Abstract
Jeanne Morefield’s Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory is a bold, passionate, and deeply generative work, offering the first book-length study that takes Edward Said seriously as a political theorist. With some humility, Morefield reveals in the book’s prelude that part of her impetus for writing this book lies in her sharing with the field of political theory a tendency to assume Said more than truly engage with his body of work (xix). Her own previous scholarship (which was so effectively summarized in Kennan Ferguson’s “Series Editor’s Introduction” that I found myself inspired to read more of it) offers an exception to political theory’s neglect of the study of empire. Her study of Said further addresses what she takes to be the insularity of political theory—its tendency to look no further than works on postcolonial theory from within the discipline rather than engaging work from other fields.
As a result, Morefield draws Said’s political theory from a wide variety of sources: his affinity with the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians, his deep engagement with music theory and comparative literature, and the “uncomfortable, unhealable wounds” (1) from his experience as a Palestinian in exile. The core of Morefield’s argument is Said’s commitment to “worldliness” as both an epistemic stance—insisting that texts, concepts, and theories are inseparable from the material and symbolic structures of empire that shape them—and an ethical-political disposition that resists complicity with structures of domination. Imperialism operates simultaneously across economic, political, cultural, and psychological registers—extracting resources while reshaping identities, deploying military force while constructing knowledge systems, creating material dependencies while transforming intimate subjectivities—in ways that cannot be captured by any single disciplinary lens. The multifaceted and multidirectional character of imperialism is such that it must be engaged with a worldly disposition. This worldliness is exemplified in Said’s practice of contrapuntal reading: a method of attending simultaneously to metropolitan narratives and to the colonial and postcolonial voices they disavow, revealing the constitutive entanglement of empire and political thought. Informed by Said’s lifelong engagement with music, contrapuntal reading requires us to hear the multiple, distinct, yet intertwined voices in a text—the canonical European traditions and the colonial worlds they simultaneously disavow and depend upon.
Alongside Said’s contrapuntal method, Morefield emphasizes two further Saidian resources for unsettling political theory: exile/loss and humanism. Exile and loss, for Said, are not simply features of his biography but describe a methodological attunement, a cultivated estrangement from disciplinary or national loyalties, a disposition for standing outside the comforts of belonging in order to retain a critical standpoint on the present. Morefield underscores how, rather than romanticizing exile and loss, Said emphasizes their painful and disorienting effects. Humanism, something for which Said has been criticized but never gave up, is reinterpreted as worldly, anti-imperial, and non-teleological—a commitment to shared human futures that resist both liberal universalism’s complicity with imperial tutelage and parochial relativism. Worldly humanism operates as embedded and entangled agentive disclosure; it is a form of humanism that Morefield productively contrasts with Hannah Arendt’s notions of bannisterless thinking—a practice of detached, independent judgment—or her boomerang theory, which renders imperial violence as external and worries about its return to corrupt the metropole. These concepts form the scaffolding that undergirds Morefield’s argument for Said’s relevance for political theory.
Morefield’s analysis offers a potent unsettling of political theory’s tendency to bracket empire by either treating it as marginal to the development of modern concepts or as background or context that can be safely quarantined from theoretical inquiry. By placing Said at the center of the story, she shows how empire is not an addendum but constitutive of the core concepts that structure political theory. This is a point with wide-ranging consequences: the history of liberalism, the meaning of sovereignty, the grammar of security, and the very sense of who counts as a political subject are all reconfigured when read contrapuntally.
This approach further resists political theory’s tendency to seek closures and conclusions that naturalize differences and flatten complexities. One compelling illustration of a contrapuntal disposition comes through in chapter 2, where Morefield’s analysis of Iris Marion Young’s notion of “determination as non-domination” (41–46, 49–50) is presented as a normative “theoretical machine” (xxiv) for addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Morefield critiques Young for situating the dispute primarily as a clash of two groups known in advance in their entirety rather than as the outcome of a settler-colonial project that has produced radical asymmetries of power. Said’s contrapuntal ensemble offers an alternative by reading Israeli and Palestinian histories together without erasing their unequal positions; it resists the pull of abstract resolution and instead insists on keeping colonial entanglements, dispossession, and resistance at the center of critique. Near the end of the chapter, Morefield points to how Said “begins his method for thinking by reorienting the need to theorize from the precarious cusp of the ‘now,’ resisting resolution, and resisting the alternatives with which to guide action and thought” (50). At a moment when the silences regarding Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and U.S. complicity in its perpetuation seem to be sustained in large part by narrow and tired imperialist frameworks of one state vs two states or the politics of recognition, an approach that unsettles the habitual starting points and recovers what is left out of dominant narratives seems not just promising but also imperative.
Unsettling the World unsettles disciplinary habits, recovers resources from Said’s work that have been underappreciated, and provides a methodological orientation that is both critical and generative. For scholars concerned with empire, postcolonialism, liberalism, or the vocation of political theory itself, this book is essential reading. In terms of pedagogy, this book suggests ways of reading and teaching differently, more open to reading beyond and against seemingly settled boundaries and borders. One hopes that Morefield’s call to take Said’s political theory seriously—to unsettle empire, to accept what and who we work so hard to deny—is taken up by others.