Questions and Assignments for Edward Said’s “States”

Questions and Assignments for Edward Said’s “States”

Read Edward Said’s essay “States.” Below, you’ll find some questions that invite you to work further with the selection.

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

1.

The first three paragraphs provide a “reading” of the opening photograph, “Tripoli, Badawi camp, May 1983.” Or, to put it another way, the writing evolves from and is in response to that photograph. As you reread these paragraphs, pay close attention to what Said is doing, to what he notices, to what prompts or requires commentary. How would you describe and explain the writing that follows? What is he doing with the photo? What is he doing as a writer? What is he doing for a reader? (How does he position a reader?)

It might be useful to begin by thinking about what Said is not doing. It is not, for example, the presentation one might expect in a slide show on travel in Lebanon. Nor is it the kind of presentation one might expect while seeing the slides of family or friends, or slides in an art history or art appreciation class.

Question

undefined. Once you have worked through the opening three paragraphs, reread the essay paying attention to Said’s work with all the photographs. Is there a pattern? Do any of the commentaries stand out for their force, variety, innovation?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

2.

Here is another passage from the introduction to After the Last Sky:

Its style and method — the interplay of text and photos, the mixture of genres, modes, styles — do not tell a consecutive story, nor do they constitute a political essay. Since the main features of our present existence are dispossession, dispersion, and yet also a kind of power incommensurate with our stateless exile, I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent us. What I have quite consciously designed, then, is an alternative mode of expression to the one usually encountered in the media, in works of social science, in popular fiction. (p. 6)

And later:

The multifaceted vision is essential to any representation of us. Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we are frequently unable either to speak the “truth” of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. An additional problem is that our language, Arabic, is unfamiliar in the West and belongs to a tradition and civilization usually both misunderstood and maligned. Everything we write about ourselves, therefore, is an interpretive translation — of our language, our experience, our senses of self and others. (p. 6)

And from “States”:

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at. Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present. (para. 38)

Question

undefined. As you reread, think about form — organization, arrangement, and genre. What is the order of the writing in this essay? (We will call it an essay for lack of a better term.) How might you diagram or explain its organization? By what principle(s) is it ordered and arranged? The essay shifts genres — memoir, history, argument. It is, as Said says, “hybrid.” What surprises are there? or disappointments? How might you describe the writer’s strategy as he works on his audience, on readers? And, finally, do you find Said’s explanation sufficient or useful — does the experience of exile produce its own inevitable style of report and representation?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

3.

Question

undefined. The essay is filled with references to people (including writers), places, and events that are, most likely, foreign to you. Choose one that seems interesting or important, worth devoting time to research. Of course the Internet will be a resource, but you should also use the library, if only to become aware of the different opportunities and materials it provides. Compile a report of the additional information; be prepared to discuss how the research has served or changed your position as a reader of “States.”
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

4.

The final chapter of After the Last Sky ends with this:

I would like to think, though, that such a book not only tells the reader about us, but in some way also reads the reader. I would like to think that we are not just the people seen or looked at in these photographs: We are also looking at our observers. (p. 166 of the print book)

Read back through Said’s essay by looking at the photos with this reversal in mind — looking in order to see yourself as the one who is being looked at, as the one observed. How are you positioned by the photographer, Jean Mohr? How are you positioned by the person in the scene, always acknowledging your presence? What are you being told?

Question

undefined. Once you have read through the photographs, reread the essay with a similar question in mind. This time, however, look for evidence of how Said positions you, defines you, invents you as a presence in the scene.
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

1.

Compose a similar project, a Said-like reading of a set of photos. These can be photos prepared for the occasion (by you or a colleague); they could also be photos already available. Whatever their source, they should represent people and places, a history and/or geography that you know well, that you know to be complex and contradictory, and that you know will not be easily or readily understood by others, both the group for whom you will be writing (most usefully the members of your class) and readers more generally. You must begin with a sense that the photos cannot speak for themselves; you must speak for them.

