The Legacy of Edward W. Said

While the late Edward Said often criticized the poststructuralists for a variety of failings--restricted disciplinary focus, unworldliness, indifference to and disdain for the human, nostalgia for a religious certainty, and denial of human agency--Spanos (English and comparative literature, Binghamton U.) argues counter-intuitively that Said's writings in Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism can be read as a not entirely conscious effort to fulfill the differential and antidisciplinary logic of early poststructuralist theory, as epitomized by the Nietzschean genealogy of Michel Foucault's Surveillir et punir (published in English as Discipline and Punish), as opposed to the later archaeologies of Foucault. Said also shares an affinity with the post-structuralists, according to Spanos, in his deconstruction of the Occidental "Other." Just as Foucault's Surveillir et punir discloses the domestic European "Other"--the madman, the vagabond, the beggar, and the social deviant--so Said discloses the global "Other"--the refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles turned into "afterthoughts" by the incorporative logic of colonialism--in his Culture and Imperialism. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)