Anything substantial to say?
"Just to clarify": Are you juvenile, or do you just act that way on the Internet? I'll await your replies to my arguments, but wont hold my breath.
As for YF's post, I couldn't tell you squat about _The Persians_ text, and whether or not her or Said's reading thereof was the better one, and it would have been filtered anyway, had you not decided to forward it to the whole list again. Please quit wasting my time.
I don much care whose reading is better, and I don see what it proves either way, vis a vis Said's bio., the origins of orientalism (as academic field or as discursive formation? know the difference?), method, etc. In fact, Said isn't really making claims about origins (that would be a different book altogether), but -- like Marx -- about genesis, or process and practice. The generation of "the Orient," the Oriental, etc..... If the claim is that ES misreads the understanding of "the Orient," or Islamic civ. during the Middle Ages -- that it want *that* eurocentric or orientalist -- then that has been said several times before. What do you think? I Haven the foggiest, but let us say this is correct. So what? This proves ES is not "historical materialist" enough? What does that mean? Please advise. (Amin doesn't think so; rather he thinks his book and Said's are complimentary (cf pages 98 - 117 of *Eurocentrism*)). That Lenin rulez?
ES's argument is that Orientalism is a _discursive formation_ (Foucault) and a particular _problematic_ (Althussser). (It exists or circulates within the context of imperialism and colonialism: without the latter, the former doesn't become what it is. Duh.) As such, it generates _what counts as_ the Orient and Orientals, as well as the positional superiority of the "occident." It also sets limits upon what can be thought or said about these "Orient/-als." It is painfully obvious that *Orientalism* is an historical and materialist analysis; ES himself said that it was a cultural materialist approach, which he in part learned from his good friend R Williams, esp the critique of "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Thry." There, the argument is that rather than thinking in reductive, grossly determinist ways, we need to think of the Base as fluid, and as "exerting pressures and setting limits" upon human practice or praxis. Orientalism, the discursive formation, does something similar in ES's view. What do you think? What is your take on the notion of "relative autonomy"? ES says he is taking on the Base-Sup project-- look at page 13, towards the bottom of the page.
The earlier critiques of ES are still the best as far as I know. Again, see Clifford in Predicament of Culture. Or see my own stuff, forthcoming in a collection from UMinn.P next Winter (I think), in which I argue that there has been a shift within Orientalism -- at least vis a vis PRC and what I call sinological-orientalism -- from a logic of essential difference (West/Rest, East is east.....etc), to one of "general equivalence" (not quite "us," but becoming that way).
--dfv
At 12:32 PM 1/22/00 -1000, you wrote:
>Just to clarify:
>
> > The main theoretical ground of Ahmad's critique of Said's _Orientalism_ is
> > that Said, despite his nod of recognition in the direction of Gramsci,
> > fails to take a historical materialist approach to the critique of
------------------------------------------------------ Daniel F. Vukovich Dept. of English; The Unit for Criticism University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 ------------------------------------------------------