Edward Said famously wrote most of "Orientalism" during his 1975-76 CASBS fellowship. The book criticized Western worldviews and representations of the East (or 'Orient') and their perpetuation of romanticized or colonial mindsets. A half-century later, "Orientalism" continues to shape scholarship, frame debates, and resonate in disparate regions and contexts. Four 2025 CASBS fellows representing different disciplines – A. Shane Dillingham, Thomas Blom Hansen, Camilla Hawthorne, and Shirin Sinnar – discuss the enduring influence and impact of Said and his landmark book.
Edward Said famously wrote most of "Orientalism" during his 1975-76 CASBS fellowship. The book criticized Western worldviews and representations of the East (or 'Orient') and their perpetuation of romanticized or colonial mindsets. A half-century later, "Orientalism" continues to shape scholarship, frame debates, and resonate in disparate regions and contexts. Four 2024-25 CASBS fellows representing different disciplines – A. Shane Dillingham, Thomas Blom Hansen, Camilla Hawthorne, and Shirin Sinnar – discuss the enduring influence and impact of Said and his landmark book.
EDWARD SAID WORKS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)
"The One State Solution," New York Times, 10 January 1999
Representations of the Intellectual (Penguin Random House, 1996)
Other works emerging from Edward Said's CASBS fellowship
EPISODE GUESTS
A. Shane Dillingham: ASU faculty page | Personal website | CASBS page
Camilla Hawthorne: UCSC faculty page | Personal website | CASBS page
Thomas Blom Hansen: Stanford faculty page | CASBS page
Shirin Sinnar: Stanford faculty page | CASBS page
Edward Said on CASBS
In evaluating his CASBS fellowship in 1976, Edward Said noted that "...the Center does not pay enough attention (in its selection of Fellows) to revisionist and/or radical scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are a great many intellectual developments taking place, many of them because of thinkers whose work departs from (if does not explicitly reject) the conventions of Establishment scholarship."
In addition to this constructive criticism, Said remarked in general that "...the quiet and the absence of immediate pressures were, for me, a very welcome change from past years, when deadlines, a thousand daily commitments, and the mad pressures of teaching in a large university (in a large city) made continuity of work and reflection almost impossible." Said further reported that Orientialism was "exactly four-fifths complete." In accounting for his "extremely valuable and productive year," he wrote: "I do not think I could have done this sort of work anywhere else...the working conditions are...comfortable in the best way for a scholar..."
Of his work on Orientalism, Said further noted: "The other more or less special advantage to this year was to have time to change directions in my work, to move from a highly theoretical kind of speculation to a very concrete historical investigation. Many of my ideas about such matters as the history of traditions, the growth of scientific and disciplinary knowledge, the ideology of scholarship, the relationship between “knowledge” and the imagination took new, concrete forms. Without such a year – and it is impossible to say where else I could have had such a year – I would still be making statements without being sure as their historical and concrete validity. Moreover, I found that I had the time to pursue leads only to prove that they were the wrong ones; the important thing was to have the time to let my work take me where it would, and not be afraid.”
Excerpted from Edward Said, "Evaluation of fellowship year 1975-76," letter to CASBS director Gardner Lindzey, August 19, 1976 (CASBS files)
Other works referenced in this episode
Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Stuart Hall, "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power," in Essential Essays, Vol. 2 (Duke Univ. Press, 2018 [1992])
Camilla Hawthorne, "Mapping Black Geographies," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2024)
Sophia Azeb, "The 'No-State Solution'," The Funambulist (2017)
Sophia Azeb, "Who Will We Be When We are Free?" The Funambulist (2019)
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
It was 50 years ago, during the 1975-76 academic year, that Edward Said was a CASBS Fellow. Said was among the 20th century's most noted comparative literature scholars, cultural and literary critics, and public intellectuals of post-colonial theory and discourse. It was here at CASBS where Said wrote most of his landmark book, Orientalism.
It criticized Western worldviews and representations of the East, and the perpetuation of romanticized imperialist colonial mindsets as manifested in literature, art, politics, and the academy at large. Orientalism commands the attention of readers half a century later, shaping contemporary scholarship and framing debates among sympathizers and critics alike. Today on Human Centered, a discussion about Edward Said and Orientalism among four scholars who recently walked the same grounds as he did while working and interacting as 2025 CASBS Fellows. And notably, the disciplinary diversity of the four is emblematic of the wide reach of Said's ideas and the deep influence of his intellectual project.
Moderating the discussion is Shirin Sinnar, the William W and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford University. She is joined by Shane Dillingham, an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University. Thomas Blom Hansen, the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. And Camilla Hawthorne, a Geographer and Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California Santa Cruz.
The four reveal their first intellectual encounters with Orientalism, explore the circumstances under which Said wrote the book, both in a broader context and within the CASBS landscape, characterize Orientalism's resonance in the Middle East, where Said advocated for a one state solution, and its influence in places well beyond. They'll discuss Orientalism's thesis, particularly from perspectives to Said's left, and survey the book's impact on mainstream disciplines and politics.
It's an ambitious and wide-ranging conversation about a towering figure and a book with an enduring legacy which can be attributed in part to CASBS. Said himself wrote, I don't think I could have done this sort of work anywhere else. We'll reveal more in the episode notes, but first, let's listen…
Shirin Sinnar: I’m really excited to have this conversation today about Edward Said's legacy, because not only has his work influenced all of us, but he also ties each of us to CASBS. So Edward Said obviously wrote most of his classic work, Orientalism, at CASBS. It was while he was a fellow from 1975 to 1976. And we actually know a little bit about his time at CASBS, some of it from his biographer, Timothy Brennan. So apparently at the time people did not apply to be a fellow at CASBS. They would mysteriously get a letter in the mail that invited them to join.
