Spain’s history from 711 to the current era as one eternal struggle to defend Spain’s soul and identity from Muslim invaders. Vidal draws a parallel between the tragedy of 711 and the invasion of Kuwait, underscoring the continuity between Abderrahman the Ummayyad prince who settled in Spain, Abdelkrim Khattabi who lead the Rif rebellion in 1921, and Saddam Hussein.44 The political climate after 9/11 and 3/11 has polarized the already contentious scholarship about Islamic Spain even outside Spain. While the Spanish Left is claiming a connection with the Arab world, and liberals across the West point to Andalusian pluralism as an important precedent for Islamic democracy, conservatives are scorning the latter’s “retrospective utopianism” and accusing them of distorting history. One American reviewer of Maria Menocal’s acclaimed Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, criticized the general “impulse to idealize” Islamic Spain, noting that the founding Ummayyad dynasty “was far from enlightened” and that the Alhambra may be “a monument to the Andalusian sublime. . . . But [it] is hardly a model for contemporary aspirations. It does not frame the world; it divides it.”45 In response to the myth of Andalusia as “interfaith utopia” put forth by European leftists, Arab nationalists, and Islamists, a cohort of Spanish, European, and American historians are promoting through publications and Web sites a countermyth of al-Andalus as an intolerant “apartheid society.”

Al-Andalus and the War on Terror The war on terror and the ongoing Iraq war have led many European conservatives to want to demonstrate their pro-American politics and their Westernness, most often by distancing themselves from Islam. It is perhaps no coincidence that the shrillest indictments of Islam have come from Italy and Spain, the European states with the closest cultural and historic ties to the “Orient.” Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi publicly declared Western civilization’s “superiority” to Islam, 46 and the journalist Oriana Fallaci’s book, The Rage and the Pride, which became a best seller in Italy, warns of Muslim immigrants who “multiply like rats”

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and of a future “Eurabia” unless Europe allies with America against the enemy: “America is us. If America collapses, Europe collapses, the whole of the West collapses.”47 Like their Spanish counterparts, Italian nationalists have a historic anxiety about the Islamic presence, in the latter’s case in medieval Sicily and southern Italy’s “mixed ancestry,” a fear revived poignantly in the national memory by the United States’ use of Moroccan troops during the Allied landing in Italy.48 Likewise, it was Spain’s prime minister José María Aznar, another strong Bush ally, who spearheaded the effort to insert a reference to Europe’s Christian roots in the EU’s constitution, a measure that rankled Andalusian and Catalan nationalists who resented how Aznar’s government had made Catholicism central to the state’s identity. Aznar also incensed the socialist opposition — a nd Muslims the world over — when his Ministry of Defense issued “Santiago Matamoros” crosses for Spanish and Latin American troops in Iraq to wear.49 When the daily El Mundo splashed the crimson, spear-tipped cross on its front page, with an editorial stating that having Spanish soldiers wear St. James the Moor Killer emblems as they patrolled the holy sites of Karbala and Najaf was offensive, Defense Minister Federico Trillo casually defended the emblem: “This is the symbol of the Spanish army.”50 The debate between the historians Castro and Sanchez-Albornoz is very much alive in Spain’s post-3/11 political discourse, providing historical justifications for political camps with radically different visions of Spain’s future relations with the Muslim world. Speaking at the fifty-ninth session of the UN General Assembly in New York on 21 September 2004, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said that the fusion of Islam and Christianity had “created and enriched” Spain, and he called for “an institutional dialogue” and “an alliance of civilizations between the Western world and the Arab and Muslim world” that Spain for historic reasons could spearhead.51 On the same day, Aznar, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, delivered his inaugural lecture, telling a distinguished audience that the objective of “Islamic terrorism” is “the establishment of its Caliphate [which] involves enslaving us all, in all respects.” And then, channeling Sanchez-Albornoz, he added,

It was Spain’s prime minister José María Aznar, another strong Bush ally, who spearheaded the effort to insert a reference to Europe’s Christian roots in the EU’s constitution.

“The problem Spain has with al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorism did not begin with the Iraq Crisis. In fact, it has nothing to do with government decisions. You must go back no less than 1300 years, to the early 8th century, when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity. This Reconquista process was very long, lasting some 800 years. However, it ended successfully. There are many radical Muslims who continue to recall that defeat, many more than any rational Western mind might suspect.”52



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The pundits who depict Moorish Spain as harshly tyrannical and violent see the 3/11 attacks as merely the latest expression of a centuries-old struggle by Muslims to reconquer Spain. But as Gilles Kepel has argued, the jihadist claim on al-Andalus began only in the late 1980s: “After the victory of Afghanistan, the U.S.-supported and oil-backed militants, in particular Tanzim al-Jihad, declared holy war on countries and regions that were Muslim but were now in the hands of the ‘ungodly.’ Their list included Israel, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Spain.”53 It is not clear why al-Andalus appeared on the jihadi irredentist agenda in the 1980s, whether it was because of the rise of the transnational Salafist/Wahabi network in Afghanistan or because Spain, long viewed sympathetically in the Arab political imagination as a counter to Anglo-American and French imperialism, had established relations with Israel and granted the right of return to Jews, but the fact is, contrary to Aznar’s contention, the Salifist-Jihadist claim on Spain is not an ancient, millennial one. It was only in the late 1980s that jihad in the Iberian Peninsula became a “binding duty,” and Spain and Portugal, like Israel and Bosnia, entered the jihadi imagination as Islamic lands snatched by infidels. Even Samuel Huntington, writing in the mid-1990s, did not see the Spanish-Moroccan frontier as a bloody “civilizational faultline.”54 In summary, the ongoing conflict has reawakened “Memories of Alhambra” in the West and the Muslim world, with different states, nationalisms, and political interests either laying claim to Moorish Spain or dissociating themselves from it, romanticizing the convivencia or showing how al-Andalus was as “despotic” as any other Islamic polity. Nuanced, dispassionate scholarship of Islamic Spain, and its influence beyond the Pyrenees, is drowned out by “the clash of civilizations” rhetoric. Scholars who write positively about Moorish Spain, and its cultural influence in Spain and beyond, are accused of being “creative utopianists” or simply “pro-Arab,” and their work is all too often lumped together with the outlandish assertions of some Islamists and Arab nationalists. Liberal intellectuals worldwide continue to stress the urgency and importance of understanding the role of Islam in Spanish history. Goytisolo recently reiterated his long-held belief that Spain urgently needs to come to terms with its “mudejar history” and cease committing “memoricidio.”55 But the conservative call to distance Spain from Islam — a nd downplay, if not erase the Moorish era — has been gaining prominence. Many Spanish commentators have echoed Fanjul’s statement, saying the Arabs should stop wallowing in victimhood, bewailing the “paradise lost” of al-Andalus, and directly confront their problems. An acknowledgment of Islam’s contribution to the formation of Spain would, in this view, implicate Spain in the political and economic agonies of the Arab region. This

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desire to forget the Islamic past, by a country that for centuries either ruled or was ruled by Muslims, and that still holds territories in North Africa, has many Spanish Muslim intellectuals shaking their heads. Author Said Alami, who heads the Association of Arab Journalists in Spain, writes: “At times, it appears as if this nation would like to self-mutilate, amputate a large part of its history and physiognomy, in an extreme measure to transform itself, to become as European as Germany and as North American as Minnesota.”56 But as a country whose history is so deeply interwoven with Africa and the Orient, Spain’s past will continue to stir political imaginations the world over, and al-Andalus will continue to be one of the most disputed epochs of human history, an era that not only connects but also separates the West from the Orient, splits Left and Right in Spain and Europe, pits Islamists against secularists in the Muslim world, and provides raw material for sundry political movements and nationalisms on both sides of the Mediterranean.

Notes I am grateful to Richard Bulliet for comments on an earlier draft of this article. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Langston Hughes would publish a poem called “Letter from Spain” about Franco’s Moroccan troops: “We captured a wounded Moor today / He was just as dark as me. / I said, ‘Boy what you been doing here / Fighting against the free?’ ” (Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902 – 1941, I, Too, Sing America [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 349 – 51). 2. See Ricardo Garcia Carcel, La Leyenda Negra: Historia y opinion (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992). The Black Legend is often attributed to Alexandre Dumas, who noted that “Africa begins in the Pyrenees.” 3. Luce López-Baralt, Islam in Spanish Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Andrew Hurley (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1. 4. Javier Valenzuela, “España, en el ojo del huracan,” Temas de Hoy, 2 February 2002. 5. María Jesús Viguera Molins, “Al-Andalus como interferencia,” in Comunidades islamicas en Europa, ed. Montserrat Abumalham (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1995), 61 – 70. 6. Edward W. Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” Nation, 17 September 2001, www.thenation.com/doc/20010917/essay. 7. Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 296. 8. See Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9. Américo Castro, España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judios (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948). 10. Luce López-Baralt, Islam in Spanish Literature, 28.



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11. Ibid. 12. See Emilio Gonzalez-Lopez, “The Myth of Saint James and Its Functional Reality,” in Américo Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization, ed. José Rubia Garcia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 13. Cited in Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808 – 1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 518. 14. Angel G. Loureiro, “Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 65 – 76. 15. Eloy Martín Corrales, La imagen del magrebí en España: Una perspectiva histórica, siglos XVI-XX (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2002), 158. 16. Cited in Raanan Rein, “In Pursuit of Votes and Economic Treaties: Francoist Spain and the Arab World, 1945 – 56,” in Spain and the Mediterranean since 1898, ed. Raanan Rein (London: Cass, 1999), 207. 17. Gustau Nerín i Abad, “Mito Franquista y realidad de la colonizacion de la Guinea Espanola,” Estudios de Asia y Africa 32, no. 1 (1997): 11, cited in Ignacio Tofino-Quesada, “Spanish Orientalism: Uses of the Past in Spain’s Colonization in Africa,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23, nos. 1 – 2 (2003): 141 – 4 8. 18. Martín Corrales, La imagen del magrebí en España, 189. 19. Dorothy Kelly, “Selling Spanish ‘Otherness’ since the 1960s,” in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29 – 37. 20. Tofino-Quesada, “Spanish Orientalism,” 143. 21. Abigail Lee Six, Juan Goytisolo: The Case for Chaos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 215. 22. Rafael Valencia, “Acerca de las comunidades musulmanas en Andalucia occidental,” in Abumalham, Comunidades islamicas en Europa, 175. 23. Helen Graham and Antonio Sanchez, “The Politics of 1992,” in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Jo Labanyi and Helen Graham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 412. See also Tony Morgan, “1992: Memories and Modernities,” in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58. 24. Boston Globe, 31 October 1991. 25. Independent, 31 March 1992. 26. Mohamed Chakor, “El Moro en el imaginario espanol,” Raices: Revista Judia de Cultura, no. 38 (1999): 46. 27. Matthew Carr, “The Year of Spain,” Race and Class 34 (1993): 71 – 77. Carr writes, “The underlying direction of official [immigration] policy was made clear by 1992’s six-month amnesty for long-term illegal residents, in which African immigrants were not eligible for the five-year residence permits which their Latin American counterparts were able to apply for” (75). 28. “King Snubs Moorish Plea for Apology,” Daily Telegraph, 20 January 2005. The Moroccan-based Association for the Defense of the Victims of the Rif War claims that the Rif region has higher cancer rates because of Spain’s use of chemical weapons in the 1920s (BBC.com, 19 January 2002). 29. In “Europe’s Back Doors” (Atlantic Monthly, January 2000, 26 – 33), George Stolz writes, “The Spanish government, which considers sub-Saharan Africans less socially disruptive than Moroccans and Algerians, no doubt had this in mind when it decided to use the enclaves [in northern Morocco] as a sort of waiting room in which to screen for able-bodied potential workers.”

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30. Ella Shohat, “Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews: Towards a Relational Approach to Community Identity,” in Cultural Readings of Imperialism, ed. Benita Parry and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), 110. 31. Charles Krauthammer, “Parsley and Pride,” Washington Post, 19 July 2002. 32. The historian P. E. Russell has said of Sanchez-Albornoz: “When SanchezAlbornoz turns to the Jews the inherent racialism of the book takes on a more familiar and far uglier form. Here we move into a Nazi-like world of Jewish plots against the innocent Christian Spaniards, both in the Middle Ages and, it is hinted, now.” Sanchez-Albornoz would refer to the Jewish presence in Spain as “always negative . . . the Jews were natural usurers.” Cited in James T. Monroe, Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present) (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 144. 33. Serafin Fanjul, “El mito de las tres culturas,” Revista de Occidente, January 2000, www.ortegaygasset.edu/revistadeoccidente/revista.html. 34. Y. José L. Martinez, “El mito de la España de las tres culturas,” Hesperides 12 (1997), cited in José L. Rodríguez Jiménez, Antisemitism and the Extreme Right in Spain (1962 – 1997), Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism 15 (Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 1999), http:// sicsa.huji.ac.il/15spain.html. 35. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). For a discussion of the “Semitic hypothesis,” see Gil Anidjar, interview by Nermeen Shaikh, Asia Source, www.asiasource .org/news/special_reports/anidjar2.cfm (accessed January 12, 2006). 36. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 67, 286. 37. But as a columnist for the Economist wrote: “A glance at the figures suggests that Mr. Lewis is a better Arabist than mathematician. At present there are not more than 13 million Muslims in the EU, out of a total population of 457 million. Even if there is a massive surge of immigration and the fertility of white Europeans falls even further, it is difficult to see how this would lead to a merger between Europe and North Africa.” See Charlemagne, “A Civil War on Terrorism,” Economist, 25 November 2004, www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory .cfm?story_id=3427223. 38. Barnabe Lopez Garcia, “El retorno de los Moriscos,” El Pais, 5 November 1992. 39. Javier Valenzuela, “España, en el ojo del huracan.” 40. For more on al-Andalus in the imagination of urban social movements in the West, see Hishaam Aidi, “Let Us Be Moors: Islam, Race, and ‘Connected Histories,’ ” Middle East Report, no. 229 (2003), www.merip.org/mer/mer229/229_aidi .html. 41. Geoff Pingree, “Spanish Leader Makes Bid to Reshape the War on Terror,” Christian Science Monitor, 13 December 2004. 42. Giles Tremlett, “Spain Being ‘Taken Back to Moorish Times,’ ” Guardian, 7 July 2004. 43. Emilio González Ferrín, Las rutas del Islam en Andalucía (Seville: La Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2004). 44. César Vidal, España frente al Islam: de Mahoma a Ben Laden (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2004). 45. See “Was the Islam of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?” New York Times, 27 September 2003.



