Millennium - Journal of International Studies http://mil.sagepub.

com/

Said's Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists

L.H.M. Ling Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2007 36: 135 DOI: 10.1177/03058298070360010901 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mil.sagepub.com/content/36/1/135

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Millennium Publishing House, LSE

Additional services and information for Millennium - Journal of International Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://mil.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

>> Version of Record - Dec 1, 2007 What is This?

Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists

L.H.M. Ling
Exile for Edward Said was a painful yet enriching condition. Indeed, exile accounted for his extraordinary productivity in theorising about and strategising for social justice for the displaced, the marginalised, the silenced. He spoke specically on the exile of Palestinians from their historic homes but his insights apply to all subjects and subjectivities suffering from hegemonic oppression and stultication. Drawing on his volume, Reections on Exile and Other Essays (2001), this article extends upon Saids understandings of exile to devise strategies for a postcolonial-feminist emancipatory agenda.

Introduction1
Exile, Edward Said wrote, is one of the saddest fates.2 Nothing could erase exiles disorienting and devastating impact. Like death, exile imprints a sense of permanent loss compounded by years of aimless wandering.3 In modern times, Said noted, exile has been transformed from the exquisite, and sometimes exclusive, punishment of special individuals like the great Latin poet Ovid into a cruel punishment of whole communities and peoples, often the inadvertent result of impersonal forces such as war, famine, and disease.4 Yet exile could also prove stimulating, liberating, even ennobling, Said conceded. It allows compels the exile to be more creative, less conventional, to have the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.5 The exiled, indeed, uniquely qualifies for dissidence. Only the exile has that awareness which comes with contrapuntal understanding, writes Vinay Lal paraphrasing Said.6
____________ 1. Many thanks to Anna M. Agathangelou, Geeta Chowdhry, Zachary B. Hall, and Sheila Nair for their contributions to this article. I remain responsible, nonetheless, for the contents herein. 2. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 47. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 64. 6. Vinay Lal, Enigmas of Exile: Reections on Edward Said, Economic and Political Weekly 1 January (2005): 33.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2007. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.36 No.1, pp. 135-145

135
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Millennium Said remained intriguingly unreflective, however, about home. In focusing almost exclusively on the exilic condition, home became an assumption, an unquestioned origin, a reified way of being. Said did not theorise on how home may relate differently to different subjectivities like daughters and servants in contrast to sons and patriarchs. His contrapuntal method registered seemingly disparate events or conditions or cognitions of being but he did not see an underlying commonality binding them, perhaps producing them. Said did not consider, either, that some who are not in exile may yet suffer from an internal, existential exile, thereby not feeling at home even when home. At most, Said acknowledged that he tried but could not and did not feel the need to go home again.7 In so doing, I submit, Said reproduced the same social relations of power about home that accounted for the pain of exile that he so lamented, studied, and made his lifes work. Yet a measure of Saids brilliance is that his legacy also gives us insights into transforming these same social relations of power. And these insights, I propose, are especially productive for postcolonial feminists in and on International Relations a condition and agenda that they share with Said personally, intellectually, and politically.

Exile and Home: Social Relations of Power

Four analytical categories help us organise Saids treatments of exile and, by extension, home. Each reveals the social relations of power that bind the supposed dichotomy of exile versus home: 1. Space: Home means being settled; exile, just the opposite. Exile, of course, marks space by either crossing it or, more accurately, enduring its loss. In setting the exiled as always outside, looking in, home is turned into an inside space that is ensconced cosily within fixed borders, fencing a familiar territory; 2. Time: Home is now and for ever; exile, never or yet to be. Time twins space conceptually as exile memorialises home through nostalgia and other reified sentiments. Home thus becomes set, overdetermined, and eternalised while exile remains lacking, liminal, and constantly trying to catch up; 3. Knowledge/power: Those at home have power; those in exile question that power. Imbricated within space and time are structures of knowledge/power, hyphenated to denote, as did Said, their mutuality in practice and thought. To Said, the provisionality and risk of exile enables real dissidence; whereas, knowledge/power at home exemplifies the conventional and the habitual; and, 4. Desire: You cant go/come home again. Lastly, desire underlies both exile and home. The exiled is always aspiring for and yearning to be at
____________ 7. Edward W. Said, Between Worlds, London Review of Books 20, no. 9 (7 May 1998): 110; Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa, Research in African Literatures 36, no. 3 (2005): 122.

