CULTURAL CRITICISM AND ANALYSIS ANTHROPOLOGY BOOKS & THE ARTS MAY 18/25, 2020, ISSUE

The Circle
Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and the
origins of American anthropology.
By Jennifer Wilson

MAY 5, 2020

Illustration by Tim Robinson.

I n 1949 a Columbia anthropologist named Geoffrey

Gorer published an essay in his study The People of Great
Russia, in which he attempted to provide insight into why
those living in the Soviet Union were not more resistant to
Stalinist authoritarianism. It was not because they were
tortured or threatened with the gulag, according to Gorer
and the study’s coauthor, the psychoanalyst John Rickman;
it was because they had been swaddled for too long as
babies. Gorer had studied child-rearing practices across
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 Western and Eastern Europe and found that Russian
peasants tended to swaddle their children for longer
periods than other parents did, sometimes up to nine
months. Therein lay the explanation, Gorer and Rickman
insisted, for why the Soviets preferred the warm cloak of
authoritarianism to the freedoms of Western liberalism.
The theory, which came to be known as the swaddling
hypothesis, was roundly and rightfully mocked. One critic
called it “diaperology.” Gorer’s friend and fellow
anthropologist Margaret Mead defended and even doubled
down on his theory; she insisted that in swaddling them
for so long, “Russians communicate to their infants a
feeling that a strong authority is necessary.”

The swaddling hypothesis and the ire it justly provoked

dealt a considerable blow to the prestige of the national
character studies program just as it was reaching its zenith
at Columbia, raising questions about the methodologies
being employed there and even the value of culture as a
heuristic. It also highlights a problem with the work of
these anthropologists, which is often framed as
revolutionary and egalitarian for insisting that human
differences are rooted in culture rather than race. That
such a worldview would be any less dangerous is belied by
the reality of how this research—culture cracking, as it was
known—was employed. From World War II into the early
years of the Cold War, anthropologists in the program
were repeatedly tapped by the US government to create
national profiles for countries deemed threats to US
national security. The most famous of these was Ruth
Benedict’s wartime study of Japanese culture, later
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 government on China, Syria, Eastern European Jews, and
other “cultures” that needed decoding before they could be
exploited.

Thus, while it attracted the most attention, the

diaperology controversy did not represent a break with the
tenets of cultural anthropology so much as it exposed the
problems that had always been lurking beneath the
surface, obscured by the hallowed lineage of the discipline.
Besides Gorer, Mead, and Benedict, Franz Boas, Zora
Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, and Edward Sapir all
considered themselves cultural anthropologists. At a time
when the country’s foremost social scientists, figures like
the eugenicist Madison Grant, were insisting that different
cultures fell along a continuum of evolution, cultural
anthropologists asserted that such a continuum did not
exist. Instead of evolving in a linear fashion from savagery
to civilization, they argued, cultures were in a constant
process of borrowing and interpolation. Boas called this
process “cultural diffusion,” and it would come to be the
bedrock of cultural anthropology, inspiring an entire
generation of anthropologists to travel the world searching
for examples of it. Hurston went to Florida to collect
African American folklore, Deloria to the American
Southwest to codify Native American languages, and Mead
to American Samoa to ask teenagers about their sex lives.
And while their findings have been heralded as
revolutionary—within the social sciences and for the
general public—they also laid the groundwork for a new
form of liberal racism centered on cultural rather than
physiological difference.
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 Covid-19 Is Forcing an Exodus From Peru’s
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Boas referred to himself and his students at Columbia as

“our little group,” and in a new book, Gods of the Upper Air,
Georgetown professor Charles King puts their lives, habits,
and missteps on full display. He paints their rise as a heroic
struggle against xenophobia, racism, and theories of
cultural supremacy. “This book,” he tells us, “is about
women and men who found themselves on the front lines
of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to
prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability
or custom—humanity is one undivided thing,” and he is
certain that in this battle, they not only fought but won. “If
it is now unremarkable for a gay couple to kiss goodbye on
a train platform, for a college student to read the Bhagavad
Gita in a Great Books class, for racism to be rejected as
both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid…then we
have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for
it.” But reading King’s highly researched book, one can
come to a different conclusion. “Culture” often proved to
be too slippery a term in the hands of these “gods of the
upper air” (a phrase borrowed from Hurston’s
autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road). As King traces their
development, particularly Boas’s, it becomes clear that
their ideas about culture and cultural differences were not
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 ranz Boas was born in 1858 in the small Prussian town of