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46. Andrew Osborn and Rory Carroll, “Scorn Poured on Berlusconi Views,” Guardian, 28 September 2001. 47. Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), 87. 48. Arnaldo Nesti, “La presencia islamica en Italia fenomenologia y tendencies,” in Abumalham, Comunidades islamicas en Europa, 385. 49. Ian Gibson, “Desconcierto general,” El Pais, 29 July 2003. 50. “Spanish Crusader Emblem ‘Offensive,’ ”Ottawa Citizen, 29 July 2003. 51. Paddy Woodworth, “ ‘Alliance of Civilisations’ Not So Easy,” Irish Times, 15 March 2005. 52. See José María Aznar, “Seven Theses on Today’s Terrorism” (lecture, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 21 September 2004), www3.Georgetown.edu/president/aznar/inauguraladdress.html. 53. Gilles Kepel, “La ‘yihad’ de Al Andalus,” El Pais, 18 March 2004. 54. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 166. 55. “Goytisolo dice que España sigue sin reconocer su identidad arabe,” EFE News Service, 25 March 2004, 4.233.161.104/search?q=cache:DRDxGB0quisJ :noticias.ya.com/cultura/2004/ 03/25/5973735.html+%22espana+sigue+sin+ reconocer+su+identidad+arabe&hl=es&lr=&strip=1; Ricard Perez Casado, “El vecino necesario,” El Pais, 23 May 2004. 56. Said Alami, “La comunidad musulmana española y el racismo,” in Abumalham, Comunidades islamicas en Europa, 137.

88 Hishaam D. Aidi

The Filipina’s Breast S avag er y, D o ci l i t y, a n d t h e Er ot i c s o f t h e A m er i c a n Em p i r e

The raiding of women has always been the dream and the obsession of the total victor. These raided bodies are the spoils of victory, the warrior’s reward.  — M alek Alloula, The Colonial Harem

In colonial documents, savage breasts were signs of conquest. From accounts of European explorers such as Columbus and Magellan, to nineteenth-century maps of the Pacific drawn by American cartographers, to American postcards featuring Native American women, the bare brown bosoms of indigenous women were markers of savagery, colonial desire, and a justification for Western imperial rule. A foundational project of European and American imperialisms was the creation of an archive of images of the non-Western other whose inferiority was marked by female nakedness. Imperial cultures deployed barbarism and female nudity to justify imperial violence and articulate colonial phantasms about the savage land. Columbus, who fetishized the “colonial breasts” of native women, was convinced that the world was not round but “pearshaped and topped by a protuberance much like a woman’s nipple.”1 In his account of the New World, his early encounters with natives emphasized their nakedness and their physical beauty: “They all go naked, men and women, as the day they were born. . . . And the women have very pretty bodies.”2 The nakedness of the native, with special emphasis on the female native’s attractive body, recalls Adam and Eve’s exile from Paradise, which constructed a romantic image of the New World with “Indians” as creatures who were “spiritually naked,” gentle people with no weapons, laws, religion, or literature. 3 The imperial impulse to convert these “exiles” of Christianity, coupled with travelers’ tales of wealth and gold in uncharted, exotic lands, would fuel Europe’s imperial fantasies for centuries. European explorers of the New World in the first decades after Columbus believed in the superiority of their “writing, navigational instruments, ships, warhorses, attack dogs, effective armor,” and gunpowder, and of their Christian culture centered on “a tortured and murdered” male god, a deity born of a virgin and sacrificed by his heavenly father to atone for

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humanity’s sins.4 With the sword and the cross in hand, the conquistador viewed the naked savages as subjects of Empire, as “marvelous possessions” who were ordered to submit themselves to a Christian God and to a European sovereign; 5 failure to do so provoked contempt and genocidal rage. The Cherokee scholar Andrea Smith reminds us that the Age of Exploration inaugurated “new” tools of genocide in the Americas: sexual violence, in particular the rape of native women and children, and military violence such as war, occupation, and forced removal from one’s native community through land laws and boarding schools.6 Thus violence and benevolence are discursive structures of imperial logic, in particular the project of disciplining the native. After Columbus, cartography popularized the feminization of a savage land that had yet to be penetrated by Empire.7 Scholars in feminist, ethnic, and postcolonial studies have analyzed the imperialist logics of colonial texts. The Cherokee scholar Rayna Green, for example, writes that European artists depicted the New World through the icon of the Indian Queen, a dark-skinned naked woman crowned with tobacco leaves and surrounded by fruits native to the Americas. 8 Her nakedness symbolized the New World as a rich, bountiful land that was both exotic and innocent. In European cartography, a colonial iconographic continuum exists between what Laura Donaldson describes as “the naked and the dressed.”9 A map by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published in 1636 shows Europe as an elaborately dressed woman with a crown and a book, suggesting civilization and literacy. Africa is a dramatic contrast, both dark skinned and unclothed.10 José Rabasa demystifies the European colonialist imaginary constructing “sartorial difference” by underscoring the racial script: “Dressed and learned in the sciences, Europe rules and supersedes Asia. . . . In contrast, Africa and America in their nudity testify to the dominance of the feminine and typify the barbarous states that are, nonetheless, full of treasures for Europe.”11 My essay charts the origin of an American idea — t he Filipina savage. While the term may sound unfamiliar to contemporary Americans, “Filipino savage,” referring to the “Filipino race,” was common in American popular discourse after 1898, when the United States annexed the struggling Republic of the Philippines for 20 million dollars, paid to the beleaguered Spanish Empire. Figure 1 is an iconic representation of the savage Filipino race from the illustrated travel book United States Colonies and Dependencies by William Boyce (1914). The image shows an Ifugao man, woman, and child standing next to an American flag. The woman’s breasts are shown, as are the bare chests of the man and child. For this discussion on U.S. imperialism and photography, the Filipina breast will be read as a sign of conquest. Recalling the work of black feminist scholars on the

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Figure 1. Captured land, captured bodies: a photo of an Ifugao man, woman, and child beside a U.S. flag, ca. 1914. From William D. Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1914)

“lubricious image of black women” and the historical context of rape and other forms of sexual violence under the institution of slavery and European colonialism,12 I argue that the naked images of brown women — i n this case Filipinas and Pacific Islander women — a re representations of American imperial power and visual icons of “sexualized savages.”13 Here, I wish to highlight the temporal convergence of the histories of European colonialism, American imperial ventures in the Pacific, and the rise of “colonial postcards” in the nineteenth century that featured naked women from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Postcards of bare-breasted Algerian women popularized both the sexual images of North African women and the project of French colonialism, and functioned as “war booty,” artifacts of war that underscore racism, voyeurism, and colonial violence as the context of French-Algerian relations.14 In nineteenth-century Britain, on the other hand, the production and consumption of colonial postcards and pornographic literature emerged with the likes of the writer-adventurer Sir Richard Burton and his inner circle in the Anthropological Society of London (later called the London Anthropological Society). Members of Burton’s core group were called the “Cannibal Club,”15 and many were



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aristocrats who participated in Britain’s imperial ventures and wrote pornographic texts that included colonial themes such as slavery and miscegenation. The fascination for colonial breasts remains even in the early twenty-first century, with Web sites such as eBay and www.postcardman. net offering “vintage postcards” of “nude women” from Africa and Asia, which sell for $50 or more each. While postcards were ephemeral popular texts that underscore the banality of the idea of the sexual female savage in nineteenth-century England, U.S.-published illustrated travel books were popular middlebrow reading fare readily available to middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Through meteorological data — such as average temperatures, hot and wet seasons, and weather conditions—these books, informed by racial and gendered logics, established “colonial intimacy.”16 The “intimate” facts about savage lands had material consequences, since such information was enabled by and, conversely, facilitated military occupation and colonial rule. Images such as this photograph (fig. 1) popularized the notion of the Filipina savage in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States, a discourse of savagery founded on American discourses on the sexually perverse female “Indian” body and images of the female black body. The icon of the naked Filipina savage will be read as a nexus of the histories of Native American genocide and slavery. I propose what I term as the erotics of the American Empire, the discursive and material processes that created the sexual and racialized representations of the Filipina colonial subject in American popular culture. While José Eduardo Limón discusses the “erotics of culture” or “the play of eroticism and desire in the relationship between Greater Mexico and the United States,”17 the erotics of empire is the play of earlier racialized and gendered discourses that constructed the Filipina as a new nonwhite other whose alterity incorporated the ideas, images, and vocabularies of the conquests of the New World, the frontier, and the legacies of slavery. To shorthand the histories that inform the erotics of U.S. imperialism, I consider two tropes — t hose of savagery and docility. In the American imperial imaginary, savage bodies were also docile bodies needing discipline and tutelage. Violence and benevolence went hand in glove in the American imperial project, as it operated in the pedagogy and practice of imperial sites of discipline such as the Hampton Institute and the various Indian boarding schools of the early twentieth century. Discipline was a “tender violence” (Wexler) that inaugurated the savage or nonwhite body as a modern subject, oftentimes at the cost of pain, physical and mental suffering, and even death.18 For this essay, I examine images of the naked Filipina as visual proof of the savagery of the Filipino race, how

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her nakedness emphasized the necessity of disciplining Filipino bodies through violent and benevolent means. The visual image of the naked Filipina was disseminated at a time of empire and war, at a time when the U.S. Congress debated on the constitutionality of the American military occupation of the Philippines even as more than seventy thousand troops were stationed there after 1898. Both imperialists and anti-imperialists, while vigorously disagreeing on the issue of colonization, freely and interchangeably used the stereotype of the Filipino savage. Harry Pratt Judson, a University of Chicago professor, wrote in favor of colonizing the Philippines as an “annexed territory” without extending citizenship or constitutional rights to “inferior races.”19 A Yale professor, Theodore S. Woolsey, on the other hand, objected to colonizing the Philippines because colonization was a financial burden that meant controlling the conduct of 7 million “savage Filipinos.”20 Recalling the project of Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978), this essay charts the origin of the ideas behind the image of the Filipina savage. In particular, what sorts of “intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly and cultural energies” went into the making of an American imperialist tradition from the late nineteenth century onward?21 How did late-nineteenthcentury U.S. visual culture come to the service of American imperialism? As I write this, I write at a time of the American Empire in the early twentyfirst century. My study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American imperial culture then is an attempt, borrowing Said’s work, “to inventory the traces upon me,” to historicize my life as a neocolonial subject of the American Empire, and to inventory “the [imperial] culture whose domination has been a powerful factor” in the life of all Filipinos (25). Published in the late 1970s, during a decade that witnessed the oil crisis, the Israel-Palestine wars, the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian guerrillas in the Munich Olympics, and the Iran hostage crisis, Orientalism was a genealogy of Western hegemony in the Middle East or the Orient, a hegemony whose genocidal results continue in this era of Bush’s War with No End. Knowledge of the Orient, or what was then called the Far East, was inextricably tied to the Western project of empire building, as evident in the narrations of memoirs, anthropological writing, accounts of travelers and explorers, and music. Orientalism was “the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically as a topic of learning, discovery and practice” (73). It is also the language of imperialism, “the collection of dreams, images and vocabularies” deployed by the West to construct the East (73). Violence and power define the language and practice of orientalism. Early articulations of orientalism, in particular English writings on Egypt, such as the lectures of Arthur James Balfour in the House of Commons,



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describe orientals as “subject races” (36), and knowledge of the oriental was used in the service of military violence and colonial rule. As subject races, orientals were a literal subject of imperial power and knowledge. As Said noted, the oriental was “something one judges (law), something one studies (curriculum), something one disciplines (in school or prison), something one illustrates (zoological manual)” (40), and the term “Orient” extended over time to include Asia, though for many Americans, the Far East still refers only to China and Japan. But by 1898, the Philippine colony was referred to as a “new Oriental problem,” with debates over the constitutionality of the occupation of the islands while an armed insurrection continued. Extending Said’s ideas, I read the Filipina savage as a subject of American imperialism. An erotics of American imperialism thus argues for an intersectional approach to the study of U.S. imperial histories dating from the late nineteenth century. While scholars such as Shelley Streeby have argued for reconsidering the distinctions made by historians and cultural studies scholars between the “continental frontier of 1848” and the “imperial frontier of 1898,”22 my own study of U.S. imperialism, culture, and Filipina images examines the heterogenous U.S. imperial cultures that inform early-twentieth-century ideas of the Filipina savage.

The Erotics of American Imperialism My project of coupling “erotics” and “American Empire” together focuses on the relationship of U.S. imperial culture with the play of eroticism, racism, desire, and fantasy that constructed the figure of the Filipina savage. I examine bodies in the imperial archive that account for the postcolonial effects of the racial and sexual politics of U.S. imperial culture. By “imperial archive” I refer to more than a library or museum but “a fantasy of knowledge,” what Thomas Richards has called “imperial fictions” collected and united in the service of the state and empire. 23 Oscar V. Campomanes describes the American imperial archive as “a massive political and cultural archive which de-nationalized Filipinos and deemed them as racialized subjects” unfit for independence and self-government; the creation of the American imperial archive, observes Campomanes, went hand in hand with “a colonial war,” the Philippine-American War of 1899, that was waged until the archive became “a self-fulfilling phantasm.”24 The tropes of savagery and docility are products of American imperial fictions about Native Americans and African Americans, and these representations formed and informed popular discourses about the Filipino colonial subject.

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Anne McClintock describes an “erotics of ravishment” in the writings of European male travelers that feminized and eroticized the “uncertain continents” of Africa, the Americas, and Asia. 25 McClintock offers the term “porno-tropics” to highlight the relationship between pornographic fantasies of the tropics and the brutal, often violent facts of conquest. This European porno-tropic tradition constructed nonwhite women as “the epitome of sexual aberration and excess” (22). We witness what McClintock terms as the “metaphysics of gender violence,” with the unknown world as feminine object to be owned and possessed by a male explorer (23). The black female body has long been part of the imperial archive of Europe informed by the politics of colonization, slavery, prostitution, and pornography. The sexualization of the black female body can be mapped in the canonical writings of nineteenth-century French writers such as Balzac, Zola, Baudelaire, and others. The figures of the mulatta, the prostitute, or the slave woman in nineteenth-century French novels and essays were what T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting refers to as icons of the “Black Venus” or “sexualized savages.”26 The lubricious images of black women, as sexual and dangerous bodies, are constructions of “feminized darkness” and representations of French imperial power (11). Drawings and photographs of breast-baring brown women from indigenous cultures, on the other hand, have long been part of American porno-tropic tradition. Island women, particularly the cultures and peoples of the Pacific, have been part of an American Pacific fetish even before the arrival of Admiral George Dewey to Manila in 1898. Figure 2 is a photograph of Pacific Islander women of Hawai‘i published in the travel book United States Colonies and Dependencies. As far back as 1791, when American geographic knowledge of the Pacific was limited, the region had already attracted economic and political interest. 27 In the decades that followed, maps of the Pacific increased. White American writers have long imagined the “South Seas” as a place inhabited by dark-skinned, cannibalistic savages or as a space for an interior voyage of the self facilitated by the white author’s or narrator’s encounter with primitive cultures. Paul Lyons has observed what he calls an “American Pacific Orientalism” tradition in the writings of hundreds of whale ship captains who sold their pamphlets to the American public in the 1790s, and traces this tradition to more-established writers such as Edgar Allan Poe in his South Seas novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 28 During the first decades of the nineteenth century, American traders, explorers, and politicians wrote about the Pacific and its peoples through racialized and gendered grammars of inferiority. The Pacific by then had been colonized by cartographers who drew images of naked native women in maps as metonymic representations of an exotic paradise.



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Drawings and photographs of breast-baring brown women from indigenous cultures have long been part of American pornotropic tradition.

