Said Edward W. - Power, politics, and culture: interviews with edward w. said

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography

Beginnings: Intention and Method

Orientalism

The Question of Palestine

Covering Islam

Literature and Society (editor)

The World, the Text, and the Critic

After the Last Sky (with Jean Mohr)

Blaming the Victims (editor)

Musical Elaborations

Culture and Imperialism

The Politics of Dispossession

Representations of the Intellectual

Peace and its Discontents

The Pen and the Sword

Entre guerre et paix

Henry James: Complete Stories, 18841891 (editor)

Out of Place: A Memoir

The End of the Peace Process

The Edward Said Reader

Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

Freud and the Non European

First published in Great Britain in 2001

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright 2001 by Edward W. Said

Introduction copyright 2001 by Gauri Viswanathan

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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eISBN: 978-1-4088-4623-0

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TO MY CHILDREN,

NAJLA AND WADIE,

THE JOY OF MY LIFE

by Gauri Viswanathan

This collection of interviews covers the years 1976 to 2000, as well as a wide variety of subjects. Except for the first one, which appeared in the Cornell University journal Diacritics and was a written exchange between the editors and myself, all of these pieces occurred, so to speak, in a face-to-face situation. Necessarily then, they reflect the immediacy of such encounters, the back-and-forth, the informal question-and-answer language, the circling around, making, and remaking of a point or argument, the challenge and counter-challenge of interviewer(s) and interviewee. They have been edited first of all by the journals, newspapers, and magazines that conducted the interviews in the first place and where they originally appeared, second by Professor Gauri Viswanathan and Shelley Wanger, third by me. As such then, they are a composite of direct discourse and later clarification. No effort at all has been made by anyone involved to make these interviews seem more writerly. They are therefore principally the records of various occasions, in many different times and places, publications, interviewers (the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, India), and many different situations, moods, and concerns.

Interviews play a role that essays and books do not. Most often in my case, they have arisen as responses to what I have written in my books and articles and, as such, reflect the interests of whoever is conducting the interview. I must say, though, that they have become the steady feature of the life of the publishing teacher and public critic. Wherever I go to lecture or publish a book, I am very grateful that kind and intellectually generous individuals give me the opportunity to answer their questions, on the spot and without preparation. In many ways, interviews are sustained acts of discovery, not only for the person being interviewed but for even the well-prepared interviewer. Thus, it is refreshingly often the case that someone with a long list of carefully written out questions discards the list and proceeds simultaneously and directly to talk to mefrom out of our discussion rather than off a pageand then more discovery often does occur, with results that are usually unpredictable. Every situation therefore reflects a specific set of circumstances, and since I have been involved in the public domain as a political activist as well as an intellectual and scholar, all sorts of challenges arise, which I have tried to meet. In any case, it is my hope that despite their informality and relatively wide-ranging nature, these interviews will also answer to the readers interests and concernsat another time, in another place.

E.W.S.

New York,

March 20, 2001

by Gauri Viswanathan

Few authors today are as prolific as Edward W. Said. The author of almost two dozen books, Said has written on a broad array of topics ranging from literary criticism to Middle East politics to opera, film, and travel. His views, marked by an engaging communicative energy, have reached a wide audience through his publications, articles and books, whether the subject is Joseph Conrad, Richard Wagner, or Palestine and the peace process. He is also the subject of several full-length works and anthologies of critical essays; indeed, there are at least a half dozen publications every year on his work, and books offering critical perspectives on Edward Said have become a growth industry in themselves. So much has been written by and about him that one can be pardoned for asking what new insights a book of interviews can be expected to provide that are not already present in Saids writings or in works about him.

The answer is simple: The interviews Said gave over the past three decades boldly announce that neither his own books and essays nor those written about him have the last word. The first thing to note is not only the number of interviews Said has given, both to print and broadcast media, but also the number of locations in which they took place, spanning Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. They confirm his presence on the international stage as one of the most forceful public intellectuals of our time, a man who evokes interest in the general public for his passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views, and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination. Dispersed in numerous publications around the world, these interviews have never before been collected in a single book. Together, they reveal a ceaselessly roving mind returning to earlier ideas in his books and articles and engaging with them anew. One measure of the fluidity and range of Saids thought is his ability to revisit arguments made in his books and essays not merely to defend and elaborate on them but, more important, both to mark their limits and probe their extended possibilities, especially in contexts other than those which first gave rise to them. In other words, Said travels with his ideas as far as they can go, long after they were first articulated, and he applies the same skepticism toward uncritical assimilation of his work as he reserves in general to his now-famous formulation about traveling theory. In the essay of the same name, published in