Curthoys Ned - Edward Said: Legacy of a Public Intellectual

Edward Said

The Legacy of a Public Intellectual

Edited by

Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2007

Introduction Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly 2007

Text individual contributors 2007

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2007

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Designed by Phil Campbell

Typeset in Utopia by J&M Typesetting

Printed in Australia by Melbourne University Design and Print Centre

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. IntellectualsPolitical activity. I. Ganguly, Debjani.

II. Curthoys, Ned. III. Title.

305.552

Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly

Saree Makdisi

Sean Scalmer

Gerard Goggin

Bill Ashcroft

Brigid Rooney

Lisa Lowe

Ned Curthoys

Debjani Ganguly

Peter Tregear

Ben Etherington

Hsu-Ming Teo

John Docker

Lorenzo Veracini

Patrick Wolfe

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 symposium 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

Bill Ashcroft is a founding exponent of postcolonial theory and coauthor 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 Goethes 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 Saids 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 200708.

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 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