Great notice of Robert Irwin's much-praised DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE: ORIENTALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS in today's Salon.
"At this fraught historical moment, a new book, Robert Irwin's "Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents," launches the most formidable assault on Said yet. Irwin has impeccable scholarly credentials: He teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written on Arabic literature and art, and is the Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Irwin's book is a hybrid, both a history of the academic field of Orientalism and an all-out assault on Said's most famous book.
Irwin maintains that Said's thesis is false, the arguments he made for it dishonest, distorted and weak, and his theoretical framework self-contradictory and evasive. He charges that Said engaged in a counterfactual rewriting of history, attacking figures from earlier eras because they did not say or do what Said thought they should have. Said's entire project, in his view, is "a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is difficult to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.""
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