Edward Wadie Said (1935–2003) was deep into the writing of his influential work Orientalism when he accepted an invitation in early 1976 to partake in the founding symposium of the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD).Footnote 1 Organized by Libya's Bar Association and held in its capital city of Tripoli, the international meeting gathered to offset the blowback generated by opponents of United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution 3379, which qualified Zionism “as a form of racism and racial discrimination.”Footnote 2 Over five hundred participants from roughly eighty countries rallied to promote the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1963 and ratified in 1965. Ultimately, Said was unable attend the Tripoli symposium. Yet the New York-based Palestinian intellectual wrote a brief contribution, published in the conference proceedings, exhibiting an epochal shift in his approach to decolonization.Footnote 3
Said's EAFORD essay, which examined the intellectual connections between imperialism and Zionism, called upon decolonization advocates to expand their purviews beyond nation-states and economies, as well as to deepen their comprehensions of imperial culture. The international gathering's ambition to eliminate race thinking and racial inequalities required an adjustment to its shared anti-imperial consciousness—that is, a decolonial turn that distinguished itself from antecedents by scrutinizing the imperial politics of knowledge instead of the particular knowledge that empire produced. Imperialism's cultural underbelly was undertheorized and misunderstood, Said explained, “we have not taken note of the history, the methodology, and the epistemology of the great systems of oppression that still affect us today.” The historical and contemporary “uses and abuses, the formation and deformation, of modern science” powered imperialism's racially framed “system of confinement,” its “particular kind of knowledge,” and “a scientific will to domination over the so-called colored, non-European peoples of the Third World.” This praxis of racial classification was the “very root of modern imperialism” and its “vision of the world.” By systemically ordering “the world and its inhabitants into stronger and weaker, backward and advanced, superior and inferior types,” imperial culture produced a powerful structure that erased “people declared unfit from History itself.”Footnote 4
In Said's opinion, imperialism's racial “victims” in Tripoli and beyond had what he would describe in Orientalism's twenty-fifth-anniversary preface as “a special intellectual and moral responsibility.”Footnote 5 Echoing the political ideas of Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, his EAFORD essay opined that this antiracism collective faced a “civilizational struggle.”Footnote 6 The Third Worldist project, led by Black and Brown peoples, needed to culturally decolonize the world, including Whites.Footnote 7 Or as Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, its “huge task” was “reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind,” in order to create “new men.”Footnote 8
The decolonial approach advanced by Said entailed a deeper understanding of imperialism's and Zionism's shared “system of thought,” as well as the epistemologies of their racialized taxonomies. This amended mode of liberation better positioned everyone to “struggle scientifically against them,” everywhere and at the same time. It was imperative that EAFORD participants, alongside their accomplices, collectively restructure decolonization and resist imperialism through an epistemic awareness of how it culturally functioned. On the eve of Orientalism, Said made his decolonial mandate explicit. Noting the archive of racial epithets used to debase the colonized and enslaved, Said challenged,
[because] we have been declared scientifically unfit for human rights, it is now time for us together to expose and destroy the whole system of confinement, dispossession, exploitation and oppression that still holds us down. It is our job as radicals to create a genuine world culture of brotherhood and common cause. But in order to wage our struggle we must first feel our chains, then we must understand them, then we must break them. And we must not allow ourselves to be bound again, least of all by chains of our own making.Footnote 9
Based predominantly on unpublished and published writings, as well as personal correspondence and public interviews, this essay explores the formation of Edward Said's anti-orientalist critique and the ways in which it authorized his decolonial beginnings. By doing so, it historicizes how Said came to reorient the historical category of decolonization.Footnote 10 Contrary to the reflections of Said himself and his close surroundings, as well as ensuing academic narrations, this essay argues that his anti-orientalist critique commenced before the “thunderbolt” that was the third Arab–Israeli war of 1967 and its shockwaves.Footnote 11 Beginnings, in this case, must be historicized according to Said's own contemporary theorization and situated within the Arab, Western, and global crosscurrents that powered his changing world. Beginnings, as Said started to examine in a 1967 essay on Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico and subsequently became the focus of both a 1968 article and a 1975 book, should not be understood as an inaugural point of consciousness, let alone the measurable actions that the latter generates.Footnote 12 “Once made the focus of consciousness,” Said explained during the consolidation of his anti-orientalism, “the beginning occupies the foreground, is no longer a beginning but has the status of an actuality.”Footnote 13 To comprehend his decolonial beginnings, therefore, is to engage with the process that formed his critique of empire's episteme.
The term “decolonial” and its “way of being in the world” best reflect Edward Said's contribution to the reconceptualization of the idea of decolonization from the late 1960s onward.Footnote 14 The consensus meaning of decolonization during Said's decolonial beginnings derived from the European prerogative to proclaim a supposed end to imperial relationships with colonized peoples and lands. As a European invention with an overwhelming Eurocentric intention, “decolonization” ideationally safeguarded imagined national and moral well-beings in metropoles, erasing the legacies of racism and the entanglement between racial differentiations and empire from the mainstream imaginations of peoples of European heritage.Footnote 15 The neologism of decolonial, which Said later alluded to in his most elaborate analysis of Fanonian thought without using the term, differentiates itself from decolonization's geographical and intellectual provenances by concentrating on “the theoretical domain of liberation” and its perpetuity in the world.Footnote 16
The historical formation of decolonial humanism, therefore, derived from anticolonial humanism, which denounced imperial reasonings that dehumanize both the colonized and colonizer and seeks to correct misrepresentations without directly tackling their epistemological structure of domination.Footnote 17 Decolonial humanism represented a personal process whereby disparate individuals in various parts of the world shifted their anti-imperial foci toward the decolonization of knowledge and its universalization. Because of Orientalism's lasting impact, Said's decolonial beginnings were integral to a historically unique cultural approach to decolonization that mobilized like-minded peoples who sought to disorient worldly ways of “thinking, being, knowing, understanding, and living” that specifically negated the humanity of racially dominated peoples for the sake of imperialism.Footnote 18
Arab anti-orientalism and its place in the Palestinian national movement moved Edward Said to immerse himself in an epistemological decolonization of the very concept of decolonization and its European moorings. Said never fully conceptualized anti-orientalism in writing, despite using the term sparingly from the mid-1970s onward and wrongfully minimizing at first its “discursive tradition” in the Arab mashriq, maghreb, and mahjar.Footnote 19 In an extensive 1975 book review of his close friend Noam Chomsky's Peace in the Middle East?, he remarked, “there is no developed intellectual position in the United States or in the world at large which supports the Arabs as a people.” Upon blaming “academic Western and U.S. ‘Orientalism’,” Said lamented, “then again there is no Arab counter-tradition of anti-Orientalism and for this of course the Arabs themselves are to blame.”Footnote 20 His closest explanation of the concept came in his most elaborate reflection of Orientalism's critics, in which he alluded to anti-orientalism as being “a decentered consciousness.”Footnote 21 This mentalité, which reoriented the idea of decolonization in a non-Eurocentric way, was centered in an individual's subjective experience and its distinct relations within “worldliness.”Footnote 22 As such, Said's critique of orientalism redefined decolonization as a phenomenon grounded in individuals and their epistemic relationships with other persons rather than in nation-states and their economies. The key to situating Said's decolonial beginnings and its contribution to the anti-orientalist countertradition and global decolonization more broadly, therefore, is in examining when, why, how, and where he energetically shared his phenomenal perspective with anyone (and everyone) who listened to and recognized it.