So Edward Said received such a letter one day, and he did in fact join CASBS. And we don't really know exactly what prompted the invitation, but Brennan, his biographer, speculates it has to do with the center's interest at the time in better understanding the Middle East. And although Said hadn't yet written a lot about the Middle East, he was mostly known as a literary critic, he was already a prominent and rare Palestinian voice in the US academic scene.
And then at CASBS, he ended up writing Orientalism, and it quickly became an intellectual sensation because he was essentially indicting so much of English and French scholarship about the Middle East and the Muslim world and parts of Asia and Africa as being crafted not only to fit the biases of Europe, but also actually to justify the colonial project and domination over those societies. So that piece of scholarship made a lot of headway, but also even during his time at CASBS, we know that from Timothy Brennan's biography that he apparently made his presence felt. He was a lively voice during lunchtime conversations.
And Said himself was generous in crediting his time at CASBS. So in the 1994 afterward that he wrote to Orientalism, he comments that he actually didn't have a lot of external support and interest in his book while he was writing Orientalism, but that CASBS was an exception, and he had a quote, to wonderfully civilized and relatively burdenless year at CASBS, and that Orientalism was actually the only book he wrote in one continuous gesture from the research to the final writing, and he really credited the time at CASBS for providing that opportunity. So Shane or Camilla, do either of you want to say a little bit more about what we know about Said's time at CASBS?
Shane Dillingham: Sure. I mean, I think it strikes me that there is an aspiration at CASBS, a kind of institutional aspiration for interdisciplinarity and for this kind of big intellectual goal of disinterested inquiry. And it seems that what Said achieved during his years was in some ways fulfilling that aspiration, right?
He took time to read kind of promiscuously across different disciplines and literatures and languages to come up with this field defining new book. And so in some ways it strikes me that Said producing Orientalism up on the hill at CASBS is kind of the aspiration fulfilled. But at the same time, he strikes me as someone who was, did not quite fit in in terms of some of the kind of intellectual milieu or longstanding intellectual traditions at CASBS that were more focused on the kind of social sciences.
And so he achieves this path breaking book in a situation which he didn't necessarily have. They have a lot of intellectual interlocutors who could kind of dialogue directly with his project. And so there's a kind of interesting story there about achieving something at CASBS in a moment where he maybe didn't always feel like he fit into the general milieu.
Camilla Hawthorne: Well, you know, I guess to follow on what Shane said, what we know from Said's accounts of his time at CASBS, I think resonates with the experiences that many of us had, that one of the most valuable aspects of the experience is really the unrestricted time, right? The time to read, to study, to think very capaciously in ways that are kind of unfettered by the sort of ever growing institutional service burdens. And at the same time, from what we understand of Said's time at CASBS, he also, I think, raised some really important questions about what is bounded as social scientific research, particularly in the way that it's framed at CASBS.
And so, as Shane said, in many ways, Said was somewhat intellectually isolated, although there were certain interlocutors who I think shaped his work. And there are ways that, in a very broad sense, sharing this kind of intellectual space with scholars from very different, not only disciplines, but really kind of political and intellectual orientations can be generative. But we know that Said raised concerns about what he referred to as an absence of radical scholars at CASBS.
And I think we can sort of imagine that when he talked about radical scholarship, he meant radical both in terms of a kind of leftist politics, but also radical in terms of challenging disciplinary boundaries, engaging in revisionist work, you know, what maybe the Frankfurt School would call kind of, you know, the work of critical social theory. And I think this is, you know, this is, I think this is significant because it raises questions about sort of the future of the social sciences and the role of, I think, CASBS as an institution in shaping the future of the social sciences, right? So this is both a more focused question about Said himself, and then more broadly about how we understand disciplines.
So, where do the social sciences interface with the humanistic social sciences, and where do the social sciences interface with the humanities? You know, for many of us who work in the humanistic social sciences, Said is a really central theoretical reference point, but that's not necessarily the case in all of the social sciences. But I think kind of more importantly, you know, what I see sort of with Said's concern about the representation of radical or revisionist scholars is actually kind of a provocation to ask what happens when we are willing to abandon the pretense of science as a qualifier to the work that we do in the so-called social sciences, right?
If we can think about Orientalism itself as a problematization of the science and all of the kind of putative claims to objectivity, accuracy, impartiality that are actually fraught with meaning and power and coloniality. So I think it's both, I think it raises a really interesting kind of historiographical question about how Said was able to do this work, but also I think raising a really important question about how we bound disciplines and academic divisions and really how we think about the politics of science as social scientists.
Shirin Sinnar: And I think what you're saying about how Said viewed his own role as a humanist at CASBS is really interestingly linked to how he saw the humanities more generally and the project of Orientalism itself, which is to be a critic and to be a critic that understands fields of inquiry as not being purely objective, but as being driven by, to some respect, the political position of those who are writing scholarship. So I think maybe we can get there in a moment and talk more about that thesis of Orientalism and how it's influenced so many disciplines. But before we get there, maybe we can just speak a little bit more about our own intellectual encounters with Said when we first encountered Said's work and in particular, Orientalism.
And maybe Thomas, do you want to jump in?
Thomas Blom Hansen: Yeah, sure. So I encountered Said's work through my incipient work on India in the 1980s. And I bought my first copy of Orientalism in a bookstore in Delhi.
Because it was widely read in that part of the world at the time. But it was also very contested. There were lots of people who belonged to the more traditional left, who pushed back against it.
And it hit the very lively Indian academic scene at the time when there was already a kind of critique of established sort of verities of Indian nationalism and the way in which the story of decolonization was told. And there was a thirst for different kind of perspectives. And it was really the group around what became the Subaltern Studies Collective that picked up and promoted Said's work.