F
Minden. He passed his childhood years reading
Robinson Crusoe and tinkering away at anything he
could get his hands on. He was rapaciously curious and
tactile, and it was through academia and fieldwork that he
would ultimately satisfy his thirst for adventure, both
physical and intellectual. He started taking courses at
Heidelberg, then transferred to the University of Bonn
before he eventually matriculated at the University of Kiel.
German universities were, at the time, awash in the ideas
of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder. As
Boas would do many years later, Herder challenged the
idea that humankind was divided into distinct races,
arguing instead that the distinctions between people were
contingent and tied to culture and homeland. His ideas
electrified Boas’s thinking and continued to do so for the
rest of his life.

In his writings and lectures, Herder insisted that the idea

of separate races or peoples was a fiction; instead, there
was one human race that had been transformed over time
into many different cultures. Yet as his work would show,
such a view was not incompatible with a white supremacist
ideology. While King does not mention this, Herder wrote,
for example, that “the Negro” should be met with empathy,
not hatred, “since the conditions of his climate could not
grant his nobler gifts,” and Herder’s view of cultural
difference would pave the way for a romantic nationalism
that rooted culture in a specific homeland or “soil”—
concepts of national identity that later became prominent
in Nazism. Nonetheless, for Boas, Herder’s theorization of
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Boas did not immediately take up anthropology as his field
of specialization. He first studied physics and wrote his
dissertation on the way light is polarized in water. He took
plates to the main harbor in the city of Kiel to see at which
depths their reflections began to change in appearance.
However, he soon became more interested in how
different groups might perceive those changes in the first
place. He wanted to understand “the point at which we
make the decision that something is no longer blue, say,
but aquamarine.” After defending his dissertation in 1881—
just as the first British textbook on a nascent subject,
anthropology, was published by Edward Burnett Tyler—
Boas joined a new generation of scholars excited about the
promises of ethnology to explain human diversity. What
exactly the field was, no one really knew, but that was part
of its appeal for Boas. So, too, was the prospect that he
could satisfy his “lust for travel,” King writes, while
“building, bit by bit…a master science of humankind.”

Boas’s first foray into the field was a trip to Baffin Island in
the Arctic to study the Indigenous groups that lived there.
From the outset, there was little doubt that he brought
from Europe not only his notebooks but a certain cultural
chauvinism as well, referring to the groups he studied as

3 of 3 free“my Eskimos” and writing that their dwellings were “not as

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 outsiders. The journey was also, Boas confessed, an effort
to advance his career. “I would immediately be accepted
among geographical circles,” he explained to an uncle
about the purpose of the trip, during which he planned to
“map the ice floes, snowdrifts, and habits of seal pods.”

The terrain and weather proved too treacherous for such

research, so Boas spent more of his time speaking with the
locals, writing down Inuit words, and learning more about
these people upon whom the European whalers were
totally dependent. He jotted down notes on igloo building
and the mechanics of a dogsled. He became particularly
close with an Inuit man named Signa; through their
conversations, King tells us, Boas learned that “Signa was
no timeless native simply struggling for survival on an
unchanging shore. He had a past, with wanderings and
movement, a family lineage, and remembered moments of
hardship and joy.” These are King’s observations, and it’s
unclear how much of this made its way into Boas’s
published record of the journey, which drew from his
trunks of sketches, notebooks on local languages, and
maps (mostly drawn by Inuit people).

Upon returning from the Arctic, Boas turned his attention

to the native population in British Columbia. He hoped
that fieldwork in North America would position him better
for employment in the United States, where anthropology
was finding a home in new institutions like the
Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Museum of
Natural History in New York City. But on the Pacific Coast,
he began to have doubts about American social science.

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 the same stage of human development were, in fact, quite
disparate. “On the Northwest Coast,” as King writes, “Boas
had found both wide variety and striking similarities
among indigenous communities, with nothing to suggest
that Bella Coola and Salish, for example, were all at the
same stage of development.”

