Edward Said's Legacy

Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, editors Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 (548 pages, index) $65.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper)*Edward Said''s Rhetoric of the Secular Mathieu E. Courville Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 (548 pages, index) $65.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper)Reviewed by Anthony AlessandriniOn the back cover of Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom's edited collection Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation is a quote from Cornel West: Edward Said was the greatest public in the late twentieth-century United States. Yet the many dimensions of his genius have yet to be fully appreciated. It would be hard to dispute the first half of this formulation; with the exception of Said's friend and colleague Noam Chomsky, it is impossible to think of an who had as much influence upon US public life during this period as Said. It is equally difficult to disagree with West's second point, but I would go a step further and suggest that the two statements are in fact connected. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Said's position as a public is directly responsible for the larger failure to come to terms with the full dimensions of his work, but there is nevertheless a connection, in that of his most important ideas have tended to be flattened out and simplified in their application both within the academy and in other contexts.This situation makes the appearance of the two books under review here particularly heartening; although they approach Said's body of work from very different angles, both books are valuable contributions to the larger effort to address Said's legacy. Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation is a large and ambitious collection, containing thirty chapters from a wide variety of disciplines and addressing the full range of Said's career. By comparison, Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, by the Canadian scholar Mathieu E. Courville, is a relatively slim monograph that focuses specifically on representations of the religious and the secular in Said's oeuvre. Taken together, these books honor two important and interrelated aspects of Said's work. The wide-ranging nature of Iskandar and Rustom's anthology conveys the sense of expansiveness-the rejection of the constricting grip of academic specialization and a concomitant ability to cross the boundaries that are too often set up between disciplines and topics-that Timothy Brennan, in his contribution to the volume, refers to approvingly as Said's intellectual generalism (111). And Said's unwavering commitment to close readings of texts, consciously adopted from his predecessors in philology and comparative literature, and his refusal to treat texts simply as objects to be manipulated within a larger polemical or didactical argument finds a nice reflection in Courville's careful readings. Rather than subject the complexities and idiosyncracies of Said's work to iron-clad overarching central argument, Courville maintains a flexibility that allows him to avoid the simplifications that have too often attended readings of these texts. Most notable in this respect is Courville's refusal to engage in the game of pointing to supposed contradictions, referring instead to Said's tendency, in the development of his work, to deal with what Courville refers to as irreconcilables, and what Said himself often called antinomies. Indeed, as Courville suggests in his introduction, where others have perceived apparent contradiction in Said's he instead chooses to locate some measure of coherence, or even at times startling lucidity (7).Both books express a frank admiration for Said's work and example, without thereby giving up the right to criticize when necessary. In this sense, they follow Said's dictum, quoted by Joseph Massad in his contribution, Affiliating with Said, to never privilege over criticism:e history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum solidarity before criticism means the end of criticism. …

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