Culture and Resistance

Culture and Resistance discusses the centrality of popular resistance to Edward W. Said’s understanding of culture, history, and social change. He reveals his thoughts on the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lays out a compelling vision for a secular, democratic future in the Middle East—and globally. The interviews with Said took place from early 1999 to early 2003, with the final interview conducted a scant half year prior to Said’s death. They focus predominantly on the situation with Palestine, elaborating and updating Said’s critical view of rigid, authoritarian, statist positions on both sides. He asserts that, just as Zionism does not define all Israelis, Arafat does not speak for all Palestinians. Moreover, Said argues that moving past these statist positions and their death march toward mutual destruction is essential in the struggle toward secular, fully democratic societies.

These interviews display Said’s relentlessly historicist mode of analysis—a valuable demonstration of method for those learning about his work. Whether considering the importance of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the ways in which aesthetics and politics are intertwined for Palestinians, or the nuances of the media use of the term ‘street Arab’, his response begins with a careful recounting of the historical situation, only then moving to a consideration of the question within and constituted by these historical conditions. This historicist focus supports and enables an equally central focus on culture. Not surprisingly, cultural resistance in the broadest sense is the key mode of activism for Said. While cultural resistance in the form of a ‘critical and political discourse’ enables ‘a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration’, ‘another dimension’ more basic than the political exists: ‘the power to analyze, to get past cliché and straight out-and-out lies from authority, the questioning of authority, and search for alternatives. These’, Said notes in the final interview, ‘are also part of the arsenal of cultural resistance’.