Cfp: "Saidism in the 21st Century," First International Interdisciplinary Conference on Edward W. Said’s Thought, Jagiellonian University, November 8-9, 2010.

The goal of the conference is to promote a new field of interdisciplinary research - SAIDISM - that is derived from Edward W. Said's (1935-2003) name and is interdisciplinarily connected to his thoughts, writings, political activities and academic work.

Themes:

Session 1: Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and Literature:

- Edward W. Said and his Early Academic Period (1958-1967)
- Joseph Conrad and conradism – inspirations, motives, symbols, languages
- Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography
- World, the Text and the Critics - literary criticism
- Beginnings – intentions and methods of writing
- Philosophy in Literature – philosophies of writers, Jean Baptiste Vico, Antonio Gramsci, etc.
- Modernism and Postmodernism in Literature - James Joyce, etc.
- Erich Auerbach and Mimesis
- William Butler Yeats

Session 2: Edward Said, Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies

- Edward W. Said and his Transitory Period (1968-1978)
- Orient and Occident
- Orientlists and oriental studies - Gustave Flaubert, Jean Baptiste Fourier, etc.
- Orientalism – phenomenon
- Orientalism in culture – literature, art, politics
- Culture and Imperialism
- Colonialism and Postcolonialism – Africanism and Frantz Fanon, Caribbean Revival, Ireland and Irish Revival, Algierian Liberation, etc.
- Domination and Power
- Postcolonial Studies – Edward W. Said’s disciples, etc.

Session 3: Edward Said and Political Activism:

- Edward W. Said and his Full-Fledged Palestinian Period (1978-1990)
- Edward W. Said and Palestine – Palestinian political career, UN, relations with Palestinian Authorities and Yasir Arafat, Palestinians on E. Said and E.Said on Palestinians,
- The Middle East Modern History – Israeli-Arab wars, Palestinian-Arab relations, Gulf war, Iran-Iraq war, Muhamad Ali and Algerian National Liberation Front, etc.
- The Middle East Current Affairs - American invasion on Iraq, USA-Iran relations, Israel-Iran relations, etc.
- Israel-Palestinian Issues – conflict, peace process, status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees,
- Islam, Islamism and Islamocentrism – fundamentalism, etc.
- The Middle East Issues in Media – modern orientalism in media, Israeli, Arabic and Iranian media, language of media
- Political Activists – inspirations, opponents, etc.

Session 4: Edward Said, Saidism, and Philosophy:

- Edward W. Said and his Late Intellectual Period (1991-2003)
- Edward W. Said and himself – identities, auto-creations, self-presentations, languages, relatives, friendships, etc.
- Edward W. Said and his cities – idea of home (Cairo, Jerusalem, Beirut, New York),cosmopolitism (Paris, London, Berlin), intellectual home (schools, universities), etc.
- Philosophical Inspirations – Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.
- Modernism and postmodernism – Theodor Adorno, Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, etc.
- Edward W. Said and his Philosophy - Travelling Theory, Exile, Dispossession, Borderlands, Intellectual Commitment, Intellectuals and Professionals, Humanism, Trans-humanism, etc.
- Intellectual and Academic Inspirations – Noam Chomsky, Gillo Pontecorvo, Frantz Fanon, etc.
- Intellectual and Academic Opponents – Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Pipes, Amos Oz, etc.
- Art, Music and Esthetics – paintings, comics, Wagner, Furtwängler, etc.
- Edward W. Said, Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
- Edward W. Said and Media – journalism (“Al-Hayat”, “Al-Ahram Weekly”, “The London Review of Books”), radio, TV, film and film-makers, documentaries, etc.
- Late Style of Edward W. Said.

Visit the conference website here: http://www.saidism.pl/.

Gray, Neil. "Orientalism Inverted: the Rise of 'Hindu Nation.'" MUTE 2.8 (2008).

The roots of Hindu cultural nationalism lie, at least in part, in an inversion of romanticist orientalist epistemologies of the 19th century. This inversion effectively shifted social and political issues from the material to the spiritual plane – serving the needs of both the colonial masters and the privileged elites of Brahminical Hinduism. Sangh Parivar and Hindutva forces exploit this highly constructed mystical carapace as a counterfeit response to contemporary expropriations under neoliberalism. In this they are facilitated by western orientalist perceptions of India as an ‘essentially’ religious civilisation. Augmented by neo-conservative theorists like the execrable Samuel Huntington, contemporary Hindu nationalism acts as a neoliberal alibi, masking the extreme authoritarianism and primitive accumulation strategies of international and local capitalist elites in a supposedly ‘Shining India’. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.metamute.org/en/content/orientalism_inverted_the_rise_of_hindu_nation.

Berkowitz, Peter. "Answering Edward Said." POLICY REVIEW (June-July 2008).