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Figure 2. Pacific fetish: photographs of Hawai‘ian women circulated in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, ca. 1914. From Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies

By the late nineteenth century, anonymous photographers brought their Kodak brownie cameras and took photographs of Pacific Islander women for their personal collections, for publication, and for scientific study, and generations of American children grew up with adventure stories about the West and the Pacific seacoast. 29 These photographs of Pacific Islander women were circulated at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when commonsense notions of the Pacific and Pacific Island peoples were already formed by and through visual and print cultures. We have no information on the subjects of the photograph or the photographer, yet this anonymity undergirds the erotics of American imperialism in two ways. First, anonymity aestheticizes the colonial panoptic. The ubiquity of such photographs of Hawai‘ian women in 1900 illustrates the textual traffic in gendered images of primitive island cultures, beginning with the eighteenth-century adventure narratives by whale-ship captains and continuing with the scientific discourse of National Geographic, which functioned as a “wellspring of masturbatory

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fantasies” for a generation of fin de siècle American men. 30 Second, anonymity underscores imperial intimacy, 31 how the bodies of Pacific Island peoples function metonymically as the knowable and accessible Pacific. The earliest articulation of an American porno-tropic tradition can be read in the representation of native women, in particular the narratives of Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and La Malinche. In popular accounts of the lives of these indigenous women, they are reduced to heroines or antiheroines based on their actions at the dawn of conquest. Sacagawea is enshrined as a mythic icon of American expansion, leading the Lewis and Clark expedition with her infant son on her back; yet her myth centers on her beauty and her superhuman abilities as a scout — how she enabled the project of American imperial expansion in the Pacific Northwest. 32 In the case of Pocahontas, American history books immortalize her as a beautiful Indian princess who saves the life of John Smith and becomes the savior of the fledgling Jamestown colony; though she marries another Puritan, she is the most celebrated female figure of miscegenation, what Robert Tilton has described as “the quiet genocide of the native population.”33 The life of La Malinche, or Doña Marina, is a more complex narrative. In historical accounts, “as translator, informer, mistress and sexual pawn,” she aided Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztec empire. 34 Her acts are mythologized as acts of female treachery, the original race traitor of Mexican history. The mestizo population of Mexico descends symbolically from her treacherous deeds, “the first mixing of Indian and European blood.”35 In British and Dutch colonies at the turn of the nineteenth century, white women were held in high esteem in a metropolitan bourgeois discourse on the endangerment of white middle-class morality and white motherhood. This privileging of white women occurred in tandem with the debasement of native women’s bodies as sexual servants or concubines of European men. Native women’s bodies served as sexual medicine for the “colonial soul.” In travel handbooks for incoming plantation employees bound for Tonkin, Sumatra, and Malaya, European men were urged to have native mistresses “for quick acclimatization, as insulation from the ill-health that sexual abstention, isolation, and boredom were thought to bring.”36 Thus the histories of European conquest and American imperial expansion are the contexts of the representation of the Filipina savage. As sexual bodies and as laboring bodies, the representations of native women in general are artifacts of empire. Portrayed in popular culture as bodies that serve Western empires, both in the sexual and domestic sense, these women remain virtually unknown to us as actors or as historical



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As scholars of Western colonialism and culture have argued, travel cultures functioned ideologically by romanticizing what Said has termed as the pleasures and the profits of empire.

agents. In the history of the American Empire, the Pacific Islander and Filipina women we have seen are merely bodies in the National Archive of Washington, DC, yet they are more than this. Their corporeal presence, as bodies in the imperial archive, must always be read against the grain of the military conquest of native America and the Pacific. The Alaskan native theorist Shari Huhndorf observes that by the turn of twentieth century, the conquest that began with Columbus’s arrival ended with the genocidal campaigns against native peoples in the West and a turn to innocence and nostalgia. 37 By the 1890s Native Americans were no longer a threat to white civilization and “began to play a more ambivalent role in the American cultural imagination” (21). The ambivalent image of the nonwhite or native body, as noble and ignoble savage, was inaugurated by white America’s anxiety over the history of conquest and, as Huhndorf observes, “serves in part to recast this terrible history by creating the illusion of white society’s innocence” (21).

The Romance and Violence of U.S. Travel Cultures At the turn of the twentieth century, photography made possible a recasting of imperial violence. By visualizing empire through the lens of domesticity, the bloodier and more disturbing aspects of U.S. imperial expansion were excised from the American nation’s myths. At the time, “new insular possessions” became topics of popular reading for a public curious to learn about the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawai‘i, and the archipelago known as the Philippine Islands. To satisfy that curiosity, dozens of illustrated travel books were published after 1898. Before the publication of such books, popular turn-of-the-century magazines such as National Geographic, Leslie’s Illustrated, and Harper’s Weekly featured articles on the Spanish-American War and on the colonies of the beleaguered Spanish Empire. While many journalistic accounts expressed American patriotism and support for “the War for humanity,” as the Spanish-American War was called, some writers described the economic possibilities the colonies offered. In National Geographic, two special issues on Cuba and the Philippines appeared in 1898 with articles on the islands’ land masses, climates, flora and fauna, and agricultural industries. As scholars of Western colonialism and culture have argued, travel cultures functioned ideologically by romanticizing what Said has termed as the pleasures and the profits of empire. 38 After 1898 the United States built what Lanny Thompson termed an “imperial archipelago,” a visual and textual archive created by writers, artists, journalists, soldiers, schoolteachers, academics, and politicians who wrote

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about the culture and peoples of the new “U.S. colonies” (fig. 3).39 Books such as José de Olivares’s Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil (ca. 1899) were popular fare that produced images of America’s new colonial subjects.40 Olivares was a native of California and a journalist for the Globe Democrat of St. Louis.41 Published as two oversized texts, Our Islands and Their People was an imperial racial spectacle that featured 1,200 black-and-white photographs along with 19 hand-colored photographs. The book was a commercial success, selling 400,000 copies and launching an industry of illustrated books on the “insular possessions” of the United States after 1898.42 The Filipino studies scholar Benito Vergara Jr. summarizes the title’s significance and this emergent imperial genre: “The transfer of ‘our islands and their people’ to the printed page through photography wrested the colonies from beyond and brought them into the domestic realm. Not only were the Philippines a political possession, but a visual possession as well, to be gazed at in the comfort of the American home.”43 In Olivares’s book, photographs of naked indigenous Filipino women were displayed alongside the clothed images of Cuban and Puerto Rican women (fig. 4). These contrasting images — t he clothed Latina versus the naked Filipina — would influence how Americans viewed the Filipino race and would have violent consequences for Filipinos then waging a war against U.S. military rule. Photographs of naked Filipinas (fig. 5) would indelibly define the Filipino race as a savage people in the minds of American readers. The Filipina’s naked body, like other native women’s bodies, ritualistically feminized the colonized land. As a visual catalog of racial inferiority, travel books would often compare Filipinas with the “savage beauties” of the Hawai‘ian Islands, but American writers did not always write favorably about Filipinas. In Olivares’s text, for example, Filipino women were described as both the object of desire and scorn. In the first place, she is the unloveliest of women. . . . After seeing Porto Rican [sic] and Cuban maidens, a man entering Manila will expect to be thrilled again by great, lustrous, dark eyes; but the glance of the Filipino woman will never thrill you. Her eyes are not large, but they are black and beady and unreadable. Very often hunger looks out at you; often hatred, but it is not passionate hatred. . . . She cannot understand why these white men with guns intrude upon her ancient customs. She doesn’t like the white man anyway. Her eyes tell him so and she wishes he were back in his own land.44

The ambivalent position of the Filipina body — as savage, as divine creature, as surly and “unlovely” — was a stark contrast to the image of the properly dressed and attractive “Spanish maidens” of Cuba and Puerto Rico. But as Vergara reminds us, the portraits of unsmiling Filipinas and



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Figure 3. American porno-tropics: José de Olivares’s book, Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil, was published circa 1899 and sold 400,000 copies.

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Figure 4. The clothed Latina: Puerto Rican schoolteachers, ca. 1899. From Olivares, Our Islands and Their People

the scowling natives confirm other things. Olivares himself mentions this — t hat Filipinos refused U.S. rule and registered their refusal bodily, through guerrilla warfare, and aesthetically, through the Filipina native’s scowl. More than nakedness thus marked the racial difference of Filipinas in the American imperial imaginary. The most compelling evidence of savagery was the Philippine-American War itself, a protracted war led by Philippine revolutionaries who continued their war for independence even after the arrest of their leader General Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901. Much to the surprise of the American military, the Filipinos would continue an organized guerrilla war against the United States for a decade, even after President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over in 1902. Older racial logics were at work during the Philippine-American War, as we can read from Olivares’s text: They are a dark people — some are distinctively black — a nd our soldiers have fallen into the habit of calling them “niggers.” . . . Many of the people



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Figure 5. The savage Filipina’s body, ca. 1899. From Olivares, Our Islands and Their People

resemble the negro in appearance, but that is as far as the similarity goes. For all the practical purposes of civilization, the mirthful, easy-going African is superior to these treacherous and blood-thirsty hybrid Malays. . . . The lamented General Lawton knew them well; a green mound in Arlington Cemetery attests his intimate acquaintance with these people, and he declared that the only good Filipinos were the dead ones. (559)

When Olivares mentions the practice of American soldiers referring to Filipinos as “niggers,” he justifies the violence and the carnage of the U.S.-led war against the Filipino revolutionaries. By describing Filipinos as “distinctively black,” when in truth many Filipinos at the time were of varying tones because of race mixing, Olivares underscores an American racist logic predicated on misrecognition and the stereotype of black inferiority. By labeling Filipinos as “niggers” and by mentioning the words

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of General Lawton — t hat the only good Filipino is a dead one — Olivares unintentionally links the history of the conquest of the West to the conquest of the Pacific with the Philippines as the new frontier. Lawton’s participation in the extermination of Native Americans was an experience he shared with other officers and American soldiers sent to the Philippine Islands. In fact, over 80 percent of the U.S. soldiers sent there had fought in the U.S.-Indian wars.45 With the violence of the Philippine-American War in mind, it thus becomes possible to “picture the invisible,”46 to imaginatively reconstruct the violence of American rule in the Philippines. The photographs of Filipinas in illustrated travel books display docile bodies under imperial control. The notion of “docility,” or how a human body is an “analysable and manipulable object,”47 was indeed an objective of U.S. colonial rule and Progressive Era ideas of social engineering. Filipinos needed to become meek and useful to be considered educated and civilized. Thus it was not enough to jail, deport, execute, or hang Filipinos who joined the revolution against the United States. The next generation of Filipinos had to be disciplined through a U.S. system of education to become colonial subjects of the empire. Travel cultures supported the project of docility by presenting Filipino subjects in need of American tutelage. Echoing earlier travel texts that presented non-Western cultures as primitive and backward, many of the texts would emphasize how far removed the Philippine Islands were from the modern and civilized cultures of the West. For the writer Anna Northend Benjamin, disciplining the natives through corporal punishment is best: “I would say that where principle is involved it is impossible to be too firm with the Philippine native. . . . In whipping a native you are speaking to him in terms which he can understand.”48 Such advice is echoed by a statement from the American general Arthur MacArthur, father of General Douglas MacArthur, who was quoted saying that the Filipinos would need “the bayonet treatment” for ten years.49 These Filipina photographs we view today are indexical and iconic signs of the U.S. Empire. As indexes of empire, they document the forced establishment of American rule in the Philippines and disturb the official histories supporting American exceptionalism and innocence by laying bare the gendered and racial logics at work in visual representation. As iconic signs of empire, they articulate the violent and benevolent nature of U.S. rule. Photography as a technology of empire embodies the figurative and literal effects of American colonization for Filipina subjects. These archival bodies disturb and complicate contemporary ideas of American benevolence and innocence entrenched in official accounts of the U.S. nation’s history. The contexts of Filipina iconography are thus the histories of conquest, control, and discipline. Civilized bodies were white bodies that



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exemplified the ideals of white imperial masculinity and femininity. Those outside these ideals were subjected to the terrors of discipline expressed in acts of political disenfranchisement, the experience of economic hardship, and physical violence such as war.

Filipina Bodies Then and Now Since the colonization of the Philippines by the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, sexual and racial discourses continue to haunt the term Filipina in the early twenty-first century. American orientalist fantasies of the Filipina savage continue in new media such as the Internet. Media scholars and Filipina feminists observe a disturbing phenomenon that many Filipinos know but prefer to ignore: a Google search of the word Filipina brings up Web sites for mail-order brides, pornography, and domestics for hire. The same cannot be said of the term Latina, though there are porn sites that display bodies of Latina women. The prurient and proletarian cyber associations for the term Filipina are imbricated, as the theorist Roland Tolentino has suggested, in “colonial, militarist and capitalist histories,” with the Internet as a technology of racialization and sexualization.50 While the media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and others have charted how the narratives of cyberspace and electronic communications “manage and engage” with orientalist myths such as Asian women’s sexualities and representations, 51 my interest with the Filipina image returns to Tolentino’s trenchant critique on the geopolitics of Filipina bodies: that Filipinas have been “integrated into the circuits of transnationalism” as laboring bodies (domestic helpers and nurses) and as sexual bodies (entertainers and mail-order brides). I would add, however, that the integration of Filipinas into the circuits of transnational capital begins with and is facilitated by what Shawn Michelle Smith terms as “technologies of vision” traceable to the nineteenth century, in particular photography and writing.52 The incorporation of Filipinas in cyberspace is connected to older American forms of photography, writing, and representation, older “American archives” from the beginnings of European and American imperial expansion.53 Technologies of visuality such as photography in the past, and the Internet in the present, enable the incorporation of Filipina bodies. If, as the visual theorist Laura Wexler reminds us, turnof-the-century photographs of Filipino men and women served as images of war displayed as peace, 54 the images of Filipina women on the Internet at the turn of the twenty-first century are images of neocolonial violence displayed as postmodern capitalism. As new media technologies promise

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and deliver ever-increasing powers of information, mobility, and surveillance, 55 the Filipina bodies in cyberspace are haunted by the histories of empire and the postmodern realities of capital as bodies that serve and as bodies for sale. Filipino activists document and organize against these realities: (1) Filipinas comprise most of the 10 million Filipino migrant workers around the world; (2) in 2002, overseas Filipino migrants remitted or wired 7 billion dollars to the Philippines; in effect, the very bodies of Filipinas keep the Philippine economy afloat; (3) from 1983 to 1995, around 50,000 Filipinas left the Philippines for the United States as mail-order brides; (4) while the last of the American military bases closed in 1992, there are still approximately 500,000 women and children engaged as sex workers.56 As the feminist scholars Vernadette Gonzalez and Robyn Rodriguez write, Filipina bodies counter “the ‘innocent’ notions of cyberdemocracy” and its claims to “transparency,” an American claim to innocence we can recall from the beginnings of empire building in the late nineteenth century: “Trafficking in women has intensified globally with the advent of telecommunications technology, and while Filipinas are not the sole commodity in this traffic, they represent unique sites where histories of U.S. . . . imperialisms, militarisms, and capitalisms coalesce.”57 Thus, while other scholars have examined the discourses of cyberspace in relation to nineteenthcentury discourses of Manifest Destiny and orientalism, a discussion of Filipina bodies requires a historical engagement with both American imperialism and neocolonialism. If colonial texts fetishized the native female’s breast as metonyms for the colony’s resources, late capitalist technologies such as the Internet fetishize the Filipina’s hands and breasts. Filipinas’ bodies, metonyms of the neocolonial status of the Philippines, live out the traumas of diaspora as mobile subjects forced to leave their home countries and work under severe exploitative conditions because of the globalization of poverty and inequality through industrialization. Disembodiment then, as a structural logic of cyberspace, 58 takes on a menacing turn when we consider how Filipina bodies in the imperial archive and in cyberspace are indexical and iconic signs of the violence of empire and capital. The surly Filipinas of the imperial archive are now replaced by globalized smiles of female labor, yet like colonial representations of old, their smiles belie the violence of inhuman conditions of exploitation, physical and sexual abuse, poverty, maddening loneliness, and the terror of uncertainty and deportation. This year, a representative of the Philippine government, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Delia Albert, disclosed that approximately 500,000 out of 2 million Filipino men and women in the United States are undocumented.59 Since 9/11, Filipinos have been targets of arrests and deportation. In 2002 the



