Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education Vol. 27, No. 3, September 2006, pp.

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Edward Said and the Cultural Politics of Education

Fazal Rizvia* and Bob Lingardb
a

University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), USA; bUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

This introductory essay to this special issue of Discourse on Edward Said and the cultural politics of education provides an overview discussion of four inter-related themes representing the wideranging scope of Saids academic and political writings. The first of these themes relates to his idea of Orientalism, through which Said sought to describe the relationship between colonial knowledge and the exercise of imperial power. The second concerns the application of this theoretical work on Orientalism to his political interventions in the murky politics of Palestine, and the subjugation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. The third theme is linked to the critical role he envisaged for the intellectual. And the final theme relates to his commitment to the principles of humanism, democratic criticism and cosmopolitanism, which formed the core basis of his theoretical work and his politics.

Introduction
No one, I think, can quite grasp the totality of his ambitions*/his voracious reading in history and politics, in the literatures of Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. For me the characteristic gesture of both his cultural and political writing (which, despite his claim to lead two lives, always seemed to me all of a piece) was the turn from the straight, predictable path, the reversal of field, the interrupted itinerary. So that, having by many accounts founded the entire field of what is called postcolonial studies, he immediately set about to critique it, to question its emergent complacencies and received ideas. His role as spokesman for Palestine involved similar turns and complexities. He often said he wanted to help bring a Palestinian state into existence so that then he could play his proper role as critic and attack it. (Mitchell, 2005, p. 3)

It is now more than two years since the world lost one of its most intelligent, articulate, and passionate public intellectuals. Throughout his life Edward Said worked tirelessly, in ways too numerous to list, for marginalized people, not only his native Palestine, but elsewhere as well. His writings exemplified that rare combination of conceptual clarity and political commitment. He taught us how to think honestly and clearly, as well as creatively and critically, about issues of knowledge and power, of theory and practice and of culture and imperialism. He insisted on the
*Corresponding author: Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 S Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Email: frizvi@uiuc.edu ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/06/030293-16 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/01596300600838744

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need to examine political issues historically in ways that were at once local and global. Imagination played an important role in his theoretical armory. He borrowed heavily from a range of theoretical resources, from Marxism to poststructuralism, never assuming that that they provided resources self-sufficient to work through complex political problems. Indeed, his contribution to the emergence of postcolonialism as a theoretical perspective needs to be acknowledged, but it is interesting to recognize that he distinguishes this theoretical approach from that of post-modernism in his provisional commitment to a continuing Enlightenment project and a form of democratic humanism. As he put it:
whereas post-modernism in one of its programmatic statements (by Jean/Francois Lyotard) stresses the disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, the emphasis behind much of the work done by postcolonial artists and scholars is exactly the opposite: the grand narratives remain, even though their implementation and realization are at present in abeyance, deferred or circumvented. (Said, 1978/2003, p. 351)

This is symptomatic of Saids work in its avoidance of following intellectual fashions, its provisionality, and its eclecticism working across difference. He believed that the role of the intellectual involved speaking truth to power. Edward Said did not write about education in any direct manner, although issues central to the cultural politics of education were never too far away from his gaze. He did mention in an interview that he always learned through teaching and that the presence of students provoked thinking and learning in a productive mediation absent from the solitary work of the scholar. This is an important insight for all pedagogues, wherever their institutional location. Issues of representation, popular culture, the media, the colonial formations of knowledge, and the institutions of imperialism were, for example, central in the vast collection of his literary and popular writings. He viewed formal education as a key institution through which colonial modes of thinking were produced and reproduced and where postcolonial aspirations could also be worked towards. Not surprisingly therefore, his work, and especially his concept of Orientalism, has been used liberally by theorists to address issues of education in both colonial and postcolonial settings, particularly in respect of policy, curriculum, and pedagogies. In the immediate aftermath of his untimely death a large number of obituaries and essays appeared assessing Saids contribution to contemporary thought. The collection Edward Said: Continuing the conversation, edited by Homi Bhabha and William Mitchell (2005), is perhaps the most important of these. However, the assessment of Saids work after his death ranged from glowing and celebratory to critical and even hostile. Said would have expected no less. In the post-September 11 era some critics unjustifiably viewed Saids work as quintessentially anti-American, overlooking the fact that he was no less critical of many recent developments in Islam and spoke out against injustices wherever they originated. Further, he often noted that he wanted a Palestinian state so he could become one of its major critics. Indeed, Said rejected essentializing any group, whether it was Islam or the West. He did not

