Revolution

I have been preoccupied in the past week with following the news of the popular uprising in Egypt--where, I should mention, I lived for three months in 2009--to oust Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime. Amid scanning my various social networking outlets for news of friends in Alexandria and Cairo, I made a half-hearted attempt to reacquaint myself with Edward Said's Orientalism. When I faced going to Postcolonialism today having only (re)read about 30 pages, I justified my negligence to myself with the reasoning that, were Edward Said still alive, he would approve of my choosing engagement with radical changes taking place on the ground in Egypt today over reading some thirty-year-old book for a class. Well, I hope he would, anyway. Really, though, there is no excuse for neglecting Said. Orientalism continues to be a remarkable book, and it should be required reading for everybody. So.

But sometimes things happen that shake our views of the world to their foundations. Things that will forever change our lives, if only in subtle ways. Things that remind us that this shit we read about in books is real. Isn't that the reason we study it in the first place? Anyway, when these things happen, I think it's not only acceptable but imperative that we climb down from the tower and try to get a sense of how things look from the ground. So, I took a break from some work this week to do that.

Revolution in Egypt aside, I wouldn't have been called upon to demonstrate my knowledge of Said's work anyway, because (as I expected) Dr. Raval lectured for the full two and a half hours of class once again. His lecture--which I think he began drafting twenty years ago and to which he probably makes only minor revisions now and again--was hugely informative, however, and probably deserving of a post unto itself. But I did want to record some of his highlights regarding required reading for scholars of Said, or of theory in general.

He recommended:

Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci

Lenin and Philosophy by Louis Althusser

Mimesis by Erich Auerbach

In Theory by Aijaz Ahmad

That's all for now. I'll revisit Said again soon.