Edward Said was a public intellectual. Not content to toil in classrooms or deliver papers at conferences, Said wanted—like the French intellectuals he admired—to engage the world with ideas.
Said is the subject of a friendly biography by University of Minnesota humanities professor Timothy Brennan. The author attended grad school at Columbia in the early ‘80s and became one of Said’s proteges. Brennan found him captivating and writes eloquently of his mentor. Readers will find Places of Mind captivating as well, perhaps more than many of Said’s own writings.
Outside the academy, where he enjoyed a distinguished career teaching literature, Said was known chiefly for two endeavors: his outspoken support for the Palestinian cause and his influential 1973 book of cultural criticism, Orientalism. The two matters were not unrelated, as Said grappled with political realities in the Near East and their underlying cultural assumptions. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 but was raised in Cairo—when the Egyptian capital was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city—and attended prep school and college in the U.S.
It’s an admirable background for a thinker who sought to straddle the world, and to his credit, Said’s intellectual ambitions brought literary, cultural, philosophical and political theory together in ways that challenged assumptions. He didn’t go for academic fads and usually maintained a nuanced relationship with the trends he embraced.
Brennan makes a point of introducing every Jew who played a role in Said’s life, from his childhood piano teacher in Cairo through the New York intelligentsia where he made his home in the ‘60s. The unspoken assertion is certainly correct: Said was no anti-Semite, a charge carelessly hurled because of his increasingly strident opposition to Israeli policies.
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The reality, Brennan shows, was as complicated as Said’s thoughts in other fields. He recognized Israel’s right to exist and imagined an eventual “one-state solution,” a federal state respecting the rights of all parties in Israel-Palestine. He was much attacked for criticizing the Oslo Accord, which many hoped would solve all problems, and he was proven correct.
Said’s Orientalism was a consciousness raising if one-sided critique of how Arabic and Islamic societies had been portrayed in Western literature. That portrait was often negative, based on stereotypes that in turn reinforced colonial polices by depicting Arabs as low and cunning, servile and autocratic, enslavers of women, worthy of being dominated by Western powers. What Said missed was the obverse side of what he termed “Orientalism,” the way images of the Near East stimulated the imagination of Western artists s well as ideas of alternative ways of life—and though. Orientalism opened windows into the stifling environment of Victorian society and was the reason many aesthetes and bohemians from the U.S. and Europe found their way to the region.
As for the historicity of some of those images, Said had little to offer. Orientalism was written as theory-driven literary criticism, not as history. It should be added that while Said’s erudition extended across centuries of Arab-language literature, he grew up a bit isolated from Arab popular culture and found it’s music incomprehensible. He preferred Brahms. And as for warning against colonialist narratives, Brennan finds no irony in Said’s life-long appreciation for Tarzan movies.
The picture that emerges in Places of Mind is of a complicated, occasionally paradoxical thinker who added caveats, asterisk and explanatory footnotes to every stand he took. He was an activist who opposed “politicization of the classroom.” Said stood against the idea of universities as job training centers but held to the older ideal that colleges existed to broaden and deepen the minds of students and their instructors. Places of Mind brims with details but despite its heft is hard put to encompass the entirety of its subject.