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always accept for himself the label postcolonial, but his foundational ethic was always constituted by a desire to understand contemporary forms of colonial discourse and practices and transcend their effects on marginalized people. It is this commitment to naming and working against the exercises of colonial power in all its manifestations, including contemporary neocolonial and postcolonial expressions, that many of his critics did not like. Said was and clearly remains a highly controversial figure. His work attracted*even demanded*response, engagement, and criticism. It is in the spirit of this approach to scholarship that this special issue of Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education brings together five original essays, each in their way intended to provide a reflexive assessment of the relevance of Saids work to the study of the cultural politics of education; each seeking to investigate the extent to which his analyses of colonial and neocolonial discourses and power could help us to think more carefully and seriously about issues of identity, representation, and cultural exchange; each attempting to enhance our understanding of the ways in which transnational configurations of knowledgepower now affect the contemporary problems of education. It is in the spirit of continuing the conversation with Saids work that this special number of Discourse has been created. As Mitchell (2005, p. 6) observed, the ebb and flow of his conversation continues and will continue in the criticism, the politics, the culture, and the evolution of human thought to come. No overview of his work, no matter how systematic, can fully capture the breadth, depth, complexity, and sophistication of Saids scholarship. In what follows we make a modest effort to discuss four interrelated themes to which he repeatedly returned throughout his life. While his treatment of each of these themes attracted a great deal of critical attention, these themes also helped reshape the nature of academic and political debate about representations of the other, which arguably led to the formation of the field of postcolonial studies. The first of these themes relates to his idea of Orientalism, through which Said sought to describe the relationship between colonial knowledge and the exercise of imperial power. The second concerns the application of this theoretical work on Orientalism to his political interventions in the murky politics of Palestine and the subjugation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. The third theme is linked to the critical role he envisaged for the intellectual. And the final theme relates to his commitment to the principles of humanism, democratic criticism. and cosmopolitanism, which formed the core basis of his theoretical analysis and politics.
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Orientalism The idea of Orientalism is central to Saids scholarship. It would not be inaccurate to say that his ground breaking book Orientalism (Said, 1978/2003) transformed the humanities, in that it pointed to a new way of understanding colonialism and the historical construction of the Orient as an object of Western gaze, variously represented as alien, barbaric, uncivilized, sensual, or exotic. Orientalism is best

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understood as a system of representations, a discourse framed by political forces through which the West sought to understand and control its colonized populations. It is a discourse that both assumes and promotes a fundamental difference between the Western us and Oriental them. It is a manner of regularized interpreting, writing about, and accounting for the Orient, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases politically marshaled to self-justify imperial conquests and exploitation. In this sense the Orient is an imagined place that is articulated through an entire system of thought and scholarship. Orientalism is much more complex than crude racism. It has a manifest form that includes information about the Orient that can be acted upon, in policy decisions and in popular representations. But Orientalism also has a latent form presupposed in the unconscious certainty about what the Orient is. In Saids terms it resides in the normative assumptions through which the Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive, which is always subject to supine malleability. The Orientals are variously represented as a fixed and unchanging Other, lacking subjectivity or variation. Their capabilities and values are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West. They are the conquerable, the inferior, or those in need of Western guidance and patronage. Orientalism thus involves multiple forms of communicative practice, such as serious travel writing or journalism, academic or political accounts which are presented to Western audiences as objective analyses of the colonized populations. According to Said, the discourse of Orientalism ultimately reveals less about the colonized people than it does about the perspective and interests of the Western people who study them and seek to exercise control over them. In the 19th century scholars, Said maintained, were interested in the Orient for a wide variety of reasons, although chief among these was the fact that colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This Foucauldian idea of knowledge as power can be found throughout Saids critique. By knowing the Orient, the Western metropolitan centre came to learn how it could dominate distant territories and cultures not only militarily, economically, and politically, but also culturally in a range of hegemonic ways. Said argued that while the knowledge developed by scholars might seem peripheral to imperialism, it was in fact essential to it, since it provided much of the rhetoric and representation necessary for the domination of one culture by another. Orientalist knowledge was also essential to the Western powers to self-justify and rationalize the desire*indeed the need and obligation*to pursue imperial expansion. In the contemporary era, Said suggested, many Orientalist discourses persist. The depiction of the Arab as irrational, menacing, violent, untrustworthy, antiWestern, and dishonest, have clearly evolved over the years, but their foundational impulse remains. Orientalism appears to have become institutionalized, he argued, in both ideologies and policies supported by the institutions built around them. He said that:
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for every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force. (Said, cited in Department of English, Emory University, 2006)