B oas’s growing ambivalence toward American social

science was on full display, literally, at the world’s fair
in Chicago in 1893. At the behest of Frederic Putnam, the
curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology, Boas agreed to create an exhibit that would
showcase anthropology’s potential as a new field of study.
The exhibit was to focus on anthropometry, the science of
measuring human anatomy and a frequent site for racist
faux-scientific theories, where physical features like chin
length were used to explain social behavior. Boas lined up
the skeletons of Native Americans and “half-bloods”
(presumably people with one black and one white parent)
in accordance with Putnam’s wishes, but as King notes, no
conclusions could be drawn from this display. For instance,
“an attempt to show the heights of Italians ended up
finding no obvious pattern from northern Italy to the
south.” The exhibit was, at least from Putnam’s point of
view, a disappointment, because few people attended it,
but it helped sharpen Boas’s insistence that the science did
not provide evidence to support white supremacy or proof
that cultural differences manifested physically.

Soon after, Boas was hired by Columbia, where he would

spend the rest of his career and train some of the most
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 wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Like Putnam, Dillingham wanted Boas to create a way to,
in King’s words, “distinguish advanced, healthy, and
vigorous northern Europeans from the lesser subraces
now stumbling over one another on the streets and
alleyways of the Lower East Side.” Boas never disputed the
terms of the inquiry and went forward using
anthropometric tools, measuring the heads of US-born
children of immigrants to see if they looked more like
their parents’ or like those of other American children.
Boas was not morally opposed to the idea that there were
real physical differences among ethnic groups and that
those differences had meaning beyond the body, but he
also wasn’t convinced that this could be backed up by
scientific inquiry. At the end of his study, he concluded that
the children of foreign-born “round-headed Jews” took on
the characteristics of their new country and “became long-
headed.” The same was true of other immigrant groups, he
wrote. “The long heads of Sicilians compressed into
shorter heads. There was, in other words, no such thing—
in purely physical terms—as a ‘Jew,’ a ‘Pole,’ or a ‘Slovak.’”
Consequently, the Dillingham Commission largely rejected
his findings when drafting its conclusions.

Much like Herder, Boas wasn’t interested in scrubbing

culture of the kinds of differentiation and hierarchies that
underpin the notion of race. He may have wanted new
categories to place people into, but he never believed that
people defied categorization. He regarded his work as
primarily a matter of empirical analysis, not political or
moral argument. But his early anthropological work and
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 W
hile Boas is the protagonist of the first half of Gods of the
Upper Air, King focuses on his disciples in the second
half, in particular on Mead, Hurston, Benedict, and
Deloria. He begins with Mead, who, like the others in this
circle, proved to be as formidable as her mentor. Born to
academic parents (her father taught business at Wharton,
and her mother was a sociologist who researched Italian
immigrants), she grew up in Pennsylvania and entered
Barnard College in 1920 as a sophomore. While taking a
course in anthropology with Boas and his assistant,
Benedict, Mead fell in with a “group of freethinking,
adventurous women, disheveled but intellectually
fashionable, half of them Jewish, and all equally
acquainted with Bolshevism and the poetry of Edna St.
Vincent Millay,” who were looking for a way to quietly
rebel. At the time, Boas was in the midst of developing his
theory of cultural diffusion, a counter to the dominant
school of cultural evolution, and Mead found in it the
perfect outlet. As King describes it, “Human practices and
habits did not diverge from some single ancient norm;
rather, from the earliest times, people living in different
places had done things differently, sharing and modifying
their habits as they came into contact with unfamiliar
individuals and groups.” It was a provocative idea, and
Mead decided to pursue it in graduate school at Columbia.
(She also wanted to pursue Benedict further.)

For her PhD dissertation, Mead decided to look for

examples of cultural diffusion in Polynesia. After arriving
there in 1925, she became interested in a topic closer to
her personal circumstances: sexual norms and how to
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 [Benedict].” She would also become involved with another
person on her sea voyage back. In Samoa, Mead began
exploring the sexual practices of the people there, writing
that they were freer to experiment with homosexuality
and polyamory. “Romantic love,” she wrote in her book
Coming of Age in Samoa, “as it occurs in [American]
civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of
monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating
fidelity, does not occur in Samoa.” She conceded that while
there might be similar patterns in behavior between the
two cultures (infidelity, as she well knew, occurred in the
United States), how people felt about that behavior
differed widely. As King writes, for Mead, “Americans…
seemed to organize their intimate lives around an
idealized sex experience…. Samoans saw things another
way.”