And it became very, very important. You can say that Said's work was most important first in South Asia and not in the Middle East. In the Middle East, it encountered a whole lot of different kind of oppositions, partly from more sort of established scholars, both in the Middle East, as well as in the European and Western Academy.
But it also encountered kind of pushback from progressives, especially Marxists, who felt that this was a kind of humanistic exercise that dealt with knowledge formations instead of talking about, you know, political economy and the sort of real issues of colonial exploitation and so on and so forth. And the same configuration was what happened in India, Pakistan, and so on and so forth. So it's interesting that there's a kind of way in which, I think in South Asia and India, for sure, there was already an existing skepticism about the way in which India had been represented by Western scholars.
And that goes back a long time. And I think it fed into that and gave it a new frame where it showed that, you know, inspired by Foucault, as Said very much is, that this is not necessarily a question of the work of individual scholars, whether you are right or wrong. It's not necessarily a question of whether some of the details in the scholarship are correct or incorrect or can be contested.
It's about the framing. It's about how you construct an object called the Orient, right? And whether the assumptions that hold it together, and that creates a kind of disciplinary set of disciplinary formations that have very long durability and also become sort of training grounds.
And as Said himself says in the intro to the first edition of Orientalism, that his target is not the Orient. He says, I don't claim to know anything in particular about the Middle East, the other parts of the world, but my objective here is to criticize the knowledge formations that were generated in such a way that Orientalists were speaking not to people in the Orient, but actually scholars in the West, right? And that was his target or criticism.
And that resonated really profoundly with a very lively and very independent and autonomous kind of intellectual scene in South Asia at the time, as it also does now, but in ways we can maybe come to that are quite different from what it was in the 1980s.
So when you first encountered this work, how did it affect you individually? What was your own set of reflections as you were reading it for the first time?
Well, I mean, I have been reading Foucault, right? So for me, it was kind of a brilliant illustration of many of Foucault's points around what is a discursive formation, right? How is it that a set of assumptions, a set of frameworks and a set of questions become the authoritative ones?
And we didn't have, I mean, Foucault had done that brilliantly in terms of Europe, in terms of using mainly French examples, but we hadn't had it for the rest of the world. And I was certainly myself in a position, I wanted to study contemporary India at the time. At that time, you could either do it by joining the sort of Orientalist disciplines of Sanskrit or classical Indian history or whatever, or history in a more, that was very much colonial, depending on colonial archives, or you could do it through development studies and questions of studying economics.
So I felt all of these were kind of a little frustrating, didn't fit me, and by reading that, I understood, this is actually the cage that has been constructed for us. And it feels as if it doesn't allow a whole lot of questioning of what I had seen myself happening in India at the time, right? And so it's very interesting that I think Orientalism, unbeknownst or without having been the intention of Said, opens a whole lot of questions across the world, right?
That his concern was really the Middle East, and most of the scholars that he criticized, and he deals with, deal with the Middle East. But it resonated even more powerfully, I think, in places that had a very, that have very deep and complex colonial histories, and also had governed how people even in these societies saw themselves. So it allowed people to question all kinds of deep assumptions about how they had come to even know about their own history, their own culture, and so on and so forth.
Shirin Sinnar: Well, I'm curious, Shane, whether you want to jump in on that, because it strikes me that some of your fields of study in Latin American history are also not part of the Orient, specifically as described by Said, and yet it sounds like his work also resonated with you. So maybe you could say more about how you first came to Orientalism.
Shane Dillingham: I think it's such a beautiful thing to reflect on how we all encountered this work and these ideas in different places and in different times, and their impact, it kind of speaks to the power of Said's ideas and the book that he crafted. So maybe perhaps because of a small age difference between Thomas and myself, I encountered Said in the post-911 world as a precocious undergraduate student who, I was going to school on the East Coast of the United States after 2001, and the war on terror, the US's invasion of Afghanistan, and then the Palestinian, the Second Intifada, all were kind of defining moments for me as a young person, and I found Edward Said and his work in that context, right? As this Palestinian intellectual who insisted on the full humanity of Palestinians and also engaged with, you know, all kind of all sides and spoke eloquently about history and politics.
And so that's how I first found him. And I read his a couple of different collections of his essays, I think, before I got to Orientalism. But that was, you know, very I think I read one of his essays in the New York Times.
That was an argument for the one state solution. I think that was published in 1999 that I still go back to because it was, you know, kind of so clear and, you know, uncompromising on the need for a solution to the conflict in the Middle East that was about justice for all people. But as I entered graduate school, and as you referenced, Shirin, I went on to study indigenous Latin American history, Said did impact the field in pretty profound ways.
And I think in part there is a South-South dialogue between the subaltern studies that Thomas was referencing in South Asia and the literature on Latin American history. And so historians of Latin America are really reading subaltern studies, are trying to think through some of the ideas that are articulated there and that are, I think, inspired by Said. And if you go to Said's introduction of Orientalism, I think he offers multiple, maybe four definitions of Orientalism.
And I think one of the basic definitions and critiques that he's offering is a critique of area studies, right? This notion that the West has set up Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East as these coherent regions that could be understood for basically colonial and imperial objectives. And I think that's why Said's work starts to resonate in Latin America is because he's showing a clear critique of area studies, right?
Whether it's the Orient or the Middle East, or you can pick a region. But his kind of, you know, he starts with a, and this goes to the kind of the debates on the left that Said engenders that Thomas referenced. You know, he starts with a Karl Marx quote in Orientalism in the first version.
He starts with a Karl Marx quote from the 18th Brumaire. They cannot represent themselves. They must be represented.
