ABSTRACT
Edward Said, responding to the canon wars within the humanities, calls for a new humanism that is cosmopolitan and learns from the past while also being “attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused” (2004, 11). Rejecting both traditionalists who want to preserve a predominantly European and male literary canon as well as poststructuralists’ critiques of the Euro-phallocentric humanist grand narratives of enlightenment and reason, Said defends a “different kind of humanism” (2004, 11). For Said, language is central to the renewal of humanism, and humanism is “a technique of trouble” (2004, 77), a process of critique, questioning, and resistance that involves interrogating texts, words, and discourses so as to reveal silences, exclusions, and mythologies. Only through language, Said contends, can the “obstruction[s] of language” be diagnosed (2004, 29).