Coming of Age in Samoa soon became a landmark work of

cultural anthropology and was a touchstone for sexual
freedom in the United States in the 1960s. As King
suggests, the popularity of her book points to some of the
problems with its analysis. “Mead was trying something
new,” he writes, but what she ended up doing was to use it
as “a mirror…to hold up to her own society.” Her desire to
create a world of sexual liberation in America had led her
largely to invent one in Samoa. “Coming of Age in Samoa
was full of bravado and overstatement,” King writes. “Mead
had few compunctions about drawing grand conclusions
from a small sample set, fifty girls in three small villages
on one island in the South Pacific.” It is of course tempting
to excuse Mead, a young queer woman who was no doubt
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Americanization of other cultures—the way in which other
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 definition—would prove to be not just dangerous but
deadly, especially as cultural anthropology soon became
part of the war effort.

When the United States entered World War II, many

American officials regarded Germany as an aberration, “a
normal, civilized society that had been overtaken by a
devilish ideology and a barbaric dictator,” King writes. The
Japanese, on the other hand, were seen as “subhuman and
repulsive,” an alien species that most Americans knew
nothing about. The US government enlisted the help of
Benedict, who had by then joined Columbia’s anthropology
department as a faculty member, to “crack” Japanese
culture.

Tasked by the Office of War Information with writing a

report on “Japanese behavior patterns” that might help the
US military identify weaknesses it could exploit, Benedict
employed what was called anthropology “at a distance,”
ethnographic work based on documents and cultural
works such as novels and films. She also consulted at
length with a Japanese American named Robert Hashima,
who was born in the United States but was educated in
Japan. He reportedly tutored Benedict “on everything
from the Japanese tea ceremony to the captured diaries of
Japanese soldiers, from hazing rituals in schools to
popular movies. When her reports required a Japanese
term or phrase, handwritten in kanji characters, it was
Hashima who supplied them.” The 60-page summary
eventually became the basis of The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword. Though the book made Benedict a household name

3 of 3 freeand a legend in the field of cultural anthropology, it has

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 “[Benedict’s] assessment of Japanese culture could
sometimes look like an idealized portrait of the Japanese
middle class or of its military elite, precisely the people
whom Hashima and other informants knew best.”

O f all of Boas’s students, the one who provided the most

enduring works of cultural anthropology was probably
the one whose work departed most from his and his
circle’s methods: Zora Neale Hurston. While Mead,
Benedict, and others sought to identify cultural patterns,
Hurston was trying to escape identification altogether. She
wrote that she was born to be someone who “questions the
gods of the pigeon-holes.” Already an active figure in the
Harlem Renaissance by the time she was a student at
Barnard, she looked for ways to exist within that
flourishing movement without being defined by it.
“Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem,”
she observed. “I was and am thoroughly sick of the
subject.”

Hurston saw in her ethnographic research less an

opportunity for codification than for collecting African
American folklore without the pressure of having to mold
it into a larger narrative of uplift or condemnation. As the
scholar Cheryl Wall explained, “The cultural relativity of
anthropology freed Hurston from the need to defend her
subjects’ alleged inferiority.” She could simply give them
space to voice their views and describe their lives as they
experienced them. “My interest lies in what makes a man
or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color,” she
wrote. “It seemed to me that the human beings I met
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 Boas encouraged Hurston to return to her native Florida
for her fieldwork, to collect folktales, jokes, and the kind of
stories of life back home that she entranced her audiences
in Harlem with. In the South she spoke to “more than a
hundred different people: phosphate miners, domestics,
laborers, boys and girls, Bahamian plantation owners,
shopkeepers, ex-slaves, sawmill hands, housewives,
railroad workers, restaurant keepers, laundresses,
preachers, bootleggers, along with a Tuskegee graduate, a
‘barber when free,’ and a ‘bum and roustabout’” (the last
was Hurston’s parlance), and instead of a work of
anthropology, she turned her fieldwork into the 1935 novel
Mules and Men, beginning what would become her
hallmark of ethnographically informed fiction, or literary
anthropology, as it became known.

