Edward Said's interviews on Alternative Radio

Missed class.

Preparing to write my book review assignment on Edward Said's collection of interviews with David Barsamian entitled 'Culture and Resistance'. Everybody but me is probably familiar with David Barsamian and alternativeradio.org. I have downloaded the classic lecture by Edward Said entitled 'Culture and Imperialism' and listened to it twice now. Once driving across the city, once doing the washing up. It is helping me crystalize an approach to the book review. I'm looking for key concepts, themes, something to help me structure and invigorate my review. I think I have found something I like. He says a 'culture' is a 'structure of feelings'. I like that. You can then juxtapose that with the fact that an 'ideology' is a 'structure of ideas'. It fits in with my approach to the review.

The book, you see, is a series of interviews over a four year period from February 1999. The content is to some degree driven by David Barsamian and his interests which, by the nature of the medium, are more topical, news driven, than philosophical and reflective. The interviews are revealing however. The way I'm looking at it is this: I need to look at the work principally as it relates to the discipline of Peace Studies. So as well as what the interviews reveal about Said as a man, his feelings, his ideas, I also want to relate these ideas and feelings to academic thought on the subject of the causes of violent conflict and potential approaches to its transformation. Much of what is said could be characterized as 'polemic': attacks on the words and actions of the enemies of Palestinian freedom. These enemies include Israeli politicians, US politicians, Yasir Arafat and his so-called cronies, other Arab states and their leaders and numerous named western 'intellectuals', historians and pundits.

This invective, though, is part of a most carefully articulated theory of the role 'culture' plays in the dominance game of imperialism as expounded in his seminal works 'Orientalism' and 'Culture and Imperialism'. He proposes that it is the intellectual's duty to fight for 'liberation' in the arena of public discourse; to challenge and expose untruths and proclaim real human values.

So my brain is trying to process as much of Said, his thoughts and feelings as I can and to try to formulate a piece that will fit in the context of my course, and, of course, express my own thoughts and feelings.

More soon.