Question

undefined. In preparation, you should reread closely to come to a careful understanding of Said’s project. (The first and second “Questions for a Second Reading” should be useful for this.) To prepare a document that is Said-like (one that shows your understanding of what Said is doing), you will need an expert’s sense of how to write from and to photographs, and you will need to consider questions of form — of order, arrangement, and genre.
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

2.

While “States” does not present itself as polemical writing — an argument in defense of Palestinian rights, an argument designed to locate blame or propose national or international policy — it is, still, writing with a purpose. It has an argument, it has a particular project in mind, and it wants something to happen.

Write an essay that represents the argument or the project of “States” for someone who has not read it. You will need, in other words, to establish a context and to summarize. You should also work from passages (and images) to give your reader a sense of the text, its key terms and language. And write about “States” as though it has something to do with you.

Question

undefined. Your essay is not just summary, in other words, but summary in service of statement, response, or extension. As you are invited to think about the Palestinians, or about exile more generally, or about the texts and images that are commonly available, what do you think? What do you have to add?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

3.

The final chapter of After the Last Sky ends with this:

I would like to think, though, that such a book not only tells the reader about us, but in some way also reads the reader. I would like to think that we are not just the people seen or looked at in these photographs: We are also looking at our observers. (p. 166 of the print book)

Question

undefined. The fourth question in “Questions for a Second Reading” sets a strategy for rereading with this passage in mind — looking in order to see yourself as the one who is being looked at, as the one observed. Write an essay in which you think this through by referring specifically to images and to text. How are you positioned? by whom and to what end?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

 

4.

Question

undefined. Said insists upon our recognizing the contemporary social, political, and historic context for intimate scenes he (and Jean Mohr) present of people going about their everyday lives. The Palestinian people are still much in the news — photographs of scenes from their lives are featured regularly in newspapers, in magazines, and on the Internet. Collect a series of these images from a particular and defined recent period of time — a week or a month, say, when the Palestinians have been in the news. Using these images, and putting them in conversation with some of the passages and images in “States,” write an essay in the manner of Said’s essay, with text and image in productive relationship. The goal of your essay should be to examine how Said’s work, in “States,” can speak to us (or might speak to us) today.
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

MAKING CONNECTIONS

1.

Edward Said talks about the formal problems in the writing of “States” (and for more on this, see the second of the “Questions for a Second Reading”):

The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at. Particularly in fiction, the struggle to achieve form expresses the writer’s efforts to construct a coherent scene, a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of representing the present. (para. 38)

And here is a similar discussion from the introduction to After the Last Sky:

The multifaceted vision is essential to any representation of us. Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we are frequently unable either to speak the “truth” of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. An additional problem is that our language, Arabic, is unfamiliar in the West and belongs to a tradition and civilization usually both misunderstood and maligned. Everything we write about ourselves, therefore, is an interpretive translation — of our language, our experience, our senses of self and others. (p. 6)

Edward Said’s sense of his project as a writing project, a writing project requiring formal experimentation, is similar to Gloria Anzaldúa’s in Borderlands/La frontera. In the chapter represented in Ways of Reading, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (p. 24 of the print book), Anzaldúa is also writing (and resisting) “interpretive translation.” In place of the photographs in “States,” she offers poems, stories, and myths, as well as passages in Spanish.

Question

undefined. Write an essay in which you consider these selections as writing projects. The formal experimentation in each is said by the writers to be fundamental, necessary, a product of the distance between a particular world of experience and the available modes of representation. In what ways are the essays similar? In what ways are they different? Where and how is a reader (where and how are you) positioned in each? What is the experience of reading them? What does one need to learn to be their ideal reader?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

2.

There are several writers in Ways of Reading whose writing could be called unconventional, even experimental. A short list includes Gloria Anzaldúa, Anne Carson, Susan Griffin, and John Edgar Wideman. (We can imagine arguments for several other selections as well.)

