"They can't express themselves, they have to be expressed by others." — Marx, Louis Bonaparte's Eighteenth Day of the Foggy Moon
In today's world where the West holds the right to speak, the real voices of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which are on the weak side, are often not heard by the whole world. This is especially true for the Middle East, a region that is both ancient and mysterious. Therefore, today it is necessary to get to know this internationally renowned master of Middle Eastern thought, Edward W. said.
Edward Said, Source: wikipedia.org
Born in Palestine in 1935 to a wealthy Christian Arab family, Edward Said attended a Western school in Cairo, Egypt, during the British occupation of Palestine, and received an Anglo-American cultural education. In the 1950s, Said went to the United States to obtain a doctorate from Harvard University and taught at Columbia University in 1963, teaching English and comparative literature. He is a well-known literary theorist and critic whose works include Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, The Question of Palestine, Intellectuals, World Text Critics, and Politics of Displacement: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination. It should be noted here that, although Said himself is not a Muslim, he has always insisted on the idea that Palestine should be established and has broken with Arafat as a result of the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, arguing that the agreement has lost the pre-1963 Palestinian territory. On the Palestinian-Israeli issue, he believes that "only through peaceful dialogue can the suffering caused by the endless war on the Arab and Jewish peoples be alleviated."
Orientalism
Orientalism, Source: wikipedia.org
In the academic community, "orientalism" is a major issue in cultural studies, and orientalism has a long history. Among them, Hegel is the pioneer of his academic level, and Sayyid is the integrator who elevated him to the level of contemporary discourse mechanisms. It is generally believed that "Orientalism" refers to the study of the language, social culture, and various humanities of the East (Near East, Middle East, Far East) in the East. If early Orientalism still had a strong academic color, the so-called "Orientalism" that was widely used from it was more political. Whether it is Orientalism or Orientalism, it is actually a kind of thinking of Westerners who stand on the European standpoint and regard the East as the "other", and it is an interpretation of the East by Western scholars.
The book "Orientalism" (also translated as Orientalism), which made Sayyid famous, caused great concern and controversy between the East and the West after its publication in 1978. He had three levels of definition of Orientalism. First, the most acceptable is its meaning as a discipline of an academic institution; second, Orientalism is a way of thinking, and for the most part the "orient" is the opposite of "the occident" (The West), which is based on the ontological and epistemological distinction between the two.
A large number of writers, including poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, accepted this distinction between east and west as a starting point for the construction of theories, poems, novels, social analysis, and political theories related to the East, the people, customs, "mind," and destiny of the East; the third meaning was to see orientalism as a way for the West to control, reconstruct, and king's landing in the East, and Said borrowed Foucault's theory of "discourse of power." , examining Orientalism as a discourse.
In view of the enormous influence and controversy caused by the book, nearly two decades after its publication, Said wrote an afterword as an explanation of some important issues. It offers its own views on the Arab view of the book as an expression of nationalist sentiment. He believes that there are two reasons why the book "Orientalism" has been misunderstood and distorted in the East. First, when a traditional culture is confronted with "constant construction and deconstruction, patriotism, extremely diaphobic nationalism, and outright and outrageous national chauvinism are the universal responses to this threat," and this response is often extreme and stable. In particular, Sayyid noted that the community of devout Muslims, like the community of Orientalists, supports the essential Islamic or Orientalism constructed by Orientalism, and that "this fit between the two is thought-provoking."
The second reason is "political and ideological" The Islamic Revolution, the Israeli-Palestinian war, the Palestinian insurrection, the apparently never-ending conflict between the Arab and Islamic East and the Christian West after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and a series of other tragedies "greatly exacerbated the sense of persecution in the hearts of those who are forced to claim belonging to the West or the East in their daily lives", "strengthened, deepened and ossified" "people's sense of self-identity" and "this antagonism between us and them". The strong and rigid self-identity in the Eastern world is in sharp and constant opposition to the Western. So things got worse. Perhaps it is the so-called "clash of civilizations" that makes this "Orientalism" both unfortunate and fortunate to be famous in the world. Of course, the philosophy contained in this book, like its author, is far from exhaustive in a few strokes of the author's writings.
Culture and imperialism
Source: douban.com
Someone once used Rushdie's novel as an analogy, if "Orientalism" is Said's "Midnight Child", then "Culture and Imperialism" is his "Satanic Poems".
In his 1978 introduction to orientalism, Edward W. said proposed to "write a book on imperialism and culture in general," culture and imperialism, published in 1993.
Culture and Imperialism lacks the systematic and easy-to-grasp theoretical clues of Orientalism, and the whole book is a "collection of fragments" composed of a series of lectures and papers, full of more contradictions and incomprehensible "mysteries" than "Orientalism".