136
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists home again. Those at home are presumed to enjoy a lodged and contained sense of desire: i.e., contentment. They are granted a status as keepers of hearth and flame who, accordingly, would do anything to keep out the exiled (i.e., those who threaten to extinguish such, otherwise they wouldnt be exiled) or keep themselves from being exiled.

The House of IR
These understandings of home and exile apply to the discipline of International Relations. To demonstrate, I refer to an earlier work that analogises mainstream IR to a colonial, patriarchal household.8 This House of IR clearly demarcates whos inside and outside, whos upstairs and downstairs, and who teeters dangerously on the borders. Recalling colonial households in Europes former subaltern states,9 this analogy ferrets from IR those erasures and violences that made the field possible.10 For example, iconic works like Saids Orientalism have cross-fertilised with members of the House of IR such as Marxism, Postmodernism, and Constructivism/Pragmatism, not to mention Feminism to produce new schools of thought such as Postcolonial IR that speak to world politics from the perspective of those outside of yet intertwined with the West. Postcolonial-feminist approaches, generally, and a more specific articulation of multiple worlds or worldism11 derive from these intellectual hybrids. Indeed, relations between members and aliens have gone on for millennia and intimately.12 Yet the House of IR exiles them from public, formal acknowledgement. Such exclusions do not simply reflect the outcome of ideological contestations. Rather, a global imperialist and capitalist order ensures a hierarchy of social relations of power to sustain this exilic condition.
[T]he House does so by appropriating the knowledge, resources, and labour of racialised, sexualised Others [e.g., contributions from non-capitalist traditions like socialism or scholarship from nativeinformants or developmental experiences from non-Western sites like ____________ 8. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism, International Studies Review 6, no. 4 (December 2004): 2149. 9. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2002. 10. Agathangelou and Ling, The House of IR: 22. 11. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, From Empire to Multiple Worlds: Transforming Violence, Desire, and Complicity in Contemporary World Politics (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 12. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 17651985, Volume 1) (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and DoubleConsciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

137
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Millennium
Asian capitalism] for its own benet and pleasure while announcing itself the sole producer the father of our world.13

Put differently, the House presumes that they want to be just like us, and not that we are indebted to them.

Home versus Exile

Edward Said would not disagree with this characterisation of world politics. His own exile, indeed, stems from it. The ArabIsraeli conflict, as taught and practised by the House of IR, divides outsiders from insiders, the powerful from the powerless, and polices the borders to protect the colonial household, now turned into a garrison state, from traitors within as well as terrorists outside. All the while, it erases from view the imperialist and capitalist bargains that constructed these demarcations. Accordingly, those downstairs and outside (e.g., Palestinians) are naturally exploited for valuable labour and resources to sustain the privileges of those upstairs and inside (e.g., Israelis). Resentments, hostilities, and revenge plots proliferate. Both the exiled and those at home seek a common desire: i.e., to preserve their home, even at the cost of exile for others, for generations to come. And the cycle repeats. Not surprisingly, then, those who once fought for freedom from the House end up imprisoning themselves in it. History demonstrates this tendency all too frequently. Postcolonial scholars have documented amply those anti-colonial struggles that, once won, unreflexively reproduce the same old colonial power relations, including old hierarchies of race, gender, class, and culture.14 As Frantz Fanon (in)famously noted, the native crouches in the dark desiring all that the settler possesses: his house, his table, his bed, and his wife in the bed.15 Said retained these imperialist and patriarchal features of the colonialhousehold/garrison-state despite his own commitment to challenging it. In registering exiles perpetual mobility and memorialising a sense of lack, he affixed stability and eternity to the concept of home that, in turn, sanctioned the erection of borders, their surveillance, and hegemonic practices. The exiled is always looking backwards with fondness and regret upon the past, for home, to Said, signified certitude, embrace, and love;
____________ 13. Agathangelou and Ling, The House of IR: 21. 14. Achille Mbembe, The Banality of Power and the Aesthestics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony, Public Culture 4, no. 2: 130; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and the Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 15. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