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Department of Homeland Security deported 713 Filipinos, and Filipino community activists say that more than 80,000 Filipinos are now targets for arrest and removal under the program called Operation Endgame.60 The erotics of empire continue as Filipinas are visualized in our electronic age. On 27 August 2004, news about an abused Filipina domestic worker, Nena Ruiz, appeared in print and electronic media. Ruiz was awarded $825,000 after she sued her employers, James J. Jackson and his wife, Elizabeth, for slavery. Jackson was vice president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures Entertainment. Ruiz, who is in her early sixties, was recruited from the Philippines by Elizabeth Jackson, who might be Filipina. The Jacksons own real estate in the Philippines, and this would be possible only if Elizabeth Jackson were a Filipino citizen. According to news reports, Ruiz claimed that “she was kept as an indentured slave for more than one year,” “received payments of only $300 for the entire year,” “was locked up, forced to care for the family dog,” and slept on a dog bed.61 Apart from her forced confinement, the Jacksons withheld her passport to discourage her from escaping, and even physically assaulted her. The jury found the Jacksons guilty of “false imprisonment, involuntary servitude, invasion of privacy, negligence and Labor Code violations.” While Filipino American newspapers celebrated Ruiz’s legal triumph, her case refracts the darker realities of hundreds of thousands of Filipinas in the United States who work for less than minimum wage and who live in fear as undocumented workers. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the legacy of American porno-tropical fantasies of the sexualized female savage continues in the era of globalization and late capital. The queer African American novelist James Baldwin once wrote that “history is written in the color of my skin.”62 We could add that the violent histories of empire and capital are written on the bodies of Filipinas, on our bruised and bleeding hands and our brown neocolonial breasts.

Notes An early version of this essay was first read as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Wellesley College; and the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2004; and at Mount Holyoke College, in March 2005. In Massachusetts, I thank Fidelito C. Cortes, Mia Ong, Jeff Santa Ana, Greg Mullins, Richard Chu, Paula Chakravartty, Gianpaolo Baoicchi, Alice Nash, David Glassberg, and Amy Martin for their support and friendship. At UC Berkeley, I am indebted to the Critical Filipino Studies Working Group, with special thanks to Joanne Rondilla and Gladys Nubla. Early drafts of the essay were written during my term as a postdoctoral fellow and as a visiting faculty member for the University of Oregon’s Ethnic Studies Program. Maraming salamat to my mentor and colleague, Shari Huhndorf; salamat din to Steve Morozumi, Lyn Fujiwara, Cynthia Tolentino, and

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Martin Summers; thanks to Ruby Lazatin for her companionship and special thanks to my excellent research assistant, Maria Cecilia Regalado Hwang. 1. The term colonial breast is from Laura E. Donaldson, “The Breasts of Columbus: A Political Anatomy of Postcolonialism and Feminist Religious Discourse,” in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, ed. Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 41 – 58. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984), 34 – 35. 3. Ibid., 35. I am mindful of the colonial context and the history of the genocide of native peoples with my use of the problematic term Indian. I examine in this essay the racist logic that is part of the term in relation to the image of Filipinos after 1898. The Spanish equivalent, indio, was also a common term used for Filipinos during the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines, which lasted for close to four hundred years. See Teodoro Agoncillo, A History of the Filipino People (1960; rpt. Quezon City: Garotech, 1990). 4. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 9. For a historical account of Columbus’s expedition as the beginnings of an “American Holocaust,” see David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 5. The term marvelous possessions is Greenblatt’s. 6. On sexual violence as a tool of genocide, see Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005). 7. Scholars in feminist, colonial, and postcolonial studies have critiqued this gendered tradition, particularly the sexual overtones of European and American imperial discourses. An abbreviated list of established and new scholars includes Oscar Campomanes, Lisa Lowe, Jenny Sharpe, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Ella Shohat, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, Laura Donaldson, Anne McClintock, Gayatri Spivak, Lee Wallace, Mary Louise Pratt, Hazel Carby, Laura Wexler, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Kimberly Alidio, Sarita See, Haunani Kay Trask, Caren Kaplan, Amy Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, and Antoinette Burton. 8. Rayna Green, Women in American Indian Society (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), 12 – 14. I am indebted to Shari Huhndorf for sharing this and other sources on Native American women and representation. 9. Laura E. Donaldson, “Introduction: God, Gold, Gender,” in Donaldson and Pui-lan, Postcolonialism, 8. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 2 – 11. For feminist critiques on representations of black women and the context of slavery, see also Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Caroline A. Streeter, “Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,” Callaloo 27, no. 3 (2004): 768 – 87. 13. The term sexualized savages is Sharpley-Whiting’s. 14. See Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).



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15. On the history of colonial postcards and pornographic texts, see Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815 – 1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 50 – 8 0. 16. On colonial intimacy, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 17. José Eduardo Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 4. 18. General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of the famed Hampton Institute, coined the term “tender violence” to refer to education for ex-slaves and “newly pacified Indians.” See Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 52-53. On the violent history of Indian boarding schools, see Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 35–54. 19. Harry Pratt Judson, “Professor Judson on Annexation and the Constitution,” Literary Digest, 7 January 1899, 1. 20. Theodore S. Woolsey, “Professor Woolsey’s Arguments against Ratifying the Treaty,” Literary Digest, 7 January 1899, 1 – 2 . 21. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 15. 22. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 9. 23. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 6. 24. Oscar V. Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2 (1995): 148 – 49. 25. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 26. Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 1 – 15. 27. M. Consuelo Leon W., “Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific,” in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 23 – 2 4. 28. Paul Lyons, “Opening Accounts in the South Seas: Poe’s Pym and American Pacific Orientalism,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 42 (1996): 291 – 326. 29. Leon W., “Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific,” 20 – 2 4. 30. Scholars have briefly commented on the imperialist and pornographic discourse of National Geographic. See Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 51. 31. The relationship between intimacy and European imperialism has been discussed by Achille Mbembe and Ann Laura Stoler. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. 32. Ella Elizabeth Clark and Margot Edmonds, Sacagawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 1 – 13. I am indebted to Shari Huhndorf for information and sources on Sacagawea and Pocahontas.

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33. See Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Thanks to Shari Huhndorf for this citation. 34. Clara Sue Kidwell, “What Would Pocahontas Think? Women and Cultural Persistence,” Callaloo 17 (1994): 145 – 49. 35. Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 941 – 6 4. 36. Ann Laura Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 348. 37. Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 38. Said, Orientalism; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Caren Kaplan, “Getting to Know You: Travel, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Anna and the King of Siam and the King and I,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Roman de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), 33 – 52; Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2 (1990): 659–90; Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 70 (1998): 581–606. 39. Lanny Thompson, “Representation and Rule in the Imperial Archipelago: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines under U.S. Dominion after 1898,” American Studies Asia 1 (2002): 3. 40. José de Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil (St. Louis: N.D. Thompson, ca. 1899). 41. Thompson, “Representation and Rule in the Imperial Archipelago,” 2. 42. Ibid., 3 – 4. 43. Benito M. Vergara Jr., Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early Twentieth Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 81. 44. Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, 590 – 91. 45. The military and cultural connections between the U.S.-Indian wars and the Philippine-American War have been discussed by Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899 – 1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Anne Paulet, “The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian: The Use of United States Indian Policy as a Guide for the Conquest and Occupation of the Philippines, 1898 – 1905” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1995); Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (1980): 810 – 31. I thank Oscar Campomanes for introducing me to Williams’s essay. 46. The phrase “picturing the invisible” is from W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 40. 47. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 136.



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48. Anna Northend Benjamin, “Some Filipino Characteristics,” Outlook (1901): 1007. 49. William Pomeroy, “ ‘Pacification’ in the Philippines, 1898 – 1913,” FranceAsie 21 (1967): 432. 50. I am indebted to the pathbreaking work of Vernadette V. Gonzalez and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, “Filipina.Com: Wives, Workers, and Whores on the Cyberfrontier,” in Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003), 215 – 3 4; and Roland Tolentino, National/Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001), 1 – 2 4. 51. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,” in Lee and Wong, Asian America.Net, 3 – 36. 52. See Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 53. The term American archives is Smith’s. 54. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 108. 55. Caren Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America/PMLA 117 (2002): 32 – 42. 56. Tolentino, National/Transnational, 1 – 11. 57. Gonzalez and Rodriguez, “Filipina.com,” 217. 58. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,” in AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Cyberspace, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3–36. 59. Carina I. Roncesvalles, “DFA [Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs] to Push for Inclusion of Filipinos in Bush Plan,” Business World online (Philippines), 12 January 2004. 60. On the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Endgame program, see R. M. Arrieta, “The New Immigrant Roundup,” in AlterNet.org, 21 June 2004, www.alternet.org/story/18997. 61. “Woman Kept as Domestic Slave,” abc7.com, 27 August 2004; Joe Sayas, “Enslaved Pilipina Domestic Helper Wins $800,000 Jury Verdict,” Asian Journal On-Line, 18 September 2004, www.asianjournal.com/cgi-bin/view_info.cgi?code= 00006763&category=IM. 62. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race (New York: Dell, 1971), 190.

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The Recourses of Necessity R ep e t i t i o n , Secu l a r M o u r n i n g , a n d Edwa r d S a i d ’ s I n v en to r i e s o f L at e R e t u r n

Work becomes a daily articulation of the formidably precise status quo into which you are bound; it brings you to a performance of your actual condition that you find, speaks your consciousness of what you are about, where you are to be found, how maddeningly complicated the mechanisms that surround you. . . . at that point you discover your freedom, which is neither capitulation nor hate but a sense that your mind is the one thing that can prevent your oppressor from having the power to touch.  — E dward Said, After the Last Sky

Trying to trace the preoccupations, anxieties, and ambition of Edward Said’s repertoire, one is struck by the constancy and repetition, the rigorous development of critical themes and variations, which, true to the vocation of the public intellectual, retain their integrity and their affiliative connections across disciplines, genres, and discourses. This line of varied repetition is doubly effective. On the one hand, it establishes the coherence and authority of a scholar’s body of work, an authority that once grounded is transferred, its rigor traveling across discursive boundaries. But repetition, on the other hand, obeys another motive, which is more tactical than strategic, more improvisational than deliberate. In moving from Said’s cultural to his political writings (traveling across an imposed boundary), we rediscover, and recover, familiar themes: this time not as masterful articulations of Western philosophy and critique but as the recourses of necessity — Vichian ricorsi remapping and retreading cultural and historical trajectories.1 Tracing the genealogy of culture, of morals, of literature, of politics, of received ideas, that repetition provides ways to challenge hierarchy and pull at the loose threads and false naturalism, the subtle tissue, of hegemony. My schematic analysis is meant to point to continuities between Said’s humanistic work and his political work, and beyond that commonplace critical endeavor to find a poignant self-revelation where the work of repetition, the compulsion and resistance to remake a world, is deeply connected both to the work of mourning and to a daily reinvestment in agency: the living testimony of the speaking or writing subject. Between Said’s cultural repetitions and his repeated political interventions we find the counterpoint of a mediated reshaping and redisposition, and a more immediate regroupSocial Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

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ing, of experience. The distinctions, of course, correspond not only to the immediacy and urgency of subject matter but to the genres and media that represent them — as Palestinians, humanists, professors, or victims. Connecting Said to wider cultural discourses about mourning and melancholia as cultural symptoms, I am nevertheless pointing to a crucial difference: to the usefulness of the work of mourning not as forgetting or the finality of peace, nor as “closure” of narrative or the “resolution” of law, but as a disciplined practice of memory. And Saidian mourning, like Palestinian nationhood, is always driven to commemorate loss beyond the state’s territory, beyond the grave site, beyond the limits of the individual subject: onto other sites, utopias both real and invisible, in exile.

Work and Repetition Said’s obsession with work and repetition — d iscipline, method, elaboration, repilogamenti, inventories, surveys — is embedded into most of his writing. 2 And that obsession, written into texts published between Beginnings and After the Last Sky, measures the distance between cultural, scholarly, artistic repetitions and the exercise of repetition in everyday life. Treading a line between a Benjaminian and Adornian critique, Said’s critical variations, from text to politics and back, look both to intellectual work and daily life, posing the question: “Does repetition enhance or degrade a fact?”3 The question, as Said notes with respect to both politics and culture, “brings forth consciousness of two where there had been repose in one; and such knowledge of course, like the repetition of procreation, cannot really be reversed. Thereafter, the problems multiply.”4 Repetition moves through and beyond exhaustion, refusing its small death. As Said remarks toward the end of After the Last Sky in 1986, “I have never met a Palestinian who is tired enough of being a Palestinian to give up entirely.”5 Repetition cures, assuages, gives coordinates to those places of erasure, displacement, or abjection and offers a practice, a space of work that inaugurates, evokes, and educates the possibility of return. It thus battles the finality of a practice of mourning and resettlement (whether of the self, the nation, or the libido), resists the abject places and morose silence of melancholia, and with a manic and directed energy refuses the limits of exhaustion. This purposeful agency applies to the practice of the humanities, to interventions against mass media, and to a trying practice of a besieged national identity. Repetition, Said reminds us, serves also to announce finality, to acknowledge death and loss. Alongside Said’s description of Palestinian structures (and implicitly Palestinian selves) as potential ruins, we might set Marx’s injunction in the Eighteenth Brumaire

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that “all that exists deserves to perish.”6 But cultural repetitions, unlike biographical recapitulations or biological reproduction, not only place a sort of celebratory aesthetic “death where life had been.” Their purposeful rebuilding of culture, their reassemblage and ordering, their inventory of sense serve to illustrate a human power to transform nature, and not merely to confirm it.

