Editor’s Introduction: The World, The Multi-Ethnic Text, and the Critic

Abstract

Multi-ethnic literature and criticism has always been interdisciplinary and thoroughly grounded in worldly contexts. In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Edward W. Said is interested in the strategies we use “to get at what occurs between the world and the aesthetic or textual object” (32). Said claims that “texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly” (35). He affirms that a text’s worldliness is “an infrangible part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning” (39). Said also includes the critic in his theory of worldliness, for the implications of the text are also “true of critics in their capacities as readers and writers in the world” (35). Indeed, if, Said argues, “we assume … that texts make up what Foucault calls archival facts, the archive being defined as the text’s social discursive presence in the world, then criticism too is another aspect of that present” (51). Thus, “critics create not only the values by which art is judged and understood, but they embody in writing those processes and actual conditions in the present by means of which art and writing bear significance” (53). Said also warns of “the fallacy of imagining the life of texts as being pleasantly ideal and without force or conflict” (47), as his theory of Orientalism and its processes of subordination makes clear. Given the operations of power and conflict in which texts are complicit, Said asserts that the “critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textuality of texts.” Further, the critic should be “finding and exposing things that otherwise lie hidden beneath piety, heedlessness, or routine” (53). The critic’s role, then, is to read beyond the page to both reveal the worldliness of the text and to contribute archival facts about the significance of “the text’s social discursive presence in the world,” particularly regarding any voices that have been silenced or otherwise subjugated.