138
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists contrastingly, the future meant vulnerability since the exiled is unplaced, unhoused, and unprotected. Said characterised this condition of being caught in-between by at least two cultures as contrapuntal since it gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions.16 Yet he never theorised about the relations between these contrapuntal worlds, memories, states of being, and their legacies. He left them simply resonating, like Bachs disjunctive chords, each equal to and confronting the other. So it is with Saids treatment of dissent and power. Framing dissidence as provisional and risky reinforces the claim of those at home that they and they alone wield knowledge/power since it is institutionalised, centralised, and thereby eternalised. In reproducing such cultural imperialism, Edward Said revealed his own deep-seated and ambivalent desire to be like those whom he critiqued: i.e., ensconced, unyielding, complacent, at home. I suppose its sour grapes, Said confessed in an interview in 1996, that I now think its maybe not worth the effort to find out [what it means to be at home].17

Hegemony and Patriarchy in Said

Saids paradoxes, nonetheless, give us a method for inquiry. Here, I will focus on two hegemony and patriarchy and how the relationship between them opens up, rather than forecloses, new intellectual vistas for an emancipatory programme. On hegemony, Saids take on home has three implications for freedom and agency: (1) that knowledge/power at home must be solid and resistant to change from within; (2) exile could not produce a knowledge/power centre of its own; and (3) the exiled critic, accordingly, could not perpetrate tyranny or authoritarianism in the guise of democratic dissent.18 On patriarchy, Said recognised only the Selfs sexual fantasies about the Orientalised Other but he rarely extended these insights to gendered, sexualised power relations among Others or from Others to the Self. At the same time, Saids ruminations on exile were awash with the latter. Saids reference to Joseph Conrad, another intellectual-in-exile, demonstrates the paradoxes of hegemony and patriarchy at work in both.19 In a short story, Amy Foster, Conrad dramatised the ultimate, singular fate of the exile. An Eastern European peasant, Yanko Goorall, is shipwrecked off the coast of Britain. Eventually, Yanko marries an Englishwoman, Amy of the title, and has a child with her. But when beset by sudden illness, Yanko dies alone and alienated. His wife, who never learned his language, takes his child away just before he expires.
____________ 16. Said, Reections on Exile and Other Essays, 186. 17. Said quoted in Lal, Enigmas of Exile: 32. 18. Cf. Alvin Koh, Saids Paradoxical Identities, Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 1(2001): 1058. 19. Edward W. Said, Reections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

