The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness by Paul A. Bové

The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness Reviews

• 
  Sunny

  Another massive game changing book. Edward Said has an uncanny ability to put into simple words some of the most intricate intellectual models and descriptions of systems that thousands others would find had to spot let alone be able to articulate. This book covers a couple of essays by Said himself and then a series of essays by other intellectuals who are writing about Said. The book got me accelerated-thinking and for me that’s like frigging time travelling because you go places in your mind that you have never been before without the hassle of airports and scary flights and currencies that you don’t understand! . No need to say anymore, if you like to box and punch from difference angles then you will love the way that this book both takes you and hits you from a thousand different intellectual angles at the same time it seems at times! Here are my best bits!:
  
  • “Said once insisted that Goethe’s greatness lies in his being open to influence. Said has made himself the modern version of this figure.”
  • “I remember in 1988 I was participating in a forum, organized under the auspices of the Jewish magazine Tikkun, in which the Jewish philosopher Michael Walzer, who is famous in the United States and a great antagonist of mine, was also participating. He's a man of the left supposedly, but a quite extraordinarily dogged Zionist. It was organized because the Palestinian National Council, of which I was then a member, had just recognized Israel and had spoken about the need for two states for the first time explicitly, and this was seen to be a new opening. I kept insisting that it was not simple. At one point Walzer said to me: 'Alright, listen. You've recognized Israel. You obviously have or can have your own state. But don't keep speaking about the past. Let's talk about the future.' This is very often said to me by my critics that I always talk about the past that I dwell too much on the injustices done to the Palestinians and so on and so forth. The audience was, I would say, about 99 per cent Jewish. When he said it, my mouth hung open, but I didn't say anything, because a woman in the audience--I'll never forget this as long as I live--got up and started vociferously attacking Walzer. She said: 'How dare you say that to a Palestinian? How dare you say that to anybody? Because of all the people in the world, we ask the world to remember our past. And you're telling a Palestinian to forget the past? How dare you?' It was an extraordinary thing. And he didn't utter a word after that.”
  • “The book and television programme Roots. That strikes me as colossally boring and totally off the mark. I think that's the last thing that we should be thinking about. What's much more interesting is to try to reach out beyond identity to something else, whatever that is. It may be death. It may be an altered state of consciousness that puts you in touch with others more than one normally is. It may be just a state of forgetfulness which, at some point, I think is what we all need-to forget.”
  • “I think the role of the intellectual is never to give unconditional support. I think the difficult thing is somehow to make your stand while giving support, but it’s not easy. You said the easy think is to just criticize. No, you give support but you also try and maintain some level of scepticism and detachment, and the integrity of your principles so that when you see the abuses being as they always do you don’t just shut up and say well in the name of the country of the name of the revolution etc. I must keep quiet.”
  • “Because Vico was the first writer who taught me that human history is painstakingly made with way you might make a model, or an object and not endowed with any particularly sacred quality and therefore it was the province of the philosopher or the scientist to be able to look at any part of human history with the same secular scrutiny without regard for idols”
  • “Cultural discourse circulates not truth but representations”
  • “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” – Nietzsche.
  • “It is not happenstance that Nietzsche was trained as a classical philologist, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a literary critic; nor should it be surprising that Antonio Gramsci, the twentieth- century thinker who has most deeply analysed the historical ramifications of cultural production and who has also become a fundamental reference for institutional critique, was a university student of literature who concentrated on linguistics”
  • “Said defines the intellectual as a person who tells the truth to power. He takes this even further into what is sometimes more difficult terrain in insisting by his own actions that the job of the intellectual is to tell the truth to his followers and to himself.”
  • “A careful reader of Said’s texts comes away not only with admiration for their conceptual precision but with respect for their example of intellectual courage in the face of protocols effective and largely unexamined that enforce complicity with the way things are.”
  • “This does not mean that music does not count for something real and persuasive. One turns to music as an affirmation of a life of creativity and of earths expressive mysteries.”
  • “Controlled intellectual abandon” – wow what a beautiful concept.
  • "As a result for some stories virtually the only remaining easily accessible source in the united states for information on international affairs is the depthless drivel of CNN and its clones which endlessly repeat the same snippets of information without background, detail or content but always accompanied by riveting images albeit the same ones hour after hour from one channel to another.”
  • “That was the genius of the Palestinian revolution as we used to call it when the PLO was perceived by its supporters as leading a battle for liberation: Arabs and others were drawn to join an inspiring movement for freedom and justice across national division’s boundaries and languages. Palestine concerned everyone so long as liberation was the goal. The present PLO leadership ended all that.”
  • "The role of the intellectual is to say the truth to power to address the central authority in every society without hypocrisy and to choose the method the style the critique best suited for these purposes. This is so because the intellectual produced a kind of performance that continues for years whose main goal is to give utterance not to mere fashion and passing fads but to real ideas and values.”
  • Conrad: “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State today. It is as if the moral clock had been put back many hours. And yet nowadays, if I were to overwork my horse so as to destroy its happiness of physical well-being I should be hauled before a magistrate.”
  • “To go beyond orientalism itself in examining the implications of its demonstration that the east / west opposition is an externalization of an internal division in the modern west.”
  • “Another example is India where English literature was a major component in the ideology of nation building that was consolidated under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. The universal humanism put forward by institutionalized literary studies was useful in the task of hegemonizing native elite culture.”
  • “The true meaning of minority for him lies in the vantage it allows on majority itself and the critique it makes possible.”
  • “The issues is not freeing ourselves from representation. It’s really about being enlightened witnesses when we watch representations. Which means that we are able to be critically vigilant about both what is being told to us and how we respond to what is being told.”