Fast Eddie Said wrote fiction

His far-too-influential book, Orientalism, is "malignant charlatanry". From a review of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies, by Robert Irwin:

...
The sweep of Said’s prejudice, and the passion that infuses his precarious, piled-up sentences, go some way to explaining why Orientalism is one of the world’s most popular academic books...

...Irwin...describes Orientalism as “a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations”, but he generally finds that the best way to demolish Said is not to join him on the high wire, where his adversary could land a lucky hit, but to lob well-aimed pies from ground level. By sketching portraits of dozens of Orientalists from the past and present, and by showing their widely varying preoccupations and abilities, Irwin makes human, and occasionally banal, an academic field that Said has demonized in its entirety. The result is an erudite and generally convincing riposte to Orientalism, a book that Irwin finds to be “richly imagined, but essentially fictional”; the characters drawn by Irwin are more rounded than Said’s cast of “villains”...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 1, 2006 11:08 AM