Orientalism and Its Discontents

Irwin offers an exhaustive list of criticisms leveled at Said and his theory. The ad hominem attacks of Said's critics seem unduly venomous. The attacks on his methodology merit closer scrutiny. On p.286, Irwin writes "Said's presentation of the history of Orientalism as a canon of great but wicked books, almost all by dead white males, was that of a literary critic who wildly overvalued the importance pf high literature in intellectual history. I think it is valid to ask just who among the Orientalists in queston was reading Lane, Scott, Eliot and Flaubert. I think it is alsop valid to reconstruct the zeitgeist of an intellectual season by investigating the scope and breadth of literary achievemnt during this epoch. The fsctual and historical errors that Irwin catalogues are probably inexcusable to the historian, but forgivable among humanists. Said's project does not live or die on the basis of historical fact. His argument is rooted in the distinctive narrative devices that are repeated or echoed in all of the authors whom he considers Orientalists. Another methodological failing according to Irwin is the conflation and misapplication of Gramsci and Foucault's theories. Irwin accuses Said of using imprecise and at times contradictory articulations of "discourse" and attributing all his slippery arguments to postmodernist intellectual giants. Irwin notes that Foucault and Gramsci have "rather different ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge. Irwin suspects Said of intellectual dishonesty because of intentional omission of critical details. On p. 291, Irwin writes " Said presented Orientalism as a unified, self-confirmatory discourse, but in so doing he ignored Reiske's outsider status, Goldzhiher's quarrels with Vambery and Renan, Kedourie's hostility towards Gibb, Rodinson's suspicions of Massignon and Hodgson's criticisms of most of his predecessors." Irwin accuses Said of racial profiling. He considers Said's analysis shabby because, for instance, Renan and Gobineau are mentioned throughout the book, but their ideas analyzed in the most superficial of ways. Irwin believes that the "consensus or paradigm" that Said assails is nothing more than a paper tiger, a manufactured foil. He concedes that the book has a cult following and that it "fostered a plethora of narratives of oppression, and its arguments fed into subaltern studies" but concludes that Said's jeremiads fell on deaf ears. On p.301, he writes "...late capitalism's blithe insouciance towards its unmaskers, its apparently successful domestication of anti-imperialist scholarship and its commodification of oppositional theory are hard to ignore..."