Edward Said and his work have been both present and absent in North Atlantic political theory. Present, as Jeanne Morefield argues in her thoughtful study, Unsettling the World, in the sense that he could be cited here and there; yet absent, insofar as he could be cited but never fully engaged. Nor have the plethora of his insights relevant to political theory directly been engaged or mined, even if some of the more iconoclastic scholars in the field consistently taught his work. As this reviewer knows firsthand, Timothy W. Luke at Virginia Tech regularly taught Orientalism (1978) in his graduate seminars, and so did Raymond Duvall at the University of Minnesota. Still, not a peep of the actual substance of Said’s work could be heard in mainstream political theory, and even less so in political science. For decades, an ineludible figure often credited with inaugurating a whole field—postcolonial studies—the trajectory of which often gave him pause, Said was equally known as a courageous defender of Palestine and a vehement critic of imperialism and of what today is characterized as Islamophobia, in addition to being a world-class literary scholar and critic.
Even so, or perhaps because of it, one of the premier and most influential cultural and literary thinkers of the late twentieth century was for all intents and purposes silenced in a field in which his work was painfully relevant. Morefield seeks to rectify this situation or at least set the stage to remedy it by offering the first book-length study by a certified political theorist, who also happens to be one of the pioneer critics of imperialism and imperial ideologies in Anglophone political theory. How does Morefield go about doing so?
Unsettling the World consists of six chapters, bookend by an introduction and a coda, and divided by a “break.” Each chapter consists of exquisite elucidations of Saidian themes in which the critical and political import of his notions of exile, loss, colonialism, imperialism, humanism, worldly critique, and the vocation of intellectuals are vigorously staged to show the relevance of these notions to many a concern in political theory. This is done in superb prose, which is something very rare in the field yet is one of the signatures of Morefield’s work, together with analytical precision and forcefulness. These notions are compellingly and accurately rendered and made legible for a field that despite its theoretical bearings is often at pains to engage with theoretical genres of thinking “others” than its own.
Unsettling the World is aptly composed of thematic chapters that reconstruct certain threads and themes in Said’s work across his vast oeuvre. Morefield mines most of his books for insights into the organizing themes of the chapters, even if the more robust theoretical engagements in Beginnings (1975) and The World, the Text and the Critic (1983) are relatively unexplored, although these were central to Said’s zone of engagements. In chapter 1 Morefield reflects on writing exile and loss by way on Said’s own reflections. Of special interest are her treatments of affiliation, attachment, and distance; most momentous in Morefield’s account is “Said’s insistence on just holding without resolving contradictions” (p. 22), which is a strength, especially in relation to the questions of identity politics and “place” treated in chapter 3. This is followed, in chapter 4, by an account of Said’s lifelong engagement with classical music. Here Morefield creatively deploys musical metaphors to account for some of Said’s fiercest polemics and his signature skill in bringing the colonized and the colonizer into a single field of vision that is critical of both. The next two chapters pursue these themes by weaving them in relation to other Saidian concerns: humanism, worldliness, and public intellectuals. Morefield includes a wonderful account of the infamous 1986 debate between Said and Michael Walzer in Grand Street. She uses powerful insights to close her book with a trenchant critique of “Liberal Narcissism,” especially in relation to Palestine.
Yet Unsettling the World is not just exegesis or an introduction to Said’s work for political theorists. By accurately reconstructing these aspects of Said’s writings, Morefield shows their relevance and puts these Saidian motifs to work as she creatively expands on them, showing the limited horizons of much political theorizing and how a genuine encounter with Said would enrich the terminology and worldliness of the field of political theory. That in and of itself is impressive enough and makes the book worth reading. Equally compelling is the moving account Morefield offers about her son as she was working on this book. It beautifully and tactfully shows the truly human and worldly valences of loss and exile. These pages reach lyrical beauty. One need not be a parent of a neurodivergent child, or a parent at all, to be captured by these pages. Only the truly numb would not be moved by them.