Culture and Imperialism not only continues the theme of orientalism's critique of imperialist ideology, but also "makes a more general description of the relationship between the modern Western suzerainty and its overseas territories" in the following aspects: first, it expands the spatial scope of the discourse from the Middle East to the entire colonial world of Britain and France, and in terms of time span, it also extends to the latest manifestations of imperialism represented by the United States at the time of the author's writing; second, it is also different from "Orientalism" in terms of perspective, and the majors carried out from the academy are also different from those of the academy. "Oriental studies" and non-literary forms turn to classic literary and artistic works that have had a great influence in the West and the world at large, thus revealing more deeply the "political unconscious" nature of imperial ideology; third, "Culture and Imperialism" opens up a theme that Orientalism has not paid attention to—the rebellion against imperialism. A quarter of the book deals with decolonization and "national liberation", which makes it understandable to say that Sayyid's critical attitude toward nationalism, especially the Arab world.
In the binary contradiction between Europe and non-Europe, colonialism and anti-colonialism, where is the legitimacy of nationalism and nativism against imperialism? Does nationalism mean the end and historical end of decolonization? Is there an inevitable difference between it and the logic of imperialism? Sayyid attempted to do so by rereading Yeats(w. The works of famous anti-imperialist writers such as b. yeats, frantz fanon, and others answer these difficult questions. Saeed divided the culture of resistance into two forms: nationalist anti-imperialist culture and liberal anti-imperialist culture, proposing to get rid of narrow nationalism and complete the so-called "post-nationalist liberation".
He believes that "the true nationalist anti-imperialist movement always has a spirit of self-criticism", and nationalism as a mobilizing force has played a positive role in opposing Western domination, restoring indigenous cultural traditions and political freedom around the world, which is an indisputable fact, but in this process, we have also seen that the independence of the nation-state does not mean true freedom and liberation, and that the new forms of separatism, xenophobia, chauvinism, totalitarianism and fundamentalism brought about by nationalism. The original imperial domination and repression is being repeated. National liberation cannot be a game of "power swapping". Sayyid said: "In typical nationalism, there is no doubt that paternalistic images can be seen everywhere." At the ideological and cognitive level, to make the indigenous position the only option for resisting and decolonization is in fact nothing more than accepting the legacy of imperialism.
Culture and Imperialism maintains Sayid's consistent style of writing, thinking about the urgent problems of the political and cultural conflict of our time with profound knowledge, grand vision, keen sense, and passionate eloquence and sober academic stance. He has always adhered to a position of cultural pluralism, opposed all original imagination and cognitive strategies, advocated equal integration and mutual respect between cultures, "culture is by no means a question of ownership, a question of borrowing and lending between absolute creditors and debtors, but a question of sharing, common experience and interdependence between different cultures." This is a universal rule!"
"On Intellectuals" and "Intellectuals"
Sayyid said, "I was exiled."
In fact, intellectuals should be in a state of exile, look at the center from the edge, and dare to avoid the temptation of interests to criticize the mainstream voices. Originally a series of speeches delivered at the invitation of the BBC in 1993, the book is a six-chapter discussion of the tradition of Western intellectuals, the author expresses the understanding of the cognition, attitude and body of intellectuals and believes that intellectuals should be maverick, willing to be lonely, uphold independent judgment and moral conscience, do not cling to power, are not keen on fame and fortune, have the courage to express their own views, act as the mouthpiece of the weak, maintain a critical consciousness, oppose double standards and idolatry, etc. At the same time, he repeatedly stressed that what he advocated was not simple cultural relativism: "Arabs can only think in the way of Arabs, and the West can only think in the West."
In fact, the choice of the world is not only "East" or "West", no worldview is absolutely opposite - communication between people is the norm, which is what Sayyid called "understanding oneself in relation to others". Not looking at things in isolation is actually the pursuit of an ideal holistic view, although "the holistic view is an important but unattainable ideal, you cannot see everything or think of everything, you have to choose and emphasize something." In order to do this you have to categorize and make a distinction. Only in this way can you analyze and understand."
In fact, Sayyid could have spent a mild-mannered life in an ivory tower with a few clear windows, like many famous American professors. But he pushed open the door of the ivory tower and chose to be with those in the dark. In an article on Sartre, Said said: "The true mission of an intellectual is to be a witness to persecution and suffering. It is the duty of every intellectual to propagate and represent particular views, ideas, ideologies, and of course to expect them to play a role in society. An intellectual who claims to write only for himself or herself, for pure scholarship, for abstract science, is not only unable to believe, but must not be. In fact, What Said was asking was the basic question of intellectuals: "How does man tell the truth?" What truth? For whom? Where?"
Edward W. Said's lifelong effort was to be an "out of date" person in a society imprisoned by silence!
Today's Chief Writer \ Kingdom Soldier