Beginning Anti-Orientalism
Empire's way of knowing race disciplined Edward Said during his youth in Palestine. An Anglocentric education in British Jerusalem and Cairo taught Said “to understand that [he] was an alien, a non-European Other.” As a “wog,” albeit with class privilege, he learned to be apolitical, to know his proper place within the perceived lower echelons of humanity while simultaneously embracing his elevated status among locals, and to accept so-called natural divisions in the world. “Colonial schools” taught him “that the only representations that counted were the representations of English history and culture.” During his early formative education, Said learned “a great deal about English history, and nothing about [his] own history, Arab history.”Footnote 23
Said's Palestinian experience with imperial culture's politics of difference and racial exclusion deepened following his move to the United States. Palestinians and broader Arab realities were far from mainstream in the US public sphere; in most cases, they were muted, invisible, and nonexistent.Footnote 24 Likely the only Palestinian—or Arab, for that matter—attending Mount Hermon preparatory school in Massachusetts in the mid-1950s, he confoundedly felt “colorless.” This particular “non-White” identity, along with a provisional Whiteness and its distinct racialization process that rejected Brownness and its relationships to Blackness, led the Palestinian student to see himself as being “marginal, non-American, alienated,” and “marked.” As Said undertook his higher education at Princeton and then Harvard, an intersectional experience of class and racialization ordered him to maintain a “proximity to whiteness.”Footnote 25 Consequently, the Middle East often “drifted further and further from [his] consciousness.” What happened there remained separate from life in the United States; in Said's mind at that time, they did not coexist.Footnote 26
Contrary to popular Arab American myth making, as well as his own, however, Said began to connect more with Middle Eastern politics and Arab anti-imperial ideas during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite not being directly involved in political organizing, he was politically minded and informed when it came to US–Middle East relations and the question of Palestine.Footnote 27 When resting from the works of Western thinkers like Vico, György Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger, the Palestinian student undertook political conversations with fellow diasporic Arabs, such as Ralph Nader, “with whom he could speak Arabic and lament the Zionist presence everywhere.” Shortly before graduating from Princeton, Said penned his “first piece of political writing”: a pro-Nasserist op-ed in the Daily Princetonian that denounced Western opposition vis-à-vis Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in 1956. His op-ed did not evoke noticeable responses.Footnote 28 He even occasionally engaged in heated debates with US Jewish friends about Israel/Palestine. In one stormy conversation, Said and his two-year roommate Arthur Gold “screamed at each other about the injustices ([Said's] word) of Israel to us (as Palestinians).”Footnote 29
At odds with US public opinion when it came to Middle Eastern matters, Said felt like a “political misfit” during his late twenties. Upon taking up a professorship in comparative literature at Columbia University in the fall of 1963, he consciously distinguished “U.S. support for Israel from the fact of my being an American pursuing a career there and having Jewish friends and colleagues.” Described by his department during his hire “as an Alexandrian Jew,” Said was perceived as having “an exotic but somewhat irrelevant Arabic background”; such misrepresentations did not seem to bother the emerging scholar at the time. Said's Western-focused research and Ivy League teachings continued to exclude the Middle East. Seeing himself as being politically “disengaged,” he left a mere Middle Eastern trace in the acknowledgment of his first book on the Polish British writer Joseph Conrad, which was dedicated to his parents Hilda and Wadie but did not mention them by name.Footnote 30
Trying times with family fueled his powerful penchant to segregate and silence Middle Eastern affairs from life in the United States. To the dismay of his parents, the pressures of academia led Said to forgo his annual visit to Lebanon in mid-1965. Missing their only son and fearing his estrangement, his mother and father sketched out their chagrin in a series of private letters. They had corresponded weekly with him since Said's move to the United States. Wadie Said, diagnosed with cancer in 1961, insisted that his son “change [his] attitude” toward family, at which Said angrily questioned his father's unwillingness “to understand the difficulties of living in [the United States].” The professor of comparative literature was “rather tired of being told what a bad person I am, and how I am always falling short of the standards of [being] a good” family member. “My attitude,” he privately opined to his father, “is quite alright the way it is—I suggest a change in others’ attitude towards me.”Footnote 31
Like Wadie, Said's mother Hilda did not hold back. Edward's first wife Maire Jaanus, a fellow literary critic of Estonian German ancestry and graduate-school colleague at Harvard who worked at the Julliard School of Music at that time, became caught in the familial crossfire.Footnote 32 Following the couple's third wedding anniversary, a “disappointed” Hilda Musa Said partially blamed Jaanus for her son's decision not to visit family in the Middle East; instead, the newlyweds opted for a summer in New England, paired with a sojourn in eastern Canada. His mother's words deeply hurt Edward Said, who had a special relationship with her. In response, Said harshly stated, “my whole attitude towards my (Middle Eastern) past is a ruin.” As the mother–son correspondence became uncharacteristically scant, Hilda openly asked Said, “Are you trying to tell us that you'll have nothing to do with us anymore? Edward dear,” she wrote, “it's not easy to forget about one's parents—or maybe with you it is?” Said stopped writing to his parents. As their son's thirtieth birthday passed, both Hilda and her husband were “broken hearted.”Footnote 33
Two months later, Said finally reconnected with them; albeit his letter was soaked in frustration. His parents, he claimed, never accepted his marriage to a non-Arab. Admitting that she “behaved badly many many times” with his wife, Hilda disparaged her son's renewed “awful talk about your marriage.” She explained, “it was only normal for us to be warry of a foreign girl marrying our only son. But honest to God we tried hard to love her.” Hilda believed that Jaanus, Said's wife, had little interest in his Middle Eastern family: “we still don't know her.” She felt that Jaanus offered little “consideration for the parents who gave her her husband.” As such, she believed her son was “a completely changed person.” Yes, Said was “in another world, another sphere, but that should never stop you from being our son.” Edward, she cried, “You're so far away from us.”Footnote 34
Experiencing Shades of Existentialism
