Hamid Dabashi: Ode To Edward Said

Remember Edward Said? He’s the one who started a Permanent Jobs Program for the most primitive people who wanted to live in the West, and get jobs in universities,, and did so not through the brilliance of their scholarship, or through the lucidity and seductiveness of their classroom performance, but because they were authentic, they were aggrieved, they were victims of the very West in which they desired so much to live, and to make sure that they could, without much talent or knowledge, manage to find a way to carve out a category — post-colonial studies, bristling with ressentiment — that would be off-limits to Westerners, and could only be taught by the people who had authentically suffered — just the way Edward Said, at Harvard and Columbia, had suffered.

One of the beneficiaries of Said’s ludicrous “Orientalism” — it had a good run, but it’s on its way out, that way out no doubt hastened by the spectacle, too longlasting and too widespread to continue to overlook, of Muslim behavior all over the wolrd — was Hamid Dabashi, who became that appetizinig thing, a Full Professor at Columbia University, hired, and then promoted, by those who shared the same background, felt the same resentments and hatreds.

I put up, from time to time, Hamid Dabashi’s Ode To Edward Said.

Here it is, one more relevant time.

And to judge by what Hamid Dabashi continues to produce, and to unembarrassedly post, he still doesn’t realize what a figure he cuts. So you can, if you wish, continue to digest and relish his work, simply by googling the name “Hamid Dabashi.” Bon appetit!.