Table Of ContentEdward Said
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Edward Said
The Legacy of a Public Intellectual
Edited by
Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly
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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited
187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
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www.mup.com.au
First published 2007
Introduction © Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly 2007
Text © individual contributors 2007
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Edward Said: the legacy of a public intellectual.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 9780522853575 (pdf).
ISBN 9780522853568 (pbk).
1. Said, Edward W.—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Intellectuals—Political activity. I. Ganguly, Debjani.
II. Curthoys, Ned. III. Title.
305.552
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly
Representing public intellectuals
1 Edward Said and the style of the public intellectual 21
Saree Makdisi
2 Edward Said and the sociology of intellectuals 36
Sean Scalmer
3 Blogging Said: Public intellectuals in the Internet age 57
Gerard Goggin
4 Exile and representation: Edward Said as public intellectual 75
Bill Ashcroft
5 Reluctant prophets and gadfly laureates: The Australian
writer as public intellectual 96
Brigid Rooney
Humanism as worldly affiliation
6 The worldliness of intimacy 121
Lisa Lowe
7 Edward Said’s unhoused philological humanism 152
Ned Curthoys
8 Edward Said, world literature and global comparatism 176
Debjani Ganguly
Contrapuntal rhythms: Music as critical metaphor
9 Edward Said and Theodor Adorno: The musician as 203
public intellectual
Peter Tregear
10 Said, Grainger and the ethics of polyphony 221
Ben Etherington
Europe, orientalism and popular culture
11 Orientalism and mass market romance novels in the
twentieth century 241
Hsu-Ming Teo
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12 The question of Europe: Said and Derrida 263
John Docker
Palestine and settler-colonial contexts
13 Interacting imaginaries in Israel and the United States 293
Lorenzo Veracini
14 Palestine, Project Europe and the (un-)making of
the new Jew: In memory of Edward W. Said 313
Patrick Wolfe
Index 000
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian
National University for hosting the symposium ‘Edward Said:
Debating the Legacy of a Public Intellectual’ in March 2006. The sym-
posium was convened by us and opened by Professor Ian Donaldson,
Director of the HRC. Many of the chapters in this book draw on
papers presented at this conference. We also wish to acknowledge the
support of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian
National University.
We are grateful to our contributors for their efforts in making the
publication of this book a relatively smooth process. We would like to
thank them for their cooperation and enthusiasm throughout the
project. We would also like to thank Ann Standish at MUP for her
proactive interest in such a volume and to Cinzia Cavallaro at MUP
for her unstinting support. We wish to acknowledge the anonymous
readers of our manuscript for their perceptive comments and
suggestions.
Finally we wish to acknowledge our friends, family and
interlocutors on this project for their enthusiasm and engagement
over a lengthy period. Particular thanks in the preparation of this
volume go to John Docker for suggesting the initial idea of the
symposium and for his helpful suggestions, Ian Donaldson, Leena
Messina, Caroline Turner, Howard Morphy, Barry Hindess, Dawn
Mirapuri, Shino Konishi, Peter Manning and Ghassan Hage.
Ned Curthoys
Debjani Ganguly
Australian National University
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Contributors
Bill Ashcroft is a founding exponent of postcolonial theory and co-
author of The Empire Writes Back (Routledge, 1989), the first text to
systematically examine a field that is now referred to as ‘postcolonial
studies’. His other publications include: The Post-colonial Studies
Reader (Routledge, 1995); The Gimbals of Unease: The Poetry of Francis
Webb (CASAL, 1997); Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies (Routledge,
1998); Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (Routledge, 1999); Edward
Said (Routledge, 2001); Edward Said and the Post-Colonial (Nova,
2001); Post-colonial Transformation (Routledge, London, 2001); On
Post-colonial Futures (Continuum, 2001). He teaches at the University
of Hong Kong.
Ned Curthoys is an ARC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cross
Cultural Research, Research School of Humanities, Australian National
University. His project analyses the recuperation of Goethe’s 1827
proposal of a ‘world literature’ in the twentieth century by anti-fascist
emigrant philologists such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer.
John Docker is adjunct senior research fellow in the Humanities
Research Centre, Research School of Humanities, ANU. Since the
publication of 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (Continuum, 2001), he
has researched and written on monotheism and polytheism and, most
recently, on genocide in relation to the Enlightenment and to
colonialism. He has recently published Is History Fiction? (UNSW
Press and University of Michigan Press, 2005), a book he co-authored
with historian Ann Curthoys.