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In the revised edition of his book Covering Islam (Said, 2002), published after September 11, he argued that the Orientalist focus on Islam in American and Western media is now characterized by even more exaggerated stereotypes and belligerent hostility. What this shows is that the Orientalist legacy has not entirely disappeared and its resources are readily called upon in the exercise of power. The significance of Saids discussion of Orientalism not only lies in his analysis of the complex and vital relationship between literature, politics, and culture, but also in his methodological innovation. Using Foucault, he insisted that the Western textual representation of the Orient is an example of the Western will to power over others and that it is inextricably linked to the material realities of political and economic domination. However, in asserting this thesis, he espoused a form of Western humanism that accepts as unproblematic a secularist cosmopolitan world view grounded in Western enlightenment philosophies. Indeed, he paid little attention to the work of non-Western colonial writers. A number of his critics have pointed out that Saids attempts to reconcile Foucault, Gramsci, and Western humanism are deeply problematic. He joins together Foucaults ideas on knowledge and power and Gramscis notion of hegemony, alongside appeals to notions such as human experience and human reality, which are located in a philosophical tradition of which both Foucault and Gramsci are critical (see Kennedy, 2000). In the end, Said appeared to work with a highly abstract and generalized view of humanity and its potential to do good. But this abstraction led him to say very little about class and gender factors influencing the structures of Orientalism. In Orientalism Said discussed the Wests feminization of the Orient and Western mens textual and real exploitation of Oriental women, but disappointingly does not explore the implications of this discussion for his humanism and for recognizing the extensive diversity of the discursive practices that might be referred to as Orientalist. In this omission he misses the opportunity to make his approach more sensitive to various different historical specificities relating to the Wests relationship with the East. This leaves him open to the charge by conservative humanities scholars, such as Bernard Lewis, that the discourse about the Orient is much less dominant and unified than he often states or implies and that Said fails to provide a non-coercive alternative to Orientalism. Much more seriously, Said appeared to work with a duality that suggested that power, speech, and representation are located exclusively with the colonizers, while the colonized appear powerless, silent, and objectified. Notwithstanding these criticisms, Saids analysis of Orientalism represents a major innovation in the analysis of Western textual practices about the Orient. It provides a highly plausible account of how colonialism would not have been possible without a

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range of discursive practices and cultural institutions. It points to the powerful role that hegemony plays in processes of colonial subjugation, which requires, at a general level, the consent of the colonized people, expressed through their general acceptance of the hegemonic discourses. It underlines the importance of understanding such discourses within the broader context of the power configurations that they often help reproduce. As Ashcroft and Ahluwalia (1999, p. 83) pointed out, the essence of Saids argument is to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms. The discourse of Orientalism is thus constituted by the terms in which the West understood the Orient, and which continue to determine the academic and popular representations of the Middle East even today. The Question of Palestine There is an essential continuity between Saids theoretical work on Orientalism and his political activism regarding the question of Palestine. Although Said lived and worked for most of his life in the USA, his convictions about the plight of the Palestinian people were deep and were based on his emotional roots, particularly his affection for his aunt Nabiha, who, after 1948, devoted her life to working with Palestinian refugees in Cairo. He felt deeply about the Palestinian refugees, displaced by the exercise of what he viewed as colonial power. He provided a passionate account of the injustices that accompanied the formation of the modern state of Israel, and he sought to write back a counter narrative to the commonly held image of the Arab as terrorist, who had little respect for human life, both of others and their own. He showed how the Israeli state and the USA used Orientalist vocabulary to dismiss the legitimate claims of the Palestinian people for their autonomy. The key to understanding the Palestinian question, according to Said, lay in the ways in which the Jews grasped the idea of their homeland. Israel, it was assumed, rested on a sense of divine promise, but this metaphysical abstraction implied that the Palestinian existence lay, from the beginning, outside both Jewish and European conceptions of a state of Israel. The persuasive power of this abstraction was aided by the discourse of Orientalism, which suggested that the Palestinian people were responsible for their derogation and indivisibility. They were not only portrayed as uncivilized and violent, but also as intruders in lands that belonged to the Jewish people by divine right. In this hegemonic narrative Israel is still constructed as the Occident and Palestine as the Orient, and that peculiar character of colonization is uniquely justified through the notion of a redemptive occupation, the fulfilment of Gods promise to the Jewish people alone. At the same time, the ideology of Zionism, Said insisted, deployed the classic colonialist strategy of the civilizing mission, arguing that Palestine was mostly unoccupied or was inhabited by a few nomadic Bedouins, who were assumed to be incapable of representing themselves and had to be represented instead by the Israeli state. In The question of Palestine (Said, 1979, p. 9) Said said that the Western

