Culture, Tradition & Power: A teach-in commemorating Edward Said

Best known for his landmark work, Orientalism, and tireless advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said (1935-2003) left behind a formidable body of work that anticipated many of today’s most controversial questions regarding representation, power, and the idea of tradition. Among Said’s key contributions was to articulate an understanding of artistic and literary production as sites of structural power, of culture as a sphere of activity that not only reflected the preoccupations of political domination, but paved the way for its actualization. Yet as a scholar of British literature, he was also embedded within the tradition he critiqued, refusing to cede its contents to the so-called defenders of Western civilization. Rather, Said advanced an understanding of tradition as process rather than possession, insisting on the liberatory potentiality of reading the canon against the grain.

This special program, co-presented with Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR) to mark the twentieth anniversary of Edward Said’s death, offers participants a chance to explore some of his evergreen questions in a collaborative setting:  What does it mean to be part of a tradition, and what claims does tradition exert on the present? How should we relate to canonical texts that advanced pernicious social and/or political agendas, and their creators? What power is bound up in artistic representation, and is there an ethical way to depict subject positions that are radically different from our own?

The program will feature introductory remarks by Mariam Said followed by a lecture by BISR faculty member, Dr. Suzanne Schneider. Participants will then have an opportunity to work through key ideas in moderated small groups before reconvening for a panel discussion and Q&A period with special guests.

Participants

Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, specializing in political theory and history of the modern Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Suzanne is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. Her writing about contemporary politics, religion, and violence has appeared in The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, n+1, and Aeon among other outlets.

 

 

 

Mariam Said was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and currently resides in New York City. Together with Daniel Barenboim, she is a major force behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and serves as the Vice-President of the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA) and Barenboim-Said Center for Music, Ramallah. Mariam Said holds an undergraduate degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon and two graduate degrees from Columbia University. She worked for more than 20 years in the financial services industry in New York.

 

 

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, political ecology, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Hedgehog Review, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues. Ajay is currently writing a manuscript on the politics of climate change.

Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is editor, with Jean Khalfa, of a collection of unpublished or uncollected work by Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Among his books that include discussions of Edward Said’s work are Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2nd ed. 2016), and White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (2nd ed. 2004).