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Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. By Daniel Martin Varisco. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 501 pp. $90 ($30, paper).
Edward Said's reputation as a serious scholar has taken heavy blows in recent years, and those with a vested interest in Saidism have been busy attempting to repair the damage. Varisco's Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid is one such attempt. If the Said apologists are finding it increasingly difficult to overlook the rhetoric of Said's Orientalism1 in the wake of an ever-growing number of works that have exposed its faults - culminating with Ibn Warraq's A Defense of the West,2 they show no signs of going gentle into the inevitable good night, and the book by Varisco, a professor of anthropology at Hofstra University, attempts mightily to buoy up Said's sinking reputation as the sage of post-colonialism.
The main problem Said's apologists face is Orientalism' 's being little more than a straw man argument; the biased, ethnically supremacist, cultural imperative that Said sketches is exaggerated at best and fabricated at worst. Unlike most Saidists, however, who ignore the misstatements, exaggerations, and fabrications, Varisco duly acknowledges them, making his approach unique. He claims to regret Said's methodology while supporting his task and his politics. The result is a very peculiar read, both for its remarkably self-conscious narrative and the certainty that it is addressing a sympathetic authence. Varisco seems convinced that he has written a very important book.
This review could end here were it not for an ambiguous claim made several times in the book. The back cover trumpets Varisco's "devastating critique of Said's methodology and conclusions" and asserts that it "employs 'critical satire' to parody the exaggerated and pedantic aspects of post-colonial discourse." On the strength of these remarks, I expected something quite different.
Beginning with a 6-page, pre-introductory preface titled "To the Reader," Varisco announces: "You have before you two books about one book." The one book of course is Orientalism and the two books are first, "a narrative that provides a critique of Said's Orientalism thesis," and second, the "endnotes and bibliography, where all the references are mercifully archived." As an admirer of endnotes, I was looking forward to the second book, but Varisco quickly threw cold water on...