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narrative sees Israel as a land without people, for a people without land, and that the creation of Israel is the rightful compensation for the centuries of persecution of the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Saids description of Israel as a colonial state challenges the hegemonic Western narrative that rests on a combination of a number of assertions, including the meta-narrative of progress and the civilized world, a metaphysical belief in the divine promise, coupled with the idea of Palestine as a largely unoccupied land and a narrative of the Jews as victims. Despite claims of anti-Semitism leveled against him, Said did not deny that Jews had historic claims to Palestine. His objection was to the Palestinian dispossession that accompanied such claims. His interest was in explaining the problematic character of their origins in the persecution of European Jews and the impact on the Palestinian people of the Zionist idea on the European conscience. Said recognized that Israels exemption from the normal criteria by which nations are judged owes everything to the Holocaust. However, he could not see why this legacy of trauma and horror should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who were absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity, of their rights. The question to be asked, he wrote in the Politics of dispossession (Said, 1994b, p. 19), is how long can the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for its behaviour towards the Palestinians. Saids critical gaze was not restricted, however, to the Israeli state and its use of colonial tactics to silence and make invisible the rights of the Palestinian people. He was equally critical of the Arab regimes and their leaders. He was often unsparing in his criticism of their repressiveness and their failure to provide social justice and development for the majority of their populations and their failure to fully support the Palestinian struggle. Said was no less critical of the Palestinian governance structures to which he briefly belonged as an independent member of the Palestine National Council (PNC). Using his authority as an independent intellectual, Said avoided taking part in the factional struggles, but rather made strategic interventions. Rejecting the policy of armed struggle as impermissible, he was an early advocate of the two state solution, implicitly recognizing Israels right to exist. Later he became a major critic of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for their misuse of power and their oppression and exploitation of their own people. The Role of the Intellectual Saids political activism around the Palestinian question demonstrated the role he saw for the intellectual. Indeed, he borrowed heavily not only from Foucault and Gramsci and critical theorists such as Adorno and others, but also from much recent feminist theory to argue for a new logic for the Palestinian question in which difference did not entail domination (Said, 1994a, p. 100). The future he imagined for Palestine was as a democratic and secular state which could relate to the Israeli state as an equal partner in the global community of nations. This vision, he

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said, can only be realized if intellectuals and others exercise critical sense, memory and scepticism. For Said, the idea of critical sense consisted of the ability to go beyond the special interests of the experts and be prepared to be self-reflexive of their relations to power. He thus drew a fundamental distinction between power elites and the critical sense that intellectuals are able to bring to political deliberations. Borrowing a term from Adorno, Said rejected all forms of identitarian thought, which render stable identities based on such affirmative categories as nationality, tradition, language, and religion. Instead, he favoured those patterns of thinking that are connected to marginal, alienated, and anti-systemic forces, what he called secular criticism freed from the restrictions of intellectual specialization. He advocated what he called amateurism in intellectual life, a need for the intellectuals actual and metaphoric exile from home, so that intellectual work can recover its connections with the political realities of the society in which it occurs. This requires the intellectual to be committed to maintaining a dialogue and openmindedness and to articulate a principled critique in order to seek some influence over public opinion. This involves keeping some distance from official or institutional bodies, so that the intellectual is able to speak truth to power. In this sense Said denied an absolute distinction between the politically implicated and disinterested objective dimensions of intellectual work. In his view, both are essential*to be of the world and to provide a critical commentary on that world. In his Reith Lectures, published as Representations of the intellectual (Said, 1994a, p. 84), he insisted on the need to take a risk in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. For Said the main problem with contemporary criticism was its functionalism, which paid too much attention to the texts formal operations, but far too little to its materiality and its political context. Instead of treating the text in its idealized and essentialized form it is more important, according to Said, to analyze how, as a cultural object, it is sought after, fought over, possessed, rejected, or achieved in time, and its authority is secured (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 1999, p. 17). The question of the worldiness of the text lies at the heart of Saids work. Said distinguished between the worldliness of speech and texts, noting how the former carries its context within it, while the latter does not. This then raised a number of critical questions for textual analysis: how do we read the text? who addresses us in text? who is silenced? how is the text used to exercise power? and how is the text implicated in materialities of dispossession, injustice, marginality, and subjection? Issues concerning the role of the public intellectual are consistent themes in all of Saids work, both popular and theoretical. He wss disdainful of the contemporary practices of literary criticism, which he accused of having given up the world for the aporias and unthinkable paradoxes of the text and for having retreated from its constituency, the citizens of modern society, who have been left to the hands of free market forces and multinational corporations (Said, 1983, p. 4). For Said this has resulted from a failure to recognize how the world, the text, and criticism are inextricably linked and how the work of the critic is bound up with the affiliations of the critics worldliness. He was convinced that intellectuals can make a difference and
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that secular criticism, freed from its rigid professional affiliations, can have transformative possibilities. The power of resistance, he sais, lies in the ability of the intellectual to write back to imperial power, to read contrapuntally, to speak truth to justice, and to understand that while intellectual work cannot provide global truths, it can challenge injustices. Somewhat paradoxical in Saids work was the position from which he spoke and wrote back. Saids writings drew heavily on his sense of being an outsider, an exile. Like Joseph Conrad, the subject of his first published book (Said, 1966), he retained an extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality, which enabled him to deploy a kind of double vision in his readings of the English novel, discerning both textual beauty, but also naming the often invisible colonial impulses, and seeing in it the potential to challenge the Western hegemony that would erupt during the post-colonial era. So while some writers, such as Chinhua Achebe, dismissed Conrad as a racist, Said saw such reasoning as amounting to intellectual amputation. According to Said texts were not inherently unacceptable, but could be used to open up dialogue and better understand how their discursive and material dimensions worked together to produce particular effects. Nowhere is this commitment to openness more apparent in Saids work than in his Culture and imperialism (Said, 1993). In it he was most articulate about his contention that intellectuals are not theoretical machines, but are themselves inflected by the complexities and contingencies of their own location in the world. Consistent with this conviction, Said sought in Culture and imperialism to articulate an alternative to what he saw as the insularity and parochialism of intellectuals, as well as the academic trend toward needless jargon and obscurantism. He suggested a view of cultures, histories, and literatures as inherently hybrid, forged out of overlapping and interdependent traditions of thought and practice. Any constructions of purity of categories are fictions, power/knowledge manifestations. To understand this hybridity, he proposed the adoption of a musical term for literary criticism, arguing that literary works should be considered contrapunctally. By contrapuntal criticism Said suggested European culture needed to be read in relation to its spatial and political relations to empire, as well as in counterpoint to the works that colonized people themselves produced in response to colonial domination. According to Said (1993, p. xxix) a contrapunctal reading is necessary partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure; all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic. Although the notion of hybridity in Saids work was left relatively untheorized, it was highly generative in drawing attention to the interrelation of culture and politics, and especially to the politics of imperial domination and to its continuing legacy. Mary Louise Pratt (1992, p. 3) characterized contrapuntal reading as involving a continual movement back and forth across the activated imperial divide. Said saw himself as occupying a position across this divide, an intermediary position between theorizing Western intellectuals and formerly colonized people suspicious of generalizing Orientalist narratives. Said regarded his own work as that of an exile who belonged to both worlds without being completely of either the one or the other (Said, 1993,

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p. xxx). For him exile was not simply a state of deprivation, but also a privileged condition that enabled him to see multiple perspectives that needed to be reconciled in some principled fashion. In an homologous way he also saw the dangers and potential re-invigorations in theory which travelled both temporally and spatially. Following Adorno, Said also believed that the intellectual could, or at least should, never be at home in the world. Humanism and Democratic Criticism
Humanism, I strongly believe, must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind of testimony that doesnt make it onto the reports but which more and more is about whether an overexploited environment, sustainable small economies and small nations, and marginalized peoples outside as well as inside the maw of the metropolitan centre can survive the grinding down and flattening out and displacement that are such prominent features of globalization. (Said, 2004b, pp. 81/82)