When completing the Conrad book and facing such personal turmoil, Said openly questioned the place of literary critics like himself in society. Phenomenality and its existential currents deeply influenced his analysis of Conrad's “immense struggle with himself” and, henceforth, trickled into his own self-reflection. According to Said, “it [was] the openness of the conscious mind that critic and writer meet to engage in the act of knowing and being aware of an experience.” As intellectuals increasingly theorized in the early 1960s, human beings experienced their lives subjectively, not naturally. Individuality, he deduced, could not exist in isolation; rather, questions of human existence had to grapple with one's positionality in humanity at large—that is, one's relationships with both others and otherness within a worldly structure. “[T]he great human appeal and distinction of Conrad's life,” argued Said in his 1966 book, “is the dramatic spirit of partnership, however uneasy or indecorous, his life exemplifies, a partnership between himself and the external world.”Footnote 35
A different shade of existentialism, an Arab version that “creatively reinvented, reformulated, and domesticated” Western existentialism, converged with Said's racial experience, analysis of Conrad, and general thinking. On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he started to openly contemplate his own exile from the Middle East and transnational way of being. Preoccupied with national liberations and by postcoloniality, Beirut-based existentialists like Husayn Muruwwa and Suhayl Idris called upon literary critics across the Arab world—including those in the United States—to become engaged “‘reactionary’ writers” whereby “individual reason and consciousness constitute[d] the first line of existence.” Traces of an Arab existentialism that “defined literature as the arena in which cultural decolonization efforts would take place and literary criticism as the means with which they would purge their culture from colonial effects” found its way into Said's writing.Footnote 36 An anti-imperial will moved him to join the ranks of Palestinian intellectuals like Fayiz Sayigh and Sami Hadawi who wrote about, demonstrated, and affirmed Palestinian existence in English for a predominantly US audience.Footnote 37 Shortly after submitting his Conrad book, Said penned his first phenomenological piece of scholarship on Palestine and the Middle East, entitled “An Ark for the Listener,” which remains unpublished.Footnote 38
In hindsight, this conscious act of writing about Palestinian exile and life in the Middle East more broadly signaled a key moment in Said's decolonial beginnings. By way of the unrecognized situation of Palestinian refugees in Western imaginations, he directly engaged with the tradition of Arab anti-orientalism and its existentialist bent that in differing ways affirmed presence.Footnote 39 Since his “earliest recollection,” extended family ties linked him with “every aspect of the Arab national liberation movement, and particularly to Palestinian movement of independence.” Said's parents, for instance, regularly hosted Palestinian intellectuals living in Beirut, such as the aforementioned founding director of the Institute of Palestine Studies Sami Hadawi. They also frequently attended Palestinian social gatherings, such as the wedding reception of Daily Star editor George Hishmeh.Footnote 40 Hadawi and Hishmeh, like Sayigh and many other Palestinian and Arab nationalists, took it upon themselves to regularly challenge Western misperceptions and misunderstandings, along with derivative foreign policies.
An unsuccessful submission to the Virginia Quarterly's 1965 Emily Clark Back Prize for short story and poetry, Said's twenty-six-page creative essay disclosed his being a Palestinian refugee for a US-based audience. His story was set in his parents’ home in “the slowly eroding mountains of [Mount] Lebanon,” a popular summer getaway for upper-class Arabs, especially Christians.Footnote 41 It narrated his lived experience of hosting an impromptu visit from four family friends from “Jerusalem life before 1948,” who were fellow Palestinian refugees seeking a temporary haven from the summer heat of Beirut, and the seeming nonevent that was their conversations. Mrs Andraos was his story's lead protagonist, an elderly and widowed Palestinian Christian woman from the West Bank village of Beit Jalla. Her late husband, as she informed Said upon being introduced, “was a very good friend” of his maternal grandfather. Three Palestinians siblings of Said's parents’ generation accompanied Andraos: a “wan and grizzly-face[d]” Khalil and his two sisters, Marguerite and Nama.
Said's “An Ark for the Listener” evidenced his Arab existential crisis in action, its anti-orientalist spark, and their gradual interconnectedness.Footnote 42 In its opening paragraph, when eluding to his “empty, lazy stretches of time spent” in the Lebanese mountains, Said represented Palestinians to Americans and the English-speaking West more broadly—albeit in problematic ways that were racially marked by his class standing, Arab American immigrant experience, and inadvertent perpetuation of an undermining image of Palestinians as helpless. In fact, Said's political act of making Palestinians visible displayed his contemporary “white but not racial/ethnic status.”Footnote 43 His “mind,” he explained in the essay when thinking back to his time spent as a young adult vacationing in Lebanon, “regularly volunteers as its scapegoat Arabs taken from the images spun by Western dreamers, robed and turbaned Arabs, dark enough to be alien from me, in their dirty silent acquisitiveness exuding a brutal laziness that frightened me with its unrestrained moneyed power.” He knew full well that the power of Western dreams misrepresented Arabs, but he remained affected by an imperial pull that racially framed “dark” Arabs within the flawed framework of human essence, rather than social conditions. His essay preserved a transnational tendency to identify with an Arab Whiteness that sought to distance itself from the relational inferiorities of Brownness and Blackness.Footnote 44 From there, he narrated Palestinian existence in the wake of the Nakba, an Arabic term meaning “disaster” or “catastrophe” coined in 1948 by Syrian intellectual Constantine Zurayk.Footnote 45
Said's US-destined essay asserted the presence of Palestinians in the world by adopting a moderate anticolonial humanism that sought to make their paradoxically entwined humanity and ongoing exiled plight more visible to an anglophone readership. Both in and through the piece, he served as the listener and the ark. Listening, in both instances, implied being heard and seen. He carried Mrs Andraos's personal story of dispossession, traveled with it, and remained moved by it. His will to listen and witness, in this case, led him to be an ark that one day—he hoped—would bring Palestinians to safety, restituting their Nakba experiences. Through his literary text, Said revealed the general sense of “the despised anxiety all refugees felt” and shared how these ongoing anxieties engendered his own “process of recognition of a misrecognition.”Footnote 46 Palestinians, he implied through the lives of these four individuals, regularly asked themselves, “What was to be next? How was one to live?” Regulated “ceremonies of common despair,” like the one that Said recounted, represented Palestinian realities. Such realities, along with their general invisibility in the West, pushed him to translate Palestinian refugeedom to a distant and overwhelmingly indifferent audience and to use English as “a language of emancipation.”Footnote 47 His essay also included Arabic words, sayings, and descriptions of cultural habits that reflected a sense of racial Arab pride. Said even mentioned Palestine by name, which was controversial in the United States at the time.
