CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN RAILING AGAINST the leftist takeover of the academy for a generation, with little to show for their efforts. A scholarly attack on Jane Austen for her unwitting complicity with British imperialism in Mansfield Park is, after all, unlikely to stir public outrage. But what about being told that more than 5,000 New Yorkers are dead for their unwitting complicity with American "imperialism"?
This latter piece of political and moral lunacy has cropped up in more campus discussions than one can count, infuriating decent conservatives and liberals alike. What’s interesting is that the apologias for the World Trade Center destruction are more intimately connected with the assault on Jane Austen than you might think.
Step away from your television set and into the groves of academe and you will learn from distinguished scholars that the terrorist attack on America is our own fault, the ripe fruit of this country’s imperial hegemony. That, at any rate, is the view of the campus left, nowhere more powerful than in the host of humanistic disciplines that sponsor studies of the Middle East, South Asia, China, and Africa. And when it comes to the study of the world outside the West, the man to whom the campus left turns for guidance is Edward Said, the same literary critic who devised that critique of Jane Austen.
The public knows Edward Said as the most prominent American supporter of the Palestinian cause, the onetime confidant of Yasser Arafat (until Arafat’s "capitulation" to the peace process), who
was famously and incongruously photographed—a Columbia professor in southern Lebanon—hurling a rock at a guardhouse on the Israeli border. But Said’s real influence has been as the founder of "post-colonial theory," arguably the dominant intellectual paradigm in those sections of the academy dedicated to the study of non-Western cultures.
A past president of the Modern Language Association, Said has primarily influenced departments of literature and languages, but the reach of post-colonial theory extends also to "area studies" and to the social sciences, especially departments of anthropology. Not only is post-colonial theory pervasive at the likes of Said’s Columbia, but even on a once traditionalist campus like the University of Chicago, the study of non-Western cultures is arguably now shaped more by post-colonial theory than by any other single paradigm.
At a stroke, Said’s 1978 book Orientalism created post-colonial theory. Drawing on the work of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault, and taking aim at the traditional liberal understanding of the humanities, Orientalism is built upon the supposition that there is no such thing as disinterested knowledge, that all knowledge is contaminated by its entanglement with power. It follows that all Western knowledge of, say, the Middle East or South Asia must wittingly or unwittingly serve the purposes of imperialist (or present-day "neo-imperialist") domination.
Said has a field day in Orientalism raking over outdated European accounts of cultural primitivism and religious ignorance in colonial domains. The simplistic and demeaning depictions of the Orient favored by the European colonists, Said plausibly claims, served as rationalizations for European rule. The colonial powers could only justify their civilizing mission by portraying their charges as ignorant savages.
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