About the Author:
May Telmissany is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Arabic Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include an authored volume in Arabic on the documentary filmmaker Fouad El Tohamy, as well as co-edited/co-authored books in French on the cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Heliopolis, and the history of public bathhouses in Cairo. An English translation of her book The Last Hammams of Cairo was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2009. Her current research project is titled Reel Good Arabs: The Arab filmmakers of the Diaspora. May Telmissany is also a confirmed Egyptian-Canadian novelist. The French version of her novel Dunyazad (Actes-Sud, Paris) was awarded the Ulysses Prize for Best first novel in 2002 in France and the State Prize for autobiographical novel in Cairo the same year. Stephanie Tara Schwartz is a Doctoral Student and Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Research Assistant at the Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies at Ryerson University. She was the recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2008-2010) for her project entitled Double Diaspora in the Literature and Film of Arab Jews. Her work on the concept of double diaspora in the writings of Sami Michael and Naim Kattan is published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Review:
Edward Said stood on the shoulders of many giants and looked beyond, and now former students, scholars and admirers are doing the same, taking intellectual risks and building on what he has given us. That is exactly what he would have wished. --Mariam Said
Orientalism was written at a very specific moment in the history of the U.S. academy, when ethnic studies, women's studies, and Third World studies were already challenging the epistemological foundations of what constituted a legitimate object of knowledge, and of who formed a legitimate subject of inquiry deserving institutional academic space. Written at the intersection of diverse forms of what Said himself called adversarial scholarship, Said's work further consolidated what came to be the burgeoning fields of multicultural and postcolonial studies. --Ella Shohat, New York University
The difference between Said and Foucault always lay in Said's concern with worldliness. The rejection of Enlightenment humanism ran counter to Said s concern for the human world and to his desire to generate a theory of community. It is in communities that individuals gain their most resonant material existence; it is within communities that political life is generated and it is in communities that ways to change societies and power structures are developed. --Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales
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