Said's 1965 unpublished essay focused on how older members of the “Nakba generation” remembered individual dispossessions, remaining connected to their homeland and indigenous territory in Palestine as a result.Footnote 48 After serving up lemonade and Italian bonbons to his guests, he recounted his waiting “for the time to pass.” Said drifted away into memories of his early years in British Palestine with family members, like his “magnificent” and “shabby fez”-wearing great-uncle Ibrahim. Mrs Andraos did the same after finishing her treats. Her shared recollections affected everyone present, including the Palestinian American academic. Notwithstanding having “heard these old stories of unimaginable woe so many times,” Said affirmed, “they never left me unmoved.”
According to Said, Andraos was “her own actress and play.” She was a “sturdy ark.” The accidental passing of her husband, Reverand Naim Andraos, epitomized her Nakba trauma and motivated the emerging scholar's narrated reconstitution of Palestinians’ “unclaimed experience” in Western imaginations.Footnote 49 She had been deeply troubled by the war that erupted between Palestinian nationalists and Zionist Jews around the time of the passing of UN Resolution 181 in late November 1947, which sanctioned the partition of British Palestine despite overwhelming Palestinian nationalist objections. “We were very worried then because there had already begun to be some bad incidents between us and the Jews,” she told Said and his three other visitors, “and that we had heard that now the Stern gang was also beginning to attack the British army. I think it was then … that two English soldiers were found with their throats cut on the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, and a third one was hanging from a tree just off the road.” With war on the brink, a friend of her husband asked the reverend to bless his new house in neighboring Bethany. Mr Andraos took off at daybreak and never returned. While touring “the whole house from top to bottom,” he stepped out onto the newly erected veranda to enjoy the stunning view overlooking the city of Jericho in the Jordan valley. Suddenly, Mrs Andraos explained in Said's parents’ living room, “the whole curved veranda fell under poor, beloved Naim.” Late that night, friends relayed the tragic news about her husband's death. Amid the joint chaos of a pending war and her sudden loss, she and her school-age son Mitry fled Palestine. Israel barred their return.
At the end of his essay, Said stressed how “he was overcome by the farcical tragedy that had befallen” Mrs Andraos, but chose not to textually associate the Nakba with the roles of English-speaking Zionists, the US government, and the international community's denial of a collective solution regarding the return of Palestinian refugees.Footnote 50 As he witnessed, her accidental misfortune summarized the calamitous, mind-boggling removal and dispossession of Palestinians that took place during the first Arab–Israeli war of 1947–9. “A whole people's refugeeship,” he felt, “their curious exile from place as well as time, had something in common with it: to a reflective mind it all seemed jerky, illogical, and merciless. To be a refugee,” Said added, “meant no one central thing as I thought it did in Europe, to be homeless and poor for example.” In the case of his privileged family and their Palestinian Christian upper-class community nestled in the Lebanese mountains, it meant “a number of open contradictions.” Said wanted the West to be able to recognize Palestinian-ness and right the wrongs of its so-called humanitarian mistake in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust, which favored Western Zionists to the great detriment of indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Inspired by her storytelling, Said declared that he had Mrs Andraos to “thank for this lesson on how it ought to be done.”Footnote 51
As his 1965 unpublished essay fell short of prize recognition and a brutal familial quarrel with his parents waned, Said continued to think and write about the relationality between an individual and the world. Picking up where he left off with Conrad, the now-tenured Columbia professor published two articles that respectively analyzed the legacy of French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the wake of his recent untimely death and Vico's secular humanism. As was the case with Conrad, Said's existential crisis appeared in his examinations of two Western philosophers that he admired.Footnote 52 Merleau-Ponty's greatest contribution, argued Said's early 1967 article, “is that we are in and of the world before we can think about it. Perception … is a crucial but complex process that reasserts our connection with the world and thereby provides the basis for all our thought and meaning-giving activity.” The cofounder of the renowned journal Les temps modernes best explained the beginnings of the human experience. Said's essay included a block quote of Merleau-Ponty's thought in which the French philosopher stated, à la Heidegger, “I discover myself in the other.” Thanks to Merleau-Ponty, he believed that “perception, quite literally, is the way that human existence comes into being.” Said's evaluation of Vico's intellectual beginnings, in turn, led him to surmise, “In distinguishing both object of the will and the will itself[,] the mind achieves consciousness.”Footnote 53 These coinciding conclusions fueled a central component of Said's pending critique of Western misrepresentations of the Middle East, the realities of which greatly impacted his own anti-orientalist consciousness in the mid-1960s and moved the beginnings of his decolonial formation.
Said's growing professional interest in the role of perception in literature about human relations directly overlapped with his US–Middle East politics when he commenced a review of Amman-based scholar Suleiman Mousa's T. E. Lawrence: An Arab View for The Nation magazine. In search of “an Arab view” amid a nascent racial crisis of representation in the Western-dominated academic field of orientalism and the Black-led civil rights movement in the United States, its literary editor urged Said to accept the magazine's invitation even though the book did not reside within his wheelhouse.Footnote 54 The authenticity of Mousa's 1966 book, which challenged the myth of Lawrence of Arabia, struck Said. Mousa convincingly disrupted Western perceptions of national liberation movements in the Middle East and embodied Arab “resistance writing,” which Said would describe roughly thirty years later as “the voyage in” to restore “marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories.”Footnote 55 His personal copy resides in the Edward W. Said reading room at Columbia's Butler library. Otherwise in pristine condition, Said underlined part of Mousa's preface. “The principal motive for writing this book,” it reads, “was a sense of what one might call ‘cultural obligation’ toward the Arab people on the one hand and the western world on the other.” Said's copy underlined “cultural obligation.”Footnote 56
Submitted before the third Arab–Israeli war of 1967, Said's review of Mousa's work was both favorable and politically in line with the grandes lignes of contemporary Arabism at its high tide. He understood and, in turn, accepted what Mousa defined as “cultural obligation,” leading him to gradually contribute to the prevailing Arab tradition of anti-orientalism. Instead of strictly criticizing dehumanizations, Said started to excavate the ideational structure that misrepresented Arab decolonization in the world. He opened his review by referencing the puzzling fact that, for problematic reasons, T. E. Lawrence had “long been ‘a joy of experts’,” unlike his perceived racialized Hashemite underlings, Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his son Feisal. The relationship between the idea of Lawrence of Arabia and Lawrence the person, Said noted, represented an important gateway into understanding modern relations between the Middle East and the West.Footnote 57
According to the comparative-literature scholar, Mousa rightfully denounced a pernicious orientalist myth that framed Western superiority. Mousa challenged the popular idea that Lawrence led inferior desert Arabs to victory against the Ottoman Empire. To the contrary, his book argued that the British representative “was merely an accessory, albeit a helpful one, to plans devised and executed for the most part without him.” Lawrence himself did not fool Arabs, past and present, Said remarked: “only a Westerner could believe that Lawrence ever passed for an Arab, or that they even thought he looked like one.” In his opinion, “Lawrence is a continuing offense to Arab truth” that hid behind Western interpretations. The myth that he symbolized and its relational representations of Arabs, Said recognized, fit nicely into an elusive genre epitomized by Thousand and One Nights. Lawrence's story oddly resembled “Scheharazade's scheme” at the core of the literary classic.
