Edward Said

This work reflects on how the representation of the Arab world has evolved in three fictional works that have emerged in the second decade of the 21st century: Homeland (Showtime Networks, 2011-2020), Tyrant (FX Network-Fox, 2014-2016), and Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime Video, 2018-). The goal is to determine whether the main socio-political milestones that occurred during this period (the Arab Spring, Syrian Civil War, appearance of ISIS, etc.) have transformed the already classic theories of authors such as Edward Said, Jack Shaheen, or Evelyn Alsultany, among others. A viewing and analysis of the first season of each show demonstrates that the panorama has not improved in terms of discourse, topics, and stereotypes. It is clear, therefore, that the lens of 9/11 is still very present in the Hollywood mindset regarding Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.

How did Primo Levi come to terms with what the historian Enzo Traverso has called ‘the end of the Jewish modernity’? How did he react to the fading out of that tradition which, between the Enlightenment and the Second World War, saw the European Jews playing a central role in the critical consciousness of the Western world? What was his relationship with Zionism? Did he ever acknowledge the Nakba? To address these questions, my article analyses the different positions that Levi took on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the awkward coincidence of the publishing of Se non ora, quando? and the 1982 Lebanon War, and what his tormented and passionate relationships with Israel reveals about the Italophone Jewish experience.
Much has been written on Levi’s Jewish identity, but his complex attitude toward the question of Palestine/Israel is relatively underexplored. Starting from Levi’s writings and interviews on the subject, my essay will therefore investigate the impact that this thorny question had on the Italian Jewry. I will structure my essay as follows: first, I will give a brief account of how the changing historical circumstances, like the foundation of Israel, the Eichmann trial, and the Six-Day War, have shifted the geopolitical position of the Jewish intelligentsia (both inside and outside Italy); second, I will analyse Levi’s struggle to find a position within this shifting scenario; finally, I will study how Levi’s public interventions fed back into Italian Jewish community.

The essay focuses on the “travel”of various debates—orientalism, post-colonialism, postzionism—between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the “translation” of Said’s ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Said’s work is engaged in its contradictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined include: the nature of the “post” in the concepts of the “post-colonial” and “post-Zionism”; the problem of “hybridity”and “resistance” in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo- American academy, of the “subaltern” intellectual.

When Edward Said wrote Orientalism, he was defending the honor of the Western "other," especially that of his fellow Arabs. Three years later, he published a book on Western media coverage of the Iranian revolution of 1979, in which he applied many of the principles he worked out in orientalism to Western journalists' coverage of events in 1979. It is probable that Said did not know that 1979 was 1400 in the Muslim calendar, and that it marked the dawn of modern global jihad and the drive for a global caliphate. It is also probable that Said had no idea that his attack on the West for their "racist" attitudes towards his fellow Arabs actually paralyzed the West's ability to deal with the cognitive war about to come. This chapter will analyze the way in which Said's honor-driven analysis worked to the benefit of those working towards a global caliphate, warriors whose values and goals were the exact opposite of what he espoused in his post-colonial work. The problems with the Western reception of Saïd continue to haunt democracies and progressive efforts.

Professeur de littérature et politiste, père fondateur des postcolonial studies, Edward W. Saïd s’efforce dans cet ouvrage de questionner la représentation occidentale de l’Orient du XVIIIe à nos jours. La désignation de l’Orient comme rival culturel, figé dans une altérité fondamentale par la communauté des orientalistes, constituerait ainsi une modalité du pouvoir colonial.
Ce papier a vocation à restituer la pensée d'Edward Saïd dans toute sa rigueur, tout en adoptant une approche originale qui puisse combiner un effort de synthèse et un effort de commentaire.

Sally Rooney'in ikinci romanı Normal İnsanlar (2018) nasıl bir zamanda yaşadığımızı iki karakterin ilişkisi üzerinden anlatıyor. Birbirlerinden başta sınıfsal uçurumları olmak üzere, karakter yapıları olarak da epey farklı olan Connell ile Marianne'in liseden üniversiteye uzanan ilişkilerinin romanı bu.

Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a
pathetic love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her
marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several
crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europe’s
alternative and potential “other,” are depicted. “Orientalism, in Said’s formulation, is
principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others”. Accordingly, within the
context of this paper, the other version of the story of “the othered” will be examined
from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters
especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and “othering” attitude towards
Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity
problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial
reading on Wide Sargasso Sea.
Key Words: postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodern paroody, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane
Eyre

La tesi che vorrebbe molti dei prodotti europei, siano essi di letteratura (all’interno della cui categoria bisogna poi distinguere i generi della narrativa, del resoconto di viaggio oppure, per esempio, del saggio scientifico) o di arte visiva, aventi per oggetto la rappresentazione dell’Oriente, come strumento finalizzato in maniera surrettizia, subliminale e in ultima battuta alla conquista culturale e politica dell’altro è stata dibattuta da molti studiosi. A partire dal 1453, quando cioè gli eruditi bizantini scappano da Costantinopoli ora in mano agli Ottomani, e riparano soprattutto in Italia, l’Europa inizia a formulare numerosi e diversi paradigmi circa l’Oriente. Paradigmi che Martin Bernal (1937-2013) definisce modello antico, che influenzeranno l’estetica europea fino alla metà del Settecento e che lo stesso Edward Said (1935-2003), figlio di una concezione foucaultiana del sapere, giudica come di parte e costruiti in malafede. In questo scritto prendiamo come buona la teoria, analizzando un caso particolare di rappresentazione pittorica del vicino Oriente agli inizi dell’Ottocento.

The noun ‘testimony’ has a very strong relationship with truth. As a mode of evidentiary discourse, it is more closely associated with law and church than with the creative field. However, artists too may bear witness, or testify, to public
events. One such artist, I suggest, is Don DeLillo, who gives an account of the 11 September 2001 disaster in New York and its aftermath in Falling Man: A Novel (2007). Though it is fiction, as signalled so clearly in the title of the novel, it can be argued that it offers testimony to at least some aspects of the disaster and its aftermath. But can a work of the imagination also be the statement of a witness, an account of something that is true? Drawing on insights from the writings of Jacques Derrida on ‘truth’ and Michel Foucault on the experience-book, and
through a close reading of DeLillo’s novel, I argue that fiction has the capacity to offer an account of an event that works in a way similar to that of testimony.

The possibility of native resistance to colonial tyranny and the threat of the loss of colonial “order” is a sustained anxiety throughout Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Critics have largely ignored or downplayed these inscriptions of resistance in Conrad's text. Much of the criticism that surrounds this novella, according to Patrick Brantlinger, is focused on the European subjects of the text, and therefore renders Africa and its native peoples as a kind of backdrop. Literary critiques of Heart of Darkness that do discuss the African natives tend to portray them as victims rather than having any kind of agency. This latent fear of native resistance demonstrates the fantasy of stability and superiority endemic to imperialism: a narrative that the imperial administration must continually tell itself.

Adapted from C. Y. Lee’s novel, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song is a film musical that may be read as a site of contested narratives. On the one hand, its laudable casting of Asian Americans seemingly indicates a greater self-representation for a minority ethnicity to express its own cultural narrative. Being a Rodgers and Hammerstein production necessarily confers cultural capital on its representations of Asian Americans, effectively Americanising the otherwise alien narrative and granting it agency and legitimacy within the mainstream. Yet it is precisely in the Americanising of preexisting Asian stereotypes that the film is guilty of what Edward Said defines as Orientalism; the film is ultimately a reductive interpretation of Asian culture as perceived and mediated through American popular culture, thereby serving as a product of cultural imperialism.

"Apa yang menarik dari buku ini adalah upaya kedua penulis untuk menerapkan pendekatan Oksidentalisme Hassan Hanafi ke dalam kajian Hubungan Internasional. Penerapan ini dilakukan tidak hanya untuk mengkritik pendekatan Orientalisme Barat yang subyektif dan hegemonik terhadap Timur, tetapi juga dimaksudkan untuk menilai Barat secara moderat dengan tujuan untuk menciptakan relasi internasional (Barat-Timur) yang lebih setara tanpa saling mendominasi/menghegemoni satu sama lain”

Prof. Dr. Komaruddin Hidayat

La presente investigación, “La imagen de la cultura amazónica en suplementos dominicales de Lima: la Amazonía desde El Dominical y Domingo”, responde a la necesidad de encontrar respuestas, desde el ámbito de la comunicación social, a interrogantes acerca del imaginario social sobre la Amazonía desde medios editados en Lima, considerando que esta relación vincula diferentes culturas, con posiciones distintas dentro de la sociedad peruana y en donde juegan un rol importante las categorizaciones que se hacen a partir de la otredad. El contexto para realizar la investigación fue el conflicto social de 2009.

