More than forty years ago Edward Said wrote, “the dictum ‘solidarity before criticism’ means the end of criticism,” even in “a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another.” In the face of scholarly orthodoxies that often seem to take the politics of criticism for granted, this panel asks two questions: 1) What does Said’s admonition mean today? and 2) Does it still hold? In an intellectual, institutional, and social environment in which we increasingly seem to believe that knowledge follows identity, what can it mean to conceptualize humanistic work outside a sometimes implicit but often in fact explicit assumption that our labor serve or ally itself with various political projects and programs; and, maybe more pointedly, how capable are we of imagining humanistic work outside the solidarity framework? Should we try? In short, these papers (each 10-15 minutes long) address Saidian legacies and possible futures of the politics of literary practice, pursuing the lessons of secular criticism.

Bruce Robbins

Edward Said: Homelessness and Worldliness

The problem of the Palestinians, crudely put, is that in a world of nation-states, they have been denied a national homeland. Yet homelessness, for Said, is also a moral, political, and intellectual virtue. Throughout his career, he championed a profile of the intellectual modeled on his own unchosen exile. While he celebrated homelessness, Said also insisted, at the risk of paradox, that the intellectual should be worldly—worldly at least in the sense of being actively engaged in trying to change the world. His solidarity with his fellow Palestinians is one inescapable example of worldliness in action. Homelessness and worldliness: the friction between these commitments, both still compelling and even inescapable, is an enduring mystery about his work.

Benjamin Schreier

Beyond Solidarity? On Reading Palestinian American Literature with Said

In “Secular Criticism” Said claims that criticism is always “oppositional”—the word functioning, he insists, “not as a modification but as an emphatic”—and cannot be subservient to a social program. In the allure of solidarity is dialectical force: given that it is ultimately the critic’s desire that installs solidarity as the frame through which the interpretive-analytical practice is filtered, justified, and enacted, it is ultimately around the critic, and not the supposedly autonomous subject, that critical literary practice is organized. If identity as a keyword for humanistic scholarship increasingly functions biopolitically to “extrapolate” (in Mbembe’s term) the field of a political anatagonism, Palestinian American literary study—in its engagement with the overdetermination of Palestinian identity in the US—offers the potential to dialectically universalize a critical concept of identity via a reading practice that operates outside the inevitably necropolitial ethnological-national mode.

Anna Kornbluh

midcrit: knowledge in, of, and for the middle

An under-examined aspect of the intersection of criticism and solidarity (though one Said was in fact interested in) is the problem of sensibility. This talk engages recent high profile meta-discourse about the project of criticism across its highly gendered spectrum (from Felski, Buurma/ Heffernan, Winant/ Sinykin, to Guillory, Kramnick, Robbins) to develop a somewhat counterconcept of “midcrit”: a mixed, disquieting formation of knowledge lodged on the mezzanine between science and sensibility. If criticism is not chemistry, it is also not charisma. If criticism is not art, its cultural midwifery is nonetheless materially consequential. If criticism is not politics, its inscribed solidarity is still prosocial. Although this intermediate knowledge zone has been difficult to avow and affirm, it is necessary practice for our epoch of social bifurcation, epistemic warfare, cognitive capitulation, and anti-aesthetic slop.

Zahi Zalloua

No Other Land and Its Controversies: An Anti-Zionist Reading

In No Other Land, Palestinians are sympathetically portrayed as victims not of Palestinians themselves, as liberal discourse often has it, but of illegal settlers and the Israeli military. At the same time, nothing in the documentary points to the Zionist invasion that originated in 1948, the era of Israel’s colonial birth; the problem thematized by No Other Land is 1967—the “land” referred to in the title is the occupied territory. Apartheid and settler colonialism do not stretch from the river to sea. The film has been praised and critiqued by both Palestinians and their supporters. Responding to the film tests Said’s imperative “never solidarity before criticism.” In this vein, I approach the film and its reception through an anti-Zionist hermeneutic, and ask, Is the film’s silence on the Nakba and Palestinian armed struggle too high of a cost for securing global liberal support? What does the critical acclaim and commercial success of No Other Land tell us about the Palestinian cause?