And I think for many, many intellectuals who are working in the global south, that was an important kind of point of departure. And so I was, you know, impacted by Said both in terms of my concern about struggles for justice in Palestine and in the broader Middle East, but also, you know, he was shaping theoretical debates. And we could talk more about those theoretical debates among historians of Latin America.
Shirin Sinnar: And Shane, you reference subaltern studies, and Thomas did too. And I'm thinking that for maybe folks who are not as familiar with South Asian studies or the various contexts in which that term has been used, I wonder if one of you could just share a little bit more about what that field was and how it affected and other fields of study.
Thomas Blom Hansen: Yeah, so, sure. Of course. Subaltern study is basically a group of young, collective of young historians mainly, but also social scientists of various stripes who come together around the project of writing history from below, as it were. Hence the word subaltern, which is actually a military term, right? That means someone who is in the lower hierarchy of the army.
And so the idea was to use, as a matter of fact, available archives, both colonial archives, as well as other vernacular archives, to tell a story about how ordinary people, poor, the large majority had experienced colonialism.
It was very much a kind of alternative history of what colonialism was, through picking up signs, picking up symbols, picking up or reading against the grain, as it were, in official documents and so on and so forth, to construct a different perspective. And basically fueled by an assumption that maybe India, although it was the largest and the oldest colony in the British Empire, hadn't been that colonized after all, in the sense that ordinary people were perhaps less shaped by colonial knowledge and colonial disciplines than many people had assumed. And so it created a kind of a methodology, it created a pathway, it created a form, a perspective in, in his, in, especially among historians, but also others, for how to do a kind of critical work.
Not abandoning the existing archives, but also, but trying to be more creative and critical in, in how to understand popular history, you might say. That model really had a huge impact across the world, especially in 1990s. And, and it still has, I mean, it's still classic.
And there's been a lot of critique of it and so on and so forth. And especially the Marxists were not very happy with it because they felt this was not the kind of history they had been promoting and so on and so forth. So, but it was nonetheless, I think one of the real important innovation in, innovations in, in how, let's say, post-colonial scholarship can be done, and models for a different kind of epistemic starting point, right? You don't necessarily start with the truth of the state, as it were. You start somewhere else.
Shirin Sinnar: And maybe we can turn in a moment to the Marxist critiques because it is interesting to know how Said's work rippled and caused controversy even among more left scholarship. But Camilla, do you want to first chime in with just where you encountered Said? And then we'll get to some of those other larger questions.
Camilla Hawthorne: Sure. So I know for a fact that my first substantive engagement with Said was in graduate school when I was teaching for the great geographer Gillian Hart, who was a theorist of empire, of fascism, of nationalism, a brilliant Gramscian and Fennonian scholar. And this was a class on post-colonial geographies, nation, and nationalism.
And you know, the fact that Said was included in that class, I think, speaks to the significance of Said to critical human geography more broadly, right? And in fact, I was looking back at the most recent edition of the textbook Key Thinkers on Space and Place. I served on the editorial advisory board for this text.
And Said is one of 62 key thinkers who are included as sort of foundational to the critical study of space and place, which I think is quite significant, right? Said wasn't formally a geographer, although, you know, geographers, we do love to claim him because he is thinking about geography in so many ways, about space and power. And so in this entry on Said and key thinkers on space and place, Daniel Clayton says that, you know, Said and Foucault together kind of mark what he refers to as a, and what many other scholars have referred to as a spatial turn in critical theory, and that many of the kind of concepts and analytics that were so central to Said are profoundly spatial in nature, right?
Like discursive practice, questions of dispossession, questions of exile, nation, diaspora. And so, you know, for me, when I think about Said as a, you know, when I think about Said as a geographer, both myself as a geographer and also Said as a geographer, we could say that Said and Orientalism is making an argument about maps, right? He's saying that the Orient, as a discursive construct, actually says less about the objective characteristics of this thing that we have come to understand as the Orient and actually tells us much more about the cognitive maps through which Europe and the West come to understand themselves and their relations to the rest of the world.
I think another key point of departure for geography is also Said's writings on traveling theory, right? The way that Said gives us tools for thinking about how theoretical frameworks move across time and across different spatial contexts, right? So theory always emerges out of a set of concrete engagements, right?
Both in dialogue with previous theories, but also out of the demands of a particular conjuncture that requires a new way of understanding the world. And so what does it mean when theories that emerge out of a particular conjuncture are taken up and used in other contexts, right? And Said has this very lengthy reflection on both the possibilities, but also, you know, there's a note of warning about a kind of overgeneralization of theory as it begins to travel.
And so effectively, he's giving us tools for thinking about the spatiality of knowledge production, right? You know, we're all sort of used to saying, you know, riffing off Donna Haraway, that all knowledge is situated, although typically when we say situated knowledges, we're thinking about kind of embodied subjectivities. But if we're really taking Said seriously, it means that we're also always knowing from somewhere, right?
Like we have to think about the spatiality from which we are knowing the world. And that understanding and reckoning with the geography of our knowing is really kind of the first step in a sort of intellectual honesty or intellectual responsibility. And so for me, as I work in kind of Black European studies, a lot of these frameworks and analytics and modes of thinking about space and power and empire have been really critical.
One touchstone for me is the way that Stuart Hall is engaging with Edward Said. So Stuart Hall, the British, Jamaican critical cultural studies theorist of the Birmingham School. And in his essay, The West and the Rest, Discourse and Power, he riffing off Said is saying that Orientalism, of course, as a discourse is actually central to understanding the Occident itself.
So again, Orientalism tells us less about the Orient than it does about the so-called Occident, and that is at the crux of Stuart Hall's argument that this thing that we take for granted as the West is less a geographical referent, right, a stable place, and more a historical construct whose boundaries are relatively contingent and flexible. And this is an argument that I have drawn on in my own work. I recently had an article come out in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers where I say that, you know, Stuart Hall reminds us that the West is an historical rather than a geographical construct, and I teach my students that we can really say the exact same thing about Europe itself, that the notion of a shared European-ness, whether it's articulated in terms of race, religion or culture, is actually a relatively recent and deeply contested historical phenomenon.