Ben Etherington completed his masters degree on Edward Said’s
musical criticism at the University of Cambridge in 2006. He is writing
a PhD at Cambridge on aesthetics and imperialism in early twentieth-
century fiction, working with faculty from English and music. He will
be a visiting researcher at the Townsend Center at the University of
California, Berkeley in 2007–08.
Debjani Ganguly is head of the Humanities Research Centre in the
Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University.
A literary and cultural historian, she has published in the areas of
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postcolonial studies, global Anglophone writing, caste and Dalit
studies, cultural histories of mixed-race, Gandhi and nonviolence
and Indian literary criticism. Her recent publications are Caste,
Colonialism and Countermodernity: Notes on a Postcolonial
Hermeneutics of Caste (Routledge, 2005), Pigments of the Imagination:
Rethinking Mixed Race (co-editor; Journal of Intercultural Studies,
2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global
Perspectives (co-editor; Routledge and Orient Longman, 2007).
Gerard Goggin is an ARC Australian research fellow in the Department
of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. His books
include Internationalizing Internet Studies (ed. with Mark McLelland;
Routledge, 2008), Mobile Phone Cultures (ed.; Routledge, 2007), Cell
Phone Culture (Routledge, 2006), Virtual Nation (ed.; UNSW Press,
2004), and, with Christopher Newell, Disability in Australia (University
of New South Wales Press, 2005) and Digital Disability (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003). Gerard is editor of Media International Australia.
Lisa Lowe is professor of comparative literature at the University of
California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include
modern French, British and American studies, and Asian migration
within European and American modernity. She is the author of
Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell University
Press, 1991) and Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
(Duke University Press, 1997) and The Politics of Culture in the Shadow
of Capital (coeditor; Duke University Press, 1997). She is working on a
study of the historical convergence of African slavery, native genocide
and Asian indentureship in the colonial Americas as the conditions of
possibility for modern liberal reason.
Saree Makdisi is professor of English and comparative literature at
the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Romantic
Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity
(Cambridge University Press, 1998) and William Blake and the
Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003) as
well as articles in scholarly journals and edited collections. He has
also published articles and commentaries on current affairs in the
London Review of Books, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles
Times.
Contributors ix
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Brigid Rooney teaches Australian studies at the University of Sydney,
and has published in such journals as Australian Feminist Studies,
Southerly, Australian Literary Studies, JASAL and Antipodes. She is
writing a monograph based on her study of some contemporary
Australian writers who have performed as public intellectuals.
Sean Scalmer is senior lecturer in the Department of History at the
University of Melbourne. He is the author of Dissent Events: Protest,
the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia (University of New
South Wales Press, 2002). In 2006 he also published a co-authored
book, Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in
Social Movements (University of New South Wales Press), and an
edited collection, What If? Counterfactual Essays in Australian History
(Melbourne University Publishing). He is writing a book on the global
circulation of Gandhian non-violence.
Hsu-Ming Teo teaches in the Department of Modern History,
Macquarie University, Sydney. She co-edited Cultural History in
Australia (University of New South Wales Press, 2003) with Richard
White and has published articles on the history of travel and tourism,
romantic love, popular fiction and the culture of British imperialism.
She is working on a book about historical representations of Arabs in
Western women’s popular culture. She has published two novels, Love
and Vertigo (Allen & Unwin, 2000), winner of the Australian–Vogel
Literary Award, and Behind the Moon (Allen & Unwin, 2005).
Peter Tregrear is Dean of Trinity College, University of Melbourne,
where he is also an honorary fellow of the Faculty of Music. Peter’s
published works include articles for Cambridge Opera Journal,
Renaissance and Modern Studies, Times Literary Supplement, the
Literary Review, Beethoven Forum and The Oxford Companion to
Australian Music. His recent research interests include the reception
of classical music in America after 9/11. His forthcoming book is on
the composer Ernst Krenek. A performer as well as an academic, Peter
was awarded the Sir Charles Mackerras Conducting Prize in 2003 by
the Australian Music Foundation.
Lorenzo Veracini is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Social
Sciences at the Australian National University. He has written on the
colonial features of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: Israel and Settler
x Contributors
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