Unsettling the World - Edward Said and Political Theory

This is the first book-length treatment of Edward Said’s influential cultural criticism from the perspective of a political theorist. Morefield argues that Said’s critique provides a timely approach that bridges historical analyses of imperialism and postcolonial politics with an urgent imperative to theorize contemporary global crises.

List of contents

Chapter One, "Writing at a Distance: Exile, Loss, and Critique." This chapter explores the sometimes-unnerving contradictions of Said's exilic disposition, from his reflections on his own life in exile to his discordant prose style, focusing on the productive criticism that he believes flow from this unsettling disclosure. It focuses on Said's 1982 essay, "Secular Criticism" and explores his approach to analyzing filiative and affiliative modes of ideological connection. The chapter concludes by turning from Said's theoretical writing about exile to his exilic writing in 1984's After the Last Sky which offers a powerful glimpse into the attached and detached mode of seeing at work in Said's exilic orientation. It also provides a fuller sense of how this orientation twins a critique of power, nationhood, and exclusion with a deep sympathy for the ties that bind love to home, love to loss, and love to loss of home.
Chapter Two, "A Cluster of Flowing Currents: Theory Unresolved and Groundless." This chapter foc

About the author

Jeanne Morefield is associate professor of Political Theory and fellow at New College, University of Oxford. She is also a non-residential fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Washington DC. She is author of Empires without Imperialism: Anglo American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford UP, 2014) and Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton UP, 2005).

Product details

• Authors: Jeanne Morefield
• Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 29.04.2022
• EAN: 9781442260283
• ISBN: 978-1-4422-6028-3
• No. of pages: 346
• Series: Modernity and Political Thought
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; Globalization, POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, Postcolonialism, PHILOSOPHY / Political, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Humanism, Social & political philosophy, Political science & theory, social and political philosophy, Political science and theory, Humanist & Secular Alternatives To Religion, Humanist philosophy