And that in fact, if we actually think about what it means to map Europe, we could do that in a number of widely varying and very contradictory ways, right? Is Europe a continent or a subcontinent? Is it one of many non-isomorphic political and economic unions?
Is it defined by who competes in the Eurovision Song Contest, in which case we would have to say that Israel is part of Europe? What about the Caribbean territories and departments of the UK and Netherlands and France, or the hyper-fortified Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla? And, you know, what about Turkey, right?
So for me, you know, Said's work on Orientalism as a way of understanding and untangling the West itself becomes really central to the project of beginning to kind of unbound and denaturalize Europe as a coherent category, because it's precisely Europe as a coherent category that is at the heart of so much violent xenophobia, racism, nationalism and exclusion.
Shirin Sinnar: Yeah, so it's fascinating to hear you say that ultimately Orientalism's legacy helps us understand the West as much or perhaps more so than any other place, right? The Orient or other regions that scholars in Britain and France were seeking to explain. I'm curious a little bit to hear whether this emphasis on these cultural constructs of East and West, even in the process of debunking them, is related to what Marxists objected to with Edward Said, like whether ultimately he reified categories of the East and West, and even as he was seeking to show that they were not so diametrically opposite as Orientalist scholars sought to make it seem as if they were, whether the focus on culture or particular geographies in some way detracted from a larger Marxist project.
Shane Dillingham: Yeah, this question, Orientalism is published in 1978. You know, it's towards the beginning of the 1980s. It seems to me that it does get caught up in some very polemical debates about, about how, you know, how intellectual inquiry should reckon with questions of culture and questions of power.
And I think there was a kind of resistance to Said's insistence on an emphasis on culture and discourse over other questions. But I'd like to hear what Thomas says. I'm happy to weigh in on my view of some of those debates and discussions.
Thomas Blom Hansen: Yeah, sure. I mean, that was part of the critique. Part of the critique was, you know, focusing on knowledge production, on cultural formations, on identities, are really in a sort of classical Marxist mold, a sort of superstructural effect of much more fundamental structures of economic inequality and exploitation.
So that was one pushback. I think there were a couple of other things, too. I mean, there was a, of course, Said is very critical of, and his very objective of Orientalism is to show how the polarity East and West came into being, right?
How, through which scientific paradigms and so on and so forth, that this became like a self-established truth and how that fed into, you know, Western self-understandings and all that. It was part of a larger argument he develops later, especially in his essays in Culture and Imperialism, which is really, I mean, we shouldn't forget that Said is a scholar of English literature. His PhD was on that, you know, he worked in that domain.
So Culture and Imperialism is really a set of essays that is diagnosis of how imperial culture shapes not just the East, but actually the West more than anything else, right? How European culture is fundamentally shaped by its, the imaginary horizons within which people think of themselves in the world are shaped by imperialism. That was something that a lot of people had found challenging, but also really suggestive, but initially it was challenging, because it also challenged this kind of Marxist ideas, the idea that, you know, there is a different stages of development of societies, and more advanced societies have different ideas of themselves, and less developed societies, and so on and so forth.
Where he said, no, there's actually a circulation of these forms of inequality, these forms of knowledge, these forms of self-making that have an independent existence that cannot be reduced to a kind of more simple economic relationship. So that was one point of contention. The other contention is, of course, that people felt, as you were hinting at, Shirin, that when you talk about, and it came perhaps more in the scholarship that follows Said, the sort of what we know, talk about as the post-colonial turn and so on and so forth, a certain reification perhaps, again, of the difference between the East and the West, right, this time not as a natural superiority of the West as was the outcome of much of Orientalist scholarship in the 19th century, but rather a kind of saying, listen, Western categories do not necessarily fit into all these other formerly colonized territories.
There were people who talked about incommensurability, the different kind of epistemic regimes that govern how people understand themselves. And that, again, became also contentious because people said, well, look, this is what exactly this sort of discussion of Orientalism and knowledge leads to, a form of reification of these categories, right? Whereas Marxism is wedded to much more universalist categories of labor, capital and so on.
And those determine how people think and understand and act in the world, right? So those were some of the pushback. And then I want to say also that some versions of, interestingly today, you know, a lot of this post-colonial language of it's necessary to emancipate our knowledge basis, to produce indigenous knowledge, to decolonize ourselves and our minds, to decolonize our curricula and whatever has been picked up also by very conservative regimes, like in Turkey, Erdogan is banging on about how important it is to decolonize the mind and how in India, the Indian right wing has done pretty much the same thing.
And you see it's a very interesting ways in which some of these, what started out as a critique of Western domination has now become something else in the hands of political forces that are, that someone like Said of course was opposed to his entire life, right? So, but that's, I guess, what happens when you produce certain frames and this is what social scientists and humanists are doing. Once you, the cat is out of the bag as it were, you know, it goes to places and you can't control it, right?
But it's interesting how especially this East and West dichotomy has been revived in various ways in which people talk about civilizations once again in all kinds of ways and so on and so forth, right? So this is not Said's fault, but it is for some of the people who were critical of the post-colonial turn as it were, for them it's like, ah, see, we told you that once you start criticizing in this vein or launch this form of critique that has a cultural basis, you become vulnerable to this form of appropriation, right?
