Edward Said's Concept of Exile

The author, a research associate at the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, has produced a richly conceived debut academic monograph which, as its title indicates, explores the concept of exile, first of all in the writing of American Palestinian critic and academic Edward Said, and also in the work of five other Arab intellectuals. These comprise four Egyptians: novelist and Nobel Prize winner for Literature Naguib Mahfouz; filmmaker Youssef Chahine; feminist activist and writer Nawal El Saadawi; and academic and feminist thinker Leila Ahmed. Said’s fellow Palestinian, the poet Mahmoud Darwish, completes the quintet. This somewhat disparate group is assembled on account of the ‘exilic properties’ discerned in their lives and their work’s ‘exemplification of Said’s intellectual endeavour’. The book, which is divided into an introduction and five chapters: ‘Exile and Intellectual Practice’, ‘Middle Eastern Artists as Exilic Intellectuals’, ‘Exile as Resistance’, ....