Volume 52, Issue 4

In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said demonstrates how many of the classical literary texts of Europe wrestle with the historical realities of colonialism and imperialism. The two analytical tropes he uses for discussing this ‘ornate absence’ (Morrison) of empire in the European novels of the nineteenth and twentieth century - the concepts of “geographical notation” and “counterpoint” - are both taken from the analysis of music. This essay seeks to adapt Said’s analytical figures to the analysis of nineteenth century American literature’s disarticulation of the nation’s residual involvement in the slave-based Atlantic economy and the links between America’s colonial (Atlantic) and imperial (continental, Pacific) activities. It argues that the geographical and meteorological notations of American texts differ from those of British novels because of the general foregrounding of spatial aspects in the early literature of the United States. Due to the vast and inherently diverse nature of American territorial engagement in the years before the Civil War (both at land and sea), American literature’s historical and geographical notations can at times be seen to include strategies of topographical displacement which endow it with an almost ‘contrapuntal’ quality.

This essay examines the notions of place and self-placement central to Ed-ward Said’s autobiographical memoir, Out of Place , and discusses their relation to the notion of exile that is so crucial to his intellectual legacy. In his theoretical writings, Said needs exile to be both literal and figurative: On the one hand, exile is the ultimate historical obscenity that cannot be made to stand for anything but itself. On the other hand, it is “a metaphorical condition” that characterizes the intellectual, such as him-self, whose homelessness allows him to do independent and courageous thinking. The implications of this double agenda are manifest in Said’s critical practice. A discussion of Said’s reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park illuminates his exilic investment in certain aspects of the culture to which he sees himself in opposition.

Edward Said’s Out of Place serves to address the double nature of a person’s extraterritoriality in life and in autobiographical texts whose subjects have migrated from their place of origin in the East to the West and define themselves with reference to American culture and politics. The African-Caribbean writer Michelle Cliff, a naturalized American citizen, uses her first two autobiographical novels, Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), to reconnect with her Caribindian past and her native island of Jamaica through stays in the US and England. The Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoglu, often labeled the “Malcolm X of German Turks,” creates from his extraterritorial existence a new cultural space in Kanak Sprak (1995) or Kopf und Kragen (2001) whose political platform derives from the situation of American minority groups. Edward Said, in turn, provides in Out of Place (1999) the biographical data behind his theoretical discussions of extraterritoriality and cultural imperialism and reconceptualizes the ‘Orient’ from his position as comparative literary critic in New York. All three writers seem to find a place in the genre of autobiography which they remodel commensurate with their extraterritorial existence.

One of the most important aspects of Edward Said’s literary and cultural theory is undoubtedly that he always attempted to return criticism to the world. In spite of numerous attacks on worldly theorizing by proponents of formalist criticism, it seems that the notion of a worldly and oppositional criticism still is crucial for leftist literary and cultural theory. However, this is not enough. This article wants to direct attention to the significance of what could be termed an antifoundationalist and anti-essentialist worldly and oppositional leftist criticism. It is argued that while Said has prepared the ground for the development of a sophisticated worldly criticism, the black philosopher and cultural critic Cornel West illustrates even more clearly the complexity and suggestiveness of the phrase antifoundationalist worldly criticism. The pragmatist West has understood the lessons of antifoundationalism and antirealism, yet at the same time he makes clear that a radicalization of neopragmatist antifoundationalism is less productive than dialectically using it as a kind of corrective of still prevailing vulgarizations of oppositional theory. While it is argued that both versions of worldly and oppositional criticism, Said’s as well as West’s, are valuable and useful with regard to contemporary counterhegemonic theory, this article also under-scores that a sophisticated worldly criticism ought to prove that it is capable of entering into a dialogue with other theoretical approaches.

Orientalism and globalism refer to materially founded relations of power and domination and culturally constructed discourses that simultaneously conceal these relations and justify behavioural patterns or specific actions that sustain them. Drawing mainly on Said’s notions of representation, the role of the critical intellectual and the question of knowledge, this paper focuses on those aspects of Said’s work that either relate more immediately to the current concerns of an increasingly globalised world or are particularly useful methodologically or theoretically to provide a better understanding of the current discourse of globalism. Although globalisation cannot be simply perceived as the latest stage of imperialism, and globalism not as the most recent version of Orientalism, there are “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories.” But there are also new questions and limits of Orientalism that need to be investigated. The main criterion for the consideration of certain aspects is not the centrality to Said’s work, but their relevance for the analysis of the hegemonic discourses of globalism and the possibility of producing alternative systems of representation.

In the 1970s, anthropology began to examine its role in the establishment and expansion of colonial rule in non-Western societies and its continuation in new forms of economic and political domination exerted by the West after the disbanding of colonial administrations. Said’s book Orientalism (1978) proved to be immensely influential in this context. Today, globalization has emerged as the domain in which anthropologists critically recast their relationship to the post-colonial field. Anthropologists increasingly study the cultural effects of the worldwide diffusion of commodities, technologies and media products, as well as the increase of immigration and other forms of transnational mobility. Faced with a surge of greatly increasing cultural diversity worldwide as a consequence of these intensified exchanges, anthropology has been forced to revise its earlier notion that globalization would inevitably bring about a culturally homogenized world. This article addresses the concept of the pluralization of modernities, explores its potential for interdisciplinary research agendas, and also inquires into problematic assumptions underlying this new theoretical approach. 1