Shane Dillingham: Yeah, and it strikes me that what Thomas is gesturing to is that in the 1980s and 1990s, there is a kind of crisis, I think, perceived or real among left-wing intellectuals about their project and their analysis. And it leads to these kind of polemical debates in which, at least in my reading, there is this notion that there is kind of one way to do scholarly inquiry and if it is not the way that I have defined, then there is not much generosity in terms of that. And I mean, I do think there are things we could critique of Said and Orientalism and I think Ajiz Ahmad was a kind of prominent Marxist critic who said what Thomas said, that in critiquing Orientalism as a project, what Said ultimately does is kind of essentialize a kind of static Western discourse that maybe doesn't exist in the way that he says in terms over time and space.
But I think it's more, those debates more tell us something about that period than necessarily the quality of Said's work, and which I think we can appreciate for its strengths and critique for some of its limitations. But it struck me that the debates that I was seeing coming up at the end of the 1990s, where you can either talk about structures of power and colonialism and capitalism, or there are these people that talk about culture and discourse. And I don't know if this is just the benefit of hindsight, but for me, I think, well, maybe we could do both of those things.
And it seems that Said was imperfectly trying to do both of those things. But it seems like at that moment, it was like you had to choose that you were either a postmodern culturalist or you were a serious Marxist critic of capitalism and colonialism. And I don't really like having to choose between those two positions.
Camilla Hawthorne: If I could riff on what both of you have just said, I mean, I think, Shane, I think you're exactly correct in kind of, again, identifying the sort of conjuncture out of which these really polemical debates emerge, right? Where we're also seeing, you know, the decline of a particular kind of radical, third-worldist, anti-capitalist organizing that largely has to do with kind of state-sponsored counterinsurgency alongside a kind of, you know, ascendancy of a sort of postmodern scholarship and then a kind of crisis, right? This crisis of the left, like, is there, you know, if we are, if everything is discursive, right, if everything is cultural, if everything is contingent, right, then, like, what can we actually organize around?
And so it's interesting that you see these different sorts of theoretical intellectual responses. I mean, one could argue, right, that, like, the new left in the UK is also kind of emerging out of a similar conjuncture, although very different, although interconnected geographical context as well, right, a different set of kind of impasses facing leftist organizing. But, you know, in a way, I think that's really summarized quite effectively by, you know, what what Judith Butler refers to as the kind of merely cultural argument, right, this sense that, you know, cultural studies focuses on the merely cultural, and that therefore is not there.
And in many ways, I think it's kind of interesting to note as well, that the merely cultural, often, not always, but in many cases, is sort of used to dismiss work that is centering, right, race, gender, sexuality, and decentering class. So the critique then becomes, right, we are focusing on representation rather than redistribution. But I think, and, you know, so to riff off of what Shane and Thomas were saying, you know, with the critiques of Said, very similar critiques of Said that kind of emerge in geography around the same time, that are less about Said and more about kind of a set of ongoing disciplinary tensions and transformations, right?
If, you know, the 80s kind of sees the ascendancy of a particular kind of Marxist geography, then what happens when particular Marxisms that are, we could say, sort of masculinist, very universalizing, begin to be challenged by other theoretical traditions? And so I think that's where we also in geography see, right, concerns about the materiality of discourse, right? The materiality of Orientalism, right?
How do we actually connect these questions and challenges of representation with the material workings of colonial and imperial power? Although, you know, I think it's important to note that as Daniel Clayton mentions in this aforementioned entry on Said, that Said himself emphasizes the fact that the actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about, right? Kind of echoing more modern critiques of, you know, the kind of popularization of decoloniality, right?
Decolonize this, decolonize that, saying that ultimately decolonization is about land back. So Said himself was like deeply concerned with the materiality of colonial power. And I do agree with Shane that I think that the controversies in some respects had less to do with Said and Orientalism and more about the kind of historical political injunct, uh, conjuncture in which the left faced a particular kind of impasse.
But I think again, with the benefit of hindsight, if we, if we sort of think about a broader set of intellectual traditions that are engaging with class, that are engaging with redistribution, that are engaging with material dispossession, we might see that while there is, um, maybe a European Marxism that remains very wedded to universal categories, that there are many other Marxist traditions, um, emanating from outside of Europe that are actually making a set of claims about the centrality of, we could say, the superstructure, right? About race, about representation, about culture, about empire, to the actual workings of capitalism, I think, in a way that destabilizes the suggestion that it's an either or, that either we focus on questions of representation or we focus on questions of redistribution, right? I mean, this is so much of what the Black radical tradition is doing.
This is what a lot of Latin American de-colonial theory is doing and thinking together sort of, you know, dependency theories and questions of epistemology and knowledge and power. This is what, you know, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies was doing as well, you know? And in fact, Stuart Hall, in an interview that, an interview late in his life was actually sort of lamenting the evacuation of Marxist political economic analysis from cultural studies because for Stuart Hall, the political economic analysis was always at the heart of the work of cultural studies.
Shirin Sinnar: So this is speaking as somebody who comes from legal scholarship and is not as familiar with some of the debates within these fields. So was Said's work and influence primarily on fields like critical geographies, subaltern studies, post-colonial studies, which I think are generally perceived maybe as more left-leaning, more Marxist-influenced fields? Or did it also have impact on, say, the traditional discipline of history?
Or if there is such a thing, I don't know. Or maybe it's that all of these fields were subsets or became kind of intersected with the disciplines that sort of traditionally created. Was there an influence that Said had on kind of fields of study that were not defined by a particular political orientation?
Shane Dillingham: Yeah, no, I think that's an important question, Shirin. Yeah, in history, I think it is in terms of kind of traditional, orthodox approaches to the discipline of history, Said's work marks a major intervention and kind of disjuncture, particularly for the field of Middle Eastern history as it was practiced in the United States and in Europe. I think that scholars, you could ask our colleagues who are more specialists in that field, but they could not do their work in the same way as they did prior to Said's intervention and prior to the publication of Orientalism.
