ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace for intellectuals to claim the margins as a site of resistance. For the African-American feminist critic bell hooks, ‘[understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for [all] oppressed, exploited, [and] colonized people’ (hooks 1990:342); while for the US/Palestinian cultural critic Edward Said, marginality is at once the blessing and the curse of a global intellectual cadre, whose (self-) exclusion from the cultural mainstream is the condition of using ‘a language that tries to speak the truth to power’ (Said 1994:xvi). To think at, and from, the margins is to challenge the authority of the mainstream, a mainstream usually defined in some combination of white, male, heterosexual, middle class. Counterhegemonic thought arguably constitutes the new academic orthodoxy, as different interest groups fight it out for the right to make the margins their own. The spectacle ofmostly privileged-academics claiming marginal status can at times be unedifying, particularly when their infighting seems so often to be far removed from the realities of social struggle. Marginality is no mere abstraction of course, nor is it to be found only outside the academy. But the cachet that the category brings indicates something other than a social burden-it suggests that ‘resistance’ itself has become a valuable intellectual commodity.
