There is an uncanny pleasure in watching someone you admire fulfill your admiration, confirm their greatness and your ability to appreciate it; thus it is for me with Said.
“Texts are protean things, they are tied to circumstances and to politics large and small, they require attention and criticism. No one can take hold of everything, of course, just as no one theory can explain or account for the connection among texts and societies. But reading and writing texts are never neutral activities: there are interest, powers, passions, pleasures entailed no matter how aesthetic or entertaining the work. Media, political economy, mass institutions––in fine, the tracings of secular power and the influence of state––are part of what we call literature. And just as it is true that we cannot read literature by men without also reading literature by women—so transfigured has been the shape of literature—it is also true that we cannot deal with the literature of the periphery without attending to the literature of metropolitan centers.” –Said, Culture and Imperialism 318.
I am going to offer this quote at the beginning of every semester I teach from now on; it will be my own little pledge of allegiance, my pledge of politicization-subversion–deconstruction if you will.
