Abstract
The introduction discusses the consensus in postcolonial criticism that Said is its founder, as Orientalism, despite Said’s repeated denials, is considered to have initiated the discipline. This discussion serves two simultaneous goals: (1) to examine the authority of Said’s writings in postcolonial criticism, and (2) to dispose of that authoritative image by highlighting the disjunctions between Said’s criticism and the institutionalized forms of postcolonial criticism. By subsequently engaging with the most relevant strands of scholarship on Said’s career, I introduce my main intervention: that his work is grounded in literary criticism and that studying his earliest concepts of ‘literature’ and ‘agency’ reveals how he turned literary criticism into a form of political intervention. I round off by addressing my method which draws on rhetorical hermeneutics.
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Notes
- 1.
This view is intrinsically Anglo-American and routinely ignores the foundational influence of African and Caribbean Francophone intellectuals. Spearheaded by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas, the 1930s négritude movement that linked the affirmation of African cultural and political identity to the struggle for independence, in many ways anticipated the theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial studies to come. Likewise, the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, which emphasized the humanistic dimensions of Marxism, can be seen as antecedent to the discipline. For the Francophone beginnings of postcolonial studies, see Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2016, 253–283) or the essays that make up Charles Forsdick and David Murphy’s Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (2003).
- 2.
In 1995, Young pointed out that Said, Bhabha, and Spivak had become so central to postcolonial studies that they constituted what he famously called “the Holy Trinity of colonial-discourse analysis” (1995, 163). He noted a remarkable increase in the field to produce new archival material rather than to develop further the insights set up by Said, Bhabha, and Spivak. To me, this historical absence of critical engagement with Said’s Orientalism attests to what I label postcolonialism’s religious criticism.
- 3.
Throughout this book, the terms ‘politics’ or ‘socio-politics’ refer to a number of interrelated meanings: (1) activities and beliefs associated with the practice of government, the organization and administration of a community, state or part of a state, and the relationships between states, as well as the management and regulation of public and private life; (2) activities and beliefs concerning the acquisition and exercise of power or authority in the broadest sense of the word; (3) the moral principles, codes of conducts and the ethical implications and consequences of actions and ideas; (4) the underlying ideas, beliefs, outlooks, attitudes, and ideology forming the basis of any activity, theory, or practice. These meanings are inextricably connected, so that, when it comes to discussing literature, the politics of reading have consequences for the politics of state, and vice versa.
- 4.
The text I refer to is Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith’s English translation Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), which is also the version Said uses in his writings. As the title suggests, this edition contains selected translations from the Italian originals. Recently Joseph Buttigieg has started the colossal project of editing, co-translating, and producing a complete critical edition of Gramsci’s notebooks in English with all attendant notes and materials (Gramsci 2011). Though these three volumes are excellent and indispensable, lack of funding means that they only contain the first eight notebooks of the 29 produced by Gramsci.
When citing from translated works in this book, I first refer to the original title and preferably even to the original edition of the work. In an accompanying footnote I then refer to the English translation from which I cite. In all following mentions, I use the title of the work’s English translation.
- 5.
On this point I find myself in agreement with Harold Veeser who thinks Brennan is at fault for producing an intelligent-design version of Said, as if “Said possessed a blueprint that he systematically went about filling over several decades, without wavering or backfilling” (2010, 24).
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Vandeviver, N. (2019). Introduction. In: Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27351-4_1
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