A Man for All Seasons and Climes? Reading Edward Said from and for Our African Place

Arab intellectual, it is true also of the modern African intellectual. Arab and African, then, are affiliated in sharing a postcolonial condition of being at once "cursed" and "blessed" with a double vision—and in sharing also, as the essay comparatively demonstrates, the creative potentials of being so circumstanced. It has been Said's sustained ethico-political vision and mission, the essay concludes, to cultivate a planetary humanism out of his double disposition. And in working out this visionary humanism we find Said recurrently acknowledging a Pan-Africanist indebtedness.