Timothy Brennan, one of Said’s finest readers and critics, as well as the author of an excellent intellectual biography of Said, Places of Mind (2021), once suggested that “everyone has their Said.” What is Morefield’s? Considering her academic trajectory, it is tempting to answer that question by referring to Said’s work on colonialism and imperialism. But there is so much more to Morefield’s book. Morefield’s Said is announced in the book’s title. It is the Said that unsettles and forces the reader to be unsettled as reader but, most important of all, as intellectual and political actor. As she writes, Said worked always in that liminal space of the unsettled, “between longing for home and loss of home, between community and intellectual solitude, between difference and human comity, between multiplicity and universality, between imperial violence and imperial connection, between discipline and resistance, between the victims and the victims’ victims. Said never resolved these tensions. He simply painted richer, more complicated portraits of the whole while simultaneously looking loss in the face and demanding a better world” (p. 206). For Morefield, Said’s work offers far more than lessons on imperialism and its legitimating discourses. He rather offers an injunction to “occupy the unsettled.” Morefield’s book seeks to honor this vision by enacting it both in relation to the field for which the book was written and to her own tragic experience of loss.
Morefield’s account of Said’s thought constitutes an important contribution to the field by showing the undeniable relevance of important aspects of his work for political theory. All the more so it commands respect. Yet in that spirit it is important to raise some questions about the nature of the engagement that Unsettling the World stages. Perhaps the clearest limitation is found in how the encounter that the book’s subtitle announces is staged. Increasingly in an age of intellectual de-differentiation, political theory scholars look at other theoretical traditions for fresh critical insights. Yet in these efforts there is a marked tendency to either make them into political theorists, as if it was some sort of badge of honor to be considered one, or to uncritically engage them. Morefield’s book comes very close to the latter. Reading Unsettling the World, one wonders whether Said ever got anything wrong or equivocated, or whether the logic of his arguments ever floundered. This book is not an encomium to his work, to be sure, yet the promise of Unsettling the World’s subtitle is only partially realized. There is little by way of a bidirectional engagement between Said and political theory in Unsettling the World, even if the most intellectually and politically enabling track is to make every engagement into a two-way street. Morefield’s, however, is one-sided. In her book, “political theory” does not talk back in any substantial way, even if Orientalism, for instance, constitutes a brilliant yet deeply flawed construction. So does Culture and Imperialism, albeit far less so. Orientalism famously combined wonderful insights with wildly misguided generalizations and wonderfully simplified anachronisms. And yet, although in Morefield’s book one reads scathing pages on liberalism’s narcissism, there is no real critical engagement with Said’s work. Said is used as a standpoint to criticize variations of political theory. Aspects of his work are thus compellingly reconstructed and rendered, but they are not critically engaged—not even sympathetically so. The contrast then is the more striking: scathing on one side, tepid on the other. A critical middle voice, as it were, is not at hand in these pages. When it comes to Said, Morefield, one of the fiercest critical voices in the field, comes across as subdued.
This has become common enough in the field these days, especially in relation to figures that are considered Others, and it would be wrong to tax Morefield too harshly for it. Genuine criticism is not only increasingly rare in this ever-depoliticized field but is also often considered improper or impolite. Many an effort to decenter canons and discourses, moreover, ends up staging one-sided engagement. It is as if the Anglophone scholar of political theory is wary of opening a genuinely dialectical engagement between political theory and the figures invoked; that is, an engagement that consists of mutual critical interrogation. Still, the question remains: Should we now add Said to the pantheon of saints alongside, say, Saint Frantz? That would be a mistake. No less than Fanon, Said’s work is not bereft of the intelligible contradictions, lacunas, and hesitations that define truly august minds. Perhaps there is another way of dealing with Said that requires neither peripheral acknowledgment nor straightforward acclimation: one can choose to read him in the same critical spirit that he read Conrad, Foucault, or Derrida. That is, at any rate, my Said: the subtle yet vigilant but also fierce reader of texts. One could also honor his memory by engaging him in the same spirit. But doing so requires knowing his work first.
Unsettling the World not only makes central aspects of Said’s intellectual itinerary known for political theorists but also shows its potential by how Morefield presents encounters of Saidian notions with others that dominate the field. In doing so, Morefield has truly delivered on the promise of her book by showing the relevance and importance of Said’s work for political theory. In Unsettling the World, Morefield has written not only an important contribution to Said studies but also an important work of political theory in its own right. It shall remain an unavoidable point of departure for any future engagement with Said, the challenges his oeuvre presents and the vistas that it opens, as well as its limitations.
