New in paperback this month is Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism & Its Discontents. Widely praised when published in late 2006, Dangerous Knowledge explores the legacy of the Orientalists from ancient civilization to modern times. Critic Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World: "Dangerous Knowledge will be hotly argued about in departments of literature and Middle Eastern studies for some time to come. Still, like Robert Irwin, I strongly believe that most scholars work hard to discover and tell us the truth. Dangerous Knowledge is a paean to that noble purpose."
Insidehigered.com has an interview today with Robert Irwin:
Q: You note that the initial scholarly reception for Orientalism was quite critical. But the book went on to have considerable influence. How do you account for that?
A: The earliest reviewers were mostly people who knew a lot about the actual state of the field. The enthusiasts who came later did not know the field and were mostly too lazy to check Said’s assertions. The book, by “speaking truth to power,” appeals to the adversarial mentality so common among students and radical lecturers.
Bashing Orientalism has seemed to be a natural intellectual accessory to opposing Israeli policies on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, American imperialism and British racism. It is much easier deliver patronizing lectures or essays about old-fashioned Orientalists than it is to actually do anything useful for Palestine (or come to that actually learn Arabic and become the “right” kind of Orientalist, whatever that would be). Also, for many students, Said’s book, with its references to Foucault, Gramsci and Althusser, must have provided them with their first brush with critical theory. Exciting stuff.
Great notice of Robert Irwin's much-praised DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE: ORIENTALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS in today's Salon.
"At this fraught historical moment, a new book, Robert Irwin's "Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents," launches the most formidable assault on Said yet. Irwin has impeccable scholarly credentials: He teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written on Arabic literature and art, and is the Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Irwin's book is a hybrid, both a history of the academic field of Orientalism and an all-out assault on Said's most famous book.
Irwin maintains that Said's thesis is false, the arguments he made for it dishonest, distorted and weak, and his theoretical framework self-contradictory and evasive. He charges that Said engaged in a counterfactual rewriting of history, attacking figures from earlier eras because they did not say or do what Said thought they should have. Said's entire project, in his view, is "a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is difficult to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.""
New in paperback this month is Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism & Its Discontents. Widely praised when published in late 2006, Dangerous Knowledge explores the legacy of the Orientalists from ancient civilization to modern times. Critic Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World: "Dangerous Knowledge will be hotly argued about in departments of literature and Middle Eastern studies for some time to come. Still, like Robert Irwin, I strongly believe that most scholars work hard to discover and tell us the truth. Dangerous Knowledge is a paean to that noble purpose."