This essay summarizes the book review The End of Orthodoxy written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published in The New York Times on February 18, 2001. The article is a review of Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile”.
Edward Said is a Palestinian who grew up in Egypt and the United States. He is known as a literary critic and theorist. Besides, he is an exile who believes that it is hard to be an exile, however, he thinks that exile is a circumstance which is morally precious.
The book “Reflections on Exile” consists of essays written between 1967 and the present. The contents of the essays are the fictions of the colonizers about the colonized people, the resistance of the colonized people and the social significance of the university education. In his essays, he also discusses his aspect of cultures. Moreover, he gives voice to the bothers of the oppressed people who try to have justice and voice, in an objective way.
One of what Said mentions in his essays are the real cultures. What he defines as real culture is a dynamic culture which includes people of different cultures, varying ideas and oppositions. One another thing is the role of the universities on the culture. Because of the specific departments in universities such as ethnic studies and women’s studies, there are many ethnic and racial identity politics. Moreover, students get discouraged from making researches about the other cultures. As a matter of fact, universities should be open to all cultures. In his another essay, Said analyses Samuel Huntington’s view of an indivisible “Western civilizations” and the “non-Western civilizations” on an essay of Huntington, titled “Clash of Civilizations”. On the later essays, Said mentions that what can associate the different nations and groups are generosity, vision, justice and universal values.