File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2002/postcolonial.0204, message 106


Date: 07 Apr 2002 13:28:24 EDT
From: Josna.Rege-AT-Dartmouth.EDU (Josna Rege)
Subject: Re: on the latest article of edward said


As I understand it, all that Edward Said was saying was that if the Palestinian cause is to have a ghost of a chance at a hearing in the U.S. it must have articulate spokespeople. I was watching a forum of leading Arab nations' spokespeople on CSPAN-2 the other day (not sure of the exact occasion) and I could barely understand what the Palestinian spokesperson was saying. Not only was his language incoherent, his whole tone lacked seriousness, was not geared to presenting the Palestianians' case powerfully to the U.S. audience. I too was frustrated, because the case itself (the moral ground, as Said puts it) is so strong, but it is not self-explanatory for an ignorant audience, and yet there was no Palestinian  at this important forum who was willing/able to make this case clearly and cogently--either directly, or through a good interpreter.

Josna 


--- You wrote:
do not agree with edward said's phrase "miserably inadequate fractured 
english" in this paragraph below. he seems to have internalized the power 
structures that he has been criticizing throughout his career. what does he 
mean by "primitive incompetence"? to invoke a phrase of mirza athar baig, 
who will speak for the so called "mental underdog"? how can the subaltern 
speak without fracturing the dominant language? if knowledge is power, how 
does one insert "illegitimate" knowledge in the domain of "legitimacy"? 
there are theorists who have even lauded the "doodles" of a child on 
his/her textbook as a different kind of writing, a different kind of 
authorship, a different kind of text, as a re-writing of the sacrality of 
the text. but here we have, the phallic master of so-called postcoloniality 
trying to preserve the sentencial in the english language.

saeed
--- end of quote ---


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