Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Convergences: Inventories of the Present

by Edward W. Said

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt--that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time--and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture.

As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays--from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Politics, History, Middle East, Literary Criticism

656 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

(Arabic Profile إدوارد سعيد)
Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among the scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has “to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual” man and woman.

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being an academic, Said also was an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations about music. Edward Said died of leukemia on 25 September 2003.

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

but the work of man is only just beginning
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses of his passion

And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory

-Aime Cesaire

Said returns so often to those lines, and even after having read this entire book, all 46 of the essays it contains, I still feel I do not understand the significance he feels in them. Like many of the other concepts and arguments deployed and investigated here, it leaves me still wondering and questioning and struggling. And that is a very good thing, I think; out of this struggle, what may come? But I feel something I don't often feel when reading; the need for someone to join me in the journey, to read with me and discuss with me and help me to make sense of all this stuff. Maybe the emphasis Said puts on inclusion and collaboration has had the effect, not only of making me feel my inadequacy, but of teaching me to go out and find answers elsewhere, not expecting myself to be complete and capable of understanding the world on my own...

Introduction

"The historical experience of imperialism for the imperialised entailed subservience and exclusion; therefore the historical experience of nationalist resistance and decolonisation was designed for liberation and inclusion. Much of what went wrong in the subsequent development of nationalism was the direct result of either forgetting or rejecting this edifying equation"

Said then suggests that the idea of historical experience acknowledges that "the dominant and subaltern peoples in imperialism" share the same world and that there is "only one worldly cultural space, the common possession of all [...] and also a universal language of rights and ideals, in which to wage the struggle for liberation and inclusion" (and that this acknowledgement reflects a reality of colonisation - that the culture of the coloniser becomes by force a part of the world of the colonised)

Possibly I must change my mind? These universals are uncomfortable.

He ends by talking about Palestine and the influence of Palestine, and the state of being an exile, on his thought. He closes:

"Since almost by definition exile and memory go together, it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it that determine how one sees the future. My hope in this book is to demonstrate the truth of this, and to provide my readers with the same pleasure I derived from using the exile's situation to practice criticism. And also to show that no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible."

I feel grief at this conclusion for the Palestinians, but there is something else here, some tension between memory's determining the imagination of the future, and the impossibility of return to the past. I am reminded I think, to critically carry the past (without which I know nothing), dream & build the future (the only place we can go) and to witness the unanswerable, to be restless, to seek the ambiguities that are the truth.

Essay 1: Labyrinth of Incarnations [Merleau-Ponty]

"perception involves not only the thinking body but also the incarnated mind"

"Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that we use our body to know the world; space and time are not abstractions but almost-entities that we haunt and inhabit. The body is not an object that receives impressions which the mind then translates in its function as a subject..."

Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne's doubt:

"Yet it was in the world that he had to realise his freedom with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to wait for the proof of his worth. That is the reason he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is the reason he never finished working. We never get away from life. We never see our ideas or our freedom face to face"

Now I am putting these ideas here without knowing yet how to interpret them, only knowing that they speak to me. I remember reading about Cezanne's doubt, how he painted Monte Ste Victoire again and again... Merleau-Ponty suggests Cezanne "simply expressed what [things] wanted to say" and I guess I can suggest that in this reading, Cezanne was trying to paint what he felt about the mountain or what the mountain said.

Essay 4: A Standing Civil War [T.E. Lawrence]

"We race over in the first dawn to the College's translucent swimming pool, and dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies closely as a skin: and we belong to that too. Everywhere a relationship: no Loneliness any more - T.E.Lawrence, The Mirror

Essay 5: Arabic Prose and Fiction After 1948

Said suggests that, as interpreted by Constantine Zurayk, "[al-nakba] caused a rift to appear between the Arabs and the very possibility of their historical continuity as a people" In this context, it became urgent for creative people to articulate the present in order to restore that possibility. I think here of the strong sense in "The Woman from Tantoura" of a beautiful story that I wanted to hear being derailed soon after it began, and how the text itself fragmented. Said highlights the importance of "the scene" as contemporaneity: "a scene formally translates the critical issues at stake in the Arab world".

