Carl Salzman Philip - Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict

DONNA ROBINSON DIVINE

When we think of postcolonialism, it is hard not to think, first and foremost, of Edward Said whose book, Orientalism, became the foundational text for a scholarly approach that has worked a powerful effect across the humanities and social sciences.1 Insisting that both scholars and scholarship must be liberated from a presumed racialized understanding of the world, Said also offered serious challenges to habitual ways of thinking about identities. Orientalism presumably showed how the West both created the Orient as a proving ground for its own identity and forged a discourse that sustained its domination over a large part of the globe. Marinated in a cauldron of provocative ideas that promised empowerment, Orientalism launched both an all-out attack against once carefully drawn disciplinary boundaries and a comprehensive assault on meanings once taken for granted. Both have gained considerable ground.

Orientalism has made its presence felt in most disciplines and is credited with generating totally new approaches in such traditional fields as anthropology, comparative literature, history, and political science, not to mention serving as a catalyst for the development of postcolonial studies. Inspired by Saids critical insights, postcolonial theorists have carried on his burden of dethroning many long-standing Western modes of domination and absolutisms by deconstructing what are widely taken to be its structures of knowledge.2 Although they continue to evoke images of their earlier marginal status, postcolonial theorists now occupy as conventional a standing in the academy as can be imagined. Tenured at the most prestigious universities, many also edit the important scholarly journals, publication in which carves out the path for advancement into the ranks of the professoriate. Postcolonialism has become a very visible part of the academic establishment.

Despite its widely acknowledged flaws3, Orientalism inspired some very imaginative work by academicians who found the books approach fertile ground for confronting not only how empires were won, but, more importantly, how they were held, focusing attention on the abuses often accompanying imperial ventures. We now know that political authorities in countries where the seeds of civil rights were deeply planted could be brutal overseas: democracies could be alive in the metropolitan centre and dead in the colonies. In Orientalism, scholars found a warrant for a vernacular perspective purportedly bringing the human dimension into the study of imperialism and revealingsupposedly for the first timethat this practice of power was very bloody indeed. Finally, Orientalism seemed to open up seductive possibilities for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to engage in a collaboration promising that truth would not only confront but also destroy unjust power structures.4 In affirming the links between knowledge and power, Said instilled in generations of scholars the faith that their work had political significance and that deconstructing Western discourse would delegitimize imperialism because established authorities required command over language as well as over the means of violence and production.

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Donna Robinson Divine is Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

To Said, imperialism was the great moral monstrosity that had escaped both scrutiny and a full moral judgement. It may have quickened the pace of European commerce, but it also siphoned off wealth and freedom from peoples too weak to resist the onslaught of modern canons. A large portion of the globe was presumed to exist primarily for the convenience and enrichment of Europe and America. For centuries, Europeans and Americans, according to Said, hid the magnitude of their oppression and violence behind improvised rationales that celebrated their power to encircle the globe as bringing enlightenment and civilization to peoples depicted as savages. From the imperial vantage point, the masses who suffered so terribly were not people with problems; they were the problems. But the savages saw the process in another way. Where Westerners saw problems, the colonized peoples, themselves, saw possibilities. And their creativity has been the object of study for postcolonial theorists, many of whom have moved so far beyond Orientalisms dichotomies that they believe they have created something entirely new.