Orientalism and After-Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work

Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said Aijaz Ahmad Drained primarily in the classical mould of scholarship in comparative European literatures, in a milieu dominated by Auerbach and Spitzer, the German comparatists who had given to the discipline its stamp of high humanism of a very conservative kind, Edward Said's attempt to assemble a narrative of European humanism's complicity in the history of European colonialism lapses into ambivalences. Faced with the problem of identifying some sort of agency that might undo the centuries-old link between the narratives of high humanism and the colonial project Said posits the most ordinary and familiar values of humanist liberalism