Summary
Edward Said’s methodological approach and reading practice, borrowed from Western classical music, for thinking together discrepant, intertwined histories, which Feldman elaborates in chapter 4 of A Shadow over Palestine across three valences: method, ethical comportment, and exile (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 819-829).
Details
- Elaborated most fully in Culture and Imperialism, contrapuntalism makes legible what Said calls “intertwined and overlapping histories,” the work of thinking “through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing together” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 823).
- Said cited Glenn Gould’s performances of Bach’s fugues as an influence; his first essay devoted to music criticism (1983) centres on Gould’s “contrapuntal vision” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 821).
- As an ethical comportment, in “The Palestinian Experience” (written 1968-69), counterpoint names a nondominating connection across difference against the preservation of “the Jewish rhythm of life”: Said’s second interpretation of that phrase is that it evades the “no less real truth that the Jewish rhythm has supplanted a more inclusive one, the Palestinian,” one which has and would allow Christian, Moslem, and Jew to “live in counterpoint with each other” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 825).
- In “Bases for Coexistence” (1997) Said made the ethical demand explicit for Israel and Palestine, where “mass extermination and mass dispossession are connected”: “We must think our histories together,” “however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 827).
- As exile, in “Between Worlds” Said describes his own post-1967 consciousness as requiring that he “use the disparate halves of my experience, as an Arab and as an American, to work with and also against each other”; Feldman notes Said named the breach of 1967 as a catalyst to “think and write contrapuntally” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 829).
- Feldman himself adopts the term for his book’s orientation: its Acknowledgments trace the book’s “contrapuntal orientation” to his 1999 semester attending Hebrew University in the mornings and Al Quds University in the afternoons (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1267-1271).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Edward Said, Orientalism, Racial relationality, Exile, Association of Arab American University Graduates