The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa

This paper focuses on one central trope of Edward Said's work—exile. Exile looms large in Said's personal, professional, and political life as an existential and epistemological condition, as a spatial and temporal state of being, belonging, and becoming, and in its material and metaphorical contexts. Said spent a large part of his early exiled life in Africa, in Egypt, and Egypt remained an important place where he would frequently return and the Egyptian academic and popular media provided a critical platform for his impassioned performances as Palestine's and the Arab world's leading public intellectual. Exile has also been the fate, welcome to some and unwelcome to many others, of numerous African intellectuals. Said's experiences and reflections on exile illuminate the exilic condition of the postcolonial world and offer us an opportunity to reflect on the dynamics and implications of African literary exile.