Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

This book takes you onto a spectacular and highly satisfying intellectual journey. Many essayists set up their tent with the first couple of paragraphs and then spend the rest of the time just rearranging the furniture inside. With Said, one never knows what point he might make next, what brilliant new connection will be created before our eyes. You can tell by reading this collection how Said won his reputation as a fantastic lecturer and educator. I guess this is why Columbia University stuck by him when he was being vilified by his enemies for championing the Palestinian cause and demanding the end of Israeli occupation. Buy it, read it, enjoy!

This collection of essays is a new triumph for Said whose exceptional energy and courage should be an example for all of us. Ever since he was diagnosed with cancer, he has been engaged in a Proustian race against time producing such compelling works as "Culture and Imperialism", "Out of Place", and "The End of the Peace Process"."Reflections on Exile" includes some of the finest essays written in the second half of the twentieth century. No critic could afford to ignore such important pieces as "Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community" and "Traveling theory reconsidered". Not for Said is jargon or ill considered perspective; his thought is always sober and penetrating. His greaest contribution was that he forced the academy to consider the narrative of the marginalised, the "voiceless", paving the way for an understanding of the world as inhabited by equal humans-- not superior "westerners" and inferior "easterners". But his contribution is not limited to deconstructing the Manicheanism of the post-colonial world; Said is the most insightful critic of his generation. He has an unmatched ability to capture the most delicate nuances in both the aesthetic and political realms. Whether he is comparing Nietzsche and Conrad or reflecting upon the Question of Palestine, Said proves his indispensibility by avoiding the pits of hazy thought that others regularly fall into. Professor Said is simply the finest essayist alive; even on a purely literary basis, the merit of his writting is undeniable. He is passionate, coherent, and eloquent.This collection of essays should be of interest to anybody concerned with literary theory, music, cultural criticism, politics and theory of nationalism. It provides a good overview of Said's breathtaking range of thought, and also includes first rate criticism on many thinkers,novelists, and musicians including: Conrad, Vico, Adorno, Lukacs, Orwell, Naipaul, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gould, Hemingway, Mahfouz, Hobsbawm, Blackmur, Gramsci and Foucault.Said is an engaged intellectual hero. Like Sartre, Russell, and Chomsky, his presence has been essential as a thinker who chooses to be in exile, who avoids the centres of dominance and keeps a distance (but is never detached) from society in order to be able to speak truth to power. His work provides a base for us to work on building human narratives free of hegemony. After Said, we cannot afford but to have a "contrapuntal" reading of the world, celebrating the values of enlightenment, hybridity, and freedom.

I don't understand the rather vicious comments below. I think that when Said claims that he's an exile, he doesn't simply means it in the political sense but a state of mind or a state of being. It means to be skeptical, cultured, and intellectually rigorous. I think some of the essays shows what it means to be a humanist in the best sense of the word. I too see myself as an exile despite a totally different set of experiences and circumstances. With this book, Said offers us a complex personality as well as an thoughtful and sensitive way of looking at the world and living in it. It might just be a manifesto of sorts for exiles just like myself.

The UN estimates that one third of mankind today does not live in the cities where they were born. No one can give voice to these feelings of dislocation more than Edward Said, one of the most perceptive living cultural historians whose range of erudition is astonishing. In these essays published over the past thirty years, he discusses a remarkably diverse set of questions dealing with the literature of estrangement (Conrad), the confrontation between colonized and colonial and of course, many literary and cultural questions relating to the arab middle east. But, as the title essay shows, a theme runs through the whole book, how does one deal with living elsewhere when you cannot go back home because home does not exist anymore or even perhaps because it never existed. The psychological burden of such an estrangement is born with great fortitude, even welcomed as a necessary component of living in the world today. It generates resistance to the powers that be at the same time that it engenders engagement with the world. The essays are stimulating because Said gives voice to the discontent we all feel when confronted with the culture of conformism around us, whether it is the manufactured consensus produced by politics and media, or the corruption of our political language or the emphasis on entertainment in every aspect of life. He ends by discussing Huntington's Clash of Civilizations; Said shows emphatically that the nature of civilization is changeable and permeable instead of monolithic, as Huntington would have us believe. Said believes that his view, based as it is on deep scholarship is the only hope we have for peaceful and just future. Huntington's view is combative and is based on an "Us versus Them" approach, when in fact the more carefully you look the more of Us you see in Them and vice versa. Of all the essays this should be required reading for decision makers.

This was my introduction to Edward Said and I found his writing a wonderful discovery even if I'm later to the game then most on this author. Perhaps academics have read Maurice Merleau-Ponty but he was new to me so when the first chapter started out I was a little put off. So I decided to scan the "Contents" and spied "Conrad and Nietzsche". Now I'd read comparisons before but never with as much originality as this essay by Mr. Said. I was hooked, and started picking and choosing my way through the familiar; T.E.Lawrence, Georgr Orwell, V.S. Naipaul, Hemingway. Some of the titles make you smile: "Through Gringo Eyes: With Conrad in Latin America", "How Not to Get Gored, On Ernest Hemingway." Familiar names but the author stands in a truly unique place as he takes on the topics. The insights make you stop to think. These essays should be read one by one and each savored before going on to the next. A great author doesn't merely repeat what you already know,causing you just to nod in agreement. Maybe you'll even modify some of your beliefs. At any rate you'll stop and think. Then start taking on some of the unfamiliar topics. For me this meant Tahia Carioca, Ahdaf Soueif, Eric Hobsbawn. And what a great way to end with "On Lost Causes", "Between Worlds", and "The Clash of Definitions." Then turn around and start reading the essays again and see how much you missed the first time and how much more your thinking is challenged all over again.