Sunday Matinee: Edward Said, The Last Interview, 2003 « @InternetArchive

…late again. With Palestine and Salaita so much in international and higher education news, Edward Said comes to mind now. In addition to sharing Cairo, there are a few once removed connection ~ the talismanic "friend of a friend." The film, a series of interviews, is long—very much worth the time watching—but you might want to take a break or watch in more than one sitting.

Following the video are links about Edward Said, professional, literary and political. Finally, I embedded my as yet less than organized collection of "Salaita Affair" links (40+).

• About Edward Said, Center for Palestine Studies, Middle East Institute, Columbia

There can be no true humanism whose scope is limited to extolling patriotically the virtues of our culture, our language, our monuments. Humanism is the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories. In my understanding of its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what 'we' have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties (28).    

The existence of individuals or groups seeking social justice and economic equality, who understand that freedom must include the right to a whole range of choices affording cultural, political, intellectual, and economic development, ipso facto will lead one to a desire for articulation as opposed to silence. This is the functional idiom of the intellectual vocation. The intellectual therefore stands in a position to make possible and further the formulation of these expectations and wishes. (234-5)

 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004

• Christopher Hitchens' A Valediction, Slate

• Edward Said, Obituary, September 2003, The Guardian

• Author bio and links to articles by Edward Said, The Nation

• This essay—Edward W. Said's first piece for The Nation from the magazine's May 30, 1966, issue—is a special selection from The Nation Digital Archive

• In a 1986 book review, Edward Said argues presciently against the dangerous "terrorism craze"—"dangerous because it consolidates the immense, unrestrained pseudo-patriotic narcissism we are nourishing."

 ...and now onto the more current, topic, the Salaita Affair (ironic shades of Zola and the Dreyfuss Affair)