Hurston’s writings showcased a rigor and presence lacking

in many other works of cultural anthropology at the time,
particularly as Benedict continued to proselytize for
anthropology “at a distance.” That some of Boas’s most
committed disciples believed their subjects deserved no
better than this kind of detached study showed how much
they carried within their work many of the same
prejudices they claimed it was dismantling. Indeed, one of
the most pernicious threads that emerges in King’s study
of the Boasians is the way in which “culture,” despite being
seen as a countertheory to “race,” ultimately just made
racism more palatable. Cultural inferiority was something
liberals could live with and feel less guilty about.

The long shadow cast by cultural anthropology’s troubling

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 culture,” not racism and racial inequality, for the poverty
and social instability plaguing black families. This
language was renewed in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton, in
defending his so-called welfare reform bill, said he wanted
to “change the culture of dependency” in America. Such
language united across party lines the many politicians
looking to scapegoat the poor and disenfranchised. In
2014, then-Representative Paul Ryan discussed his plans to
take on poverty by telling reporters, “We have got this
tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men
not working, and just generations of men not even
thinking about working or learning to value the culture of
work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be
dealt with.”

That Boas’s intervention against racism and racial

inequality would ultimately produce a reincarnation of
them, albeit cloaked in more respectable language, is less
surprising after reading Gods of the Upper Air, in which
King admits that Boas fell into the habit of letting “cultural
inferiority [stand] in for biological inferiority.” Boas, Mead,
Benedict, and their circle sought to show the fallacy of
biological and physical difference, but they also created
forms of categorization without questioning the
underlying biases that might inform them. To return to
Boas in his days as a university student, with his plates at
the harbor: Did he really think that all Germans (or all
Eskimos, for that matter) agreed on when blue became
aquamarine? Certainly not, but a patternless individualism
would have been impossible to codify and make into a
science; such chaos—or humanity—is more the stuff of
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put it best: “There is
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 Jennifer Wilson Jennifer Wilson is a contributing writer for The Nation. Her
work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New
Yorker, and elsewhere.

To submit a correction for our consideration, click here.

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 BIOGRAPHY PALESTINE BOOKS & THE ARTS MAY 18/25, 2020, ISSUE

The Worldly Exile

Edward Said’s life and afterlives.
By Rashid Khalidi

MAY 5, 2020

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 eventeen years after his death, Edward Said remains a
powerful intellectual presence in academic and public

S discourse, a fact attested to by the appearance of two

important new books. After Said, edited by Bashir Abu-
Manneh, offers assessments of Said’s vast body of
scholarship by a dozen noted writers and academics. The
Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966–2006, edited by
Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, two former
students, is an expanded version of The Edward Said Reader,
which was published a few years before his death in 2003.
The Reader offered us a full picture of Said’s breadth and
influence as a public intellectual; the new collection is
more than 150 pages longer and includes eight essays that
didn’t appear in the earlier volume, plus a new preface and
an expanded introduction. The newly included essays
range from overtly political sallies to reflective meditations
on the “late style” in music and literature that were
published posthumously. Some of them, like “Freud and
the Non-European,” reflect concerns that preoccupied him
toward the end of his life and are among the most complex
and subtle of his writings. Others remind us how widely
read he was, how broad his interests were, and how
penetrating his insights could be. Coupled with the
reflections on his major works in After Said, they also give
the reader a sense of the consistency of his politics,
imbued with a universalist and cosmopolitan humanism
that sat at the center of his literary and political writings.

It is not surprising that so many people are still reading

and grappling with Said’s ideas. His extensive oeuvre
includes 25 books, many of them monuments in their field,
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Imperialism. He was the
founding father of an entire academic domain—
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postcolonial studies—that has thrived despite a certain
critical distance
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 In his 40 years at Columbia University, Said mentored
numerous scholars, many of whom hold prominent
positions today in literature and other departments
throughout the Anglo-American academy, and the
influence of his scholarship also extends far, leaving its
mark on the study of the Middle East, anthropology, and
art history. Forty-two years after its publication, his most
influential work, Orientalism, is still widely taught to
undergraduate and graduate students around the world.