El desarrollo de esta tesis contempla 5 capítulos. Los tres primeros de marco teórico-contextual: el primero trata sobre el periodismo especializado, la prensa semanal y la cobertura de lo cultural, por lo cual se abordan las varias definiciones de cultura; el segundo se centra en imagen, imaginarios sociales, representaciones sociales, revisando conceptos de otredad, interculturalidad, estereotipos, ideología y exclusión; y el tercero realiza un acercamiento a la Amazonía, analizando la valoración social y cultural, por un lado, y haciendo un recorrido histórico, por otro. En el cuarto capítulo se establece la metodología de la investigación, con una parte cuantitativa, ligada entre otros elementos, a los marcos de referencia, y otra cualitativa enfocada en el análisis del discurso. En el quinto y último capítulo se desarrolla el análisis y presentación de resultados, marcado por tres grandes campos: i) la macroestructura del discurso, ii) los actores sociales, y iii) las valoraciones y tipificaciones sobre el capital simbólico de lo amazónico.

The films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan are always groping for the general condition of ‘humanity’ – that vague anachronism, ever the object of contempt for contemporary philosophers. It is now commonplace to hear that authorship, modernity, subjectivity, history and humanity are outmoded concepts of a bygone era. Yet, in countless art films of recent years, we continue to note a dominant thematic preoccupation with recognition, anxiety and subjectivity, begging the question: If we have departed from the humanist regime of art and philosophy, why do its primary concerns continue to dominate? In this article, I wish to analyse Ceylan’s oeuvre as a continuation of the themes and aesthetics of humanist film-makers and philosophers. With in-depth discussion of the themes and aesthetics of the breadth of his oeuvre, I argue that Ceylan’s films are humanist because they focus on human subjectivity as a matter of conflict: between our notion of selfhood and the world around us. In opposition to claims of some flaccid ‘liberal humanism’ derided by posthumanists like Hayles (1999), I wish to argue that Ceylan’s humanism persists with a critical condition intrinsic to the human, denying an escape into a historically rupturing, post-ist logic.

This essay was published in a special issue of ha-Kiṿun Mizraḥ, dedicated to the memory of the Iraqi Jewish author, Shimon Ballas (and edited by Almog Behar and Yuval Evri). The essay examines how Ballas, who was himself in exile from Iraq, relates the experiences of other exiles. Considering Ballas’ oeuvre, I detect his tendency to draw literary portraits—that is, to dedicate each novel to a detailed literary portrait of a single, forgotten historical figure. Unlike Albert Memmi, another Arab Jewish author who was fond of portraits (“portrait of the colonizer,” “portrait of the colonized,” “portrait of a Jew”), Ballas’s portraits were never abstract. They were based rather on true biographies of forgotten historical figures, ones who were never at home in a single nation or culture. The gallery that Ballas forms by amassing together these various portraits allows him to challenge the necessity of the Zionist narrative and to reintroduce other historical possibilities. Focusing on Ballas’ novel Locked Chamber (1980), which sketches a portrait of a Palestinian in Israel, I argue that in trying to convey Palestinian experiences Ballas does not draw on the content of Palestinian literature but rather on its form—particularly as it has been refined by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose work Ballas had researched and translated. By reading Edward Said’s thoughts on the episodic form of Kanafani’s writing, I show how Ballas borrows this technique both to convey the rupture introduced by 1948 into Palestinian and Arab time and to insist that he, too, is part of the Arab world.

