[For those academics whose right to travel has been suspended temporarily by the authorities. You know that you are far more worthy of respect than the ones with self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation. o.e.]
(…)
It comes to two
images for inhabiting the academic and cultural space provided by school and
university. On the one hand, we can be there in order to reign and hold sway. (…)
your legitimacy is that this is your domain, which you can describe with
authority as principally Western, or African or Islamic, or American, or on and
on. The other model is more mobile, more
playful, although no less serious. The image
of traveler depends not on power but on motion,
on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and
understand a variety of disguises, masks, and rhetorics. Travelers must suspend
the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. Most
of all (…) the traveler crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed
positions, all the time. To do this with dedication and love as well as a
realistic sense of the terrain is, I believe, a kind of academic freedom at its
highest, since one of its main features is that you can leave authority and
dogma to the potentate. You will have other things to think about and enjoy
than yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive,
far more worthy of study and respect than self-adulation and uncritical self-appreciation.
To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge
and freedom. (404)
Edward Said's
"Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler."
in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward W. Said, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000. ISBN: 0-674-00302-0 at p. 372-404.
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