Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist

Abstract

This essay begins by expressing a concern with the much-too-easy retrieval of empire in the writings of many commentators across the political spectrum. I suggest, via a reading of Edward Said as an International Relations theorist, that part of our failing, as scholars of the global, to prevent such a resurrection lies in a discipline too focused on depoliticized `technocratic expertise' and overly `nationalistic' in its orientation. What Edward Said has to offer IR scholars, I argue, is a `global intellectual posture' — a sensibility that involves a critical but hospitable awareness of an inhabited and co-habited world and an intellectual approach that provides a rigorous and more complete approach to `the global'. Said's thoughts on humanism help situate the most marginal and underrepresented bodies firmly and concretely into the center of an IR that that has been mostly `greatpower' focused in the questions and issues it attends to. Said's discussions of `contrapuntality' provides a method that enables the study of simultaneous and mutually constitutive (of East and West, North and South) histories against the linear, developmentalist (from Westphalia to Globalization) historical narratives inherited by most IR scholars. Understanding our contemporary international relations as a product of a history of cultural encounters (in which colonialism played a key part) would make it possible, for students and scholars of IR, to articulate a global imaginary that is sensitive to both power and difference.