Essay 9: Tourism among the Dogs [George Orwell]

I was quite startled by Said's on-point commentary of Stansky & Abrahams Orwell: The Transformation which reveals the political poverty of his work

"Orwell's writing life was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values... but it was always being overshadowed and hidden by the adventurous content of his material, which had the effect of persuading his readers that he spoke as one of the oppressed"

"What then is the literary history narrated in Orwell: The Transformation? Surely the consolidation of Orwell's plain style as it reported without unnecessary adornment the views of a decent man. Many good things have justifiably been said about this style, although it is curious how they have often tended to prevent other things from being said. For instance, the plain reportorial style coerces history, process, knowledge itself into mere events being observed. Out of this style has grown the eye-witness, seemingly opinion-less politics - along with its strength and weakness - of contemporary Western journalism. When they are on the rampage, you show Asian and Asiatic mobs rampaging: an obviously disturbing scene presented by an obviously concerned reporter who is beyond Left piety or right-wing cant. But are such events events only when they are shown through the eyes of the decent reporter? Must we inevitably forget the complex reality that produced the event just so that we can experience concern at mob violence? Is there to be no remaking of the power that put the reporter or analyst there in the first place and made it possible to represent the world as a function of comfortable concern? Is it not intrinsically the case that such a style is far more insidiously unfair, so much more subtly dissembling of its affiliations with power, than any avowedly political rhetoric? And more ironically still, aren't its obsessive fantasies about indoctrination and propaganda likely to promote exactly that "value-free" technocracy against which one might expect plainness and truth to protest?"

Essay 10 & 12: Bitter Dispatches from the Third World/Among the Believers [V.S. Naipaul]

Said picks up on a story Naipaul reports, of learning the name of jasmine - a scent he had known and a name he had known finally connecting after years of not touching each other in his mind - and relates them to Naipaul's "bitterness", affection for the West, nostalgia for colonialism and disdain for "Third World" places and people.

"For his portrait of 'wounded' India, Naipaul resorts to an almost hysterical repetition of how the place has no vitality, no creativity, no authenticity; read the book's last half and you will not believe that this, in its turgid denunciations of a poor country for not measuring up, is the great Naipaul everyone has been extolling.

Frustratingly, he points out, Naipaul's work is made use of by British and USian critics who share those sentiments and by politicians, and doubtless is believed by readers like myself struggling (or not making much critical effort) to decide which stories, which witnesses to believe about countries and cultures and people beyond our direct experience. Said comes to the rescue, pointing out the distortions and omissions in Naipaul's images. In Essay 12 "Among the Believers", Said's exposure and denunciation blazes with righteous rage; Naipaul's agenda is to show, with "no appreciable respect for history" (the text is full of inaccuracies as well as selective examples), that Islam and Muslims are inferior to "the West".

"Naipaul wouldn't make a trip to Israel, for example, which is not to say that he wouldn't find rabbinical laws governing daily behaviour any less repressive than Khomeini's. No: his, audience knows Israel is OK, "Islam" not. And one more thing. If it is criticism that the West stands for, good - we wat Naipaul to criticize those mad mullahs, vacant Islamic students, cliche-ridden revolutionaries. But does he write for and to them? Does he live among them, risk their direct retaliation, write in their presence so to speak, and does he like Socrates live through the consequences of of his criticism? Not at all. No dialogue. He snipes at them from the Atlantic Monthly where none of them can ever get back at him."

Essay 17: Reflections on Exile

But I am the exile
Seal me with your eyes.
Take me wherever you are -
Take me whatever you are.
Restore to me the colour of my face
And the warmth of body
The light of heart and eye,
The salt of bread and rhythmn,
The taste of earth... the Motherland.
Shield me with your eyes.
Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow.
Take me as a verse from my tragedy;
Take me as a toy, a brick from the house
So that our children will remember to return.

-Mahmoud Darwish

Here is another poem by Darwish that speaks even more terribly and loudly and profoundly and beautifully of the condition and contradictions of exile that Said articulates:

Who Am I, Without Exile?
------------------------

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water
binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway
to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing
makes me enter the gospels. Not
a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb
and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing
makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing
carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing
and not promise. What will I do? What
will I do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?

Water
binds me
to your name ...
Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams
to my reality: not dust and not fire. What
will I do without roses from Samarkand? What
will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar
stones? Our weight has become light like our houses
in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange
creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened
from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what
will we do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?

Water
binds me
to your name ...
There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you
but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O
stranger! what will we do with what is left to us
of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths?
And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house.
Was this road always like this, from the start,
or did our dreams find a mare on the hill
among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it?
And what will we do?
What
will we do
without
exile?

This bears no comment at all.

