Martin Hardie on Mon, 10 Nov 2003 11:05:00 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Regulation on Postcolonial Studies |
Obviously the proposed regulation (details posted last week by Eduardo Navas) is part of a larger picture, in relation to the education sphere in the US recall the committeee of which Mrs Cheney forms a part concerning un-American academics, but it also reachers wider and further than that. I thought this Fisk article was of interest as it describes a wider circle of activities invloved in this tendency and it also shows that such tendencies in thre age of Empire are not confined to the US. As with many things we talk about here they are not purely US issues but gobal issues that take their own peculiar form throughout the globe (in this case as the Aussies will recognise Griener-peculiar). we should also take note of the way the late Edward Said is portayed as some sort of intellectual terrorist jamming "America's intellectual radar" ...maybe thus allowing the gound to be laid for other darstardly (?) deads. Anyway here is the start of the Fisk article and the link to the rest below it: -- November 4, 2003 When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word? Smearing Said and Hanan Ashrawi By ROBERT FISK Is "Palestinian" now just a dirty word? Or is "Arab" the dirty word? Let's start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote--among many other books--Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia last month, Zev Chafets sneered at him in the New York Daily News in the following words: "As an Episcopalian, he's ineligible for the customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's honoured with a couple of female doctoral graduates." According to Chafets, who (says the Post) spent 33 years "in politics, government and journalism" in Jerusalem, Orientalism "rests on a simple thesis: Westerners are inherently unable to fairly judge, or even grasp, the Arab world." Said "didn't blow up the Marines in Lebanon in 1983 ... he certainly didn't fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. What he did was to jam America's intellectual radar." http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk11042003.html :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: http://openflows.org/~auskadi/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net