Pannu !1 EDWARD W. SAID, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (London, England: Granta Publications, 2001). Pp. 617. “And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,/ of intelligence, of force, and there/ is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.” (Said, “The Clash of Definitions,” 589) Published in hardcover in 2001 by Grant Publications, this voluminous work is a collection of forty-six previously published essays and articles, written over a period of thirtyfive years. A blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays provides insight into the intellect that was Edward Said. For readers familiar with Said’s most important works, such as Orientalism (1978), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990), and Culture and Imperialism (1993), they will find overlapping themes reprised throughout this book. Arranged chronologically, these essays discuss Said’s academic obsessions, notably, the relationship between West and East, and the topic of exile in various areas, not limited to history, geography and mobility, literature and identity, politics and anthropology. In his introduction, “Criticism and Exile,” Said offers an autobiographical account of his life, from his childhood in Egypt to his success as a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. In order to understand and appreciate this collection, it is important for the reader to have awareness of Said’s position as both scholar and exile. Said’s autobiography aids his readers’ understanding of the circumstances which impacted his scholarship, as well, shaped Said into one of the most controversial literary scholars of his generation. Moreover, this autobiography illuminates Said’s political passion, that is, the liberation of Palestine as an independent nation-state. As explicated by this volume, exile can be both a painful and beneficial condition. There are a wide variety of topics to explore in this Pannu !2 collection; the idea of exile is treated in several contexts. For Said, exile is the critical distance from cultural identity; it is the opposition to all orthodoxies, whether from the colonizer or those of the colonized. This impressive body of work illustrates the range of knowledge and level of relevance Said had as an academic. Included is an analysis of notable authors in exile, such as Joseph Conrad and V.S. Naipaul, as well as articles which focus on the critical theories of philosophers such as Michael Foucault and Theodor Adorno. There are also essays which reflect Said’s passion for music. Although Said places an underlying emphasis on Palestinian politics, as suggested by several of the essays in this work, the primary focus of the book is the politics of culture, as well as the mobility and transmission of ideas through various mediums, notably literature and politics. One of the remarkable, thought-provoking essays in the collection is “The Anglo-Arab Encounter.” In his study of Egyptian journalist Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, Said questions what it means to negotiate language in terms of writing a national literature in a different, albeit colonial language. In the case of Soueif’s political novel, she is writing a distinctly Arab tale in English. Of this text, Said states, “Soueif accomplishes the feat of refining a style that is totally amphibious, that is, not felt as the dutiful English translation of an Arabic original, but unmistakably authentic, stubborn, idiomatic, and, yes, Arab” (409). English is reducible to the novels language of publication, and the narrative is what upholds the novel’s stance as Arabic literature. In order to place this essay in the context of Said’s greater works, as seen throughout this collection, the underlining theme of mobility is key. For Said, Soueif’s novel recognizes the difficulty of trying to conceive of a national identity in national literature, especially in a text which struggles to understand the impact of Western concepts and morals on an Eastern, Arab woman. As essays such as “Reflections on Exile,” “Fantasy’s Role in the Pannu !3 Making of Nations,” and “The Clash of Definitions” will strive to show, ideas of nationhood, identity, and exile are negotiable. This negotiability can be found in the mobility of language. This is an overlapping theme for Said. If literature is conceptualized in terms of a national paradigm, then identity and belonging as linked to a national, distinct language can be overturned. Nationalism is not limited to the language which a nation-state subscribes to or identifies as its innate characteristic, that is, Soueif’s text can exist in the realm of Arabic national literature even though it is written in English. Language is mobile; thus, its application can be both a marker of national identity, but also a vehicle for the transmission of identity through time and space. For Soueif to have written her novel in English means that she has universalized the Arabic national novel into a universal novel. That is, Arabic literature becomes worldly and no longer confined to language in terms of upholding a national identity. In “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” Said examines the ideas he presented in a previous essay (“Traveling Theory”) about the transcendence of theories through time and space. The analysis Said provides in this essay echoes the scholarship of academics such as Franco Moretti, Frederic Jameson, and Masao Miyoshi, in that he argues that once “human experience is recorded and then given a theoretical formulation,” it can be invoked by real historical circumstances (436). That is, ideas are mobile; they have the power to impact different periods of time, depending on the present political situation. Following this is “History, Literature, and Geography,” which is a study of Auerbach’s Mimesis, in which Said considers the relationship between history and literature. As he states, “The two terms are mediated by the critical consciousness the mind of the individual reader and critic, whose work sees history and literature somehow informing each other” (457). For readers familiar with Orientalism, Said's theory of imagined (that is, perceived) geographies is applied to the relationship of history and literature, Pannu !4 notably in a colonial context in the characterization of the Orient as an imagined geography. For Said, the “othering” of the East as feminine set the stage for European discourse and acquisition of territories. Essentially, the West posits an imaginary Orient by means of history and literature in order to justify and advance its individual colonial ambitions. Together, these essays illustrate the transmission of Western colonialist thought on the East, and its application. Theories of European supremacy over the East originated from old modes of thought, such as the bible. In essence, ideas from the past were brought into the present time, and were utilized to subject a nation and its people. Each of the essays and articles in this collection offers a breadth of perspective on ideas of mobility in terms of a larger framework, such as politics, history, and literature. Exile is the primary theme, and how Said understands its relation to various frameworks is illustrated in this volume. However, essay collections have some limitations; only a limited number of readers will have interest in all the subjects covered. Moreover, the essays share repeated themes, and the underlying political bias in several of the essays — particularly the essays which discuss Palestinian politics — may deter some readers from truly appreciating the collection. In the introductory essay, Said indicates the liberation of Palestine will appear as an ongoing theme. He states, “There is first of all the sheer fact of Palestine as a deeply, some might say inordinately significant geographical territory, a subject for imaginative, ideological, cultural, and religious projection, but also the site of an ongoing conflict for control” (xxxiii). With the Palestinian conflict in the back of the readers mind, it is difficult to distinguish the individuality of the essays with Said’s own political interests. Perhaps to understand why Said chose to include his political beliefs throughout this work, it is crucial to return to the essays addressed above. Palestine may Pannu !5 be the perfect example of exile, and the influence of Western politics and imagination on the East. Above all, this collection is the portrait of an accomplished intellectual life. Whether scholars of Orientalist theory, or newcomers to Said, this collection will serve as a primer in the continuous scholarship on Western relations in the East, whether they are analyzed through a political or literary lens.