The Sight from Heterotopia: Edward W. Said and the Possibility of Criticism

Abstract

  Abdul R. JanMohamed, an American critic who founded the postcolonial journal Cultural Critique, characterizes Edward W. Said as one of the specular border intellectual and points out that the site of this subject in the present postcolonial world is one mode of what Michel Foucault called “heterotopia,” that is to say, the “counter-site” in which all other real sites that can be found within a culture “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”

  In this paper, taking this conception of JanMohamed on the heterotopian subject as a pilot lamp, the itinerary of Said’s critical intervention to his surrounding socio-political and cultural environments will be retraced, hoping that this specular border intellectual’s sight from heterotopia might newly open out the possibility of criticism in the present days.