139
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Millennium She fears his fevered mumblings in a foreign tongue would scare the little boy. [A] solitary death illuminated, so to speak, by unresponsive, uncommunicating eyes, Said wrote, was every Conradian exiles fear.20 One could almost hear Said whisper: Mine included. Said did not consider that husband and wife could transcend the limitations of spoken language to revel in an unspoken bond. Nor did he think that Yanko could have talked to his child in his own language. Instead, Said accepted Conrads premise that Yanko remained an isolated, sovereign centre, albeit whose hegemony was turned inwards onto him alone, untouched by time or labour or love. Man and his household stay strictly bordered, just like Palestine and Israel, home and exile, past and present. Women and other subjugated subjects know better. They know that they sustain the household/state with their labour and resources despite being stamped as exploitable and disposable, regardless of whether they are inside and civilised or downstairs and domesticated, or outside and alien.21 In exchange for such an arrangement, patriarchy supposedly extends protection but women and other subjugated subjects are not dumb to the high human cost demanded for the price of admission. They are the ones who bear and raise the children who might walk onto a landmine22 or find themselves kidnapped and sold into prostitution rings23 or toil in fields/offices/factories that benefit owners, not labourers24 all this, for little to no say in the decision-making while receiving more promises of democratisation and sovereignty.25 The home is never that secure in another sense. The very nature of patriarchal exploitation and arrogance compels alliances between subjugated subjects inside with those outside. In the Middle East, feminists, workers, and other dissident activists from among both Israelis and Palestinians have sought consistently to forge a different path to politics. The impact they have made is proportional to the extent mainstream analysts and media alike dismiss or ignore them.26
____________ 20. Said, Reections on Exile and Other Essays, 180. 21. Note, for example, this recent controversy in Israel. Orthodox male Jews insist that women sit at the back of the bus to preserve religious and gender propriety. http://www.npr.org./templates/story/story.php?storyId=7361060. 22. UNICEF, The State of the Worlds Children 2005. http://www.unicef.org/ publications/index_24432.html. 23. Cf. Anna M. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in the Mediterranean Nation-States (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 24. Cf. Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances (London: Routledge, 2000). 25. Cf. L.H.M. Ling, Hypermasculinity on the Rise, Again: A Response to Fukuyama on Women and World Politics, International Feminist Journal of Politics 2, no. 2 (2000): 27886. 26. Valentine Moghadam, Gender and Globalisation: Female Labour and Womens Mobilisation, Journal of World-Systems Research 5, no. 2 (1999): 36788; Valentine Moghadam, Conict, Peace, and Feminist Alternatives, talk delivered at the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, 30 May 2001.

140
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists Moreover, dissident intellectuals in exile such as Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, the last of whom Said hailed as the critical intellectual par exemplar27 have centralised their knowledge/ power from the margins, as the history of their institution (also mine), the New School, attests.28 Not only have these refugees from World War II given us pioneering works on democracy and freedom but they have produced, also, a legacy now institutionalised into a paradigm of learning and progressive politics for future generations. Lastly, these same processes work within dissidence-in-exile for it, too, could become a source of patriarchal hegemony. Insulated by a sense of righteous loss and focused almost entirely on the individual, the intellectual-in-exile is immunised from having to account for why she happens to have the lifestyle to think, the education to write, the confidence to speak truth to power. As Paul Tiyambe Zeleza notes, Saids memoir of his childhood in Cairo tells much through its silences. One passage merits quoting at length:
We are given the expatriate Cairo, the Cairo of Arab exiles, in all its minutia its sights, sounds, smells, and scandals but the Cairo of the indigenous Egyptians is largely invisible. Egypt intrudes in this island of comfortable exile, violently and almost annoyingly, through the revolution of 1952 and Nassers doomed socialist experiment, which prevents Said from visiting between 1960 and 1975, and when he nally does in 1977, Cairo is a great disappointment, as his former Egyptian neighbour, Gindi, records his impression; Cairo was no longer the cosmopolitan city of his youth, for it had become, she quotes him, any large third-world city, so sprawling and demographically uncontrolled had Cairo become its services crippled, its immense mass so dusty and crumbling I have no wish to return.29

From such ambivalences come a set of postcolonial-feminist queries. These guide an emancipatory programme that pays attention to Saids paradoxes while helping us traverse beyond them.

Postcolonial-Feminist Queries
Postcolonial feminists do not stay suspended between worlds30 but take us to another place, another subjectivity. They celebrate the richness, resilience, and resonance of overlapping, interactive, mutually creating worlds. This perspective reects postcolonial studies general insights on race and subalternity but these are read explicitly through the analytical lens of gender. Such intersections and integrations show the multivaried, cross-cutting allegiances of contemporary politics where simple binaries such as coloniser versus colonised, international versus domestic,
____________ 27. Lal, Enigmas of Exile. 28. For a history of the New School, see http://www.newschool.edu. 29. Zeleza, The Politics and Poetics of Exile: 6. 30. Said, Between Worlds.

