Revisiting Edward Said: Culture vs Materiality (A study of his positionality Conflicts in Al-Ahram's articles)

Abstract

Keeping in view the distinct status of Edward Said in postcolonial discourse, the contexts of his intellectual endeavors reflect an unconscious or innocent indifference to material issues the post-colonial societies were immediately facing after the end of formal colonization. This research article seeks to understand the politics of discourse that Edward Said’s formative works and his Al-Ahram articles exhibit by deconstructing the texts to revisit his celebrated intellectual cum political status among the postcolonial cultural and academic intelligentsia during the previous century. Edward Said seems a significant cultural force behind the curtain who helped the socio-cultural identities of marginalized communities to attain their socio-political exterior in a discourse that was essentially a sovereign attempt to voice the marginalized people enjoying the territorial place only. He substantiated his intellectual position in Culture and Imperialism (1993) and cemented it with historiographic evidence from the text and tradition that constructed the cultural space only, for that matter; but when he started authoring articles for Al-Ahram (An Egyptian Newspaper), he foregrounded his positional interior that was conflicting with his own previously established positions. He shifted the material debate to cultural lifeways, societal experiences, and nativity, and in doing so he innocently facilitated capitalism in establishing the fruitless discourse of cultural politics. but when Edward Said started writing for Al-Ahram, he concentrated more on material issues than cultural debate, especially when he started emphasizing his concerns regarding the Palestine issue. This is what I understand as positionality conflicts. This article attempts to investigate Edward Said’s articles to unearth his determined ideological/political narratives constructing cultural discourse and later confrontation with space, place, culture, and identity, which turned out to be more material than mere ideological. In a way, Edward Said realized over time that his earlier works were not grounded which signified the cultural exterior only.