DIVA distinguished panel of contributors assess and expand Edward Said’s many contributions to the study of colonialism, imperialism and representation that have marked his career-long struggle to end conflict and further the effort to build civilizati/div

This indispensable volume, a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource on Edward Said's life and work, spans his broad legacy both within and beyond the academy. The book brings together contributions from 31 luminaries to engage Said's provocative ideas.

Working with processes of translocation enabled Edward Said to point out interdependence and complementarity across geographical borders and disciplinary boundaries while recognizing cultural difference and the distinct historical experiences of colonizer and colonized. This book brings into focus Said’s politics of reading, from his literary criticism in English to his political columns in Arabic. The international contributors—from Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the United States—investigate his intellectual legacies without necessarily identifying themselves with the critical positions these involve. Instead of treating his work as a unitary theoretical system, the various arguments explored offer a critical assessment of those situations in which his writing has entered into a productive relationship with other theoretical positions and interlocutors. The collection considers location, which has always been a central category in and for Said’s writing; readings, which designates the acts by which, according to Said, the world comes to be constituted; and legacies, which pertains to the many fields across the boundaries of established academic disciplines that have taken up Said’s challenges. The critical positions visited in this book include critical and cultural theory, postcolonialism, literary studies, theatre and performance studies, and visual and music studies.

Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature. Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea that nothing is translatable to the idea that everything is translatable, The Translation Zone examines the vital role of translation studies in the "invention" of comparative literature as a discipline. Apter emphasizes "language wars" (including the role of mistranslation in the art of war), linguistic incommensurability in translation studies, the tension between textual and cultural translation, the role of translation in shaping a global literary canon, the resistance to Anglophone dominance, and the impact of translation technologies on the very notion of how translation is defined. The book speaks to a range of disciplines and spans the globe. Ultimately, The Translation Zone maintains that a new comparative literature must take stock of the political impact of translation technologies on the definition of foreign or symbolic languages in the humanities, while recognizing the complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual.

This book is dedicated to Edward Said (1935-2003), a major literary and cultural critic, who has been instrumental in promoting decolonization through his analytical and critical writing. Scholarly articles tackle various aspects of Said's writing on fiction, criticism, politics, and music, and the volume includes an extensive bibliography of Edward Said. Edward Said and Critical Decolonization strives to cover the multifaceted career of Said, with emphasis on his critical contribution to decolonization and resistance to hegemony. There are moving testimonies by friends and relatives, students and colleagues, which throw light on his personality. An article by Said himself on the idea of the university is published here for the first time. The volume also includes articles exploring in depth Said's political, critical, and aesthetic positions--including his views on intellectuals and secular criticism, on traveling theory, and humanism. And Said's thought is explored in relation to other major thinkers such as Freud and Foucault. Contributors: Fadwa Abdel Rahman, Richard Armstrong, Mostafa Bayoumi, Terry Eagleton, Rokus de Groot, Stathis Gourgouris, Hoda Guindi, Ananya Kabir, Lamis El Nakkash, Daisuke Nishihara, Rubén Chuaqui, Yasmine Ramadan, Andrew Rubin, Edward Said, Najla Said, Yumna Siddiqi, David Sweet, Michael Wood, and Youssef Yacoubi.

This book examines the earliest writings of Edward Said and the foundations of what came to be known as postcolonial criticism, in order to reveal how the groundbreaking author of Orientalism turned literary criticism into a form of political intervention. Tracing Said’s shifting conceptions of ‘literature’ and ‘agency’ in relation to the history of (American) literary studies in the thirty years or so between the end of World War II and the last quarter of the twentieth century, this book offers a rich and novel understanding of the critical practice of this indispensable figure and the institutional context from which it emerged. By combining broad-scale literary history with granular attention to the vocabulary of criticism, Nicolas Vandeviver brings to light the harmonizing of methodological conflicts that informs Said’s approach to literature; and argues that Said’s enduring political significance is grounded in his practice as a literary critic.

Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular provides an important new reading of Edward W. Said's work, emphasizing not only the distinction but also the fuzzy borders between representations of 'the religious' and 'the secular' found within and throughout his oeuvre and at the core of some of his most customary rhetorical strategies. Mathieu Courville begins by examining Said's own reflections on his life, before moving on to key debates about Said's work within Religious Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, and his relationship to French critical theorists. Through close attention to Said's use of the literal and the figurative when dealing with religious, national and cultural matters, Courville discerns a pattern that illuminates what Said means by secular. Said's work shows that the secular is not the utter opposite of religion in the modern globalized world, but may exist in a productive tension with it.

Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics - specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts - played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the USA during a critical period after WWII.

To broaden the interpretive scope of critical theory and increase its usefulness, this text draws tradition-based views of language and anti-humanistic theories from their abstract frameworks into the field of cultural studies. It examines major thinkers and contemporary writers.