Over those four decades, Said became probably the most

eminent public intellectual of his generation, producing a
wealth of essays, articles, and long interviews (on
everything from Middle Eastern politics to classical music
and psychoanalysis) and writing for a broad general
readership as well as his academic peers. His public
involvement ranged from contemporary affairs to debates
about the history of empire, but it was most pronounced
where Palestine was concerned. Through his writings, his
media appearances, and his activism, Said did more than
anyone else to make the question of Palestine better
understood in North America. Although this advocacy
earned him many admirers in the United States and the
rest of the world, including among Palestinians, it also
earned him powerful enemies in the academy, the media,
and elsewhere. Nonetheless, at a distance of nearly two
decades since his death, it is clear that their enmity has
done little to diminish his legacy or the immediacy and
relevance of his ideas.

E dward Said was born in British-ruled Palestine and

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 College, tells it all, and struggling to fit in, he also spent
parts of his youth in Lebanon and Palestine. His well-to-do
family lost homes, businesses, and property in Jerusalem
as a result of the Nakba in 1948, and although the young
Said was somewhat cushioned from the material
consequences, these events had a considerable impact on
him—as did the neocolonial political, social, and cultural
environments in which he grew up.

Said was sent to the United States to complete his high

school education at a New England prep school, which he
graduated from in 1953. Then he enrolled at Princeton,
where he studied under the critic and poet R.P. Blackmur,
and completed a PhD at Harvard, writing on his fellow
exile Joseph Conrad. Said was, for all intents and purposes,
a fairly conventional scholar at that point, winning a
coveted appointment in the English and comparative
literature department at Columbia in 1963 and publishing
a book on Conrad and the autobiographical element in his
novels. But world events—in particular the Israeli-Arab
War in 1967—marked a transformative moment for him.
Witnessing these developments both from afar in New
York and in Lebanon during summers with his family, he
came to realize the disjuncture between what was
happening in the Middle East and how it was depicted in
the West. This realization informed nearly all of the work
that followed: first with Orientalism, published in 1978, and
then with The Question of Palestine the next year.

What made Said’s writing so revelatory for nonspecialists

was how his arguments broadened our horizons and

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 years after 1967 as we all absorbed the shock and the
consequences of that year’s war. Soon I discovered that as
much of a pleasure as it was to read Said, it was an even
greater pleasure to listen to him. One was drawn into a
wide-ranging conversation about literature, music,
philosophy, philology, and politics, all illuminated by the
extraordinary sense of urgency that seemed to drive him
from very early on. His capacious range and his
application of that knowledge to history and politics was
inflected by his strong personal commitments, which made
his work far richer and more interesting than that of any
other theorist or literary scholar then writing in the Anglo-
American academy. Part of its lasting appeal, in fact, is that
it continues to speak to us in much the same fashion:
blending a broad, interdisciplinary humanistic knowledge
with attention to pressing global concerns.

Said’s 1997 essay “On Lost Causes” in the Selected Works

offers a wonderful example of this. It progresses from an
extended meditation on four late novels by Miguel de
Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas
Hardy to a coruscating critique of the Oslo Accords as a
defeat for the Palestinians, one that led many to believe
that Palestine was a lost cause. The essay is suffused with a
sense of melancholy: The reader knows that in writing
about these authors’ novels, Said was likely penning an
essay that would count among his own final works.
Refracting his disappointment with the outcome of the
Palestinian liberation struggle in the late ’90s through the
grim pessimism of Cervantes, Swift, Flaubert, and Hardy,
Said provided a much more illuminating assessment of the
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any ordinary political essay could
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novels as well. Very few literary critics and professors of
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 T he best articles in the excellent After Said exhibit the
same combination of literary fluency and political
acuity. Bashir Abu-Manneh’s introduction astutely stresses
the centrality of politics to Said’s criticism and to his entire
career—a judgment that is fully borne out by a careful
reading of the eight new essays in the Selected Works. Abu-
Manneh helps us better understand Said’s political
evolution, noting the impact on him and an entire Arab
generation of the 1967 war and how it spurred his turn to
overtly political writing on Palestine and the Middle East.
Abu-Manneh adds that this impact “marked everything
Said did afterward,” leading him to become “his
generation’s most influential cultural critic of empire” and
“a defender of the colonized and oppressed,” all based on
“his firm anti-imperial principles.”

