Saad Eddin Ibrahim continua a chiedere all’Occidente un atteggiamento diverso da quello avuto in questi ultimi anni. Qualcuno lo ascolterà, ora che l’era Bush jr. è finita?

A oltre trent’anni dalla pubblicazione di Orientalismo, gli specialisti ri-discutono sulla pietra miliare di Edward Said. Una raccolta di saggi su Viewpoints, del Middle East Institute di Washington, raccolti da Daniel Martin Varisco e consultabili online.

Ironically, Said’s stated hope that his text would lead to a new way of moving beyond the discourse of power as knowledge has come true in most current scholarship. This is not due to his methodological contribution, especially given the extensive criticism over his adaptation of Michel Foucault’s ‘discourse’ and Antonio Gramsci’s “egemonia,” but a result of the wider interdisciplinary assault on positivist hubris and scientism. Uncritical reading of Said’s text obscures the positive results in contemporary academic study of an area too easily imaginable as an “Orient.” After three decades, it is time to move beyond PhD thesis cataloguing of what the West did to the East and self-unfulfilling political punditry about what real individuals in the East say they want to do to the West. Edward Said brought us a long way in this process, but the politics of polemics can only go so far, as he himself acknowledged in his later years.

Polemica dura tra chi si occupa di Medio Oriente, se i blogger non stiano minando il giornalismo (vero) nell’area. Segnalazione su arabist. Lunga risposta di Mahoney alle critiche di Larry Pintak e Yousry Foda sul Columbia Journalism Review. Può sembrare una questione “di cortile”, ma il caso italiano rischia di essere un altro case study, tra un po’.