Unsettling the World

Jeanne Morefield is associate professor of Political Theory and fellow at New College, University of Oxford. She is also a non-residential fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Washington DC. She is author of Empires without Imperialism: Anglo American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford UP, 2014) and Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton UP, 2005).

Jeanne Morefield’s Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory extends her already impressive body of work on the nature and function of empire and imperialism into a radical turning point. In Said she has found a kindred soul not just to interpret the world, as Marx had urged, but to change it. With this master stroke Morefield relocates us in “the middle of a raging cyclone” as she puts it which is Said’s way of recasting the world not despite but against empire. The result however is not just rereading Said against the grain of the current imperial meltdown. She borrows from Said to build a whole new moral and imaginative citadel from which not just to reimagine but rebuild the world. In Said, Morefield detects and praises what she performs with uncommon verve and vitality for a whole new generation of critical thinking.

• Chapter One, “Writing at a Distance: Exile, Loss, and Critique.” This chapter explores the sometimes-unnerving contradictions of Said’s exilic disposition, from his reflections on his own life in exile to his discordant prose style, focusing on the productive criticism that he believes flow from this unsettling disclosure. It focuses on Said’s 1982 essay, “Secular Criticism” and explores his approach to analyzing filiative and affiliative modes of ideological connection. The chapter concludes by turning from Said’s theoretical writing about exile to his exilic writing in 1984’s After the Last Sky which offers a powerful glimpse into the attached and detached mode of seeing at work in Said’s exilic orientation. It also provides a fuller sense of how this orientation twins a critique of power, nationhood, and exclusion with a deep sympathy for the ties that bind love to home, love to loss, and love to loss of home.Chapter Two, “A Cluster of Flowing Currents: Theory Unresolved and Groundless.” This chapter foc