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A frank and entertaining memoir, from the daughter of Edward Said, about growing up second-generation Arab American and struggling with that identity.

Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany's colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies—a kind of colonialism without colonies—in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of \"Germans\" with \"natives\" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial fantasies acted as a rehearsal for actual colonial ventures in Africa, South America, and the Pacific. From as early as the sixteenth century, Germans preoccupied themselves with an imaginary drive for colonial conquest and possession that eventually grew into a collective obsession. Zantop illustrates the gendered character of Germany's colonial imagination through critical readings of popular novels, plays, and travel literature that imagine sexual conquest and surrender in colonial territory—or love and blissful domestic relations between colonizer and colonized. She looks at scientific articles, philosophical essays, and political pamphlets that helped create a racist colonial discourse and demonstrates that from its earliest manifestations, the German colonial imagination contained ideas about a specifically German national identity, different from, if not superior to, most others.

Book review. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

Boullata reviews \"Out of Place: A Memoir\" by Edward W. Said.

Edward Said, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is interviewed. He recently wrote a memoir titled \"Out of Place.\"

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem, but those who know him chiefly through the fame -- some would say notoriety -- he has gained as a Palestinian spokesman will be surprised to learn just how small a part of his childhood was spent in that much-disputed region. Palestine was the home of his extended family, a place for visits and vacations that seemed \"languid, almost dreamlike . . . temporary, even transitory.\" He himself lived and grew up in Cairo, where his father was both a member of the city's Levantine Christian trading community and, oddly, an American citizen. Cairo was where Wadie Said became a rich man, turning a stationery store into Egypt's largest supplier of office equipment. It was where his children went to school, and the place from which he sent his only son to finish his education in the United States, where Said now is a literature professor at Columbia University. These facts, laid out with great clarity in this memoir of his education and childhood, are at odds with Said's earlier autobiographical statements, and have recently provoked some controversy; see, for example, Justus Reid Weiner's \" `My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,\" in the September issue of Commentary. Said's cousins may have been thrown out of their Palestinian homes by the founding of Israel. His immediate family was not, and in fact seems to have suffered more from President Gamal Abdel Nasser's crackdowns on Egypt's non-Muslim population. For, seen through nationalist Nasserite eyes, Said's family had less in common with the bulk of Arab society than with the clan of Sephardic Jews whose vanished world Andre Aciman explored in his wonderful 1994 memoir, \"Out of Egypt.\" Both families belonged to what one may call the Westernized, comprador class of colonial middlemen, a buffer group neither European nor fully native, and one whose economic power depended on the fact that it was alien to both. This is a class much-criticized in postcolonial theory; it is also, interestingly, a class whose sons and daughters, Said most prominent among them, have written the bulk of that theory.

After 1948, there remained only the memory of Palestine. But which one? \"It seems inexplicably to me now that having dominated our lives for generations, the problem of Palestine and its tragic loss, which affected virtually everyone we knew, deeply changing our world, should have been so relatively repressed, undiscussed, or even remarked on by my parents.\"(33) But Said simultaneously describes a different reality. In Said's family the topic of Palestine was rarely talked about openly, although remarks by his father suggested the catastrophic collapse. But around [Edward], the reality of dispossession was evident in many other ways. Aunt Nabiha, for example, worked indefatigably to help the refugees, and she was the first to introduce him to their suffering. So while there was no openness about the fall of Palestine, neither was there total silence. Said himself appears uncertain about the level and import of repression when he describes the memory of Palestine as \"so relatively repressed,\" thus revealing an uncomfortable coexistence between the words \"so\" and \"relatively\" that pull the meaning of the sentence in opposite directions. In fact, Palestine coexisted in a commingling of memory and silence. It loomed large on their lives, but was often expressed in subtle, indirect ways. One reason that Said's parents did not discuss the loss of Palestine with their children was that parents at that period did not discuss with their children many subjects deemed sensitive. His parents conducted a typically strict home: they repressed the subject of the body and they repressed the fall of Palestine, although both factors continued to shape everyone's identity. Said articulates this, though without drawing further conclusions: \"Palestine...like sex [was] off limits to me.\"(34) Added to this are the facts that Victoria College and his family's circle of friends were totally nonpolitical, and that his father generally struggled to express himself because, both by temperament and background, he was not used to speak openly. [Wadie] Said was not the kind of person who would share with his children his pain over Palestine or, for that matter, over anything else. Said is an attentive observer of the sights and voices of power, at home and in the wider world of colonialism. One day, returning home at dusk, he crossed the fields of the Gezira Club, where his father was a member, when Mr. Ripley, the director of the club and father of Ralph, a school contemporary, saw him: \"'Don't you know that you are not supposed to be here...? Arabs aren't allowed here, and you're an Arab!' If I hadn't thought of myself as an Arab before, I now directly grasped the significance of the designation as truly disabling.\" When Said went home and told what had happened, his father remained noncommittal. Both displayed a \"fatalistic compact...about our necessarily inferior status.\"(9) Colonialism, viewed through the eyes of a youngster, exposed his father's surprising helplessness, as well as his own nascent national identity. Said is at his best when he communicates the sentiments and uncertainties of young Edward, as when he describes his sexual growth in a repressed home. At the age of twelve he was informed that the pubic hair between his legs was not normal. His body and his sisters' bodies became taboo. His father used to check his pajamas for stains of semen to make sure Edward was not \"self-abusing\" himself. The \"contest\" over his body and the \"administering of reforms and physical punishment\" resulted in a life-long sense of his body's peculiar and problematic status.(10)

Few spokesmen for the Palestinian cause in our day are as articulate, or as well-known, as Edward W. Said. The holder of an endowed chair in literature at Columbia University, president of the Modern Language Association, a prolific author of books and articles both scholarly and popular, a frequent lecturer and commentator on radio and television, a sometime diplomatic intermediary and congressional witness, Mr. Said has earned a reputation not only for polemical brilliance but for a fierce pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel zealotry. His most famous book \"Orientalism,\" with its bold thesis that the Western study of Islam is itself a form of \"colonialism,\" has had a profound and radicalizing influence on literary studies. A great deal of Mr. Said's moral authority derives from his personal credentials. As a living embodiment of the Palestinian cause, he has made much of his own birth, childhood, and schooling in Palestine, telling a story of idyllic beginnings and violent dispossession. Here is Mr. Said's own oft-recited outline of his early life (in Harper's, 1992): \"I was born, in November 1935, in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo.\"