Essay 22: Foucault and the Imagination of Power

"...there is some value in trying to understand why [Foucault] imagin[ed] power to be so irresistable and unopposable... Consider these four possibilities. You think about power
1. To imagine what you could do if you had power
2. To speculate about what you would imagine if you had power
3. To arrive at some assessment of what power you would need in order to vanquish present power
4. To postulate a range of things that cannot be imagined or commanded by any form of power that exists at present.
It seems to me that Foucault was mainly attracted to the first and second possibilities, that is, to thinking about power from the standpoint of its actual realisation, not of opposition to it. The third and fourth possibilities are insurgent and utopian... In short, Foucault's imagination of power is largely with rather than against it...

Essay 34: Identity, Authority, and Freedom

"[There are] two images for inhabiting the academic and cultural space provided by school and university. On the one hand, we can be there in order to reign and hold sway. Here, in such a conception of academic space, the academic professional is king and potentate. In that form you sit surveying all before you with detachment and mastery. Your legitimacy is that this is your domain, which you can describe with authority as principally Western, or African, or Islamic, or American, or on and on. The other model is considerably more mobile, more playful, although no less serious. The image of the traveller depends not on power but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks and rhetorics. Travellers must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. Most of all, and most unlike the potentate who must guard only one place and defend its frontiers, the traveller crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed positions, all the time. To do this with dedication and love as well as a realistic sense of the terrain is, I believe, a kind of academic freedom at its highest, since one of its main features is that you can leave authority and dogma to the potentate. You will have other things to enjoy than merely yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive, far more worthy of study and respect than self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation. To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom

Essay 37: Traveling Theory Reconsidered (Frantz Fanon)

"Fanon makes clear what he has been intending all along: national consiousness is undoubtedly going to be captured by the colonial bourgeois elite, the nationalistic leaders, and far from guaranteeing real independence this will perpetuate colonialism in a a new form ("sterile formalism"). Thus, he says, if nationalism "is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words, into humanism, it leads up a blind alley". Borrowing from Aime Cesaire, Fanon suggests that the necessity is to "invent souls", not to reproduce the solutions and formulas either of colonialism or the "tribal" past. "The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women." A few sentences later he states that a national government (the only government ever known!) ought to cede its power back to the people, dissolve itself.

"There is concurrence here between Fanon and Lukacs... The work of theory, criticism, demystification, deconsecration, and decentralization they imply is never finished. The point of theory thereore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile."

Essay 42: On Defiance and Taking Positions

Here Said discusses the role of the intellectual:

"The main issue for the intellectual today [seems to me to be] human suffering. Indeed the intellectual vocation essentially is somehow to alleviate human suffering and not to celebrate what in effect does not need celebrating, whether that's the state or the patria or any of these basically triumphalist agents in our society."

"If something isn't said, then you can try by saying it to create an audience for it where perhaps one hadn't existed before"

Essay 46: The Clash of Definitions

Said demolishes the "clash of civilizations" concept in this essay. What I find most touching and thought-provoking (and difficult, as well as comforting) about it is his contention that in music and literature borders are always being crossed and cultures are always meeting in a spirit of "reconcilation and harmony". This is also another reminder to me to read that book "They Came Before Columbus"...

"And this sort of cooperative, collective enterprise is what one misses in the proclaimers of an undying clash between cultures: the lifelong dedication that has existed in all modern societies among scholars, artists, musicians, visionaries and prophets to try to come to terms with the Other, with that other society or culture that seems so foreign and so distant. One thinks of Joseph Needham and his lifelong study of China, or in France, of Louis Massignon, his pilgrimage within Islam. It seems to me that unless we emphasize and maximise the spirit of cooperation and humanistic exchange - and here I speak not simply of uninformed delight or of amateurish enthusiasm for the exotic, but rather of profound existential commitment and labour on behalf of the other - we are going to end up superficially and stridently banging the drum for "our" culture in opposition to all others."

Later I shared this paragraph with my family and had to work through my understanding of it a little bit more. I tried to explain that what I like about this paragraph and the way Said expresses the same idea throughout the book that is troubling and difficult for me in a productive way, is that it not only refutes and indicts the obviously terrible and racist arguments of chauvinist nationalism and so on, it also speaks to the folks aligning ourselves against such things, and urges us not to give up on cross-cultural engagement just because it is difficult and can be problematic, can be another colonising, exploitative act. profound existential commitment and labour on behalf of the other... these arid, unwieldy words will keep coming back to me in my own efforts to cross over, traverse borders and boundaries, with humility and respect and delight.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Missing Professor Said today as I finish this.