I mean, I think there was shifts taking place, but it raises some kind of fundamental questions and as a polemic that says, there is a field of knowledge that has been built up, that has otherized a region set of peoples as somehow less than human. I think that that was an incredibly impactful argument. It was done so elegantly and one that engaged with history as well as literature.
And so I think that you would in today, if someone was to enroll in a doctoral program in history in the United States or I think in Europe or in other places, Said's work would be assigned as a key text, right? As if you were to take a kind of assigned theory course or methodology course. I would be surprised if you didn't see Said or one of Said's interlocutors on the syllabus.
And so yeah, I think there's a kind of, as you were saying, there's a kind of left debate and engagement with Said and Orientalism. But there's also a much broader one that expands beyond particular political currents.
Thomas Blom Hansen: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. But I also want to just add that I think it's interesting that the Middle East, while it's true that Said's work has been really consequential in the way the Middle East has been studied, that's also where there's been the most ferocious pushback against it. I mean, he's polemicizing himself against people like Bernard Lewis and others.
But because of the current and not so long ago, political investments in the region and the production of the Middle East, the projection of the Middle East as a site of enmity vis-a-vis the West and all that, that is the charge of that. You know, you will not, you may find that Defense Academies in Europe and the US are reading about Said, but not for the same reasons as people in a doctoral program, right? So there's a kind of political sharpening of contradictions in the Middle East that makes it a field that is where Said is still more controversial than he is in many other fields.
What you say, Shane, about history is completely correct. I would say anthropology as much, if not more, in the sense that Said as a kind of, as part of a larger post-colonial set of arguments that came along also with the impact of the work of Foucault and many others led to a complete sort of revolution, I would say, in anthropology in the late, in the course of the 1980s, that led to a completely different understanding of how anthropology constructs its own object of knowledge, right? That's way more reflexive, way more attentive to the way in which these histories and the people, the societies that we study have been already framed by a set of knowledges, they are already deeply colonized places that even people's, the way people are educated, I work on India, right?
The way people are trained in Indian history is a history that has a deep imprint of colonial intervention of many kinds. So that kind of consciousness that, you know, there is no, I mean, we used to say that anthropology came away from the mountains, down from the mountains, and came ashore from the islands, right? And began to study mainstream societies and the big and the current questions.
It's not just about Said, it's not just about post-colonialism, but it is a very important part of that piece. The sort of the realization of the untenability of the idea that there are people who are cultural others that can be studied in their own, as it were, isolation or their own totality, that the world is an already interconnected place, not just by capitalism, but also by knowledge systems, by imperial knowledge systems that have been serving all kinds of interest. So, yeah, completely, it was part of that complete turn around of the discipline that made it a place that was certainly inviting for me to be in, very different from anthropology of the 1970s, for instance, or 60s.
Shirin Sinnar: Would any of you like to offer perhaps some closing thoughts about Said's legacy or particularly his relevance for this particular moment that we are in, whether the in your academic disciplines or in our politics? What do you take away from Said most at this moment?
Shane Dillingham: You know, I think one of the things that we've, you know, the four of us have discussed over the year there that we shared at CASBS and that I think Said, you know, kind of represents and encourages us all to do is, I think, you know, sometimes in the social sciences or in certain segments of the scholarly world, there's this notion that we're kind of animating assumption that if we get the kind of smartest people in the room with the best ideas, we can solve the world's problems, right? And there's this, I think that sometimes goes either unspoken or sometimes it's stated explicitly that we just need some really smart people to get together and develop some really sharp ideas and they will solve the world's problems, you know, which are many, right? In terms of the violent inequalities that we see in our contemporary world.
And it's kind of framed as a technical problem, right? That can be solved with just some smart folks. And I think for Said, you know, his animating assumption was not that.
It was rather that we live in a world that was historically produced by colonialism and other forms of violent inequality and that we have to reckon with that and kind of think with that and ask those kind of radical questions. And that's kind of what we started when we were talking about Said's reflections on his own times as CASBS is to kind of say, we need to kind of radical in terms of going to the root of, what are the roots of these contemporary crises, whether it's the climate crisis or questions of migration or inequality today. And so I think Said encourages us to ask more radical questions and not be scared to kind of follow the course of where those questions take us.
Shirin Sinnar: Thomas?
Thomas Blom Hansen: Yeah. Well, I want to turn to some, maybe another dimension of Said, which is his role as a public intellectual, as someone as a Palestinian intellectual, as a public intellectual who was critical of Zionism, but he was also critical of dogmatic forms of Arab nationalism, forms of exclusivism. And Shane mentioned the essay about the One State Solution, which I think is still is a very live document.
It's no longer such a live debate, given what has just happened the last two years in that part of the world. But I find it very admirable that he was someone in 1980s and 90s, 90s he became very unwell, but you know, who would take on his opponents and who was in the public eye. And he was at Columbia University for many, many years.
And there were lots of people there, colleagues there, who took exception to the work he did and what he stood for politically, and he would face them. Some of these same people have been involved in inviting the scrutiny that Columbia is under right now. But he would take issue, he would not shy away from that, he would not hide, he would go out, he would argue, and he would see that as part of his obligation.
As a public intellectual, as a critical intellectual, as a Palestinian, and so on and so forth. It landed him in many forms of crosshairs of various people, not just conservatives in this country, or people who believe in Zionism, but also Arab nationalists. We shouldn't forget that he was at loggerheads with the PLO, and Arafat, and the leadership of the PLO, that actually for a number of years banned his books from being used in education in the territories governed by, dominated by the PLO.