But where might these principles that work across difference come from? Ultimately for Said these principles involved the transcendence of nationalism and other certitudes of affiliation and the redefinition of Western humanism. In his last book, Humanism and democratic criticism, Said (2004b) returned to a theme that defined his critical humanist perspective, but now in a highly charged political atmosphere following the tragic events of September 11 and its aftermath. With his faith in humanistic and democratic principles undiminished, he maintained that these values were more urgent and necessary than ever before. He argued that humanistic education need not necessarily be Eurocentric and gender blind and that it is possible to develop a more critical democratic form of humanism that rests on the principles of self-knowledge and self-criticism and an awareness that comes from learning about other peoples, ideas, and traditions. In this way he argued for a need to revitalize the humanities, where learning is no longer ahistorical, but plays a key role as an instrument of political and cultural transformations. On this revitalization of humanism it is worth quoting Said himself, in a response to criticism of his conjoining of poststructuralism and humanism:
I believed then, and still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past. (Said, 2004b, pp. 10/11)

Said believed that the so-called humanities crisis rested on a misconception that there was a basic conflict between established traditions and our increasingly complex and diversified world. This position, he argued, failed to recognize that todays canonical knowledge was mostly produced by the radical thinkers of the past and that, by its very nature, human progress requires an epistemic disposition to question, upset, and reform. In an increasingly interdependent world, he insisted,

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humanistic education was needed to develop our own critical perspective on our shared intellectual heritage, while at the same time engaging with other perspectives that are so often dismissed as irrelevant and impossible to translate. In this way he denied the thesis of cultural incommensurability and insisted that cultural change was impossible without critical engagement with other cultures (Said, 2004a). While agreeing that humanism indeed provided an ideological framework responsible for racism, sexism, and Western imperialism, Said nevertheless insisted that humanism need not imply a conservative approach to knowledge and that a critical relational humanism has the potential to address issues of global injustices. Said was thus both critical of traditional humanism, and saw in it the potential to articulate a set of progressive principles that were not only integral to an understanding of culture and society, but also integral to providing the tools of global conviviality. Unlike Samuel Huntington (1996), he refused to divide the world into hermetically sealed civilizations, and he regarded Huntingtons thesis as politically very dangerous in a paper with the characteristically ironic title, clash of ignorance. He focused instead on the political dynamics of global interconnectivity and interdependence and on the hybridity produced by colonialism. According to Said the challenge facing us now is to unify aspects of one or more cultures and to oppose elements in them which are inimical to the principles of freedom and selfexpression. He deplored the lack of any effective critical and democratic discourse in the American academy, which he attributed partly to the compartmentalization of academic life around discrete disciplines, to the deep specialization of disciplines, and to the separation of theory and practice. He saw as urgent the task of providing alternative readings and interpretations from a perspective that did not pretend to be Archimedean, but rather which is located within contemporary political realities. In this intellectual task Said found the resources of humanism particularly helpful, but insisted that these resources needed to be reworked. He defined humanism as the exertion of ones faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages, and other histories (Said, 2004b, p. 4). Denying the distinction between humanist and critical education, Said saw in critical humanism not a way of affirming what is already known, but an intellectual process and practice that questioned and reformulated what is often presented in a canonical and commodified form, with the kind of codified certainty that is represented, for example, in the phrase the classics. His view of humanism thus championed democratic criticism based on the epistemic virtues of reflexivity, relationality, and engagement. This view underlined the need for intellectuals to drop their obscurantist tendencies and become more involved in public life, but in so doing to remain at a tangent to power. Said and the Cultural Politics of Education As we have already noted, Said did not write anything specifically about education, apart from comments on the significance of pedagogy to his thinking, his thoughts on

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the role of the intellectual, on the university as an important public space for democratic discussions, and on the significance of developing a disposition of criticality in all our students. On pedagogy and thinking Said noted:
Ive been teaching now for almost forty years. And Ive always learnt during the actual class. Theres something that eludes me when I read and think without the presence of students. So Ive always thought of my classes not as a routine to go through but rather an experience of investigation and discovery. (Said, in Viswanathan, 2001, p. 280)