Saidian Inventories The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.  — A ntonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy” “What has been cogently thought,” Adorno says, “must be thought in some other place by other people. This confidence accompanies even the loneliest and most impotent thought.” That is another way of phrasing the Palestinian dream: the desire for a perfect congruence between memory, actuality, and language. Anything is better than what we have now — but still the road forward is blocked, the instruments of the past are insufficient, we can’t get to the past. . . . . . . Still, I am impressed by some of the methods used to restore Palestine in the meantime. There is the steady trickle of memoirs: the daybooks, journals, albums, diaries, and recollections of various Palestinians.  — E dward Said, After the Last Sky

Saidian inventories have their radical roots in two precursors. The first, Giambattista Vico, provides a historical and narrative frame for communal tales, the collective true fables of a people’s history. The second, Antonio Gramsci, offers the art of a social and class inventory as the historical, economic, and political register of the anonymous mass. This essay marks moments of transition in Said’s work, reviewing some powerful categories in his own critical elaborations. Inventories play a vital and recurrent role in Said’s work, and within it we can trace their genealogy through Gramsci and backward into Vico as the recourse for anamnesis, an archaeology for history’s dispossessed: working classes, masses, gentiles, Palestinians. These inventories form the dialectical threads of Said’s work beyond Orientalism and Cultural Imperialism, pointing to absolute continuities between the work of mourning, repetition, and recovery that unites the humanist to the exile, culture to nation. I trace some of the breadth and foundation of a Saidian inventory from Beginnings to “Secu-



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lar Criticism” and “On Repetition,” from After the Last Sky to “Return to Palestine-Israel,” keeping offstage the provocative self-portraits of Out of Place.7 In traveling over some of Said’s terrain, and remembering the ideological spotlight and vilifications he battled both globally and quite close to home, this meditation concludes both inside and beyond bodies of inventory and moments of return, reflecting on two important Saidian moments of self-revelation and redefinition — one concerning shame and responsibility, the other writing the space between mourning, territory, and the law.

Vichian Inventory: Repilogamenti and Repossession The forms and fables of Western culture, as Vico might have called them, serve for the Palestinian critic as true repilogamenti — gatherings and commentaries that make some other secular order or secular critique possible. 8 The Palestinian utopia, as Said has called it, involves a return without a destination, and the return must be constantly enacted — i n repeated themes, in the repetition of private and national customs, in the constant reassertion of a continued survival, in the restatement of the goals of self-determination, when that self-determination is threatened by Palestinian authorities. After the Last Sky is a profoundly Vichian work, part essay, part reportage, part collective fable, capable of acting as a repilogamento — a recapitulation by a people of its own history. The emotional and moral force of the essays surges precisely from the narrative and critical repetitions of Palestinian lives elaborated through space and time. This preoccupation with inventory, with an evaluative recapitulation and a burdened history, is present already in Beginnings, where the will to begin, in a Vichian sense, acknowledges an end, a decay, a burial. This connection between living and dying, beginning and ending, resonates for Said in the imagined etymological kinship between humanitas and humando. This resonance calls culture and civilization back to their beginnings in the rituals of death and remembrance.9 The resonance of this etymological affiliation has poignant repercussions throughout Said’s work and helps us understand After the Last Sky as a work that articulates humanist affirmation and communal loss. This artful articulation of the humanities with humando as well as humanus recalls us to the rituals of burying exercised by communities — a practice returned to the world of the living by writers and scholars who find and found a home-place, or a discipline, as a site for memory and return. Through Said’s writing, we rediscover the political work of the humanities’ cultural rescue, and we recall that his home discipline of com-

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paratism was founded by other exiles and refugees seeking to rescue and remember a European culture that seemed likewise ruined and dispersed. His humanistic narration of besieged nationalism and resilient national character integrates the politics and culture of Palestine, working against their segregation and dispersal. Thus his insistent return and his Palestinian humanism affirm both political cause and universal value, turning to culture as the place and practice of urgent recognitions. Said affirms the politics of the present through the humanistic inscription of Palestinian culture, reminding us that the practice of the humanities and their enduring and expanding site for culture are both national and supranational. Most poignantly, he reminds us how the value of the humanities lies in their capacity to turn mournful practices of remembrance to political recognitions, and that their legacy is based not on profit but on loss. With repetition comes return, and each in the Saidian oeuvre invokes the other, but always with a critical turn. In examining genealogy, affiliations, gentile and sacred history, novelistic countermemories, imperialist fantasies and self-division, philological foundations or intellectual traditions, Said traces a methodological form and cultural geography for perpetual ritrovamenti — for perpetual return and rediscovery, for reappraising ideological maps by measuring the cultural coordinates of another moment. Such an exercise of will, of the enterprise of conation within selfeducation, affords the critic a repeated practice, a home, a status within the law of culture. But in Said’s case the exercise of moral will leads to the evidence of an erasure, of displacement, of a utopic and atopic site for culture. If Said’s engagement with humanism has been taken to task as high culture or Western,10 then I would suggest that this is also where it must be read most poignantly, not as the practicing of some sentimental art of conservation and encirclement of standards or cultural literacy, but as the tracing of a site that cannot be erased, perpetually marking out and repeating a line of both permanence and flight that exceeds the limits of the Western articulation of culture. The repeated themes of Said’s allegedly conservative cultural corpus, indissolubly bound to the politics of Palestine and to movements of liberation or decolonization, work in fact both to layer and to reinvigorate the radical power of these depleted or discredited moments and movements.

Most poignantly, [Said] reminds us how the value of the humanities lies in their capacity to turn mournful practices of remembrance to political recognitions, and that their legacy is based not on profit but on loss.

Gramscian Inventory In Said’s work, Vichian maxims intersect with Gramscian meditations to form a countermemory of secular order and secular time, resisting the



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final authority of the sacred: the “political lie,” as Erich Auerbach called it, of absolute authority taken up by the state in modernity.11 Said’s writings — l iterary and political — a rticulate Vico’s beginnings, his humanist ontology for a “common nature of the nations,” to Gramsci’s socialist first principles in “The Study of Philosophy”: his insistence on the nature of classes to answer the question “of what historical type is the conformism, the mass humanity to which one belongs?”12 Against the disjointed and episodic experience of modernity, Gramsci insists on a socialist archaeology for the foundations of popular philosophy. For Gramsci the socius of a philosophical inventory is dispersed, submerged in the anonymity of the mass, of peasants, of the working class. In this essay Gramsci turns from mass to individual and insists on the need to know oneself “as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.”13 Gramsci’s attention to inventories lay in part in his role as the philosopher and theoretician of a history of loss and political dispossession. Gramsci’s catalogs would thus insist on recording personal and cultural truths that lay unacknowledged, unmapped, or canceled by Italian politics and by fascism’s victory and its repressions. In his “war of position” in politics and culture, Gramsci both recorded a permanent struggle and acknowledged the annihilation of the frontal assault, the obvious victory. With the same insistence on recording the practices of a displaced history, or an imperiled subjectivity, Said compiles a Palestinian cultural tally even as he bemoans its scarcity, complaining of a dissonance between the “wildness and disorganization of our history and the apparently coherent political, social, and cultural personality.”14 He goes on to mark the absence of a Palestinian ideological inventory of categories, archives, and cartographies capable of matching those of the Western orientalism. In tracing the necessity for rooting a radical poetics/politics and a dispossessed nationalism in the institution, we discover the urgent bridge between Said’s apparent cultural conservatism and his political radicalism: “We have no dominant theory of Palestinian culture, history, society; we cannot rely on one central image (exodus, holocaust, long march); there is no completely coherent discourse adequate to us, and I doubt whether at this point we could be adequate for it.”15

Lateness Said’s outline of the lateness of Palestinian nationalism and self-determi­ nation forces an appraisal and reappraisal of forms and categories that first nations have exploited for cultural authority, that which they have

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assimilated and then critiqued. Here the necessities of a national “lateness” rediscover and to some degree reinvigorate formations and categories whose strategic, revolutionary, and authorizing discourses, once plumbed, are now read as conservative forms.16 Thus the lateness of a radical cause serves not only to rediscover and to repeat the master forms of Western nationalism (which, after all, is what Palestine must antagonistically contend with) but to decenter them, to manipulate their forms as analogues capable of transmitting not the triumph of a national territory but the struggles of a national dispersion. The preoccupation with lateness or return is articulated in an explicitly autobiographical form from 1992 on, beginning with “Return to PalestineIsrael.”17 But that preoccupation is already fully present in the evocative self-disclosures of After the Last Sky. This earlier text articulates a lyrically critical meditation, a singular and binding voice that grounds the anonymous faces that are the exemplars of human rights or catastrophe photography. The text opens a biographical door, assembling personal disclosure from an Edward Said who, by virtue of his connection to a multiplicity of faces and eyes and mouths, speaks as a phenomenological or communal voice, a representative, writing in four movements the spaces, themes, and variations of a displaced culture. His voice, from what in Spanish is called el extranjero (meaning from abroad but connoting literally a place of strangeness), helps connect the estrangement from home and the self-estrangement suffered by refugee or exile to the public and political estrangements that continuously render Palestinians as strangers to humanity, culture, and progress, to their homeland, and which, circularly, render them strangers to themselves.

Return Against exhaustion, Said offers a notion of repeated practice that is both historical and inaugural. But in those repeated practices, and in the decisive repetition of a return to the homeland, the difficult disjunctures between criticism and its object come to the fore. Between After the Last Sky and Said’s first return to Palestine in 1992, one can measure nearly an epoch. Yet for all its poignancy, After the Last Sky is no work of mourning: the act is never quite inaugurated, let alone articulated, in the text. Losses are counted, displacements are narrated, the dead are cited as the freight of the living, but there is no burial, no ending to the loss, no reinvestment of desire and its will. “Return to Palestine-Israel” marks a sea change in Said’s work, and its personal reflection returns us to the revelations of After the Last Sky.



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This time, however, the territory is not cordoned off and reimagined from memory. With “Return” we have no accompanying collective documentary project or photographic archive. The urgency of this late return involves the geography traveled, years that have passed, time measured in lost coordinates. With this essay Said records the lateness of nation, traced as cause in After the Last Sky, to the dangerous and compromised lateness of a territorial solution for Palestine. This other beginning for Said offers us a Palestine traversed and checked against memory, memory whose maps find occupations, erasures, and the trace of family ghosts in the remnants of colonial institutions. Here the repilogamenti of Vico’s secular culture once more encounter Gramsci’s call for the inventory of invisible traces. From secularism against Judeo-Christian authority, to a class memory for the anonymous masses of the working classes, Said elaborates a Palestinian inventory in his writings — t he Palestinian becomes the late exemplar of the twentieth-century struggle of the dispossessed, of the migrant, the worker, the bondsman.

Mourning Arriving in Palestine, on a trip he describes in “Return to PalestineIsrael” as a journey of mourning,18 Said reexamines, in shifting forms, the subjects and subjectivities he had adopted in After the Last Sky, categories of “States,” “Interior,” “Emergence,” and “Past and Future.” To begin the work of mourning, Gillian Rose reminds us, means to encounter the limits of a topos, of the state and its law.19 In After the Last Sky, Said marked one form of social death for Palestinians, narrating his mother’s experience of a negated legal identity within Palestine to highlight the difficult status of Palestinian women and their subordination. 20 With the death of his mother and the return to Palestine, the work of political mourning, like Antigone burying that negated being outside the city walls, seems everywhere represented in his reappraisal, in his new cartography for childhood memories and parental homes. It seems remarkable that it is precisely at the moment when Said undertakes the work of mourning that he begins to meditate on a new necessity for identity and agency — a juridical category for the Palestinian subject as a legal person within the divided Israeli state. 21 Said’s dawning apprehension of that necessity in “Return” developed across the last ten years of his work, as the Palestinian state became synonymous with states of exception and states of emergency, enmeshed in uneven war and coercive peace with its powerful captor and enemy. Looking back to “Return” in recent years, the reader must feel chastened as Said moves around a landscape now

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more striated by state vigilance and violence than ever before. Making a register of lost subjects and institutions, of displaced ghosts and landscapes uncanny in their absence of Palestinian ruins, Said moves instead to look to the state, and to Israeli Palestinians as a visible site, an encampment of agency. These citizens are contestatory yet mobile agents who follow Said’s aunt’s injunction for Palestinians to work both within and against the system — “since every society is going to oppose Palestinians as if by heavenly edict” — a nd thus create a parallel or alternative system that would respond to their needs. 22 Systems, affiliations, networks, institutions: these mark the way for a people beyond a state. What is remarkable about Said’s work and that of other Palestinians inside and outside Palestine-Israel is that repeated appeals, analyses, interventions, and evocations of exile do not become a reactionary or pathological melancholy, or (like that of Zionists or right-wing Cubans) a metaphysical symptom of rabid nationalism circulating in some supraterritorial somatic body. The dialectic played out in Said’s work situates the self not only between territory and law (unstable even in the discourse of human rights) but in a deliberately nondiasporic dialectic that both reenacts and sublates the Nakba, the catastrophe, by moving again and again between exile/estrangement (manfa and ghurba), and return (awdah). 23 Between mourning, the law, and the state. “Return” moves from a surveyed and recovered geography of childhood and genealogy and then in a second movement enters the present of the institutions and community life, the schools, camps, advocates, refugees, and citizens that form a Palestinian present. And it is this reentry into the state limits of Palestinian existence, their encirclement within the law, that somehow permits Said to acknowledge another reality beyond the limits of mourning. “I think I needed the chance metaphorically to bury the dead, and what with the large number of funerary associations for me, Palestine/Israel was indeed a mournful place.”24 With “Return,” the mood is of a meditation on an unknown and compromised territory sedimented, like Freud’s metaphor for memory, on older recollections, archaeologies of what is finished. Divided between a mortuary Jerusalem of a “history finished, packed up, taken somewhere else” (183) and a living Nazareth, dimmest in memory, strongest in presence, Said surveys a new geography, both recognizable and alien. We find there an inscription of an edging mortality, “a fitting accompaniment to the ebbing of my life and the generational progress toward death” (181). But in an echo of Faulkner’s warning that nothing ever happens once and then is finished, Said’s return and his exercise of pilgrimage do not lay the past to rest. They offer the true political valence of mourning, echoing the determination of Antigone and Phocion’s wife, rescuing bodies and ashes beyond city walls.



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The recovery of a dispossessed memory marks both the necessity and the tyranny of law. The integration of this mourning to the present reality of Palestine-Israel offers for Said the possibility of an alternative: “But I can feel and sometimes actually see a different future as I couldn’t before” (199). This inventory of late return opens what has been the latest chapter of Said’s move to establish an alternate order beyond even the law of a thwarted and corrupt Palestinian Authority. It reconnects us to the whole corpus of his work and to the status of an aesthetic catalog whose categories are not only analogues or allusions but thresholds for integrating the public life of the polis to the invisible places of loss and the urgency of responsibility. Said’s meditation on Palestinian work refers us to a Hegelian self-consciousness; his meditations on culture and literature return us to a realm of home, pleasure, and affiliation. And so self-consciousness, in its dialectical repetitions, again and again “comes up against . . . its own positing of ‘the world,’ discovering outcomes the inverse of what it intended.”25

Shame and Responsibility In After the Last Sky, a displaced Palestinian stands before Said at a symposium, a scholarly meeting, a panel on politics, and asks: “Would one of you scholars please tell me, where am I supposed to go now?” As Said recalls, “No one had anything to tell him. He was an embarrassment, and I have no idea what in fact he did, what became of him. My shame.”26 In confessing that he never directly took up the urgency of this intervention — t his calling up of a singular truth within theories of power — Said acknowledges, “My shame,” returning us perhaps to a notion of shame that reveals a separation between act and subject, or between motivation and destination. The episode and the utterance point to the contradictions of profession and vocation, of the pleasures, contingencies, and responsibilities inherent to each. Reaching beyond the humanist pleasure of theorized politics where “in dreams begin responsibilities,” Said comes up against the reiterated and obscured object of his study and the motivating subject of his vocation — t he missing interlocutor, shame and need. And thus, in the midst of professional play and prominence, the Saidian narrator encounters a dialectical paradox, and an unanswered need, where, “seeking pleasure . . . self-consciousness encounters necessity, the grave of life.”27 In Said’s work we find the traces of forms where the pleasures of the text meet the necessities of the world. And curiously, for him, this experience of self-consciousness and shame is experienced outside the Middle East, outside the West Bank, and in contrast to experiences here where

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he was constantly taken up, made to feel one of a community or group, asked for opinions about ongoing works, subjects of inquiry, or political programs.