Said believed that Mousa's critique countered this Western style by reclaiming Arab decolonization from Eurocentricism. His basic perception of decolonization at that moment differed from Western mainstreams; Said rejected the idea that Western imperial centers controlled Arab national liberation.Footnote 58 Said's review noted that Mousa's “true achievement” was “that it dissociates Arab history from Lawrence.” Arabs were the subjects of their liberation, not objects that “naturally” lacked human agency. The myth of Lawrence of Arabia wrongfully functioned “as a subject to be compelled into prose and not an objective action, quite independent of him, to be revered and given national meaning” in ways that prejudiced decolonizing Arabs to the benefit of Westerners. Analogous Western misrepresentations of Arabs, penned by the likes of Edward Lane, Gertrude Bell, novelist P. H. Newby, and many more, he recognized, generated “a literate curiosity” about the Middle East “and a continuous interest that no Arab really feels.” His review lauded Mousa's attempt to counter the West's “attractive fascination with what is still so very much a little understood curiosity.”Footnote 59
Reorienting Arab Anti-Orientalism, Reconceptualizing Decolonization
This “little understood curiosity,” coupled with Said's experiences with shades of existentialism and developing research interests, formed an anti-orientalist consciousness vis-à-vis the fraught relationship between Arabs, Western misperceptions of Arabs, and the West that began to set itself apart from its contemporaries. The impending third Arab–Israeli war of 1967 and the “thunderbolt” of the Arab naksa (“setback”) contributed to this, profoundly unsettling the intellectual in exile.Footnote 60 Confined by jury duty in New York City as the 1967 war unfolded, Said overflowed with a similar anxiety that engendered his unsuccessful 1965 essay submission. Unable to connect with family in the Middle East, his informational needs were left to a US media that defamed Arabs. He engaged with US television and newspapers “from the viewpoint of a horrified and shamed victim.” The US public sphere overwhelmingly celebrated Israel's military situation as a progressive continuation of Jewish national liberation, obfuscating its imperial dimensions and silencing its effects on Palestinians.Footnote 61 It reified the pattern of prevailing Western misrepresentations of Arabs and the relational chauvinism that Said identified through Mousa's historical work.
Unnerved by “the enormous cultural hatred and bias towards Arabs and the Arab world,” Said compulsively “clipped things out of papers and magazines.”Footnote 62 The New York Times's reporting on the situation in his place of birth, Jerusalem, reproduced Zionist and Israeli myths with headlines like “Arabs Allowed to Leave.” In an explanation of the so-called Jewish state's swift occupation of the eastern part of the Holy City, columnist Hanson Baldwin surmised, “Israel is a relatively modern one-class state. The Arab nations are still essentially feudalistic in social structure … Israel had a great will to fight and an offensive spirit. The Arabs, as a nation, lack this.” Grossly perturbed, the Columbia professor authored “one or two letters to the [New York Times]” in response, which went unpublished and are absent from his private papers.Footnote 63
It was amid this devastating context that Said received an untimely letter from the literary editor of The Nation. She informed him that it was “impossible to carry” his review of Mousa's T. E. Lawrence book. The reason given: “inner staff matters (reduced space and editorial content clashes, etc.).” Said hastily accused the US magazine of racial discrimination: The Nation, due to the contemporary political climate, sent it back precisely because it presented “an Arab view.” Refused anew from being a representational voice, the US-based Palestinian intellectual felt that he was not being “correctly treated.” The Nation apologized, but held ground on not publishing his book review, which Said sarcastically remarked treated “the Arabs in an unaccustomed way.”Footnote 64 That is, his review treated them with dignity.
Henceforth, Said consciously reoriented his intellectual focus toward the intertwined politics of Arab–US relations, the Palestinian national movement, and literature of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Anti-orientalism became Said's aspired modus operandi, as he “began to feel that what happened in the Arab world concerned [him] personally and could no longer be accepted with a passive political disengagement.”Footnote 65 The Arab defeat of 1967 “politicised” him, as he “was emotionally reclaimed by the Arab world and Palestine in particular.” Said privately reached out to Robert Alter, a former fellow doctoral student in literature at Harvard, after reading the latter's article in Commentary on anti-Jewish prejudice amid US intellectuals after the 1967 war. As well as having US–Middle East relations and orientalism's flawed literate curiosity on his mind, Said freshly submitted a pending article that examined the role of engaged intellectuals and the beginnings of consciousness, which continued his recent analyses of Conrad, Merleau-Ponty, and Vico. He was also likely in the final stages of coauthoring a translation of a work by German literary scholar Erich Auerbach with his wife Jaanus, which favorably commented that philology “conceives man dialectically, not statically.”Footnote 66
In light of Palestinian experiences at the hands of the so-called Jewish state, Robert Alter's affirmation that Israel's victory represented an anti-imperial victory for Jewish existence left Said with “mixed feelings.” Palestinians were absent from Alter's essay in Commentary about Israel's presence in the Middle East. As members of “generation existential,” he asked his friend “Bob” if Israeli existence superseded—and thus voided—Palestinian existence. Framing Israel in an existential way, considering its maltreatment of indigenous Palestinians, positioned Alter in “a moral box,” he felt. Unlike most members of the nascent Palestinian revolution, Said affirmed Israel's right to exist yet questioned Alter on the relationality between Israeli settler colonial denial and Palestinian existence. Bob's Zionist logic, he intimated, failed to recognize the philosophical principle of coexistence and its collective dimensions, which were integral to permanent peace in the Middle East and mirrored physical realities in Israel/Palestine.Footnote 67
Said's early anti-orientalist engagement did not restrict itself to Zionists; it also confronted fellow Arabs and the politics of self-representation in the Middle East. A “historic” transformation of the Palestinian national movement was afoot in the Arab world and beyond, as Palestinians took on “a more active part in the liberation of their country” by seizing “the initiative away from the Arab states.” Both the Arab defeat and the failure of UN Resolution 242, which did not recognize the existence of a Palestinian nation, identify Israel as the aggressor in the 1967 war, or denounce its ongoing illegal military occupation of the West Bank, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai region, made a permanent settlement in the Arab–Israeli and Israeli–Palestinian conflicts more elusive. They convinced Said that Arab losses were “due to the fact that we were considered to be an inferior people.”Footnote 68