Warraq, Ibn. Defending the West: a Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007. In Ibn Warraq, Said and his celebrated Orientalism have found a worthy critic. To be sure, Ibn Warraq is not the first to squarely confront Said. Bernard Lewis exposed massive flaws in Said’s understanding of the Islamic world in a lengthy and sharp 1982 exchange in the New York Review of Books. In a substantial 1999 essay in the New Criterion, Australian writer Keith Windschuttle demonstrated that Said’s depiction of the whole of Oriental studies as a form of imperialism is devoid of serious historical support, both in its depiction of the West and of the East. And in 2001, in Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Washington Institute for Near East Studies fellow Martin Kramer chronicled the baleful impact of Said’s writings on Middle East scholars. But Ibn Warraq’s is the first book-length, post-9/11 critique of Said’s views and of the fashionable 'postcolonial studies' paradigm that Orientalism spawned. And, with a rare combination of polemical zest and prodigious learning, it is the first to address and refute Said’s arguments “against the background of a more general presentation of salient aspects of Western civilization.” A pen name taken by the author of Defending the West to protect himself from retribution from Muslims enraged by his writings, Ibn Warraq means “son of a stationer, book-seller, paper-seller.” The name, adopted over the centuries as an alias by dissenting Muslims, evokes the ninth-century figure Muhammad al Warraq, who doubted that Muhammad was a prophet and insisted that the claims of Islam must submit to the authority of reason. It is certainly an apt choice for our generation’s Ibn Warraq, who burst upon the scene in 1995 with his outspoken Why I Am Not A Muslim, then edited five volumes aimed at putting Islam in historical and philosophical context, and, with his most recent book, seeks to set the record straight about two centuries’ worth of Western scholarship of the Arab people and of Islamic civilization. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/19458849.html.

Aspden, Rachel. "Imagining the East." NEW STATESMAN May 29, 2008.

Once dismissed as imperialist fantasies about the Muslim world, British orientalist paintings are once again becoming popular. Their exotic visions tell us much about the social and cultural history of Victorian Britain. A snake writhes over the desert sands that half submerge the Sphinx. A crafty merchant examines a coin presented by two anxious, veiled customers. Heavily laden camels kneel at an encampment. Bored, gorgeously clad concubines lounge in the secret depths of a harem. The British orientalist paintings of Tate Britain's forthcoming exhibition "The Lure of the East" are colourful, exotic, often technically brilliant. But they are also controversial, variously perceived to be collectible masterpieces, ugly kitsch, or imperialist fantasies on a par with tabloid images of burqa-clad women and bearded Islamists. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/art/2008/05/british-orientalist-paintings.

CFP: "Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy," University of Ottawa and Carleton University, October 31-November 2, 2008.

This bilingual English/French colloquium celebrates the works of one of the world’s most compelling intellectuals, the Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said (November 1st 1935- September 23rd 2003), author of Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Out of Place among other famous books. The colloquium revolves around the theme of 'Counterpoint,' extensively used by Said as the interplay of diverse ideas and various 'discrepant' cultural experiences. As Said writes in Culture and Imperialism: "As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.” Following Said’s legacy this colloquium envisions a polyphonic, interdisciplinary engagement from fields as broad as comparative literature, sociology, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Diaspora studies, musicology, and political science with a special focus on Middle Eastern politics. The organizers seek papers/ panel proposals drawing from or expanding on the following themes: • Colonialism and Imperialism: a Middle Eastern Context • Transnationalism and Reflections on Exile • Overlapping Territories and Imaginative Geographies • Language, History and the Production of Knowledge • The Arab World: States, Territories and Refugees. • Gender, Class and Orientalism • Criticism and French Philosophy • Otherness in the Arts • Representations of the Secular • Power, Politics and Truth Please send a 200 word abstract of paper/panel proposals to counterpoints.conference@gmail.com; deadline for paper/panel submission: July 15th, 2008. For more information please contact: may.telmissany@uottawa.ca or nahla_abdo@carleton.ca. See the CFP online here: http://www.carleton.ca/socanth/documents/CallforPapersSaid08_000.pdf.

Irwin, Robert. "Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 7, 2008.

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3885948.ece.

Weiss, Michael. "The Bertrand Russell of Islam: a Review of Warraq's DEFENDING THE WEST [on ORIENTALISM]." NEW YORK SUN December 12, 2007.

. . . "Orientalism," Mr. Warraq writes, "taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity . . . encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam." Though it's Mr. Warraq's plaint that the book "stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslims' sensibilities," it is not merely an abstract charge, but personally felt. "Ibn Warraq" is an Arabic pseudonym, meaning "son of a stationer, book-seller, paper-seller," which this Indian-born writer assumed after witnessing the critical reception Islamists gave Salman Rushdie, all the while claiming themselves as victims. Said, Mr. Warraq argues, contributed to the Islamic ideology of victimization, practically inviting offense by writing, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." This sentence is repeated multiple times throughout Defending the West, which otherwise might have been titled "Not In My Name." Applying the cool, thin steel of Occam to these and other follies of logic and critical analysis, Mr. Warraq asks, "If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society . . . then how could this false or pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe?" . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/article/67922.

Paparella, Emanuel L. "Edward Said on Cultural Imperialism." OVI September 24, 2007

While writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Vico at Yale University, some thirty three years ago, a book appeared which attracted my attention. But it was not its author, still relatively obscure at the time, rather it was its title which urged me to buy Beginnings by Edward Said. To my mind, that title echoed immediately Vico’s notion of 'origins.' And in fact, as expected, Said not only acknowledges Vico as the book’s inspiration and methodology, but dedicates a whole section to him. It turned out to be a kind of epiphany for me, in the same way that Ignazio Silone had previously been, not so much for what the book revealed about the problematic in the New Science that I was then grappling with (i.e., that of transcendence and immanence in Vico’s notion of Providence), but for what it said on the crucial role of the intellectual vis-à-vis the culture he lives and works in. One of the most pregnant passages in that book is this: “The writer’s life, his career, and his text, form a system of relationships whose configuration "in real human time" becomes progressively stronger (i.e., more distinct, more individualized and exacerbated). In fact, these relationships gradually become the writer’s all-encompassing subject” (p. 227). . . . Part 1: http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2112?PHPSESSID=ea8a3df5479ae76a53e101d35eadcee5; Part 2: http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/2113?PHPSESSID=ea8a3df5479ae76a53e101d35eadcee5.