This is an important insight for all pedagogues about the imbrication of teaching and learning and which implies a respect for the other, in this case the student, and the rejection of a didactic one-way pedagogy. Saids theoretical and political interventions have other implications for thinking about the cultural politics of education. Since education was a central site for the exercise of colonial power, both in the metropolitan centre where it was through education that the legitimizing discourses of the colonial adventures were justified, and in the colonial societies, where education provided the structuring mechanisms of asymmetrical relations of power. It involved a cultural politics through which the colonial subjects were both named and represented. It was in and through educational institutions that students came to first accept as natural and inevitable the links between colonial power and knowledge. Beyond this level of generality, however, there is still much to learn about the role of schools and universities in the Orientalist strategies for knowing and dominating the colonized world and about the ways in which Orientalist legacies continue to inform the ways knowledge about cultural others is still organized and disseminated, as well as resisted and contested. In his voluminous writings on the question of Palestine Said clearly showed how Orientalist discourses persist in the Western and, in particular, American representations of Islam and in the ways in which the politics of the Middle East is still discussed through a complex geometry of power designed to maintain Western influence over this increasingly important region of the world. Saids incisive analysis of these issues clearly has a major contribution to make not only in any pedagogic exploration of contemporary world politics, but also in understanding the dynamics of cultural exchange, the speed and intensity of which have increased significantly in the age of globalization. If one of the aims of education is to enhance intellectual work, then we have much to learn from Saids discussion of how it might best be organized so that it takes account of the worldliness of the text and the critic. Saids writings on humanism and democratic criticism are equally significant to an exploration of the cultural politics of education, in that they suggest a set of pedagogic values that provide a way out of nihilistic critique and relativism and point to a way in which humanism can be rethought, especially in a globalized world increasingly dominated by the rampant individualism of the market. Said gestured towards some possible features of what we might want to call a postcolonial pedagogy across his extensive oeuvre, but especially in his essay On defiance and taking positions, reproduced in the collection Reflections on exile (Said,

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2000). Here Said eschewed a directly political approach to pedagogy and curriculum and asserted that we need to teach our disciplines or fields to our students whilst also transgressing disciplinary boundaries, but beyond this and more importantly, he suggested that we must also teach a disposition of criticality. According to Said our prime responsibility is to our students and their education, their critical dispositions. This disposition in his words is sense of critical awareness, a sense of scepticism, that you dont take whats given to you uncritically (Said, 2000, p. 502). This can be compared with his sense of the role of the intellectual as necessarily requiring the questioning of power rather than its consolidation, which implies a more structuralist than Foucauldian approach to power. This tension between competing theories of power, a specific example of the conjoining of the apparently immiscible, is a central feature of all of Saids work. James Clifford (1980) commented on this poststructuralist/humanist tension in a review of Orientalism when it first appeared. It is this tension which can be seen, however, to be very productive, as Greg Dimitriadis suggests in his essay in this special issue. There are other aspects of Saids work which carry implications for pedagogy and curricula, including his emphasis on the importance of the intellectual to function as a kind of public memory (Said, 2000, p. 503) and his approach to literary and musical criticism of reading contrapuntally. Saids critical humanism, which recognised commonalities as well as differences across peoples, also provided a broader frame for curricula and pedagogies in the context of globalization and postcoloniality. Mass systems of schooling have since their inception been concerned with the creation of what Benedict Anderson (1983) called the imagined community of the nation. Today schooling also needs to complexify that imagined community, but also seek to constitute a disposition of what, after Gilroy (2000), we might call a critical planetary humanism, one inflected and nuanced by insights from postcolonial theory. Saids work can assist in that project, which will have to work against many elements of the reparochializing agenda and fear of difference (Gilroy, 2004) evident in the context of post-September 11. Now, the papers in this special issue do not deal with education using Said in this way. Rather, what they do is demonstrate the usefulness of Saids theories and concepts for applied analysis of a number of fields of cultural politics, including education. Thus, Colin Symes in his essay demonstrates how Saids musical criticism and musical concepts, such as the contrapuntal and fugue, provide analyses, metaphors and metonyms for his thinking about culture, politics, society, and identities. Symes also speaks of Saids ambivalent engagement with the literary canon, recognizing its strengths as well as weaknesses, particularly its involvement in power/knowledge work in both its representations and silences. His focus, however, is explicitly on Saids musical criticism and tracing the genealogical roots of this criticism. Symes also positions Saids work on classical music against the backdrop of the writings of Adorno and the neglect of classical music by more contemporary cultural theorists as elitist. Said also offered an implied critique of the absence of the serious study of music from the contemporary educational curriculum. In the location of classical music and performance in context Said demonstrated his