Like Antigone’s defiance, “Palestinian

Ruin Each Palestinian structure presents itself as a potential ruin. The theme of the formerly proud family house (village, city, camp) now wrecked, left behind, or owned by someone else, turns up everywhere in our literature and cultural heritage. Each new house is a substitute, supplanted in turn by yet another substitute.  — Said, After the Last Sky

The border crossings that Said enacts in his works respond in a way to the necessity of that lost voice, of that displaced life. Crossing borders, the act of mourning both the loss and the shame, refuses finality or quietism or resignation. Like Antigone’s defiance, “Palestinian genius,” in Said’s words, “expresses itself in activities that do not lessen the alienation, discontinuity and dispossession but that dramatize and clarify them instead.”28 The Saidian inventory, articulated across both the body and the territory of his work, invokes a work of resistance that involves mourning but transcends it by attempting to resist in order to challenge and to speak to the finality of the law. Such an inventory, even when it narrates the heroism of Freud or Vico, continues to stress labor in the face of death, determination against exhaustion. “Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, but fragmentary compositions and self-consciously staged testimonials in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations” (38). And if Said’s stress on the humanities refers us to their imaginary Vichian foundations in humando or burying—in the territorial settlement that remembers the dead—then his actual practice and his intellectual genealogy points to exiles, wanderers, heretics, and iconoclasts — a lways in danger of dying away from home. His work, even when exhorting a return to scholarly first principles and intellectual labor, insists on a necessary mobility and on a strategic dissemination of critical self-consciousness. In this willful wandering that exceeds contingencies, expulsions, or exclusions (either by institutions, technologies, or the mirage of a global territory), Said is never mournful about the position of the intellectual nor melancholy about his status; under the most traditional categories, he provokes us to new maneuvers against the burgeoning theological truths of the market. His work chooses “fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over



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genius,” in Said’s words, “expresses itself in activities that do not lessen the alienation, discontinuity and dispossession but that dramatize and clarify them instead.”

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the settlements of held territory. Criticism over resignation: a Palestinian and humanistic self-consciousness in a barren plain of investments and consumer appetites. The heroism of anger, attention, alertness, focus” (150). Alternative thought, the freedom to begin, to think, and act again, either in the American academy or on the West Bank, offers the resources of hope and the recourse of action for the most besieged consciousness, even in the midst of loss and as the deepest work of mourning.

Notes This essay was originally written as a paper for a panel on the work of Edward Said at the Modern Language Association convention of 1999. It was revised and expanded since then, but I have not altered the essay in any substantial way since Said’s death on September 25, 2003. In retrospect, the essay’s themes presage the labor of mourning and the demands for remembrance, responsibility, and engagement that issue from his writing and survive his passing. I chose not to comment on that finality in the piece, nor to change the verbal “time” that frames his work, since, like his memory, Said’s writerly voice remains urgently present, tense, and very much alive. 1. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 262 – 63, 354; Said, “On Repetition,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 111 – 18. 2. For more on Said’s discussion of work as a form of Palestinian economic and psychic resistance, see Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 96 – 100. 3. Said, “On Repetition,” 125. For a discussion of the relationship between the Palestinian domestic compulsion to repeat and the exhaustion of space, see Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 56 – 62. 4. Said, “On Repetition,” 125. 5. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 158. 6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 304; Said discusses the use of genealogy in Marx’s text in “On Repetition,” 120 – 25. 7. My own selective inventory of Said’s work focuses especially on the lessdiscussed texts: Beginnings, and Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky. But I also draw on the following works by Said: Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); “Secular Criticism” and “On Repetition,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic; “Return to Palestine-Israel,” Observer, 25 October – 1 November 1992, collected in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969 – 1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 175 – 99; Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999). 8. For a revealing early discussion of the relationship between recapitulating and beginning the work of thinking provoked by Vico’s fascination for fables or repilogamenti, see Said, Beginnings, 356 – 57.

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9. Ibid., 373 – 74. Here Said memorably excavates Vico’s imagined etymology for humanitas in the Latin humare, or “to bury,” rather than in its true root in humanus. See Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. David Marsh (New York: Penguin, 2001), 8. 10. See, e.g., Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of Said’s humanism in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992). 11. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; rpt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 14. 12. Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 324. 13. Ibid. 14. See Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 20 – 23, 75. 15. Ibid., 129. 16. For a discussion of the conception of “lateness” that preoccupied Said toward the end of his career, see his “Adorno as Lateness Itself,” in Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995). 17. On this return after twenty-six years, see also Said, “Preface to the 1999 Edition,” in After the Last Sky, vi – x i. 18. For the multiple play of mourning in the essay, for his mother, his father, his own failing health, and, symbolically, for Palestine-Israel, see Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” 181 – 82, 199. 19. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35 – 36. 20. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 77 – 78. With the term social death I am invoking Orlando Patterson’s articulation of enslavement and total “natal” alienation in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 21. See Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” 189 – 91. 22. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 119. For Said’s portrayal of his aunt Nabiha as a figure of both historical misery and dogged activism, see After the Last Sky, 116 – 19; and Out of Place, 117 – 21. 23. On Nakba, or catastrophe, see Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 116; on Said’s invocation of exile and estrangement (manfa and ghurba), but not diaspora, see 115; on return (awdah), see 32 – 33. 24. Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” 199. 25. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 74. 26. Said, “Return to Palestine-Israel,” 32. 27. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 74. 28. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, 41.



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Edward Said’s Lieux de Mémoire O u t o f Pl ace a n d t h e P o l i t i c s o f A u to b i o g r a p h y

The contemporary theoretical scene on autobiography, or “life writing” (a term preferred by many of the newer critics), has been thriving in recent years, providing many different or even contradictory perspectives on this literary genre, whose definition and scope have frequently been reformulated.1 Situating myself within the framework built by such complex theoretical positionings and acknowledging the widespread critical concerns about the relevance of texts to political struggles, how narratives legitimize or function as accomplices of historical events, and matters of representation and representability of such events, I first focus here on the unstable and much-negotiated character of autobiography as a genre. Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and the heated debate that its publication caused allows me to illustrate some of the theoretical points discussed in the first part of my essay, as they represent a perfect case of the complex metamorphoses and changing parameters of autobiography. As Said is an exile who writes as a Palestinian and on behalf of Palestinians, I also attempt to probe into the inner mechanisms of autobiographical-historical writing, by applying Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire to my reading of Said’s memoir and its reception. Finally, I map the implications of personal memory, recollection, and writing a personal narrative in a context such as Said’s. The problem of defining autobiography and its relations to other kinds of self-narratives has been subject to much debate. Ever since the publication of James Olney’s important collection of theoretical and critical essays on autobiography in 1980, both the genre of autobiography and the criticism of autobiography have received unprecedented attention. Olney suggests that what we make of the genre depends on the way we define “auto,” “bio,” and “graphy.” At the same time he notes that the style of autobiography has altered significantly through the ages; moreover, the history, the canon, and the definitions of this genre have also been inextricably linked to the history of autobiographical criticism. Discussions of the canon and genre of autobiography, I believe, also reflect changes in thinking about canons and genres in general. If earlier autobiographies and autobiographical criticism stressed the bios, the life, more recent Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

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autobiographies and critical studies have stressed the auto, the self. 2 In so doing they have opened up the discussion of autobiographical narrating by insisting on its status as an act of creation rather than a mere transcription of the past. In other words, recent critics have been more concerned with the autobiographer’s literary representation of his or her philosophical, psychological, cultural, and, additionally, political or spiritual self, rather than the truth-value of the narrative of events in his or her life history. Such explorations situate autobiographical texts within the parameters of literary production rather than the realm of history writing. Continuing Olney’s line of thought, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, go one step further and emphasize the shift of the debate from a concept of the “self” to one of “subjectivity.” Postcolonial and postmodern interventions have amplified, according to them, the possible modes of self-narrating and undermined canonical norms of autobiographical inscriptions. Former preoccupations of autobiography critics with the nature of this genre’s truth-value or the self’s struggle with identity have been displaced, and “a new emphasis on graphia has assumed central importance.”3 Furthermore, acknowledging the complex terrain of autobiography writing and criticism in contemporary culture, the two critics foreground such terms as performativity, positionality, and heteroglossic dialogism as instruments for mapping the complex terrain of autobiography nowadays. Smith and Watson also suggest that the rhetorics of identity, location, and address are organizing new forms of critical inquiry.4 To sum up, along with David Parker, I believe that at this moment in the troubled history of the genre an in-depth “relationality has established itself as a paradigm in contemporary auto/biography studies”; 5 or, to put it otherwise, that both primary texts and theoretical approaches draw upon and adapt intensively highly diverse aspects of contemporary cultural theory, as is the case with Said’s memoir. With regard to the relation between autobiography and the postcolonial critical discourse, Françoise Lionnet takes one step further and emphasizes the performative valences acquired by the genre: “Postcolonial autobiography, in all its myriad forms, is best defined by the transformative and visionary dimension: by the convictions that writing matters and that narrative has the power to transform the reader.” Lionnet insists on the “writer’s responsibility and his or her ability to take risks.”6 In light of all these critical and theoretical shifts and changes of focus, numerous questions on the specific case of Said’s memoir arise: What transformative dimension does Said’s memoir acquire? What risks does he take? What dimensions does autobiography have for him, taking into

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account his position as “father” of postcolonial criticism? Why and how does he appropriate the genre of life writing? Before attempting to answer these questions, I briefly review some major critical stances on the intricate relationship between autobiography and history, and on the fiction-nonfiction debate; these will prove instrumental as starting points for my analysis and, moreover, will make clear one of the most common frameworks within which Said’s memoir has been approached. Autobiography characterized as memoir was the dominant form of life writing in the early history of the genre, when the focus was mainly on life. In this form, the “individual is perceived respectively, as the actor in or the witness to history.”7 Readers in the past looked to the memoir to experience history: “The autobiographer was expected to subordinate imagination to the attempt to communicate trustworthy, verifiable, subjective messages.”8 The memoirs of important players of historical events — generals, prime ministers, various statesmen — were and are eagerly read for their views on the events in which their authors participated. Albert Stone asserts that autobiography cannot be seen only as imaginative literature or as a document of social history: “I remain uneasy to treat autobiography chiefly as a branch of imaginative literature and thus to stress artistic creation over the equally complex processes of historical recreation, ideological argument, and psychological expression. Life is the more inclusive sign — not Literature — which deserves to be placed above the gateway to the house of autobiography.”9 Memoir as a form of witnessing to historical events continues to retain power. The autobiographers of such memoirs personalize history, they give personal accounts of events, and these become individual accounts of public events. Reading thus the dramatic developments of the autobiographical form and the politics of identity formation, as previously mentioned, one becomes increasingly conscious of the “relational turn in life writing studies” and of the play of the autobiographical act itself,10 “in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness.”11 Autobiography in our time, as Paul John Eakin points out, “is increasingly understood as both an art of memory and an art of the imagination.”12 This understanding has important implications for the present study, because Said’s memoir, as I show, brings into play complex questions about self-representation, memory, history, and the process of signification. In an interview with Salman Rushdie, Said was asked if it was not tiring to begin anew to explain the history of Palestine, “to go back and again



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to the same story,” every time something related to Palestine happens in U.S. media: “The interesting thing is that there seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story unless you go on telling it; it will just drop and disappear,”13 answered the critic. Said kept on telling the story in a variety of ways, in dozens of interviews and several books, including his memoir. Starting with Orientalism, where he analyzes “the affiliation of knowledge with power,”14 Said began approaching possibilities of a better understanding of the East, the “Orient,” and consequently, in an oblique way, he tackled the problem of Palestine and his own belonging to that “lost world.” If in The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), Peace and Its Discontents (1996) Said continues the main thesis of Orientalism by focusing on the emergence of the Palestinian nation and its presentday existence, it is his collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, published in 1986 under the title After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, that, I think, serves best as a witness to contemporary Palestinian identity issues. What Said writes mirrors and complements the black-and-white photographs with which he is continuously engaged in a dialogue. The photographs are not the portraits of his own family (later included, however, in his memoir), but rather pictures of people doing ordinary things, displaying the everyday facts of life in hard times. Said thus had a strong long-term interest in creating the framework for Palestinian voices and history; from a certain point on in his very public career, Said wrote, he worked tirelessly and served as a spokesman (both officially and unofficially) for the Palestinian national movement, explaining Palestinian identity, history, politics, and rights to the American audience. Having noticed and criticized the lack of any serious effort to institutionalize the Palestinian story, to give it objective existence,15 he constantly insisted that the Palestinians had the right to represent themselves, and that they be entitled to narrate their own history, which, as he argued in “Permission to Narrate,” has a value and specificity of its own. Perhaps the greatest battle Palestinians have waged as a people has been the right to a remembered presence, and with that presence, the right to possess and reclaim a collective historical reality, at least since the Zionist movement began its encroachments on the land. . . . What we never understood was the power of a narrative history to mobilize people around a common goal. In the case of Israel, the narrative’s main point was that Zionism’s goal was to restore, reestablish, repatriate, and reconnect a people with its original homeland.16

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Emphasizing the importance of a Palestinian narrative, he acknowledges the impossibility of imagining a single one: “There are many kinds of Palestinian experience, which cannot be assembled into one. One would therefore have to write parallel histories of the communities in Lebanon, the occupied territories, and so on.”17 This is the background against which Out of Place may be seen as Said’s next step in encountering and responding to questions of Palestinian identity. This time he turned to his individual story, more specifically to his childhood in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Dhour el Shweir between his year of birth and his departure for the United States: I found myself telling the story of my life against the background of World War II, the loss of Palestine and the establishment of Israel, the end of the Egyptian monarchy, the Nasser years, the 1967 War, the emergence of the Palestinian movement, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo Peace Process. These are in my memoir only allusively, even though their fugitive presence can be seen here and there. Each of the places I lived in — Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon, the United States — has a complicated, dense web of valences that was very much part of growing up, gaining an identity, forming my consciousness of myself and of others.18

