The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

The truism that postcolonial critics have mainly applied their theoretical animadversions in areas outside the Middle East (whereas that was the region in which Edward Said arguably laid the foundations of postcolonialism in Orientalism) is part of the raison d’etre of this collection of twenty-four chapters. It is voiced in the Introduction and followed through in chapters on Said himself and various ones on Arabic and Arab Anglophone literature and Middle Eastern contexts where debates over (mainly western) hegemonic values and violence gave or give rise to political and cultural contestation. In the introductory section (ch. 2), Karim Mattar reviews the balance of Said’s contribution to postcolonial studies by listing a who’s who? of postcolonial scholars who have been ‘well served’ in following Said’s discussion on the Israel/ Palestine conflict (p. 38). Waïl Hassan’s excellently thought through exposition on ‘Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature,’ (ch. 3) attempts to rescue postcolonial studies from the charge of being outmoded and irrelevant to the conditions of the twenty-first century, to re-invigorate postcolonial theory and recover it from its obsessions with ‘the political imperatives of decolonization and independence’ (p. 50) of a by-gone era. The section ends with interviews with Ahdaf Soueif and Sinan Antoon.