Chapter 12 - Edward Said and Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures

Summary

Edward Said’s work is central to the study and theorization of resistance in colonial and postcolonial literatures. Although Orientalism (1978) ignored resistance, Said’s many writings on Palestine, Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994) provide many of the parameters for the fields of postcolonial literary and cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Culture and Imperialism offers several concepts that were to become central to resistance in postcolonial studies, but it also responds to work being done by Mary Louise Pratt, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Harlow and others. This chapter focuses on works originally written in English, thus bypassing the Négritude movement and the Bengali Renaissance, although Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) (Les Damnés de la Terre [1961]) will be discussed because Fanon’s critique of Western colonialism is central to Culture and Imperialism and to the works of one of the most important postcolonial resistance writers, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1969), although first published in Arabic, will also feature because of its relation to Said’s arguments about resistance in Culture and Imperialism.