The quest for identity, offering one’s life as a model, self-understanding, and ordering or reordering one’s life may be as many reasons for writing an autobiography. Said starts writing his memoir as a result of a medical diagnosis, leukemia, in 1991; he found it important, he says, “to leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived in the Arab world” (ix). It is a return to his childhood in Jerusalem, Lebanon, and mostly Cairo — what he calls the “lost or forgotten world” (xi) — a nd to the prep schools and universities that he attended when he came to the United States. It is the story of a boy who felt out of place as a Palestinian in Egypt (and Lebanon, where his family had a summer house), as a Christian in a Muslim world, and as an Arab, holding an American passport and citizenship (his father emigrated to the United States in 1911 and returned to Palestine after World War I) in a colonial world. The attempt to leave something behind, complemented by the feeling he “had something to understand about a peculiar past,”19 is also an attempt to reconcile himself with the unsettling sense “of many identities — mostly in conflict with each other” (5) and to “open himself to the deeply disorganized state of my real history . . . and then to try to construct them in order” (6). Memory proves crucial and instrumental in such an



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[Said] probes into the incongruities so painful to him as a child, especially the mixture of cultures and languages that made him yearn not to be confusingly plural.

endeavor: “My memory proved crucial to my being able to function at all during periods of debilitating sickness, treatment and anxiety” (ix); “my memory — u naided by anything except concentrated reflection on and archaeological prying into a very distant and essentially irrecoverable past — seemed hospitable and generous to my often importunate forays” (216). Said turns to memory because memory can be seen as the precondition and the mechanism of both identity and history. Beneath all the propositions and declarations of narrative and history stands the glue of identity, “the primary fastening, which is memory.” Thus behind narrative identity lie micromechanisms of memory. And from these grow the roots, trunks, branches, and flowers of our personal and social histories, as Paul Ricoeur would put it. 20 The story of a “foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakable Arabic family name Said” (3) unfolds peacefully. It starts with the portrait of his family, its genealogy, and complicated web of relatives —  maternal and paternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins who will be with us throughout the book. The beginning is thus a collection of portraits of family members interspersed with accounts of Said’s first perceptions of them. It narrates episodes and situations of Said’s early life, bringing before our eyes the little boy playing Robinson or Tarzan, watching Ali Baba, Aladdin, or Sinbad movies, reading Shakespeare with his mother, and listening to the Opera Nights. It continues with the unruly schoolboy, Said’s concerns about his body at puberty, the girls whom he fell in love with, and the boring summer holidays. The narrator probes into the incongruities so painful to him as a child, especially the mixture of cultures and languages that made him yearn not to be confusingly plural. As a boy, he wished he could have been “all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian” (5). The search for understanding his identity is inextricably linked with the historical moment in which he lived and the changing realities of the world around him. In “Between Worlds” Said calls Out of Place a story “worthy of rescue,”21 given that the three places where he grew up no longer exist as they were. To re-create his story is in some sense to re-create those places, and the book abounds in topologies and description of places; it maps all his departures and travels, juggling such names as Talbiyah, Zamalek, Haifa, Katamon, Cairo, Ramallah, or Dhour el Shweir. It offers detailed accounts and impressions of everyday life, acquaintances, and incidents. The portraits of Said’s neighbors or friends also echo themes, images, feelings, details, and nuances that document the intricacies of that “Levantine” world. In describing friends of the family, of mixed Lebanese, Egyptian, Armenian, and Turkish origin, Said writes:

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But like us they were marked for extinction in the worldly Cairo environment that was already beginning to be undermined. We were all Shawam, amphibious Levantine creatures whose essential lostness was momentarily stayed by a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of daydream, that included elaborate catered dinner parties, outings to fashionable restaurants, the opera, ballet, and concerts. By the end of the forties we were no longer just Shawam but khawagat, the designated and respectful title for foreigners which, as used by Muslim Egyptians, has always carried a tinge of hostility. Despite the fact that I spoke — a nd I thought looked — l ike a native Egyptian, something seemed to give me away. I resented the implication that I was somehow a foreigner, even though deep down I knew that to them I was, despite being an Arab. (195)

Memoirs by academics usually do not cause an angry public stir, as was the case with Said’s memoir. The personal circumstances of its writing (Said’s leukemia), stated directly, also play a major part in the debate triggered by the book. For Said, his book necessarily means going back and attempting to rescue from oblivion times and places that had all but disappeared. “It’s like an inverse of my illness,” he said in an interview. “It’s like a mirror, but from which all the actual images have been effaced. There is nothing in the book about it. And I found that very salutary, having something like that to go back.”22 Writing one’s life story, as therapy, as healing, as an act of remembering (the past) but also of forgetting (the present), might stand as a possible interpretation of Said’s memoir. However, none of the early critics and reviewers of the book focused on the psychological valences of this memoir, which Said himself probably intended. Almost no review tackled the “self” part of the “self-life-writing” of his autobiography. 23 Without exception, the book was initially analyzed either in the context of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict or in relation to Said’s commitment to the Palestinian cause, as its main representative and spokesman in the United States. Justus Reid Weiner launched one of the first and most ferocious attacks; titled “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” it was published in Commentary, “a bastion of uncompromising Zionism,”24 as its opponents call it. This review is mainly an attempt to undermine Said’s credibility as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause by questioning his very Palestinian identity and arguing that he constantly overstated his and his family’s connections to Palestine. Weiner accused Said of embroidering his story to make himself more Palestinian than he is, and more of a victim of the Nakba, the fall of Palestine in 1948 when Israel was created and Palestinians driven out, than he ever was: What are we to make of that, in his own case, the plain, direct, and honest truth is so radically at odds with the parable of Palestinian identity he has



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been at such pains to construct over the decades? For, to say it the last time, he himself grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward Said’s birth and had become the owner of a thriving business. . . . Whatever we do finally make of all this, there can be no denying that the parable itself is a lie, an artful lie; a skillful lie; above all a very useful and by now widely accepted lie — but a lie. . . . he continues the process of silently “spinning” this lie, a process now auspiciously launched in Out of Place. 25

An attempt to discredit Said as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause is plainly intended to discredit the cause as a whole. This is how Said retorted to Weiner’s arguments in the Egyptian journal Al-Ahram: If they can prove that the leading Palestine intellectual is a liar, what does this say about the rest of Palestinians? “It is part of the Palestinian fate,” Said wrote, “always to be required to prove one’s existence and history.”26 As a result, three different Web sites, CounterPunch, Salon Books, and The Guardian, launched a debate about the debate, and for a long while there was a constant outpouring of articles related to this point. 27 However, this exchange covers only one of the major attempts to discredit Said in regard to his memoir. In a New Statesman article titled “Israel v. Palestine: Which Side Is the Left On?” Geoffrey Wheatcroft apparently dismisses Weiner’s argument while commenting that Said “has a light attitude to fact.” Wheatcroft discards Weiner’s attack only to reinforce it from a different perspective, namely, by stressing Said’s European and Eurocentric background both in his professional and private life, then concludes, in a casual and ironic tone: “The accidents of his birth are irrelevant to the real truth, that Edward Said is a man of the West, and to the larger truth that the world we live in today has been made by Europe. Do I need to add, for the better or worse?”28 The British novelist Timothy Mo, in The Spectator, with an irreverent tone (“[Said’s] memoir is a new and tragically perhaps final departure for him — he is dying of leukemia”), accuses Said of inconsistency and even hypocrisy: “Said’s stance on his dual cultural heritage is inconsistent to the point of hypocrisy. . . . he takes the enlightened decencies of the host country for granted while he cheers on benighted from a safe distance.” Adding a personal note, “as someone as doubly mixed and triply displaced as the professor,” Mo continues, “I don’t buy the: ‘Please feel sorry for me, but aren’t I an interesting human being?’ premise that underlies the whole book.”29 In SAIS Review, a fellow Jerusalem-born scholar, Meron Benvenisti, treads the same line of inquiry. He views Said’s memoir in a political context, summarizing the debate so far:

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Questions about his integrity raised for political reasons by right wing Jewish detractors [Weiner’s article] . . . have been angrily rejected as false by his Israeli left-wing supporters who — regardless of the truth — v iewed them as a personal affront. Said’s life and therefore his memoir is perceived in a political context. . . . Although Out of Place is intended to tell the reader about Said’s family, his personal emotions and his internal landscape, it is the political — not the personal — aspect, which readers and reviewers seek or read into this book. 30

Benvenisti’s interest, however, is “also political” — as he himself readily admits — a nd he accuses Said of selective blindness and childhood myopia for not acknowledging the Jewish presence in the Jerusalem of his childhood: “He clearly has no recollection of the one hundred thousand Jews who inhabited the area surrounding tiny Talbiyah.” If so far, in the reviews mentioned, Said’s memoir was one way or another denied authenticity and truth-value and accused of “non-representability,” now, with Benvenisti, it is viewed as emblematic for all those who left Palestine: White members of well established Jewish families took their places in Yishun’s military forces. . . . their Arab contemporaries left town before the war or during its early months. . . . in this respect the Said family is not unique. . . . [his] parents had taken him to the safety of Cairo six months earlier. . . . When Said’s father had given up on Palestine as a place, my father was wounded. (218, emphasis mine)

Once again Said’s writing is reduced to the status of rhetoric, even though the perspective is changed. Benvenisti continues: For all his bold rhetoric and admirable activism after 1967 Said still seems unable to assign to the Palestinians any responsibility for the event of 1948. . . . he cannot muster the courage to openly admit the cowardice and betrayal of the Palestinian leadership and elites including his own family during 1948. (218 – 19, emphasis mine)

Benvenisti then refers to the lack of Palestinian unity versus the Israeli one: “The arrogant disregard toward the primitive and ignorant lower classes was a decisive factor in the defeat of Palestine in 1948” (218). After all this, the memoir can be easily reduced to a “portrait of privileged family and a pampered youth in the midst of great suffering and great destruction” (220). In his “Exile’s Return,” published in the New York Review of Books, Amos Elon analyzes Palestine-Israeli history, its conflicts, and Said’s



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involvement in the PLO, the peace process, and the Oslo agreements, then proceeds to a detailed presentation of the memoir as such and in the end discards Weiner’s accusations. This new, less-passionate direction is continued by Alon Confino’s complex article published in Israel Studies, titled “Remembering Talbiyah: On Edward Said’s Out of Place”: this is truly the first review that goes beyond taking sides in the Middle East conflict and making class-struggle judgments in reading Said’s memoir. Confino reads the book in the context of Said’s critical work (he relates it to the role of the intellectual, the significance of exile, voices of power, etc.), and within a larger context, that is, the Palestinian-Israeli national narratives: Both narratives possess a notion of exile and dispossession — for Israelis, a 2000-year history of Diaspora that ended with the foundation of Israel, for the Palestinians, a history of rootedness in Palestine that ended in dispossession with the same foundation of Israel. But both narratives also insist on a national home with a definite idea of place and ownership. These two national narratives talk past each other, ignoring the other’s history and suffering. Said’s self-representation also includes a sense of exile and a sense of home. He contributes, however, by providing a sense of the Other, as when he recently wrote that “there can be no possible reconciliation [between Jews and Palestinians], no possible solution unless these two communities confront their experience [of the Holocaust and the 1948 dispossession] in the light of the other.” Perhaps it needs a cosmopolitan intellectual, with a sense of exile and of roots, who lives far from the eye of the storm to state this fundamental truth. 31

Confino points to the core of the debate and the whole anger it produced by concluding that through his memoir “Said has written a testimony more eloquent than all his political writing; the personal is often more powerful than the purely political” (196). This heated debate and controversy recalls similar reactions of various Chinese American scholars to Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. Some Chinese American critics questioned its autobiographical status, its authenticity, and its representativeness. 32 The fundamental objection concerned its generic status, more specifically its being billed as autobiography rather than fiction. However, while Kingston has never claimed truth-value, Said pointed out both in his memoir and in his rebuttal to Weiner that he was telling the truth. 33 “There [in Out of Place] I scrupulously record the facts of my early life spent between Jerusalem, Cairo and Dhour Al-Shweir (Lebanon), making clear that, being the member of a privileged class, I was spared the worst ravages of the Nakba.”34 In the same article he goes on to correct many of

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Weiner’s “mistakes of fact” and even suggests possible sources of further inquiry (e.g., his professor in Canada, his oldest cousin, the children of the pastor, etc.). What does this whole controversy tell us? Why was this book more controversial than any other by Said? 35 What are the implications of explicit autobiographical writing in Said’s case? More precisely, what are these implications when taking into account his status as an exile, as the most representative spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the United States, and as a highly influential and well-established critic in American academia? Several issues are at stake here, all intertwined along the axes created by such complicated and uneasy relationships as those built between autobiography and history, history and memory, exile and identity. The problematic relationship between autobiography and history, as mentioned above, may provide the first key to understanding the nature of such a debate. Said re-creates vivid, personal pictures of his childhood experiences in places that have now disappeared, politically and culturally. Exile autobiographers inevitably have a sense that they are witnesses to history; one cannot fail noticing the way Said, too, presents himself as a “witness” to history (the various histories he lived through and regimes he lived under in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon), as well as his impulse to testify to his experience and show the rest of the world what happened to him and his homeland. I believe that one way to understand the reviews discussed above in connection to Said’s memoir may be discovered within the complex framework built around the heated and highly controversial relationship between autobiographical writing and history. As previously discussed, Albert Stone, the autobiographical critic, considers that autobiographies can provide discreet glimpses to historical events, but as historical documents they are problematic. They must be understood as “overdetermined” expressions of the autobiographer’s autonomy, but they nevertheless bring into focus the historical, social, and cultural environment in which the author lived. 36 For the historian, such writings provide important information and authentic subjective responses to historical events, but additional documentary sources are needed to verify activities and facts. Autobiographies as windows to history are thus still valid but problematic. They become “individual versions of history,”37 and as channels to history they are important in a variety of contexts for both critics and historians. In the conundrums of Palestine’s past, the relevance of autobiographical writing lends itself to multiple interpretations and significations. Assembling an experiential history can function as countermemory, as a



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means to renarrativize the past and break the silences and fill in the gaps of official history. In the face of no official narrative, or erased/distorted narrative, the individual narrative and memory become the source of and representation of history. The investment of memory with the function of preserving collective identity over time is quite common. Anthony Smith even stated: “One might almost say: no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation.”38 This relationship between personal memory, collective identity, and national identity appears to play an essential role in the way critics received Said’s memoir. Below, I discuss the French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire; reading Out of Place from Nora’s point of view might prove instrumental for a better interpreting and understanding of the heated reception, outlined above, that Said’s memoir triggered. According to Pierre Nora, “memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name.” Nora differentiates between what he calls history and “real memory.” Continually in process, “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived,” real memory functions as “a bond tying us to the eternal present.” Memory surrounding the rememberer, memory in process, memory as a continually renegotiated ground of social interaction, this “real memory” is, according to him, social and unviolated. History, on the other hand, is an artificial form of remembering, composed of “sifted and sorted historical traces . . . of mediation, of distance”; it is “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.” The means by which “our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past,” history is a representation of the past, while memory is the perpetually actual phenomenon. 39 Because of the “acceleration of history,” which confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory and history, Nora introduces the concept of lieux de mémoire. Sites of memory, according to him, “originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies . . . because such activities no longer occur naturally.”40 To keep the traces of memory, we must create sites of memory — museums, festivals, anniversaries, or memoirs. We need lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. The truth of lieux de mémoire, Nora continues, is that “without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away. . . . if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de