141
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Millennium men versus women, masculinity versus femininity do not apply.31 Saids paradoxes on exile and home, then, motivate the following postcolonial-feminist queries. 1. On space: What does it mean to be settled and unsettled? For feminists, memories of home may not be suffused with as much tenderness as suggested by Said and other masculinist writers, whether male or female. Postcolonial feminists experience pain as much as anybody else when forced to leave home, especially when instigated by patriarchal, colonial power politics. But they may not find themselves in the same kind of suspension and liminality as defined by Saids exilic condition. Indeed, postcolonial feminists may encounter a scenario reminiscent of home, even in exile now doubled by the racism and sexism of the new locale: i.e., weighed down by patriarchal tradition, defined by identities of woman, wife, daughter, or sister, and assigned to the same social-sexual roles as reproducer, nurturer, maid, or worker. Not surprisingly, women writers in exile do not just discover creativity and stimulation in exile but also a voice for their stories, their concerns, their dreams. For women writers from the Maghreb, writes Zeleza, exile in the global North [brought] with it new marginalities and alienation of race [nonetheless, they were able to] use exile to create new spaces of active agency for women disempowered by the triple patriarchal tyrannies of French colonialism, postcolonial authoritarianism, and religious fundamentalism thereby turning exile into a productive contradiction in which the mechanisms of alienation are transformed into mechanisms of liberation.32 2. On time: Why is the past privileged over the present or the future, especially through certain memories, stories, or images? Given the border-crossing agility of colonial and patriarchal relations covered by rationalisations of religion or poverty or simply struggles to establish a new life, postcolonial-feminists question the privileging of the past over the present/future, especially through the propagation of certain memories, stories, and images. The politics behind such contrapuntal representations invariably arise, not just between home and exile but also upstairs versus downstairs, inside versus outside. Taiwans exile from the home of China serves as an apt example. For almost forty years, the Nationalists (KMT) on Taiwan maintained that they would recover/restore (guangfu) the Chinese mainland, enshrouded in nostalgia as the original, ancient, glorious home of ones ancestors. Displayed prominently throughout the island, especially at KMT rallies, was a famous phrase: Do not forget [the] national humiliation [of not being home] in time of peace and security (wu wang zai ju). Recovering/ restoring the mainland was comparable to completing the Confucian obligation of filial piety, as Chiang Kaishek, embodying Taiwan, was the exiled son. However, as soon as Taiwan ended martial law in 1987 (a decade
____________ 31. Cf. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development. 32. Zeleza, The Politics and Poetics of Exile: 15.

142
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists after Chiangs death) and opened direct links with the mainland, very different representations flooded Taiwans media and, by extension, the popular consciousness. These ranged from representing China as a source of cultural strangeness to its feminisation and sexualisation as more businessmen from Taiwan entered the Chinese mainland market for profits and women.33 Quite clearly, patriarchal hegemony operated behind both representations, whether from the position of the filial KMT to ancestral China or Sugar-Daddy Taiwan to mistress China. At the same time, Taiwan itself is racialised, feminised, and sexualised by the US. Ching-Chane Hwang and Bo-yu Chen34 note that US foreign policy analysts historically cast the USChinaTaiwan relationship in terms of a strategic triangle where the optimum outcome is a mnage trois (i.e., symmetrical amities among all three actors) in contrast to a stable marriage (i.e., amity between two of the actors and enmity between each of them and the third) or romantic triangle (i.e., amity between one pivot and two wing actors but enmity between the latter).35 In all three scenarios, there is no question that Taiwan could never be pivot to Americas or Chinas wing. [T]o what identity could one return? asks Mustapha Hamil.36 Neither exile nor home could allow any deviation from the colonialpatriarchal House, if that is what inspires the return. I add: is a different answer even possible when the return is so vested with a past lost through exile? Accordingly, postcolonial-feminists juxtapose past, present, and future, so that each may illuminate a way of understanding, framing, and shaping the other. The future does not become a repository of past desires/oppressions but a beacon of emancipation through integration for the self and its community. 3. On knowledge/power: Whose labour and resources produce the knowledge/power, whether it is from home or in exile? Postcolonial feminists need to know since the colonial household/garrison-state typically holds them responsible for reproduction at all levels. Given this hierarchy, what does it mean for feminised subjects to have knowledge/ power when they already exercise it substantively, on a daily basis, to sustain the colonial household/garrison-state yet are still cast as helpless victims who need protection?
____________ 33. Shu-mei Shih, Gender and a New Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 2 (1998): 287319; Shu-mei Shih, The Trope of Mainland China in Taiwans Media, positions: east asia cultures critique 3, no. 1 (1995): 14983. 34. Ching-Chane Hwang and Bo-yu Chen, Subaltern Straits: Chinese and Taiwanese Perspectives on US Foreign Policy on China and Taiwan, National Sun Yat-sen University, unpublished manuscript. 35. Cf. Lowell Dittmer, The Strategic Triangle: An Elementary Game-Theoretical Analysis, World Politics 33, no. 4 (July 1981): 485515. 36. Mustapha Hamil, Exile and its Discontents: Malika Mokaddems Forbidden Woman, Research in African Literatures 35, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 57.

