Session 4(b): Said: Others, Power and Comparatives

Session 4b: Said: Others, Power and Comparatives
Chair: Marcelo Svirsky

Comparative Study between Edward Said and Fouad Ajami
Saleh Soliman Abdelazim
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates

This study deals with interculturalism as a process which depends on sharing and learning across cultures. Throughout lengthy and continuous training and practicing of accepting others and dealing with them, human beings will be able to promote understanding, equality, sympathy, and justice among each other. One of the main advocates of establishing and supporting values of cultural exchange, tolerance, and accurate understanding is intellectuals. No doubt, there are many differences among societies in regards to existence of the former values, but the role of real intellectuals has remained the most influential and leading one in supporting and impeding these values.
In this study, I will focus on two American Intellectuals, born in Arab countries, to shed some light on their roles in supporting or impeding intercultural understanding between Arabs and Muslims on the one hand and Americans on the other. These two thinkers are Edward Said and Fouad Ajami.
Both, Fouad Ajami, the director of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, and the deceased Edward said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, are émigrés, who left their own countries to the USA. While the first belongs to the Shiite minority in Lebanon , the latter belongs to the Christian minority in Palestine before 1948. In this regard, this study will analyze their writings, which included books, articles, meetings, interviews to see to what extent their intellectual productions have contributed, negatively or positively, to the process of interculturalism. The study will adopt discourse analysis and depend on theoretical literature of the role of intellectuals, especially in regards to intercultural and multicultural topics.

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Crossing Over to the Other and Precincts of the Cultural Hurdle: A Reading of Two English Texts
Ahmed T. H. Al-Ali
Applied science University, Amman, Jordan

Attempts to cross over to the other have always been registered in the history of humanity. More than any other ‘other’, the Orient has always been depicted, viewed, represented and largely determined by a canon, a network of prejudices and unexamined assumptions that serve to bolster a Western identity as much as identifying and stressing the non-Western as “other”.
Within the Western tradition of narrating the Orient, there is a deliberate stress on those signs that mark it as “other”. In his important book Edward Said Orientalism (1978), it has been argued that Western thought and scholarship regarding the Orient, the Arabs, and Islam in particular, have been
Said has introduced the structure of Orientalism as a “European representation of the Orient and has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1-2).
Twentieth-Century English writers, following the footsteps of many ‘expatriates’ before them chose to live and experience the orient, attempting to cross over for the other. From the pioneers in the field to modern ones, the ‘other’ keeps its status defying time and change.
A study of the product of the years spent facing the other, highlights the collision that takes place when the writer’s western formulation bumps into the abundant oriental impediments. Between the work of the early expatiates and that of the modern ones, the similarity is striking. There is always the blind trust in the canon whenever the attempts to reach for the other seem doomed to failure.

Influence of the Inferior: Intercultural Transmission Beyond the Terminology of Power
Helena Motoh
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts (Filozofska fakulteta), Ljubljana, Slovenia

The paper discusses the problematic issue of intercultural influence in case of the Jesuit correspondence between China and Europe in the 17th and 18th century.
In L’Archéologie du savoir Foucault accuses the notion of influence of being a causal link violently imposed on singular facts, and closely linked to the relationship of power and dominance. The paper tries to rethink the problem of intercultural influence in the above-mentioned case, beginning with the Said-Leys debate on orientalism in sinology. Namely, the impact of the proto-sinological knowledge in Europe differs largely from the typical power-knowledge relationship described by Said as orientalism. The relationship of power that serves as a base for this communication is essentially pre-colonial and the transmission is notably asymmetrical. While the scientific discoveries and technological improvements are being brought to China , almost no significant philosophical or ideological shift can be traced there. On the other hand, Europe becomes increasingly fascinated by the ideas and texts imported from China, a reference commonly omitted in the writing of non-sinological provenance.
The paper therefore tries to reconsider the question of influence without dominance: Can China be said to have influenced Europe of the 17th and 18th century? Can the changes in the European thought be ascribed to the Chinese influence or did China simply serve as a mirror of the Other, assisting Europe to transform itself on its own basis? Can the notion of influence be applied in atypical relationships of power and dominance?
The paper certainly does not attempt to accomplish the impossible task of collecting enough evidence to prove or deny the influence taking place. The question is approached from another perspective – firstly by analysing the considerations of such an impact in the works by the transmitters themselves and secondly by juxtaposing the different models of transmission generated in the works on the subject, from Encyclopédie to Zhu Qianzhi.