In democratic systems, a sacrificial lamb candidacy is an office seeker chosen by a party to contest an election even if there is little or no likelihood of success. Sacrificial lambs are chosen for a variety of reasons. In some cases, a party may put forward a sacrificial lamb to blunt the appeal of an opposition candidate who has an aspiration for higher office. Sacrifice candidates also can force r ival political parties to expend resources and therefore dilute their ability to support candidates in more closely contested elections. Sacrificial lambs may be put forward in an effort to give candidates experience and prepare them for future political campaigns. The sacrificial strategy further gives parties an ability to nominate candidates for office in an effort to attract voters from groups not normally aligned with that party or to launch attacks that might be considered too risky for a mainstream candidate. For instance, in 2004, the U.S. Republican Party nominated former diplomat and African American party member Alan Keys to oppose Barack Obama in the Illinois senatorial election, with the expectation that Keys could criticize Obama more sharply than other Republicans without provoking a backlash or prompting charges of racism. The Republican Party also hoped Keys would diminish Obama’s popularity ahead of an expected presidential run in 2008.

Edward Said

The radical literary views and persuasive style of the Palestinian American Edward W. Said (1935–2003) rapidly promoted him to one of the most prominent and influential cultural critics of the twentieth century. Said was born in Jerusalem and studied in Cairo, Egypt; Northfield Mount Her mon in Massachusetts (1953); Princeton (BA, 1957); and Harvard (MA, 1960; PhD 1964). His doctoral dissertation in English Literature was titled “The Letters and the Shorter Fiction of Joseph Conrad” and was published as Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography in 1966. Conrad would continue to figure prominently in Said’s later writings and had a resoundingly deep-seated effect on the development of his cultural philosophy.

Arguably, Said’s most provocative work was Orientalism (1979). In that seminal text, Said eloquently proved along literary lines how the West had structurally defined itself in terms of an occidental other (refers to the mirror image of the occident—i.e., the orient—that helps the occident know itself) through the domination, subordination, seduction, and subduction of the Middle East. Orientalism resulted in a spate of intense criticism and high praise for illuminating literary approaches to colonialism and postcolonial politics in the tradition of Tunisian novelist and sociologist Albert Memmi and French psychiatrist and revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon. Said widened and deepened their intellectual scope with his vast comprehension of social history, literary criticism, political theory, and cultural theory. Said addressed the many limitations of Orientalism later in his Culture and Imperialism (1993). One of these limitations involved the nature of indigenous resistance and the importance of the colonized natives’ interpretation of the colonizer.

Said was prophetic when he warned in 1986 that the excessive ultranationalist tendencies sweeping America would lead to a false sense of American invulnerability, a sense that indeed was shattered by the terrorist attacks against the United States in September 2001. He was caught between nominalism and realism. He was also a Palestinian, an Arab, and a Christian who was raised in a Muslim-dominant region but schooled in two conservative American universities. In Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981) he criticized the media-produced misconceptions about Islam. His The World, the Text, and the Critic (1986) illustrated the importance of critical distance and heteronormative formations of dominant cultures brought forth by Conrad and Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukács through the poststructuralism of Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, and French philosopher Michel Foucault’s postmodernism.

Throughout his life, Said’s scholarly publications, newspaper articles, and public interviews directly challenged predominant intellectual norms embedded in the political economy of the modern Western psyche. He influenced generations of young scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines across the world. As America’s strongest proponent for Palestine, he simultaneously criticized and exonerated the problematic leadership of the Palestinian cause. He spoke at more than one hundred universities and institutions and published ten single-authored books that included method in criticism and political activism. Among his many academic accolades and international prizes, he was given the Lionel Trilling Award in 1976 for Beginnings (1975) and an endowed chair at Columbia University.

Said’s deep sense of moral and political dislocation arose out of his upbringing, his preponderant brilliance, and his unfortunate and prolonged battle with sickness until death. His powerful influence over future generations of Old World critics and New World scholars represents an appropriate epitaph to the legacy of a great thinker and profound intellectual. He died on September 25, 2003, in New York City.

Bibliography:

Barsamian, David, ed. Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said. Cambridge, Mass.: South End, 2003.
Kennedy,Valerie. Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf/Vintage, 1994.
New York:Vintage, 1979.
Sprinker, Michael, ed. Edward Said: A Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.
Viswanathan, Gauri, ed. Power Politics and Culture. New York: Pantheon, 2001.

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