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