I didn't feel much hope when I began this book. The earliest essays are dense literary theory published in the same elite literary journals that make him despair, that make him feel like this whole scholarship thing is a racket, the same niche group buying each others' books.

But as time goes on, Said loosens, becomes a public intellectual writing for a wider audience in Harpers and The London Review of Books. Finally, at the end of all these pages, he's an old man confronting his own mortality with gentle sadness.

I especially appreciated:

-Said's skepticism of all forms of nationalism, even among the occupied and oppressed. Without condemning nationalist independence movements, while still actively supporting Palestine's right to exist, he pushes toward a goal of 'worldliness.' Worldliness means giving up some roots and attachments in exchange for deeper, broader, more nuanced understandings of the world. The right condemned him as "The Professor of Terror," while some of the left were furious that he wouldn't go far enough.

This also ties in with Said's distrust of 'identity politics.' He was a founding force to expand the canon to include other voices. But he never considered the works of 'dead white men' to be invalid. In fact, that's largely what he focused on throughout his life, with an appreciation that could also be devastatingly critical.

Always, Said seems to be pushing toward freedom for himself and all others. That includes freedom from our own mental rigidities and rules. When ideology threatens to curtain off some form of beauty or pleasure, Said pulls the curtains down.

I also enjoyed Said's essays on music and composers. Said was a pianist, and he himself lived an extraordinary contrapuntal life.

[Eliana Rivero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es difícil comentar este libro porque resultó complejo, ya sea por la diversidad de temas que trata o por el sinfín de referencias que hay. Said es un gran ensayista, que plantea de una forma que trata de ser sencilla, las dificultades que representa la cultura, la literatura y la identidad en el mundo moderno. Aparte de seguir la rama del Orientalismo, reflexiona el papel del exiliado en el mundo y sobre estar divido entre dos naciones distintas (lo que le sucede a él).

Son 31 ensayos donde se explaya en temas referentes a Oriente y sus problemáticas, tanto sociales, políticas y económicas y que se ven reflejadas en la literatura. También hay ensayos de literatura árabe, de Nietzsche, de Conrad (una constante), de Hemingway, de Foucault, del islam, de Lukács, de obras de otros ensayistas, etc. Un verdadero humanista, en todo caso, porque se interesa mucho en el ser humano y sus preocupaciones sociales. A pesar de que todos los ensayos son de antes del año 2000, ciertas nociones de la sociedad pueden plantearse aún el día de hoy: las disputas en el medio Oriente, los problemas geográficos que generan los escritores, las migraciones, etc.

Creo que después de todo, Said medita en torno a la literatura y la sociedad en vías de reencontrar el arte con las personas, romper esa barrera que ha impuesto la gente especializada. El arte puede ser de todos. Por la cantidad de autores, libros, historia, música, cine y geografía que deconozco, fue un reto comprender tanta información. Lo disfruté, pero hay que leerlo con cuidado. Creo que mi ensayo favorito fue sobre Moby Dick (y eso que yo no he leído Moby Dick) y uno llamado "Entre mundos". Said es fundamental para la crítica literaria y cultural. En algunos temas fue un poquito esclarecedor para mí y en otras cosas me dejó confundida. Pero bueno, así es la teoría literaria.

Y para terminar, una cosita bonita y que es cierta:

"Uno de los grandes placeres para aquellos que leen y estudian literatura es el descubrimiento de viejas normas en las que todas las culturas que conozco coinciden: cosas como el estilo o la ejecución, la existencia de escritores buenos así como de otros menores, y el ejercicio del gusto". (p.380) en La política del conocimiento.

[Ayleen Julio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antes de seguir, resulta conveniente aclarar que este es un libro de ensayos; y que justo acabo de leer el que le da nombre a la compilación, no todos.
A pesar de no coincidir en algunos puntos de su exposición Reflexiones sobre el exilio me parece un ensayo lúcido, y un excelente punto de partida para comprender fenómenos como el exilio y la migración, así como la representación del migrante desde una óptica más bien sociológica. No obstante, da pie para pensarlo desde la literatura. Volveré a otros ensayos suyos, de eso no hay duda porque es un crítico muy fácil de leer.

[subhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

My biggest criticism of Edward Said’s writing is that his knowledge is too vast and his creative ways of articulating his own critiques of others/constructing an image of the possibilities he’s envisioned was that it was never palatable to the average reader. ‘Reflection on Exile’ does certainly satisfy that critique. Said, who usually takes the most objective outlook in his writing does show his grappling with being exiled from his homeland and what that means to him.