According to the scholar of comparative literature, as well as other Arab intellectuals at the time, a global disregard for Palestinians was partly explained by the fact that they did not make themselves visibly present; rather, they were both politically and culturally (mis)represented by others, including non-Palestinian Arabs.Footnote 69 Members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed. The Palestinian political body, created by the Arab League in 1964 and veritably controlled by Egypt, was in a state of self-representational crisis because of a “general Palestinian frustration over the PLO's impotence.” As such, half of the PLO's executive committee, referred to by the Lebanese press as the “Magnificent Seven,” publicly called for the resignation of inaugural chairman Ahmed Shukairy, who had been handpicked by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and tasked with the containment of Palestinian radicals. Shukairy reluctantly complied in late December 1967.Footnote 70
Said, amid his first sabbatical as a fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign and a faltering marriage with Jaanus, returned to Lebanon for an extended visit around the time of Shukairy's resignation and immersed himself in discussions over the future of the Palestinian national movement.Footnote 71 In early 1968, a revolutionary spirit energized Palestinians and their Arab associates in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, North America, and elsewhere.Footnote 72 Palestinian fedayeen (“commandos”), led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah and George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, launched grassroots armed struggles against Israel to the delight of many in the transnational Arab public sphere. Palestinian military raids were celebrated as a hopeful alternative to the humiliation that was the 1967 war. Beirut's influential weekly magazine Al-Usbu al-Arabi (Arab Week), for instance, heralded the fedayeen as its “man of the year.” An-Nahar (The Day) columnist Michel Abou-Jawdeh exclaimed that the fedayeen evidenced “the existence of the Palestinian people.”Footnote 73
Palestinian and Arab excitement over fedayeen activities reached its apex in late March 1968 after a day-long battle with Israeli forces in the East Bank refugee camp of Karameh, “located in a hilly area about four miles from the Jordan River.” The battle of Karameh, which means “dignity” in Arabic, was not a classic military victory for the Palestinian fedayeen and Jordanian military forces stationed in the largely abandoned refugee camp. Rather than being outright defeated, Israeli troops retreated at day's end. The Palestinian national movement and the Arab world declared victory, nonetheless. Unlike non-Palestinian Arab forces during the 1967 war, many felt that Karameh abolished “the myth that Israel cannot be defeated.” Narrated by Fatah and the Arab public sphere at large as both “legend” and a “heroic triumph,” the battle represented a “decisive moment” for Said and in Arab imaginations more broadly. It became understood that Palestinian decolonization “was fundamentally the responsibility of Palestinians themselves.” Even King Hussein of Jordan, despite his tumultuous relationships with both Palestinian revolutionaries and the idea of a Palestinian state, threw his lot behind the changing Palestinian national movement, declaring, “We are all fedayeen.”Footnote 74
Back from his extended visit in the Middle East, Said wasted little time in becoming a representational voice in the United States and joining the ranks of intellectuals in an Arab tradition of anti-orientalism that unearthed how the legacies of empire shaped contemporary Arab identities and lives.Footnote 75 The Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), established in 1967 in response to the academic field of orientalism's lack of Middle Eastern membership and the proliferation of overt anti-Arab racism in the United States, served as Said's main forum. Key to the AAUG's early organizational success was its ability to generate scholarship that reflected its antiracist and anti-imperial mandates.Footnote 76 Said soon received an invitation from his dear Palestinian friend, AAUG leading organizer and influential recruiter Dr Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, to contribute to a special issue of the Arab League's monthly magazine, the Arab World. Abu-Lughod, to whom Said later referred as “my guru” and to whom Orientalism is partly dedicated, wanted to counter “the American perspective” on the 1967 war, which had been predominantly “hostile” during “this critical stage in the development of the Palestinian question.” As a fellow “concerned Arab,” he asked Said to pen “an essay on ‘The Arab in American Jewish Literature’.” Said accepted his friend's offer. But instead of focusing on US Jewish writings, perhaps because he did not want to jeopardize his many friendships with US Jews, he opted to focus on mainstream channels within the US public sphere and critique its moral climate.Footnote 77
Said's resulting essay, entitled “The Arab Portrayed,” represented the juncture whereby an anti-orientalist consciousness and his decolonial beginnings intersected with “the origin of [his 1978] book Orientalism.” As his workplace in upper Manhattan became an active site in the Black civil rights struggle in the United States, the global politics of antiracism imprinted Said.Footnote 78 The writings of Frantz Fanon, a vanguard in burgeoning efforts that challenged the idea of decolonization's Eurocentricity, were integral to his decolonial process of tackling the social relationships between his lived Palestinian refugee experience, anti-Arab racisms, empire's legacies in the postcolonial era, and the production of knowledge. Despite not citing “the chief black hero of the New Left” and “spokesman for the Third World,” traces of Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961)—which became an important text for Palestinian revolutionaries and “a kind of bible of the decolonization moment”—permeated Said's 1968 essay.Footnote 79 Importantly, both books outlined the shared experiences of Blacks and Arabs with imperial Whiteness and the “collective catharsis” of Western culture, in turn facilitating a universal sense of solidarity as racially oppressed peoples.Footnote 80
Said's 1968 “The Arab Portrayed” disclosed why and how US–Arab relations reached their nadir during the 1967 war: a multidimensional form of race knowing, which dialectically made Arabs more non-White and Israelis and Jews more White, shaped social relationships between Arab communities and non-Arabs in the United States. An imagined US–Israeli special relationship made it that “the Arab has been reduced to pure antagonism to Israel,” the US-based Palestinian scholar argued. “The logic, not so much events in the [1967] War, but of events in the American consciousness of the Arab permitted this vulgar demotion of a people into a stupid and offensive caricature.” Said felt that US media misrepresentations were “depressing” in “the way in which the Arabs were made to be seen” as subhuman and “a kind of troublesome non-person.”
Misrepresentations of Arabs in “the American imagination” and their racializations had the effect of silencing Arab points of view. Said contended that the challenge for “the Arab case against the West is that they cannot get through.” Perhaps having his recent failed experiences with the New York Times and The Nation in mind, he declared that US media extended a historical phenomenon in Western literature that denied Arabs the abilities to communicate and represent themselves. “Liberal sentiment, always quick to champion liberation causes, will continue to bypass the Arabs so long as there remains a conflict between Arab and Israeli for attention,” he lamented. “What is most telling about Western consciousness of the Arab is how few ordinary human categories of human existence seem applicable to him.”
