Jag läser Timothy Brennans nyutkomna biografi över Edward Said, en figur som jag alltid haft en viss nästan motvillig fascination för. Said framstår som mer politisk i en traditionell mening än hans efterföljare, men också mindre politisk i en nutida mening. Mer politisk i den meningen att hans texter om t ex representationen av araber inte handlade om "sårande stereotyper" i största allmänhet utan snarare om kulturen och medias geopolitiska roll. Det fanns så att säga verkliga politiska (i sista hand militära) konflikter mellan stater, inte bara ett allmänt antagande om maktförhållanden inom ett samhälle. Mindre politisk i att han - mirabile dictu! - inte verkar ha varit villig att låta politiska ställningstaganden genomsyra hela tillvaron och förvandla humaniora till ett identitetsbaserat proxykrig med oklara realpolitiska vinster men desto klarare förluster vad gäller kärnverksamheten. Till viss del är detta en generationsfråga, men inte bara - det framgår ur Brennans bok att det i hög grad var en fråga om temperament. Några citat:
"Postcolonialism’s new wave of scholars, many of them from former
colonial territories or related by birth or family name to those who
were, broke into Western academic life for the first time. By the
same
token, they were from a generation formed under Reagan, on the one
hand, and postmodernism, on the other. From South Asia, Latin America,
and the Middle East, often from well-to-do families with political
connections, many migrated to the metropolitan university in part
because of the openings Said had created. But once there, and feeling
their newfound power, they subscribed to a “big bang” theory that no
resistance to colonialism had existed before them. The idea seemed to be
that one had to be a member of an oppressed racial, ethnic, or national
group in order to resist imperial injustices, and an equation was drawn
(one Said had always opposed) between what one knows and what one is.
In a setting marked by the end of the postwar economic boom (1972) and
the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the thematic emphases of
postcolonial studies hardly corresponded to Said’s, which had to do with
the
creation of new states, the petitioning of governments, and media
battles in the public sphere. The motives of postcolonial studies, by
contrast, might be described as a general loathing for a Western
entity vaguely dubbed 'modernity.'"
"[H]e pointed out that affirming the existence of a nonwhite 'other' is not itself an argument and certainly not a progressive one. A race, a gender—neither is the beginning or end of a person. Were one to assume that it was, the absurd corollary would be that a 'fifth-rate pamphlet and a great novel have more or less the same significance.' What matters in the end, Said argued, is 'how a work is written and how it is read'.”
"He offered a critical response to the report of the World Commission on Culture and Development (UNESCO) titled 'Our Creative Diversity,' in which he complained that for all its fine points it had not a word to say about encouraging students to think for themselves. He also faulted it for sidestepping the fundamental oddity of university education, which—flying in the face of modernism as well as theory’s supposed Copernican break with all that went before—was the need to submit to the authority of a tradition, a discipline, and scholarship."
"The movement from paper and ink to a backlit screen meant abandoning
the physicality of the text, the tedious and exacting labors of
producing it, and the imaginative effort required by readers holding a
book in their hands without the aid of hypertext. It was not simply
nostalgia to want to hold on to the intellectual world that the older
technology of writing allowed when not doing so had such disastrous
consequences on the critical faculties. From essay to essay, he made the
same sort of case: progressive
thinking meant preserving traditions, not destroying them."