Question

undefined. Choose a selection from one of these writers to read alongside Edward Said’s “States.” As you read the two, pay particular attention to what the writing does, to how it works. This is not quite the same as paying attention to what it says. What does this way of writing allow each writer to do that another style, perhaps “topic sentence, examples, and conclusion,” would not? What does it offer a reader — or what does it allow a reader to do? Write an essay in which you compare the styles of these two selections. Is there one that you find compelling or attractive? If each provides a textbook example, what are you invited to think about as you consider the possibilities and limits of your own style? of “standard” or “school” style? In what ways might this work be seen as a way of working on the problems of writing? And what might this work have to do with you, a student in a writing class?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

3.

Said says,

All cultures spin out a dialectic of self and other, the subject “I” who is native, authentic, at home, and the object “it” or “you,” who is foreign, perhaps threatening, different, out there. From this dialectic comes the series of heroes and monsters, founding fathers and barbarians, prized masterpieces and despised opponents that express a culture from its deepest sense of national self-identity to its refined patriotism, and finally to its coarse jingoism, xenophobia, and exclusivist bias. (para. 41)

This is as true of the Palestinians as it is of the Israelis — although, he adds, “For Palestinian culture, the odd thing is that its own identity is more frequently than not perceived as ‘other.’”

Citing Benedict Anderson and what he refers to as “imagined communities,” Mary Louise Pratt in “Arts of the Contact Zone” (p. 315 of the print book) argues that our idea of community is “strongly utopian, embodying values like equality, fraternity, liberty, which the societies often profess but systematically fail to realize.” Against this utopian vision of community, Pratt argues that we need to develop ways of understanding (noticing or creating) social and intellectual spaces that are not homogeneous or unified — contact zones. She argues that we need to develop ways of understanding and valuing difference.

Question

undefined. There are similar goals and objects to these projects. Reread Pratt’s essay with Said’s “States” in mind. Recalling what she refers to as the “literate arts of the contact zone,” can you find points of reference in Said’s text? Said’s thinking always attended to the importance and the conditions of writing, including his own. There are ways that “States” could be imagined as both “autoethnographic” and “transcultural.” How might his work allow you to understand the “literate arts of the contact zone” in practice? How might his work allow you to understand the problems and possibilities of such writing beyond what Pratt has imagined, presented, and predicted?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

4.

Question

undefined. Jean Mohr’s collaboration with John Berger was important to Said, particularly in the 1975 book A Seventh Man, a photographic essay on migrant workers in Europe. Find a copy of A Seventh Man (in a library or a bookstore or online) and write an essay on what you think it was in Mohr’s work, and in his collaboration with Berger, that was most compelling to Said.
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]

5.

In Edward Said’s essay “States,” he theorizes about the notion of exile in relation to Palestinian identity, offering a study of exile and dislocation through his analysis of photographs taken by Jean Mohr. Consider the following passage:

We turn ourselves into objects not for sale, but for scrutiny. People ask us, as if looking into an exhibit case, “What is it you Palestinians want?” — as if we can put our demands into a single neat phrase. All of us speak of awdah, “return,” but do we mean that literally, or do we mean “we must restore ourselves to ourselves”? (para. 31)

When Said talks about being looked at as though in an exhibit case, we might understand him as being concerned with the problem of dehumanization. After all, to be in an exhibit case is to be captured, trapped, or even dead. In her essay “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy” (p. 112 of the print book), Judith Butler might be understood to be considering a similar problem. She writes, “I would like to start, and to end, with the question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has preoccupied many of us for years: what makes for a grievable life?”

Question

undefined. Write an essay in which you consider the ways Said and Butler might be said to be speaking with each other. How might the condition of exile be like the condition of being beside oneself? What kind of connections — whether you see them as productive or problematic, or both at once — can be made between the ways Said talks about nation, identity, and home, and the ways Butler talks about gender and sexuality? What passages from each seem to have the other in mind? How does each struggle with reference, with pronouns like “we” and “our”?
Rich Text Editor
[Points: 10]