“I could not meet loss face to face. I stood by the door of my parents home like a beggar.”

“It must be recognized that the nationalism of exiles brings about a self awareness as much as it does a less attractive forms of self-assertion.”

[Janine Farah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever."

Edward Said rips my heart out every.single.time. So many of his works are all time favourites of mine and this is no excpetion. He was an academic who could write like a poet. This collection of essay are all spectacular but the titular 'Reflections on Exile' is an exploration of what it means to have been exiled from one's home. He writes concerning his people, the Palestinians, but is relevant to all those forced from their lands after being uprooted by war or persecution.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this!

A collection of essays by Edward W. Said, arranged chronologically, written over a period of some 35 years, and published in 2001.

Said’s writing style is quite dense and erudite, which is challenging at times, and not every essay was equally interesting to me, depending on how it connected with my own journey and academic awareness. But as a whole, it was very stimulating and broadening for me, a delight! and worth the brain-effort!

I bought the book for the title essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’ which was recommended to me to help in my thinking about my experience of living as a foreigner these last ten years. But the book gave me a whole lot more. I enjoyed the way Said used the lenses of literature, music, film, dance, as well as history and geography to dig into deep dynamics of post/colonialism, identity and power, and experiences of the Arab world. I found Said’s passion for justice infectious. It was fascinating discovering through essays very much situated in their decade and moment, a nuanced understanding of continued relevance.

[Leo Africanus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best collection of essays...ever!

[Heather scarlett victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karin made me read this, for which i am eternally grateful.

[Christiane Alsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Said masters the art of essay writing

[Sankar Raj · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of essays by the great intellectual Said.

[grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Said offers a rigorous critique of how Western narratives often flatten and stereotype non Western identities. Through sharp, precise analysis, Said reveals the political and cultural mechanisms behind such distortions, rooting his critique in both literary and historical contexts. His exploration of exile and marginality is particularly compelling, presenting displacement not as a source of romanticized creativity, but as a condition that deepens critical awareness of cultural misrepresentation. Rather than essentialize identity, Said insists on its complexity and fluidity, demanding a more ethical and responsible approach to representation. The collection remains politically relevant.

[ASC Library]

814.54 Sai

[Riri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really worth the reflection. Powerful to see such an important issue from new and different points of view.

[Fran Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

flicked through but enjoyed for the most part

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

SO insightful! really helped w my essay ;)

[sanjna · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant

[marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

no ha nacido nadie capaz de convencerme de que este hombre no tiene objetivamente la razón en absolutamente todo (y es muy difícil que yo diga esto)

[O · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. Reflections on Exile (17) is my favorite.

[Shane K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, eclectic essay collection.

[Highlyeccentric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essay on exile is A++

[scrapespaghetti · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lawrence will not endure as guerrilla fighter, political militant, or even psychological oddity. But as a writer for whom writing replaced character with a dynamic of ceaseless and self-nullifying activity, he will remain exemplary. The body was held in contempt (“I have wished myself to know that any deliberate exercise of display of the body is prostitution; our created shapes being only our accidents until by taking pleasure or pains in them we make them our fault”), the mind was rebellious in an originality that admitted no progenitor. His final province, “the processes of air,” overcame even his personality, until he could write from isolation into a fellowship as intimate as it was distant:

We race over in the first dawn to the College’s translucent swimming pool, and dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies closely as a skin:—and we belong to that too. Everywhere a relationship: no loneliness any more. (The Mint)

[Tahseen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The breadth of subject matter covered in these beautifully crafted essays is remarkable. 'Cairo and Alexandria' is one to keep in mind for any walk through old Cairo. Any essays mentioning Bernard Lewis (quite a few do) are worth the cover price alone.

[Anas Theo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An astonishing compilation of Said's essays that contribute to understand his basic thesis, perceptions, research domains etc. Literary theory , post-colonialism, middle-eastern studies and other areas such as philosophy of music are in the centre of his analysis.

[Matt]

A weakness for the essay edges this one out among my favorite books by Said.

[Nate]

Rating applies to: the Introduction, "Amateur of the Insoluble", "Conrad and Nietzsche", and "Reflections on Exile"

[Purple Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just re-reading some of these as I prepare a paper. I wish I had time to re-read the whole thing. I forgot how much I enjoed reading Said. I'll bump this one up a star.

Still love this!

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful. I really enjoyed this.