This post-1967 awakening constituted a remarkable shift

for a conventionally trained literary critic whose first two
books, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography and
Beginnings: Invention and Method, gave little indication of
what was to come. Said’s new political orientation
infuriated many of his contemporaries, in particular those
offended by his advocacy for the Palestinian cause and his
critique of American imperialism, as well as those who
disliked his insistence that if literary criticism and, indeed,
humanism were to have value, they would have to be
infused with an appreciation of context, worldliness, and
the political stakes of all cultural expressions. By
demanding that Palestinians be allowed “permission to
narrate” their own history, in the words of another of his
famous essays, Said challenged a hegemonic narrative
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 rights had hoped was permanently closed. They could
never forgive him for this, and their hostility pursued him
for the rest of his life—and continues to do so beyond the
grave.

Although the turning point in Said’s thinking was spurred

by the 1967 war, it first became visible in a spate of
publications in the late ’70s and early ’80s with the
appearance of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and
Covering Islam. In Said’s earlier works, one can discern
some of the features that made his later writings so
powerful. His early sympathy for and identification with
Conrad, for example, was at least partly a recognition by
one multilingual exile writing in a language that was not
his mother tongue of the similarities in the trajectory of
another such exile. Like Conrad, Said sensed himself to be
in some way out of place, which was not coincidentally the
title of his 1999 memoir. Also like Conrad, Said was
intimately aware of the world outside his immediate one.
This sense of alienation and worldliness proved to be a
powerful combination and allowed him to inhabit a far
wider and more diverse set of perspectives than his peers.
He could see what others rooted in “the West” often could
not—especially about Western culture.

S aid’s alienation and worldliness were at the heart of the

complexity and richness of his work; they lent him a
sharper awareness of and sympathy for other cultures and
stirred inside him a pointed disdain for the placid
provincialism and monoglot lack of reflection among many
leading figures in the American academy. Although he
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 saliently in Orientalism, it characterized much of Said’s
mature work, both critical and political. In one of his last
offerings, “The Return to Philology” (on what he called
this “most unmodern” branch of learning), his erudite
analysis is informed by a sense of the larger stakes of the
specific political moment: the war in Iraq and Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright’s casual dismissal in 1996 of the
thousands of Iraqi deaths in that decade as a result of US-
mandated sanctions.

Said deftly interlaced philosophy and literature with

political critique. Although his political writings could be
blunt, even scalding, he most often wielded a sharp scalpel
in his criticism and did so with elegance and élan. The best
of the essays in After Said do likewise, often using literary
analysis to make subtle political points. At the same time,
they avoid the hagiography that is unfortunately prevalent
in many of the works on Said. Both Abu-Manneh’s
introduction and Robert Spencer’s “Political Economy and
the Iraq War” question the lack of an underpinning in
political economy in Said’s writing on imperialism in
general and on recent US policy in the Middle East in
particular, although they do so while underscoring the
lasting value of his interventions.

Similarly, Vivek Chibber’s “The Dual Legacy of

Orientalism” offers one of the most acute and fair-minded
expositions of the flaws in what he nevertheless recognizes
as a “great book.” Although he notes the distance between
Said’s “profound commitment to humanism, universal
rights, secularism, and liberalism” and the disavowal or at

3 of 3 freeleast skepticism of postcolonial theory toward these values,

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 critique of imperialism to the mainstream, Chibber
observes, it fed an approach that undermined that very
critique by excising its economic dimensions—a point that
serves as one of the key subtexts in this collection.
Although Said is one of this era’s fiercest critics of
imperialism, missing from his analysis is a grounding in
political economy, a failing that robbed his critique of
some of its potential force and gave license to his
postcolonial followers to move away from Marxism.

Equally penetrating is the analysis by Seamus Deane in his

essay on Culture and Imperialism. Sympathetic to Said’s
commitment to Palestine, to his harsh reading of the
depredations of imperialism, and to his opposition to the
US war in Iraq, Deane nevertheless traces some of the
shortcomings in his ambiguous attitude to anti-colonial
violence. Contrasting Said’s views with those of Fanon,
Deane points to “a willed mystification about the question
of violence” throughout Said’s writings.

