1 - Lessons From Said

Summary

[T]oday's intellectual is most likely to be a closeted literature professor, with a secure income, and no interest in dealing with the world outside the classroom.

Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 1996

I’ve stuck pretty carefully to the notion that the classroom is sacrosanct to a certain degree.

Edward Said, in an interview of 1997

In the Preface to Out of Place Edward Said implied that he had been surprised when, looking back at what he had written, he realized how prominently his school years featured in the book. For reasons I touched on in the Introduction, his reaction may itself be surprising to some readers: many people think of their time at school as formative, and in Said's case it led to a life-long commitment to education. Yet the perplexity he felt over education's place in his memoir seems consistent with the uneasy status of education in his most influential critical works, where it receives little explicit attention – however deeply implicated and present it may be in other ways – and where the attention it does receive is frequently, and sometimes ferociously, antipathetic.

Much of the antipathy is grounded, of course, in Said's understanding of colonial education's place in colonialism. In his view, to borrow a summary from two of the many people working in his wake,

education was a central site for the exercise of colonial power, both in the metropolitan centre where it was through education that the legitimizing discourses of the colonial adventures were justified, and in the colonial societies, where education provided the structuring mechanisms of asymmetrical relations of power. […] It was in and through educational institutions that students came to first accept as natural and inevitable the links between colonial power and knowledge.

What is more, Said understood the complicity between education and imperialism to extend into the present, long after the major European empires started to crumble. In ‘Orientalism Now’ (the last chapter of the original text of 1978), he wrote:

there is no Arab educational institution capable of challenging places like Oxford, Harvard, or UCLA in the study of the Arab world, much less in any non-Oriental subject matter.