In a Fanonian way, Said explained that Arabs socially “see themselves in the same situation as any other non-European people subjected to European colonization … If the Arab occupies space in the mind at all,” he affirmed, “it is of negative value.” Building on his unpublished 1966 review of Mousa's demystification of T. E. Lawrence, the social theorist in action contended that contemporary US knowledge about Arabs “relie[d] so heavily on a simple[,] seriously defective and malicious, conception of fact.” As such, he held orientalism's “academic and liberal view” partly responsible for such falsehoods and their whitewashing. In his mind, an anti-Arab structure and its Manichean mind-set made Arabs into “victims of imperialism.”Footnote 81 Arab histories of the present and their racial matters in the United States affirmed Fanon's intervention that decolonization remained an ongoing process. To violently overturn orientalism's imperial culture and structure, “the Arab must be admitted into one's consciousness as a human quality with which one must come to terms.” Said “did not want to be hortatory about this, but [he] did want to connect this need with what is going to have to take place in the West generally and in the American political imagination in particular.”Footnote 82
Whereas “The Arab Portrayed” quickly gained Said recognition in the Arab American community, as well as New Left circles in the United States, US media misrepresentations of Arabs exacerbated in step with Israel's post-1967 military occupation and illegal settlement-building initiatives. Militant Palestinian revolutionaries garnered US headlines in ways that reinforced the demeaning racial stereotypes and unequal social relationships that Said denounced.Footnote 83 Nevertheless, he maintained regular contact with close friends and relatives, like his cousin Kamal Nasir, who were deep in the trenches of the PLO. Prior to his assassination at the hands of an Israeli special forces unit in 1973, Nasir managed the PLO's United Information Office and edited its central newspaper, Filastin al-Thawra (The Palestine Revolution). Said thus “started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.”Footnote 84
Ultimately, a June 1969 Western media interview with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir provoked him into becoming an unofficial spokesperson for the Palestinian revolution and Arab decolonization in the United States. When asked about Israel's responsibilities toward “the plight of Palestinians,” Meir responded to the London Sunday Times with infamous words, “There were no such things as Palestinians.” Palestine, she explained, never existed. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them.” In her mind, Palestinians “did not exist.”Footnote 85 As Said later recalled, Meir's statement “set me, and many others, on the slightly preposterous challenge of disproving her.” In a Fanonian sense, again, he later remembered his “working in an almost entirely negative, the non-existence, the non-history which I had somehow to make visible despite occlusions, misrepresentations, and denials.”Footnote 86
The Palestinian national movement and the Israeli prime minister's public denial of Palestinian existence in the Western press pushed Said to deepen his anti-orientalism and redress intellectual understandings of decolonization in a non-Eurocentric way. It became clear to him thereafter that his “most specific task was … to make the case for Palestinian presence,” as incumbent cultural and political structures erased it. Palestinians needed to coexist with Israelis and non-Israeli Zionists in Western imaginations. A way for them to do so was to assert their place and socially stand alongside misrepresentations of Palestine and Palestinians—that is, to coexist with them, frustrations notwithstanding. Henceforth, as an engaged intellectual, Said devoted his life “to try[ing] to change the public consciousness in which Palestinians had no presence at all.” His “major goal was getting” Palestinians “the right, or permission, to tell our story.”Footnote 87
Following a summer of shuttling between Amman and Beirut, the hotbed of the Palestinian revolution where he likely encountered Meir's interview, “one of the very first things” Said did was write an explicit account of his current-day experience as a Palestinian. Simultaneously published in slightly different forms in the Columbia Forum and an edited volume on Arab–Jewish reconciliation, Said's phenomenological piece built upon his unpublished 1965 ark essay and took his decolonial beginnings beyond merely critiquing US dehumanizations of Arabs and recognizing orientalism's structure. His essay, which was thereafter reprinted in the Beirut-based Americans for Justice in the Middle East's Middle East Newsletter, aimed “to put the Palestinian experience to the reader on both a personal and public level” as an Arab existentialist means of universal liberation. Without citation, Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth influenced Said's phenomenological intervention: “Individual experience because it is national and because it is a link in the chain of national existence, ceases to be individual, limited, and shrunken and is enabled to open out into the truth of the nation and of the world.”Footnote 88
Once an observant listener and now a representational voice, Said critiqued “everyone 's unwillingness to allow for a true Palestinian presence,” which had been denied by Israel and Zionists, supported by non-Palestinian Arab governments, deemed irrelevant in the West, and generally personified by Palestinians until 1967, himself included. Due to the fact that “the displaced Palestinian has had his human prerogative … taken from him in his political struggle,” the principal objective of the Palestinian national movement was “integration.”Footnote 89 “Palestinianism,” he explained, “is an effort at repatriation, but the present state of the Palestinian experience … is a problematic early transition from being in exile to becoming a Palestinian once again”—or from subhuman to human. Palestinians could no longer rely on liberal humanitarianism to end their plight. Even “Western good-thinkers who sympathize so effortlessly with the Vietnamese peasant, the American black, or the Latin American laborer” did not empathize with members of the Palestinian national movement. According to Said, “this was only because he is an ‘Arab’ who is opposed by ‘Jews.’” In the wake of the Holocaust, Jewish liberation effaced Palestinians and their unequal relationships with Zionism and the state of Israel. This made life for him in the United Stated “especially painful.”Footnote 90
Said followed up his identification of Palestinian nonexistence in Western imaginations and global affairs with evidence of his own personal experience. He offered up his insider perspective and revealed his emotions as means for both his readers and himself to reconceptualize the category of decolonization as an epistemic process centered in an individual's relationship with the world rather than one cemented by the nation-state form and its place in the international system. Prior to the 1967 war, he denied his Palestinian existence in public. When asked about his place of origin, Said “cowardly” answered that he was “from Lebanon,” not stateless Palestine. Captured by “peripherality” and its “political silence,” Palestinians like himself simply did not know “to whom or to what to talk.” Peripherality, Said explained, represented “not being able to stand at the center of your destiny” and the “feeling that your prerogatives have been usurped.” Political silence, for its part, meant “talking with different voices, none of them [a Palestinian's] own.” All that changed with the Arab defeat and advent of the Palestinian revolution.Footnote 91
Said's 1969 essay, then, theorized postcolonialism and demystified the Eurocentric idea of decolonization. The category of decolonization articulated “that Arab independence was not so much earned but granted in forms that suited the former colonizers.” Building on the Moroccan scholar Abdullah Laroui's critique of Arab nationalism, he deduced that Arab equality with Western independent nations was a mirage: “Arab independence [is] … a Western construction.” His own racial experience as a Palestinian in the United States proved it. He was not alone. Palestinians opted to “replace the silence with what is now only a substitutive political voice.” Palestinianism, as defined by Said, dedicated itself to “liberating Palestine, actually and intellectually, from the segregations and the confusions that have captured it for so long.” The “experienced condition of imposed silence” motivated him to write as a social way of speaking with the West. “This essay of mine,” he explained in print, “because it is in English, partakes both of the peripherality and of the paradoxical silence that I have been trying to describe.”Footnote 92