This essay traces the history, current state, and potential future of comparative literature. The great expansions have coincided with aspirations for international understanding. The term first emerged after the Napoleonic wars. The field soared in the late 19th century, became a discipline after the Second World War, and experienced its most vigorous growth (of departments and programs) in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

Comparative literature has always worried its supporters as well as its skeptics. At the same time it has experienced a constant crisis within. In each episode it has responded by enlarging its purview and self-definition. Thus in the late 20th century it transcended the European literatures that had long been its bedrock to embrace East-West literary and cultural relations in ever-broader outward orbits, encompassing eventually first Edward Said's orientalism, then Homi Bhabha's deconstructivist postcolonialism, and finally Gayatri Spivak's eclecticism. The models that served during the extended pax americana seem poorly suited to terrorism, war, and globalization. Supranationalism cannot be lightly readjusted to fit transnationalism. But comparative literature can and will survive, so long as balances persist between theory and practice, so long as interdisciplinarity does not come at the cost of disciplinarity, and so long as the indivisible relationships uniting humanism, humanities, and humaneness are not forgotten. While comparative literature retains its emphases on language-training and critical skills, and while it satisfies desires of students to transcend boundaries culturally, interpretatively, and otherwise, it will not only always remain alive but even often thrive.

This paper attempts to analyze the movie Avatar with several postcolonial theories and perspectives. It argues that the movie consists of a paradox of telling an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial story while using  stereotypes and other simplifications similarly used by authors who had imperialist and racist views.

Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the eponymous term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the West's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of "The East," i.e. the Orient. (This book is a Research copy.) [Use it for research purposes.]

Inspired by Said's methodology of contrapuntal reading, this article examines Edward Said's reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet (1604) in his memoir, Out of Place (1999) to shed light on his experiences of exile and displacement. We contend that Hamlet gives voice to Said's incestuous desire and his inability, like that of Hamlet, to live up to the standards required of him by his dominating father who, like Hamlet's father, is a ghostly figure that dominates Said's life even after his death. We argue that while Said points out that Shakespeare is an extension of imperial authority, his readings of Hamlet with his mother destabilises the colonising force of Shakespeare and displaces Western hegemony over performance and interpretations.

After the World War II, the world remarks many changes in every aspect including culture, society, literature and so on. Writers around the world wrote about the effect of colonizer/colonized relationship. Edward Said is one of the pillars who deals with such discourse. Said believes that the legacy of the colonizer still exists in terms of civil wars, corruption and labor exploitation. In other word, Said means that the West creates a wrong image about the Orient and considers it as the "Other" in contrast to the ideal West. Said was the one who deconstructs the western's thinking about the East. So his books : Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981) are appropriate to examine the idea of the 'Other' and to show how Said decipher the western wrong image about the East. Thus, this paper will emphasis on the concept of the Other according to Said. Keyword: The Other, The East, The West, Postcolonial.

Although he maintained that he was not himself a Marxist-and frequently criticized both existing communism and Marxist literary criticism-Edward W. Said's thought and work were profoundly innuenced by Marxist theory, critical practice, and general discourse: his writings owe much to a Marxist tradition and draw inspiration from the committed aesthetics and politics of Jean-Paul Sartre, the narrative theory of Georg Lukács, the postcolonial psychology of Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci's notions of hegemony and the function of intellectuals, the Frankfurt School's critique of everyday life, and Raymond Williams' cultural studies. is essay examines Said's putative anti-Marxism in the context of his distinctively spatial approach to literature and culture and argues that understanding his spatially oriented criticism helps to square the circle of his ambiguous relationship to Marxism and amplify the power of his oppositional criticism. Said's engagement with Marxist theory informs his humanism and democratic critical practice, which are all the more relevant and necessary in our present condition.

Contributing to a growing body of research on acknowledging U.S. imperialism within teacher education, this article explores how knowledge production on Iran-and U.S.-Iran relations more broadly-in secondary education represents a site of what Britzman has called difficult knowledge. Here, the difficulty of classroom engagements with the theme of U.S. imperialism is highlighted in several epistemic stumbling blocks, notably notions of White epistemic authority, neoliberal multiculturalism, and imperial feeling. Drawing upon data collected during a 9-month ethnographic study, the analysis presents classroom scenes from a high school world literature unit on Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, selected by the teacher to explore themes of colonialism, imperialism, and revolution. Despite these intentions, classroom engagements with the text often reproduced Orientalist understandings. These findings inform the concluding argument that mobilizes contrapuntal reading as a generative technique for teacher education research and practice to identify and confront the epistemic bases that normalize systems of oppression.