Abstract
Bill Ashcroft articulates the basic difficulty for Said’s work on Palestine/Israel: both “ordinary Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a structure of representations,” he writes, “a binary structure of alterity that originated before the establishment of Israel.”1 Edward Said’s response, according to Ashcroft, should be seen as a form of “postcolonial transformation” that is, as the “disruption of this binary structure ofrepresentation,” accompanied by “a refusal to be located.”2 In his work on Palestine/Israel, Edward Said lived a democratic aspiration from the in-between position of the postcolonial.3 As such, he serves as a representative figure for contemporary discussions of democratic practices. There is deep ambiguity in his embrace of the term “democratic” that derives not only from his experience as an articulator of Palestinian experience, long the object of the nondemocratic practices of democratic governments, but also because of his peculiar position as a postcolonial voice speaking from the metropole. He resisted the label “postcolonial” for himself, but he often characterized the Palestine/Israel question as a unique kind of postcolonial situation, so his political work situates him in what might be called a postcolonial space. While he spoke from this space, from that self-claiming position that his pioneering work Orientalism made possible,4 he nonetheless sought to move beyond it to an honest engagement with others.
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Notes
Bill Ashcroft, “Representation and Liberation: From Orientalism to the Palestinian Crisis,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 295.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2.
The self-analysis of Israel as a democracy and the working through of the tensions between the requirements of Zionism and democracy are ongoing. See for example the work of Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy (New York: Allworth Press, 2002) and The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). More recently,
Ben White considers the problem posed by Palestinians for Israeli democracy in Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
An excellent example of this kind of negotiation between the idea of democracy and the way it manifests itself in different practices in different locations can be found in Lisa Wedeen, “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy,” in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, ed. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 274–306. In this case, Wedeen discusses the qat chews of Yemen as democratic practices in public spaces.
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 249.
See James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 47.
Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xix.
Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 209.
Ian Shapiro illustrates the propensity for institutional design among democratic theorists when speaking of the need for deliberation among democratic citizens: “Because people cannot really be forced to deliberate, the challenge for democratic institutional designers is to structure the incentives so that people will want to deploy deliberation to minimize domination in the course of their endeavors.” See Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5. While the problem of institutional design is a vexing and important one, it puts the cart before the horse in our present discussion. People must first agree to live in conditions conducive to democratic practices before the latter can be efficaciously engaged in.
Marla Brettschneider is closer to our problem when she proposes that “as we engage with the ‘how’ question, of how to get on together in a democracy based on the experiences and insights from the margins, we find that we must reevaluate concepts that are currently seen as core facets of Western democratic thought.” See Brettschneider, Democratic Theorizing from the Margins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 199–200.
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri V’iswanathan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 249.
The Arab Spring is an interesting manifestation of this idea. See Michaele L. Ferguson, Sharing Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–11.
See Paul Woodruff, First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
See Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy: 1948–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and
David Engel, Zionism (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009). Compare with the account of, for instance,
Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2001).
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 29.
See As’ad Ghanem, Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). Said’s criticism of the Arafat regime is ongoing from the first Gulf War through Oslo and until Said’s death. See the occasional essays in and commentaries in
Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), End of the Peace Process, and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).
Bonnie Honig interrogates the near centrality of “foreigners” to democratic self-understandings and development in Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Edward Said with David Barsamian. Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W Said (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), 105.
Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now…” in Giorgio Agamben, et al., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 44.
Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 603.
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Brooklyn, NY and London: Verso Books, 2009), 33–34.
Edward Said, “Traveling Theory” in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–247.
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 438.
Carlos Forment, “Peripheral Peoples and Narrative Identities: Arendtian Reflections on Late Modernity,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): 314–330.
See a neo-Kantian argument for human rights in Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (NewYork: Harcourt-Brace, 1973), especially “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” 267–302.
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter History (London: Verso Books, 2011).
Ibid., 9. See also Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Giambattista Vico, New Science (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000). Vico is a constant presence in Said’s work, grounding his theoretical constructs and his political concerns in the world of the everyday, starting with the concluding chapter of his first book. See
“Conclusion: Vico in His Work and in This” in Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 345–382.
We should take care to situate Said’s use of postcolonial assumptions outside of the assumptions scholars like Spivak caution against, that is, that margins necessitate centers and, therefore, retain former colonial relations of domination. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Duncan Ivison’s effort at reconciling the concerns of the postcolonial outlook with the dominant assumptions of Western political order ends up positing the possibility of liberalism as a modus vivendi rather than an overarching system or even defined set of rules. See
Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Most recently, Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride argue that working from theories of decolonization might be more productive than seeking a unitary postcolonial perspective. Their work shows how “the attempt to envision and the ability to create a decolonized regime, population, identity, economy and ethic are certainly influenced by colonial legacies” (153) The multiplicity of colonial and decolonization experiences demand attending to particularities rather than seeking ultimate foundations. See
Kohn and McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 46–47. See also William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
W. G. T. Mitchell, “Secular Divination: Edward Said’s Humanism” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 491.
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© 2013 John Randolph LeBlanc
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LeBlanc, J.R. (2013). Democratic Aspirations, Democratic Ambiguities. In: Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008589_2
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