The Reorientations of Edward Said

'Steeped in Western culture, the great critic of Western narratives came to his post-colonialist convictions gradually but with growing intensity.'

Pankaj Mishra reviews Places of Mind, an authorized biography by Timothy Brennan, in The New Yorker.

"Perhaps against Said’s own wishes, Orientalism ended up describing an eternal and unbridgeable gulf between Western and non-Western societies. While discrediting much knowledge produced in Europe and America over two millennia, the book displayed no awareness of the vast archive of Asian, African, and Latin-American thought that had preceded it, including discourses devised by non-Western élites—such as the Brahminical theory of caste in India—to make their dominance seem natural and legitimate. Unsurprisingly, upper-caste ideologues of Hindu supremacism approvingly cite Orientalism when railing against Western scholars of Indian religion and history. The book’s critique of Eurocentrism was in fact curiously Eurocentric, and its vision of an internally consistent and coherent 'West' had much in common with the 'Plato-to-nato' genealogy of the free world popularized during the Cold War. In both narratives, the ancient Greeks, Renaissance Italians, and French sages of the Enlightenment had all contributed to the making of 'Western Civilization.'"