And so he, but he was like, for him, it was part of the fight, it was worth it, right? Because that is what a public intellectual does, and he has this memorable exchange that I can't quote the whole thing now, but where he's asked whether he has, he's recognizing the Jewish right to be in Israel, right? Do Jews have any claim on the territory?
And that's the kind of question everybody is being asked today, including Zoran Mamdani and other people, right? This is a question everybody seems to be the litmus test of the time. And his answer was, he says, yes, of course, Jews have a historical claim on this territory, it's indisputable that Jews were here.
But lots of other people have historical claims, equally deep, equally legitimate. And that's exactly why the only way we can solve this is to have a pluri-national, pluri-cultural one state that gives equal rights to everybody, instead of saying that only one part, in this case, the Jewish nation, should have exclusive rights to this territory. Why is that the case?
And that, I think, is a powerful and reasonable argument that is maybe so reasonable that it has been completely silenced today. Right?
Camilla Hawthorne: It seems that, you know, we're all really honing in on the prescience of Said's support for a one state solution. And I want to riff on that a bit more. And I want to riff on that via the work of my friend and colleague, Sophia Azeb, who has written actually about what she calls the No State Solution.
Right? So we talk about two state solution, one state solution. But sort of what does it mean to actually problematize the state itself as a kind of vehicle for anti-colonial liberatory politics?
And, you know, Sophia is able to do that by building on Said's work, and especially the way that Said is thinking about exile. And so in a, you know, in a really wonderful piece called, Who Will We Be When We Are Free? She quotes Said saying that, you know, exile is a solitude experienced outside the group, the deprivations felt at not being with others in the communal habitation.
And, you know, what Sophia is saying, you know, for Said, Said writes that exile is a jealous state because it does not compel us to share our humanity with others. And so Sophia is really building on that when she makes this claim that the deprivations of exile can't be recovered through nationalism, which is itself a reproduction of the violence of the modern nation state. And so I think in this moment, what I find so kind of enduring and powerful with Said's work is his willingness to ask really challenging, and oftentimes inopportune questions about the work of anti-colonial, the project of anti-colonial liberation, right?
And I think there's something really significant about this conjuncture where we are both seeing a kind of resurgence of neo-fascist politics across the so-called West. And at the same time, a resurgence of anti-colonial nationalism, particularly in Palestine, as Palestinians are facing genocide. And I think Said prompts us in this moment to sort of ask the really hard question, which is, what do we do with the category of the nation in both of these contexts?
Because one could argue that in these two very different contexts, there has been a kind of recourse to a kind of liberal view of the nation, right? A kind of, the possibility of salvaging a different kind of nation. We see this in the United States, for example, right?
When we have folks who are critical of the Trump administration saying, you know, this is not what America is, right? That there's that nationalism kind of gets used as a vehicle for challenging what are seen as the kind of excesses of the Trump administration. And I think, you know, I see this, I work with a lot of grad students who are working on Palestine and I see them as well grappling with, I think, a distinct but also related question of sort of what we do with the nation, right?
If the nation form has been the source of profound violence, exclusion, discrimination, categorization, exile, what does it then mean to pin one's hopes for kind of anti-colonial liberation on a national project? Are there ways that the nation form can be salvaged or not? This is also a question that Fanon was thinking about as well.
I think that Said really prompts us to imagine what anti-colonial liberation in a way that is not welded to nationalism could potentially look like. And I think he does that when he's encouraging us to think about a one state solution, right? Which is a non-ethnostate.
And so I think that in this moment where the multiple compounding political crises of this conjuncture might compel us to kind of retreat into convenient liberal categories, I think Said's legacy is a kind of a reminder of the urgency of holding on to that kind of insistent, radical critique, even when it may seem inopportune, that there's actually a really important imaginative work, right, of imagining other kinds of possibilities outside the current order of things, right? What does it mean to imagine political futures beyond the boundaries of the modern nation state? What does it mean to think about Palestinian liberation in ways that don't reproduce static understandings of Palestinian-ness that might actually in practice exclude the majority of Palestinians in exile across the diaspora?
And I think those are questions that have relevance to Palestine, but they also have questions more broadly in this moment of genocide and fascism.
Shirin Sinnar: So I'll take maybe the moderator's privilege, if I can, to just add a couple of thoughts of my own. And I think that everyone has said something about just how deep and provocative a set of questions Edward Said was willing to ask and the positions that he was willing to take. And for me, that connects up to a set of essays that he published in 1994 based on some lectures he gave, the REIT lectures, I think, for the BBC a year earlier.
And they were published as a set of essays called Representations of the Intellectual. And that series of lectures, which I first read in college, really struck me in terms of how clearly Edward Said spoke about what is the role of an intellectual. And as I personally think about what it means to be an academic in this moment, this very fraught, increasing authoritarian moment, Said's call for an intellectual to ask the really hard questions, to not be co-opted either by governments or by corporations, to confront orthodoxy and dogma on all sides.
That message really continues to resonate with me, as well as, and this is something that others have alluded to as well, that while Said was deeply committed to Palestinians and to Palestinian self-determination and liberation, he was also someone who critiqued tribalism, and he was an adamant believer in the need for universal principles, for speaking about justice and the dignity of all peoples in a way that was according to human principles, not just according to what group he belonged to. So for me, now thinking about Said and what he means in this moment, it's both just his fierce commitment to independent thought and also a search for, to live up to a set of universal human values. Those things really resonate to me about Edward Said.
So thank you, Shane. Thank you, Camilla. Thank you, Thomas. This was a wonderful conversation, reminded me of many of our best lunch moments at CASBS over the past year. And I hope that each of us can continue to engage with Said and with each other. And with this great community of scholars over time.
Narrator: That was Shirin Sinnar, Shane Dillingham, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Camilla Hawthorne discussing Edward Said and his book Orientalism. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.