Attempting to understand why he was so uncomfortable

writing in more direct terms on the vexed question of anti-
colonial violence, Deane notes that Said was likely
“severely compromised” by living in a country where a
virulent bias against Muslims, Arabs, and especially
Palestinians had led (and continues to lead) many to
invariably code their acts of violence as “terrorism.”

Deane is equally thoughtful in analyzing Said’s

intervention in the so-called culture wars toward the end
of Culture and Imperialism, arguing that by focusing on such
a trivial matter, he marred the conclusion of his
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 Said’s effort to “woo the American academy by means of
culture” into opposing imperialism was as fruitless as
“cajoling a cat into altruism.”

I f many of the essays in After Said involve a sympathetic

but often critical engagement with his work, there are
several that also extend the power of his insights and
political vision. In “Said and the ‘Worlding’ of Nineteenth-
Century Fiction,” Lauren Goodlad points out that, as even
friendly critics have conceded, Culture and Imperialism
often disconnects questions of empire from those relating
to the globalization of capital, but she then makes a
compelling case that the book still performed a major
service by helping to “deprovincialize” European literature
and culture. Whatever flaws exist in Said’s nonmaterialist
understanding of empire—his assertion, for example, that
imperialism is driven by an “almost metaphysical
obligation to rule”—he still shined a powerful spotlight on
a subject that had been absent from most previous studies
of European novels. By doing so, he not only challenged a
smug Eurocentrism that endures in the academy to this
day but also redirected his readers’ attention toward a
politics that can help us move past it. As Jeanne Morefield
notes in her contribution to the collection, Said sought to
foster “a humanism capable of escaping Eurocentrism’s
yawning maw,” a liberalism that could confront its
tendency to sanction “destruction and death for distant
civilians under the banner of a benign imperialism.”

Like Goodlad and Morefield, Joe Cleary makes a

persuasive case for what some of Said’s critics miss, with
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 disputes about the minutiae of favored modes of theory
than in the worldly socio-intellectual concerns that had
provoked the theories in the first place.” While Said’s peers
settled “into a phase of institutional consolidation…with a
fairly predictable canon of modern Anglophone writers,”
Cleary writes, Said, even in the last stages of his illness,
“continued to produce searing essays that testified to his
undiminished abilities as a politically committed thinker.”

As After Said and the Selected Works reveal, Said was not
only politically committed; he never really stopped
arguing. His vision remained, to the end, both worldly and
alienated. He insisted that we see past our own national or
parochial cultures in order to better understand them. He
called on us to expand the narrowness of our moral and
political imaginations and to see the world in its entirety as
our common home. As an exile as comfortable in New
York as in Beirut, Cairo, Paris, or London, he infused his
literary style with a cosmopolitan ease and his often urgent
politics with a cosmopolitan humanism—a humanism that
remains a potent antidote to the cloistered and often
nationalist chauvinism that seems to be ascendant even in
an age of global crises.

Said’s internationalism and cosmopolitan humanism are

perhaps his most important legacies. Human life and its
challenges—whether they be pandemics, climate change,
perpetual war, or neoliberal policies that impoverish the
many to enrich the few—force us past the confines of
national or cultural boundaries. One can only imagine how
Said would have responded to the malign forces that have

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 most appropriate thing” in the face of such folly “would be
to read Edward Said all over again, as though for the very
first time.”

The Selected Works and the essays in After Said remind us

that it is not enough to produce good ideas and generate
critical perspectives today; we must expand the very
horizon of our thinking both geographically and morally.
Ideas and culture must be fought for not only in the
cloistered precincts of academia but also out in the world,
in the public arena. That was what Said, while always the
consummate academic, did for his entire career, and it
remains a vivid example for others—scholars, writers,
students, activists, and ordinary citizens. Said wrote about
the experience of rereading Freud’s essays:

That we, different readers from different periods of history,

with different cultural backgrounds, should continue to do
this…strikes me as nothing less than a vindication of his
work’s power to instigate new thought, as well as to
illuminate situations that he himself might never have
dreamed of.

Much the same can be said of Said. As a literary critic, a

teacher, and a political activist, he addressed the world
with a passion and commitment that speak to us today.

Rashid Khalidi Rashid Khalidi’s most recent book is The Hundred Years’ War
on Palestine. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at
Columbia University.

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