ABSTRACT
Just as identity must be constructed, so Edward Said must construct himself as a victim in order to make ‘the journey in’. The Palestinian ‘victim’, who resides in the metropolis as a prominent and celebrated intellectual, embodies in his own worldliness the very paradox of hybridity, development and will that complicates post-colonial cultural identity. Never theless, though Said’s marginality must be constructed as a feature of his own journey, it would be wrong to see this as somehow duplicitous or purely invented. The sense of loss is both deep and unremitting, but it is a sense of loss from which empowerment emerges. We find time and again in Said’s work, as in his life, that the sense of loss of the exile
produces the empowering distance of the public intellectual; dislocation sharpens and detaches the critical voice.