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mémoire” (12). An important dimension of Nora’s sites of memory, which sheds light on understanding the angry stir Said’s book caused, is that such sites are “bastions” upon which “we buttress our identities,” but, according to Nora, “if the defeated were not threatened, there would be no need to build them” (12). Nora’s work constitutes thus a key theoretical intervention on the contemporary relationship between nation, identity, and memory. From the perspective of Palestinian history, I would say that Said’s memoir itself becomes a lieu de mémoire, a site where “memory crystallizes and secrets itself,” which functions as traces of such “environments of memory” in a society cut off from its past and even original location (7). This very approach may account for the double edge of Said’s memoir, which made the reviews of the book become reactions to his early life: the book works as a sum of lieux de mémoire, because in the Palestinian case there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. “If history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de mémoire”; such is the way in which Nora further explains his term, and this sounds truer than ever in the Palestinian case. The very existence of Palestine and consequently its memory have constantly been under the siege of recent history — h istory as a means of organizing and reconstructing the past, itself a very problematic and incomplete one. “Indeed, it is this very push and pull that produces lieux de mémoire — moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned” (12). Said’s representation of Palestine, his family background, and his early life revealed in the memoir fit perfectly with Nora’s definition of sites of memory. The episodes that Said depicts and the places and people that he describes are all moments of history turned away from the movement of history and then returned, through personal recollection, to the pages of his memoir, thus becoming a Palestinian “site of memory” so much feared and criticized by his opponents. Just as Nora provides a catalog of “places of memory,” which, he argues, now form the basis of French social memory, Said’s memoir viewed as a lieu de mémoire enables the same shift about Palestinian social memory and consequently Palestinian identity. Out of Place can be interpreted as achieving the connection (a highly problematic and problematized one, in Said’s case) between individual and national identity via personal memory and recollection. By this move Palestinian identity can form itself through “places of memory” rather than through a concept of national identity understood in relation to the history of a “politically determined group of citizens” that, in Said’s view, was no longer possible, given the specific context. Said’s homeland, forever lost, survives only in traces and memories.



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de mémoire, because in the Palestinian case there are no longer milieux

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What Said the autobiographer, a Janus-faced exiled and translated person, offers us in this book are traces of a living past that at the same time mark its destruction.41 The people, places, and moments that he gives voice to are perfect illustrations of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, “no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”42 Just like Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Out of Place is “a mixed hybrid . . . bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mobius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile.”43 Said’s book is an act of witnessing and a site of memory because it evokes and tries to re-create the life that existed; it itself turns into a site where subsequent generations can find a lost origin, where they can learn about the time and place that they will never see. Out of Place thus also belongs to the tradition of memory books born from the impulse to write a testament for future generations. “Another purpose in doing it was that I wanted my children to have something to look at,” acknowledges Said in an interview with Scott Sherman.44 Said’s book constitutes an unprecedented, truly popular labor to record in writing as much as possible about a destroyed world. Out of Place becomes an agent of memory, as Said is someone who gives narrative shape to the surviving fragments of an irretrievable past. Seen in this context, the photographs (the stationery of his father, group photos with family and friends) are both icons and indexical traces: as traces they record both life and death, preserve and create memory, and build a site of commemoration and rememoration. 45 Interpreted as a “site of memory,” the book commemorates and monumentalizes these Palestinian traces to perpetuate a lost tradition and maintain a collective identity. A mixture, as already noted, of life and death and of the temporal and the eternal, a major purpose of lieux de mémoire, as well as of Said’s book, is “to stop time, to inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial”; 46 however, it is also clear that the sites of memory “thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections.”47 This capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications, is another key feature of lieux de mémoire that applies to Said’s book, as I show in the next section. The relations between memory and history, as already pointed out in Nora’s approach, are exceptionally vexed especially in their implications for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. The problem of memory as such has become a constant preoccupation of historians and critical theorists

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alike. What aspects of the past should be remembered and how should they be remembered? A significant part of Said’s book is an act of individual remembering and evocation of collective memory and collective experience. The use of memory, remembering, and evocation can and should be subject to examination: “Whenever remembering is evoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where and in which context, against what?”48 By writing his memoir and turning to his early years in the Palestinian Jerusalem, Said created a Palestinian site of memory and continued his effort dedicated to a Palestinian narrative on a more personal tone. His story can be shared and remembered and forms a national memory and tradition. Accordingly, his authority to spin such a story and its very authenticity were challenged for many reasons, such as his class status, his family’s special situation, his early departure to the United States, and so on. Criticism of his autobiography becomes political in just this way. Because of its generic claims to truth, the genre of autobiography offered Said the opportunity to promote himself as a representative subject, that is, as subject who stands for others; but it also threatened him with unsympathetic scrutiny. As Said knows well, public and private life are interwoven in such a way that both legitimation and discrediting are always possible. Within the volatility generated by representativeness, the private becomes ambivalent as it transforms into public discourse. Concerned with remembering and the interpenetration of the private and the public, Sidonie Smith notes: “The I as an enunciatory site is a point of convergence of autobiographical politics and the politics of memory.”49 Of these, memory is crucial because, like experience, it is both what one possesses by virtue of living and what can be constituted as evidence only by submitting it to various tests and protocols of presentation. As evidence, memory is only as authoritative as the person who is remembering, and only to a degree permitted in particular contexts. There is, then, a politics of memory in the sense that a politics of persons and their actions is operating, as Michel Foucault theorized, in a field of power. Said embarked on putting together his memoir after having written a great deal and after his authority and voice in the American academia and American public sphere at large had long been institutionalized and respected, as the impressive number of volumes dedicated to him and celebrating his work, along with interviews and talk shows, clearly show. In this particular framework, the Palestine of the title of his book The Question of Palestine, even then indirectly set under question, is now fully a “place.” In her review of Said’s memoir, Diane Stevenson makes the connection between the book, the debate it caused, and American consumer society.



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In a consumer society, she notes, “history is being sold by personality, by the personal credibility of the witness. We are to trust the teller, not the tale. And so individual memories have become the stuff of our version of history.” Further on she writes: “His memoir has the integrity of a personal story; it isn’t something to be turned into instant history. It enters into history, but through the dialectic between the part and the whole, the personal and the public, not a short circuit from one to the other. It’s the private story of a public intellectual.”50 Said’s memoir has taken us along the complex and problematic connections between autobiography and history, personal memory, national identity, exile and literary criticism. Writing his memoir, he writes his identity, rewrites his earlier work, creates a Palestinian site of memory, and finally turns Palestine from a trope into a full-fledged topos. As we could notice, for Said his autobiography had a thoroughly existential and profoundly human dimension. It had an existential dimension for him as an individual in a moment of personal crisis, as well as for him as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, a cause in crisis. His memoir works two ways, just like a Derridean pharmakon. Given the reactions of the press, it certainly works as poison; given that he fulfills his mission to narrate, it does function as remedy, healing. Healing at the individual level, the writing of the memoir gave him “something to look forward to . . . a purpose”: it was a reverse of his illness, “whereas with other sorts of work that I did — essays, lectures, teaching, journalism — I was going across the illness. . . . with this memoir I was borne along” (216). Also, healing worked in the sense of commemorating and being able to leave an account of those remote times and places, facing loss and forgetting. In this essay I have attempted to stake out a terrain that calls for staking, yet paradoxically refuses it and in general evades any definite boundaries or frames. Said’s autobiography goes beyond the old model of literary genre with more or less clear boundaries and contours, stubbornly resisting any possible fixity; in his case, autobiography avoids the two directions in which it was analyzed in previous periods, namely, history and fiction/ nonfiction, inhabiting, I hold, a third space of continuous becoming, the space of the Deleuzian “AND.” Said’s memoir becomes a minefieldlike mobile territory of constant clashes and negotiations, as I have attempted to demonstrate with the analysis of the reviews of the book. Out of Place is composed of difference, multiplicity, and contingency; as such, it can be a dangerous, uncomfortable location for both reader and writer, as all his reviews clearly show. It marks points of crisis, spaces where conflicting values, ideas, and beliefs converge only to diverge anew along lines that construct even wider splits and conflicts. As a Palestinian

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lieu de mémoire, his book surprises us by its capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of its ramifications. Seen as such, Said’s memoir opens up in-between spaces where new forms of art, experience, and political action emerge.

Notes For practical reasons, in this essay terms such as autobiography, memoir, self-narrative, and life writing will be used interchangeably. 1. The fall issue of Biography, a journal dedicated to life writing, contains an annual annotated bibliography; for the last four years, the bibliographies have been almost ninety pages long and contained around eight hundred entries, covering single-author books, edited issues and volumes, articles in scholarly journals, and dissertations. The editor, Craig Howes, notes in the 2004 issue that “we expect the numbers of publications, and the numbers of authors who see life writing as one of their specialty areas only to increase” (Biography 27, no. 4 [2004]: v). For differing perspectives on this genre, see Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” MLN 94 (1979): 919 – 30; James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Albert Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 2. James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment,” in Olney, Autobiography, 20 – 21. 3. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 129 – 37. 4. Ibid., 143 – 47. 5. David Parker, “Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/biography in the (Anti-)Global Age,” Biography 28, no. 1 (2005): v. 6. Françoise Lionnet, “Of Mangoes and Maroons,” in De/Colonizing the Subject, The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 322. 7. Eakin, Touching the World, 142. 8. Albert Stone, “Modern American Autobiography: Text and Transactions,” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 100. 9. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts, 19. 10. Parker, “Inhabiting Multiple Worlds,” vi. 11. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, 5 – 6. 12. Ibid., 6.



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13. Salman Rushdie, “On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said,” in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Penguin, 1991), 178. 14. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 24. 15. Said talks about this in several articles and interviews, including “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 175 – 93; “Permission to Narrate,” London Review of Books, 16 February 1984, 13 – 17; and “On a Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said,” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 166 – 87. 16. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 184. 17. Rushdie, “On Palestinian Identity,” 179. 18. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), xi, xii. Hereafter cited in the text. 19. Jacqueline Rose, “Edward Said Talks to Jacqueline Rose,” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 15. 20. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 21. Edward Said, “Between Worlds,” London Review of Books, 7 May 1998, reprinted in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 568. 22. Janny Scott, “A Palestinian Literary Critic Confronts Time,” New York Times, 19 September 1998. 23. Justus Reid Weiner, “ ‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary, September 1999, 23 – 31; Weiner, “Justus Reid Weiner Writes,” Commentary, January 2000, 9 – 16; Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Israel v Palestine: Which Side Is the Left On?” New Statesman, 18 October 1999, 32 – 33; Timothy Mo, “Alpha or Gamma for Behaviour,” Spectator, 18 – 25 December 1999, 66 – 6 8; Meron Benvenisti, “Blank Spaces: Talbiyah and Rehavia,” SAIS Review 20 (2000): 215 – 2 0; Amos Elon, “Exile’s Return,” New York Review of Books, 18 November 1999, 12 – 15; Scott Sherman, “Edward Said: A Contested History,” Publishers Weekly, 6 September 1999, 74 – 75; David Pryce-Jones, “Corruption of the Best,” National Review, 9 August 1999, 45 – 46; Christopher Hitchens, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” Nation, 4 October 1999, 9; Edward Grossman, “Speaking for Himself,” American Spectator, December 1999 – January 2000, 38 – 43; Ian Buruma, “Misplaced Person,” New York Times, 3 October 1999. Articles such as Mustapha Marrouchi, “Exile Runes,” College Literature (2001): 88 – 127; William V. Spanos, “Edward Said’s Mount Hermon and Mine: A Forwarding Remembrance,” boundary 2 28 (2001): 157 – 89; Andrew N. Rubin, “Techniques of Trouble: Edward Said and the Dialectics of Cultural Philology,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 861 – 76; or Amahl Bishara, “House and Homeland: Examining Sentiments about and Claims to Jerusalem and Its Houses,” Social Text, no. 75 (2003): 141 – 62, are not subject to my inquiry: they were published a few years after the publication of Said’s memoir and are not properly reviews but rather complex and nuanced approaches to Said’s memoir. 24. Wheatcroft, “Israel v Palestine.” 25. Weiner, “My Beautiful Old House,” 23 – 31. 26. Edward Said, “Defamation, Zionist-Style,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 26 August – 1 September 1999, weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/444/op2.htm.

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27. CounterPunch, 1 September 1999, “Commentary ‘Scholar’ Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said,” www.counterpunch.org/said1/html. See also www.salon.com/books/log/1999/08/26/said and Julien Borger, “Friends Rally to Repulse Attack on Edward Said,” Guardian, 23 August 1999, www.guardian. co.uk/israel/Story/o,2763,203150,00.html. 28. Wheatcroft, “Israel v. Palestine,” 32 – 33. 29. Mo, “Alpha or Gamma for Behaviour,” 66 – 6 8. 30. Benvenisti, “Blank Spaces,” 215. 31. Alon Confino, “Remembering Talbiyah: On Edward Said’s Out Of Place,” Israel Studies 5 (2000): 194 – 95. 32. Frank Chin, “The Most Popular Book in China,” Quilt 4 (1984): 6 – 12; Chin, “This Is Not an Autobiography,” Genre 18, no. 2 (1985): 109 – 30; Benjamin Tong, “Critic of Admirer Sees Dumb Racist,” San Francisco Journal, 11 May 1977, 6; Kathryn Fong, “To Maxine Hong Kingston: A Letter,” Bulletin for Concerned Asian Scholars 9, no. 4 (1977): 67 – 69. 33. Said emphasizes the truth-value of his memoir even in later articles and interviews such as “Edward Said Confronts His Future, His Past, and His Critics’ Accusations,” Atlantic Monthly, 22 September 1999, www.theatlantic.com/unbound/ interviews/ba990922.htm; or Said, “The Hazards of Publishing a Memoir,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 2 – 8 December 1999, weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/458/op2.htm. 34. Said, “Defamation, Zionist-Style.” 35. Said’s work has often been attacked and criticized; Aijaz Ahmad and many others top the list of his most virulent critics. 36. Stone, “Modern American Autobiography,” 95 – 119. 37. Ibid., 97. 38. Anthony D. Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996): 383. See also Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83 – 86. 39. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 8. 40. Ibid., 12. 41. Susan Suleiman’s analysis of Holocaust memoirs, “Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Immigrants,” discusses the dialectic of rememoration and commemoration. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 397 – 418. 42. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12. 43. Ibid., 19. 44. Sherman, “Edward Said,” 74. 45. I am indebted to Hirsch’s extremely interesting essay on photography’s capacity to invoke absence as well as presence. See Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” devoted to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in Suleiman, Exile and Creativity, 418 – 47. 46. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 19. 47. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 8.



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48. Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 100. 49. Sidonie Smith, “Memory, Narrative, and the Discourses of Identity in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven,” in Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998), 41. 50. Diane Stevenson, “Memory and History,” Yale Review 88 (2000): 145.

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