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protean critical capacities and his central notion that all cultural forms are hybrid in nature. In this essay Symes manifests his own critical habitus, which aligns with Saids disposition of criticality. He also illustrates the usefulness of Saids work for critical analysis. Cathryn McConaghy echoes the title of Saids (1999) memoirs in her essay Schooling out of place, which uses Saids theoretical approaches, particularly his concept of imaginative geographies developed in Orientalism, to reconsider rurality and teacher mobilities in Australia, specifically drawing on a number of research projects she has been involved in in New South Wales. In a sense, to paraphrase McConaghy and her use of Said, she asks the question: How can rurality and teacher mobilities and transience in rural Australia be read otherwise or contrapuntally? McConaghy also develops the concept of Ruralism out of the idea of Orientalism and demonstrates how this frames the readings most readily available of the experience of teaching in rural schools.1 Here McConaghy uses the notion of reading contrapuntally to suggest, a la Said, that such reading focuses on some specific thing or text and its other, but that it also requires both historical and geographical sensibilities, including considerations of the relational politics of time and space. Specifically, the concepts of displacement, exilic identities, travelling theory, and reading contrapuntally are applied to rural schooling in a most original and insightful fashion, which indicates the productiveness of the approach offered by Said. McConaghy notes the tense sense of loss and pleasure in the exilic experience, as well as the simultaneous depoliticizing and reinvigorating effects of travelling theory, and also, we would add, travelling policy. In stressing that everything is political, McConaghy argues that Said neglects typographies of desire. As Leslie Roman says in her paper in this special issue of Discourse, the exilic experience of refugees and forced migrants is not materially comparable to the exile of the intellectual, nor would we add to that of mobile rural teachers. Nonetheless, as McConaghy demonstrates, the notions of exile and displacement remain useful metaphorical ones which provide insights into the many contemporary experiences of mobility, including those of rural teachers in Australia. Jon Nixon, in his essay Towards a hermeneutics of hope: The legacy of Edward Said, considers the lessons for contemporary scholar-teachers within the academy of Saids work, specifically his philological hermeneutics and democratic humanism. Nixon notes how a contemporary rethinking of the principles offered by Said is very important, given the policy and market pressures on the democratic knowledge production and dissemination functions of the university. Drawing on Said, Nixon suggests that our humanistic scholarship needs to use its authority carefully, be attentive to texts (being simultaneously receptive and resistant in Saids terms), and be respectful of difference, and that we live self-questioning, rather than complacent, lives as scholar-teachers. We would also note Saids stance that critical scholarship requires a slow pace, unlike the soundbite culture in which the academy and its work are currently situated.

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Leslie Roman also writes of Saids secular humanism and the ways in which it might be used to create a situated cosmopolitanism as central to a global citizenship that challenges dominant corporate and marketized forms, which work in reductive anti-democratic ways and which constitute citizens as merely global consumers. As Roman suggests, this situated cosmopolitanism is more than liberal multiculturalism writ large. This is part of that project geared to pursuing the cosmopolitan possibilities of education referred to earlier. In On the production of expert knowledge: Revisiting Edward Saids work on the intellectual Greg Dimitriadis also draws on the humanist insights from Said about the role of the intellectual and expert versus amateur knowledges and dispositions, and applies these insights to the academy in a time of academic capitalism and intellectual retrenchments and, specifically, to the pressures upon Schools of Education in the USA today. In this way the Nixon, Roman and Dimitriadis papers are nicely complementary. Dimitriadis observes that Said suggested we need to hold on to three intellectual dispositions as critical academics, namely the professional, the amateur, and the reflective activist. According to Said as academics we have three sets of responsibilities, which work in tension with each other. These include our prime responsibilities to our students and to our discipline and the need to defend its autonomy in a way suggested by Pierre Bourdieu in his work on the autonomy of specific fields. Said also noted our responsibility as academics to being citizens in the broader world beyond the academy. Dimitriadis applies these concepts in a productive way to the role of critical academics in Schools of Education today. Part of the defence of such dispositions is part of another pressing political project, that of maintaining the university as the one remaining utopia for democratic thought, argumentation, and knowledge production, as suggested by Said. Dimitriadiss essay on the uses of Said can be seen as part of his other intellectual and postcolonial work with Cameron McCarthy (Dimitriadis & McCarthy, 2001), Reading and teaching the postcolonial. Collectively these papers show the productive relevance of Saids work in education and demonstrate the necessity of continuing the conversation with his work for educational scholars and researchers. In particular, we would see his work contributing in most productive ways to considerations of the cosmopolitan possibilities of education and for considerations of postcolonial pedagogies.

Note
1. The concept of Aboriginalism has been developed in a similar way in contemporary Australian scholarship to understand the ways in which certain forms of abstract as well as empirical knowledge were central to the colonization of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Lingard and Rizvi (1994) have used the concept to analyse the important political work of the Australian indigenous artist Gordon Bennett. Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001) also used the art of Gordon Bennett in their book about Reading and teaching the postcolonial.

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