{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030104712041884817, 'fraction_numerical': 0.018979057591623036, 'mean_word_length': 4.85823754789272, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Irreconcilabilities and Transgressions: Edward W. Said’s Idea of a Wordly Criticism – An Introduction

Orientalism, begun by Edward W. Said after the Six Days War of 1967 and published in 1978, is a study that combines Foucault’s analysis of knowledge and power with Gramsci’s reflections on the workings of hegemony. It is a study of the construction of the “Orient” as Europe’s “Other,” of a discursive regime that, at the same time, is “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (Said 1978, 2). Said’s book met with a lot of polemical criticism, but was crucial for a critique of Eurocentrism in the humanities and social sciences and for the development of postcolonial criticism in the United States and other parts of the West. The special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, “‘Between Worlds’: The Legacy of Edward W. Said,” is mainly based on a workshop on the genealogy of Orientalism and its impact on American Studies organized for the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien at Mannheim in June 2004. I would like to make some introductory remarks on the scope and the direction of Said’s work and begin by taking up a sentence by Said himself at the beginning of his essay “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985) which will structure my observations (for a monographical essay on Said’s work until 1990 see Lenz 1991). Said argues that he will use his essay to reflect critically on his book Orientalism in the wider context of four important general issues: