Jeanne Morefield

Unsettling the World

Edward Said and Political Theory

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This is the first book-length treatment of Edward Saidâ s influential cultural criticism from the perspective of a political theorist. Morefield argues that Saidâ s critique provides a timely approach that bridges historical analyses of imperialism and postcolonial politics with an urgent imperative to theorize contemporary global crises.

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Produktdetails

• Modernity and Political Thought
• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield
• Seitenzahl: 346
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. April 2022
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 528g
• ISBN-13: 9781538168622
• ISBN-10: 1538168626
• Artikelnr.: 63158252

Autorenporträt

Jeanne Morefield is professor of politics at Whitman College. She is author of Empires without Imperialism: Anglo American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford UP, 2014) and Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton UP, 2005).

Inhaltsangabe

Chapter One will introduce Said to a political theory audience who might
not be intimately familiar with his work by examining his incalculable
impact on postcolonial scholarship. Despite his looming presence in other
disciplines, Said's writing have been largely ignored by political
theorists because they don't fall neatly into the categories of either
critical or normative theory. The chapter critiques the way international
ethicists de-historicize institutions of international politics and the
privileged position by which Western experts are able to diagnose and
"solve" the problems of the formerly colonized world.
Chapter Two will begin the process of formulating a Saidian response to
this form of liberal presentism by looking closely at the promises and
challenges of Said's humanism. The chapter will first interrogate the
tension between his support for universal ideas like justice and freedom
(most apparent in his refusal to dismiss human rights as "cultural or
grammatical things") and his equally deep commitment to Foucaultian
discourse analysis. This combination of worldliness and the provisional,
disputable, arguable products of human inquiry compelled Said to situate
"critique at the very heart of humanism."
Chapter Three will explore the relationship between a humanism that is
explicitly historical, critical and global and Said's conception of the
exilic intellectual. The chapter begins with a brief examination of the
role of "exile" in twentieth century political theory more generally. It
moves on to examine Said's conviction that humanist intellectuals engaged
in critique must understand themselves as already contaminated by "power,
positions, and interests," a disposition which elicits an ongoing processes
of self-reflection that asks the critic to pay close attention to their own
subject position vis-à-visthe event/text they are analyzing. Said
championed a subject position for the critic rooted in exile. "The
intellectual," he argued, "who considers him or herself to be part of a
more general condition affecting the displaced national community is...
likely to be a source not of acculturation and adjustment, but rather of
volatility and instability." The chapter will conclude by thinking
critically about some of the conceptual problems generated by this approach
to exile, such as, the fact that it appears profoundly voluntarist in a way
that seems to run counter to Said's own theory of power. Despite these
tensions, the kinds of reflective practices that flow from a position of
exile offer a necessary corrective to the unquestioned positionality of
liberal internationalism.
Chapter Four will explore the kinds of political reflection enabled by
exile, focusing on Said's analysis of language and the way this
fine-grained approach to language functions in his explicitly political
writings. It will begin with an investigation of Said's conviction that the
self-reflective awareness of the exilic critic entails "a lifelong
attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human
beings who exist in history," a disposition he called philological. The
chapter will then turn to Said's political writings to explore this
attentiveness to the kinds of communities both engendered and occluded by
pro-nouns.
Chapter Five will explore the unsettled approach to crisis implicit in
Said's two-pronged approach his exilic humanism. On the one hand, the
practice of humanist criticism compels the exilic intellectual to approach
perceived crises in international politics from the perspective of language
critique, drilling into the space between words to reveal the holes where
narrating subjects should be, subjects who - despite their rhetorical
invisibility - still daily experience the material violence of a world
which refuses to represent them or create the space for them to represent
themselves. On the other hand, Said's critical humanism insists that we
engage the kinds of historical analyses that "protect against and forestall
the disappearance of the past" which have fallen victim to the discursive
press of crisis.[1]
Chapter Six draws together the threads of discussion by thinking more
broadly about the adequacy of Said's theory as a counterweight to the
international ethics of liberal internationalism. This will include
thinking explicitly about those aspects of Said's work that might frustrate
some political theorists: his insistence, for instance, on conceptualizing
democracy as a form of critical practice rather than as a type of politics,
and his refusal to theorize the foundational logic behind concepts that he
values like "justice" and "human rights." The book concludes by suggesting
that it is precisely Said's relentlessly critical insistence on searching
for the hidden "we" behind discourses of democracy, justice, and human
rights that makes his humanism particularly able to puncture the presentist
logic behind so many contemporary approaches to international politics,
thus bringing the past that cannot be acknowledged, and the collective
subjects who cannot be represented, back into the center of analysis.
[1] Said, HDC, 141.