Edward Said, who taught English and comparative literature at Columbia, was the author most famously of Orientalism. His other books include The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine the Way We See the Rest of the World, Culture and Imperialism and Out of Place: A Memoir. He was also an accomplished pianist, and founded the West-Eastern Divan orchestra with the conductor Daniel Barenboim in 1999. He wrote forty pieces for the LRB on subjects including late style, the belly-dancer Tahia Carioca, meeting Sartre, and the Oslo Accords, ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles’. Said’s friend and former neighbour Michael Wood wrote about him in the paper after his death in 2003.
‘The world is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.’ Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO’s exit from Beirut in August 1982. ‘Where shall we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky’? Nineteen years later, what was happening then to the Palestinians in...
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a former professor of political science at Northwestern University who later became vice-president of Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, died at the age of 72 on 23 May in his Ramallah home, after a long illness. I learned of his death as I was walking out of Tel Aviv airport on my way to see him. He was my oldest and dearest friend, remarkable as an introspective...
The core repertory of Western classical music is dominated by a small number of composers, mostly German and Austrian, mostly of the 18th and 19th centuries. In their work, perfection – of form, melody, harmony and rhythm – is common; in fact it occurs in their music with a frequency unimaginable in painting (except perhaps for Raphael) or literature. Yet even in such...
[ This article refers to a number of maps which are too detailed to be rendered readably on this website. They are available (via these links) as Acrobat PDF files. Map One shows the situation in Hebron now, with the Arab town dominated by Israeli settlements. Map Two follows the sequence of Israeli transfers of West Bank territory to Palestinian self-rule between 1994 and 1999. Map Three...
The odd thing is that most of the contributors to these books doubt whether it is possible to offer a clear and distinct idea of the subject under discussion. Indeed, Karen Painter, one of the...
In Being and Nothingness Sartre has an admirable passage about the stubborn human tendency to ‘fill’, the fact that a good part of human life, in politics as elsewhere, is devoted to...
The politics of dispossession is nationalism – an over-generalisation which at once calls for precise qualification. It is quite true that not all nationalists are dispossessed: possessors...
The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. William Blake,...
The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine, are meant to be about Critical Theory, and up to now they have, for good or ill, been faithful (in their fashion) to that...
Professor Bernard Lewis enjoys a worldwide reputation as a scholar of Near-Eastern history, and in his most recent work, Semites and Anti-Semites, he has chosen to concentrate his formidable...
In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an...
Edward Said is the first Palestinian to have stormed the East Coast literary establishment. His achievement has partly been the result of what his more paranoid opponents must regard as his...
The Palestinian problem has been the subject of world-wide debate for more than a decade. Yet the issue is not well understood. The debate, for all its volume and intensity, has rarely managed to...
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