Edward Said, who seemed to devote his life to the greying of a world that many would like to keep black and white, has passed away at the age of 67 from pancreatic cancer. From one of his last published editorials:
Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery — and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because “that’s the way the Arabs are.” That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.
We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.
I haven’t studied Said seriously enough to draw any but the most superficial of conclusions about his lasting value to literary or political criticism, but I do know that his fundamental ideas — those found in Orientalism — opened up minority, colonial, and post-colonial literature for me in practical and profound ways — a rare feat amid the pomp and pedantry of contemporary “theory.” As an aside, the first and, as far as I know, only book-length study of Said was written by Abdirahman A. Hussein, a fairly recent product of UT’s doctoral program.