143
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Millennium George W. Bush made this connection amply clear when he urged the nation to go shopping in response to the 9/11 attacks.37 Recognising that the American economy depended on consumers to rebound, Bush nonetheless taxed those very same consumers, in blood and treasure, to fund his imperialist ventures overseas, all in the name of protecting them. Clearly, some benefit from this arrangement at the expense of others.38 Typically, the former, such as the mega-corporation Halliburton and the oil industry, are inside and upstairs the colonial household/garrisonstate, while others, like mom-and-pop (family) stores and the general populace, remain downstairs or outside. Meanwhile, US academics like Noah Feldman analogise the US democratisation of Iraq, for example, as a process of insemination with clear notions of who is inseminating whom.39 He adds a warning to the US: When things go wrong, he [sic] cannot get out but is sucked into what American vernacular calls the quagmire a situation from which he cannot extract himself, but in which he cannot remain without suffering unmanning damage.40 Feldman seems intent on revising the Madama Butterfly fable: Lt Pinkerton (US) was not callous but right to leave clingy Cho-cho-san (Iraq) even if they did produce a son (democracy) together. 4. On desire: How do we build communities together? Feminised subjects have little to gain in upholding one House over another, whether in exile or at home. Instead, postcolonial feminists seek to redefine community and what it means to build it. Elsewhere,41 we draw on Gandhis notion of an oceanic circle for inspiration. It calls for building communities trans-subjectively: that is, between you and me, not you for me. Unlike the House of IR and other colonial households/garrisonstates, the oceanic circle channels desire differently. It does not have the outermost circumference wield power to crush the inner circle but give[s] strength to all within and derive[s] its strength from it.42 These queries help us to see, act, and feel another world politics. Various communities, not a single House, appear before us. Living inside,
____________ 37. Cf. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11, International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 3 (September 2004): 51738. 38. L.H.M. Ling, Neoliberal Neocolonialism: Comparing Enron with Asias Crony Capitalism, in Discourses of Violence Violence of Discourses: Critical Interventions, Transgressive Readings and Postnational Negotiations, ed. Dirk Wiemann, Agata Stopinska, Anke Bartels and Johannes Angermller (Frankfurt/ Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 93105. 39. Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 40. Ibid., 95. 41. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, Power and Play through Poisies: Reconstructing Self and Other in the 9/11 Commission Report, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (2005): 82753. 42. Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 348.

144
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Saids Exile: Strategic Insights for Postcolonial Feminists between, and through these multiple worlds, we transcend faux borders, whether they divide a field of study like IR or slash through societies as in the Middle East. Only then could we obviate the tired exclusions of who is at home and who is in exile and allow many in the world, including Edward Said, finally to rest.

Conclusion
We still need Edward Said today not because his thinking was perfect but just the opposite. The paradoxes he produced in his treatments on exile and home compel us to search further, probe deeper, inquire more comprehensively. No mere quest for intellectual coherence, it is motivated instead by Saids compassion in face of injustice, his integrity when pressed with his own contradictions, and his celebration of the joy and beauty of creativity despite long-standing pain and suffering, of his people and within himself. In this sense, Said exemplified both home and exile. May we continue in his footsteps. L.H.M. Ling is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) at The New School, New York, US.

145
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013

Millennium

146
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com by guest on February 28, 2013