Shooting Fast Eddie Said in a barrel

Even the defence, by Maya Jasanoff in the London Review of Books, is limp. "Post-colonial" discourse for your delectation - the author at least has a decent respect for reality, hard though it be for her to admit it. An earlier guest-post on the book under review is here.

Ms. Jasanoff concedes the first trench line:

So how effectively does Irwin challenge Said? Factual purists will be delighted by his pot-shots. He makes mincemeat of such sweeping assertions as ‘Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the 17th century on.’ He corrects several inaccuracies concerning the medieval and Renaissance periods, and disputes Said’s representation of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. He effectively contests the portrayal of Orientalism ‘as a unified, self-confirmatory discourse’ by emphasising internecine disagreements. He provides an impressive list of Arab academics to challenge the suggestion that Orientalism has prevented Arabs from writing about themselves...

Now for some discourse:

Another disappointing aspect of Irwin’s encyclopedic approach is the relative dearth of overarching analysis. All this rich evidence begs questions. The most obvious ones concern inspirations and motives...

Of course, there is a perplexing ambiguity to Said’s presentation of the relationship between imperialism and scholarship. Does Orientalism act as a substitute for empire? Does it enable empire? Or is it the consequence of empire? (Phrasing the questions in parallel terms: does knowledge act as a substitute for power; does it enable power; or is it the consequence of power?) Irwin’s systematic attention to Oriental studies across Europe does much to counter Said’s contention that Orientalism was the product of the ‘three great empires – British, French, American’. For one thing, as Irwin quite rightly notes, ‘if one wants to give full and proper consideration to the relationship between Orientalism and imperialism, then one should turn to Russia with its vast empire of Muslim subjects.’ An equally gaping lacuna in Said’s work, Irwin stresses, concerns German Orientalism: German universities exercised scholarly hegemony at a time when German states possessed no Oriental colonies at all [my emphasis, and there goes the whole imperialist construction - MC]...

...Irwin has no truck with efforts to ‘“negotiate the Other”, “reinvent alterity” and suchlike enterprises’ pursued by post-colonialist literary critics; and it is easy to mock their sometimes convoluted prose. It is far less easy, however, to dismiss their impact in replacing Said’s now outdated binary conception of Otherness with richer analyses of hybridity and identities...

Duhh. Let us now dismiss this nonesense and re-read The State and Revolution or Mein Kampf, that we may learn the effects of wrong and evil thought - directly in the case of Hitler and less directly but rapidly in the case of Lenin - on the real world. While Fast Eddie's lies fester and distort. And excuse murder.

Update: Moral equivalence at its worst, from an exhibit on the Soviet Gulag that is touring the US:

..."Brutal systems have played a prominent role in many countries, including the United States," one of the exhibit's last panels tells visitors. By itself, that one clause--"including the United States"--would be bad enough. But the panel continues. "Although slavery ended after the American Civil War, its consequences persist. The repercussions of the Holocaust in Europe and apartheid in South Africa reverberate even today. Similarly, Russians face the legacy of the gulag. How can citizens in these countries face up to the horrors of the past?"

Just as it is the small details of the Gulag exhibit that lead one to consider the depth of the deprivation its captives endured, it is the word "similarly" that so effectively undermines what has just been shown. After all, if the Gulag is "similar" to anything in American life or history, does it teach us anything about the Soviet Union--or about anything at all? "If you cannot distinguish between levels of evil, you are a cause of evil." Such was the astute reaction of a man whose father spent a decade in the Gulag, when confronted with this moral equivalence in the paragraph above...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 26, 2006 11:26 PM