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ABSTRACT
In this essay, I offer a reading of Edward W. Said's intellectual politics and of his understanding of intellectualism. I begin by discussing the debate over the status and value of Said's most celebrated and influential book, Orientalism, situating this debate in the context both of the reassertion of imperial dominance that began in the 1970s and is still very much in train and-within the academy-of the rise of postcolonial studies. Said's politics were left-wing, liberationist, and nationalitarian; as such, they were always decidedly different from those of most of his postcolonialist readers and interlocutors. I explain why I regard Orientalism as atypical of Said's work as a whole, and move on to consider his various commentaries (most notably in Representations of the Intellectual), on the social role of intellectuals. These commentaries make abundantly clear that Said wrote from premises and on behalf of principles quite different from those generally prevailing in postcolonial studies. Particularly brilliant in Said's representation of the intellectual, I suggest, is his clear-sighted awareness of what might be specific to intellectual work, that is, his grasp of what it is that intellectuals do that might be both socially valuable and also not within the remit of any other group of social agents. In closing, I use Pierre Bourdieu (who has also written superbly on intellectual labor) to pinpoint some potential weaknesses in Said's account of intellectuals.
Reading Edward Said has always been a political exercise. I don't mean this quite in the "public" sense-although it is true that, when I used to prescribe his books for my courses in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, I would sometimes be approached by a student (and on a couple of occasions by the parents of a student) who would ask me (in vain, 1 am happy to report) to remove the offending writings from my syllabi on the grounds that Said was a rabid antiSemite who actively espoused and defended terrorism. I mean rather that there has always been an academic and intellectual struggle over the meaning of Said, over the substance, the tendency, the bearing of his work, its ideological, epistemological, and methodological commitments.
This interpretive conflict has a lot to do, I think, with the fact that...