Said's Arab existentialism cross-read global writings on anticolonial humanism with the activities of the Palestinian national movement and critiques of disciplinary orientalism to intellectually refine his anti-orientalist consciousness in a decolonial way. In the years that followed, when speaking to like-minded audiences about US–Middle East relations, Israel/Palestine, and decolonization in the world, Said regularly invoked Fanon's approach. He frequently denounced empire's Manichean logic, its “chains of racism,” and the resulting “white man's way of discriminating politically and economically against nonwhites in the interest of continued and increased power and superiority.” In the case of Israel/Palestine, Zionism and Western imperialism partnered to transform “the non-Jew” into “a racial enemy of the state of Israel. Those roles,” he pronounced at the third annual meeting of the AAUG in late 1970, “have been thrust on Arabs as a result of Zionism's racial chauvinism.” These racial structures of imperialism prevented universal equalities. They also revealed a fault line in contemporary understandings of decolonization. Being Arab—and Palestinian, more specifically—contradicted the imagined liberatory spirit in the West that strictly championed Jewish liberation in Israel and relationally degraded the Palestinian national movement. For Said, decolonization was not strictly about national independence; it was about “social justice, in every sense of the word.” His non-Eurocentric idea of decolonization called for “overturning an order that withholds social justice.”Footnote 93
Said formally commenced work on a critical examination of orientalism's order in the early 1970s, which he identified “in many places, mostly academic and governmental.”Footnote 94 What rendered Said's anti-orientalism more powerful and different was its epistemological focus. Combined with his phenomenological take on decolonization and its engaged politics of (re)presentation, Said's decolonial humanism sought to empower a socially grounded and decentered consciousness in the world via a critique of how and why orientalism's episteme misrepresented “orientals” for the benefit of White “non-orientals.” Whereas Fanon and Sartre anchored themselves predominantly in the psychological and the existential respectively, Said shifted contemporary intellectual understandings of social relationships between racial difference and empire from the interpersonal to the intercultural without erasing individualities. His personalized intervention against and epistemological engagement with the West's “regime of truth” and its “collective Otherness” engendered greater recognition of imperial culture's entwined phenomena of copresence and coessence in the world and further unearthed its entrenched universality.Footnote 95
A will to be “less wretched” prompted Said's anti-orientalist reorientation toward the cultural machinations of empire. His novel way of making Palestinians present—and Arabs by extension—accorded ultimate importance to an epistemological way of “thinking, acting, writing.”Footnote 96 Said outlined the motivations that nourished his decolonial humanism before a private Arab audience in the United States around the time he commenced work on his book Orientalism. If orientalism disregarded Arabs “as a people, treating us as inferior, must our role be passively to cooperate with such a vision?” he provocatively asked. “Politics is a matter of neither military force, nor of uninformed economic force.” Rather, politics “is an extension of thought, thought that is effective, committed to definite values, based upon knowledge: knowledge, above all else, is paramount.” And “If Orientalism is a bankrupt mode of knowledge, why have we not provided a better sort?” In Said's opinion, the Arab challenge at hand was “that we have been known to the West only as enemies of Israel, and further back, as the Orientals of which the Orientalists spoke. We ourselves have not spoken,” Said contended, “we have not really spoken.” It was imperative that Arabs “devise a political culture, a political will, a political mind that can participate in, and perhaps later win, the cultural struggle from which now, and let us be honest and admit it, we are excluded.” Arabs needed a more effective way to “counteract Orientalism.” According to the US-based Palestinian scholar, this required preemptive interventions in “the process of the production of meaning at the very onset of that process.”Footnote 97
Conclusion
Around the time of the 1976 antiracism symposium in Tripoli, Libya, Said spelled out his decolonial humanism in an interview with Diacritics. While stepping away from writing Orientalism, he shared that his forthcoming book's “political intention [was] to demonstrate how Orientalism is and was a way of being in the world.” Like other Arab anti-orientalists, Said self-identified as “an Oriental writing back at the Orientalists, who for so long has thrived upon our silence.” What made his approach distinctive, though, was his writing “to them, as it were, by dismantling the structure of their discipline” and unearthing its “ideological biases.” On a worldly scale, the decolonial intellectual admitted that he felt himself “writing for compatriots and colleagues about matters of common concerns.”Footnote 98 By writing back to, for, and with others at the same time, Said assured that he was present with them all in an inclusive, universalizing way.
Said's decolonial beginnings derived from a political will to affirm Palestinian existence in a world devoid of a Palestinian state on the horizon. His drive to assert Palestinian presence initiated an intellectual process by which Said's anti-orientalist consciousness traveled from directly challenging orientalist misrepresentations to unearthing how and why orientalism structurally misrepresented so-called orientals. A recognition of the body of knowledge that perpetuated the reality of Palestinian nonexistence in Western imaginations uniquely positioned the scholar of comparative literature to intellectualize how the European idea of decolonization shackled the Palestinian national movement, which dialectically opposed Jewish liberation and its Western champions in a pernicious way. As the Nakba continued, he realized that it was no longer enough to profess Palestinian existence, denounce Palestinian nonexistence, criticize Israeli settler colonialism, and condemn harmful Western foreign policies. Rather, for Said, it was necessary to reorient anti-orientalism by refining a nascent decolonial humanism inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon. Said's excavation of empire's politics of knowledge luminously confronted orientalism's racial misrepresentations through its critique of the very structure that sanctioned his nonexistence, providing self-representation to anti-orientalists in the process.
The decolonial approach formulated by Said, which criticized the imperial production of knowledge instead of its generated perceptions in segregation, reordered the dominant understanding of decolonization and, as evidenced by Orientalism's agelessness, decentered its conceptual station away from Eurocentricism. By harmonizing phenomenology with an epistemic critique of empire and Palestinian liberation, he unchained the global legacy of race knowing and remade decolonization into an inclusive idea based on an individual's experience with imperial culture and its universal applicability. Reformed as a political culture, decolonization was no longer understood as a moment controlled from the top by the Western world and Whiteness; rather, it was a phenomenal process whose cultural “goal had to be won from the ground up.” Heeding the Fanonian call that “the level of consciousness of young people must be raised,” Said henceforth dedicated himself to “the education of the masses.”Footnote 99 His recognition that decolonial humanism transformed anti-orientalism into a universal mode of liberation engendered a cultural redefinition of decolonization and empire together, for the sake of everyone.
Acknowledgments
Feedback provided by Lotfi Ben Rejeb, Abed Takriti, Judy Wu, Katie Labelle, Tracie Matysik, Lorenzo Veracini, and John Munro, as well as Modern Intellectual History's anonymous reviewers was integral during this essay's drafting process. It also deeply benefited from the vibrant environment offered by a 2018 international workshop on Revising the Geography of Modern World Histories, organized by David Huyssen and Shaul Mitelpunkt at the University of York. Finally, Harris Ford's aid during the final formatting stage was much appreciated.
