THE BUSINESS OF TERROR
US: a disputed history of identity
By Edward W Said

ANYONE with the slightest understanding of how cultures work knows that
defining a culture, saying what it is for members of that culture, is always
a major and, even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. There are
canonical authorities to be selected and regularly revised, debated,
reselected, or dismissed. There are ideas of good and evil, belonging or not
belonging (the same and the different), hierarchies of value to be
specified, discussed, rediscussed and settled or not.

Moreover each culture defines its enemies, who stands beyond it and
threatens it. For the Greeks, beginning with Herodotus, anyone who did not
speak Greek was automatically a barbarian, an Other to be despised and
fought against. An excellent recent book by the French classicist Frangois
Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus (1), painstakingly shows how deliberately
Herodotus set about constructing an image of a barbarian Other from the
Scythians, more even than from the Persians.

The official culture is that of priests, academies and the state. It
provides definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries and what I have
called "belonging". It is this official culture that speaks in the name of
the whole, that tries to express the general will, the general ethos and
idea, that inclusively holds the official past (the founding fathers and
texts, the pantheon of heroes and villains) and excludes what is foreign or
different or undesirable in the past. From it come the definitions of what
may or may not be said, those prohibitions and proscriptions that are
necessary to any culture if it is to have authority.

It is also true that besides the mainstream or official or canonical culture
there are dissenting or alternative, unorthodox, heterodox cultures that
contain many anti- authoritarian strains in competition with the official
culture. These can be called the counterculture, an ensemble of practices
associated with outsiders - the poor, immigrants, artistic bohemians,
rebels, artists. From the counterculture comes the critique of authority and
attacks on what is official and orthodox. The great contemporary Arab poet
Adonis has written a massive account of the relationship between orthodoxy
and heterodoxy in Arabic culture and shown the constant dialectic and
tension between them. No culture is understandable without some sense of
this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the
official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and
to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity is
to miss what is vital and fecund.

In the United States the debate about what is American has gone through many
transformations and sometimes dramatic shifts. When I was growing up,
Westerns depicted native Americans as evil devils to be destroyed or tamed.
They were called Red Indians and insofar as they had any function in the
culture - and this was as true of films as of the writing of academic
history - it was as a foil to the advancing course of white civilisation.
Today that has changed completely. Native Americans are seen as victims, not
villains, of the advance of the US into the Wild West.

There has been a change in the status of Columbus and even more dramatic
reversals in the depictions of African-Americans and women. Toni Morrison
noted how in classic American literature there is an obsession with
whiteness, as Melville's Moby-Dick and Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym eloquently
testify. Yet she says major male, white writers of the 19th and 20th
centuries, men who shaped the canon of American literature, created their
works by using whiteness as a way of avoiding, curtaining and rendering
invisible the African presence in the midst of society. That Toni Morrison
writes her novels and criticism with such success and brilliance now
underscores the extent of the change from the world of Melville and
Hemingway to that of Dubois, Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Morrison herself.

Which vision is the real America, and who can lay claim to represent and
define it? The question is complex and deeply interesting but cannot be
settled by reducing the matter to a few clichis.

A recent view of the difficulties in cultural contests whose object is the
definition of a civilisation can be found in Arthur Schlesinger's little
book, The Disuniting of America (2). As a mainstream historian, Schlesinger
is understandably troubled by the fact that emergent and immigrant groups in
the US have disputed the official, unitary national fable as it used to be
represented by great classical historians such as Bancroft, Henry Adams and,
more recently, Richard Hofstader. The disputants want the writing of history
to reflect not only a nation conceived of and ruled by patricians and
landowners but one in which slaves, servants, labourers and poor immigrants
played an important but as yet unacknowledged role.

The narratives of such people, silenced by the great discourses whose source
was Washington, the investment banks of New York, the universities of New
England and the industrial fortunes of the Middle West, have come to disrupt
the slow progress and unruffled serenity of the official story. They ask
questions, tell the experiences of social unfortunates and make the claims
of "lesser" peoples - women, Asians and African-Americans and other
minorities, sexual as well as ethnic. Whether one agrees or not with
Schlesinger's cri de coeur, there is no disagreeing with his underlying
thesis that the writing of history is the royal road to the definition of a
country and that the identity of a society is in large part a function of
historical interpretation, which is fraught with contested claims and
counterclaims. The US is in such a fraught situation today.