Editor's Comments

The present special issue of Research in African Literatures devoted to Edward Said is the result of a RAL editorial board decision taken in late 2003, shortly after Said's death, to pay tribute to his memory and work. Although his actual critical engagement with African literature is slight, reducible at best to a few scattered, though insightful, comments on such writers as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Tayeb Salih, or Senghor, some of the theoretical notions under which he subsumes such comments—nativism and cosmopolitan hybridity, social as opposed to national consciousness, othering and self-representation, discrepant experiences and overlapping histories, and the "postimperial intellectual attitude"—are all of urgent intellectual, ethical, and political relevance to African literary and cultural studies. But how, precisely, have Said's notions and insights, his analytical categories, and his strategy of "contrapuntal reading" impacted the study of concrete African literary and cultural objects? What is their interpretive value or lack thereof, in the context of African literary and cultural studies? And finally, what is the influence of his method, especially in Orientalism, on the work of such African scholars as Yves-Valentin Mudimbe, in particular the latter's The Invention of Africa? These are some of the questions that are addressed in the first four articles of this issue. The remaining contributions examine a range of key general and theoretical issues central to Said's work, including his reading of Foucault and Freud, his representation of the intellectual, and the reception of his Orientalism.

RAL wishes to thank the contributors to this volume for responding positively to its invitation, and hopes that the debate will be joined—not on Said and postcolonial theory and criticism in general (there is no shortage of material on this), but on his specific legacy to African literary and cultural criticism.