Speaking the Truth to Power Introducing the 2021 Edward W. Said Days
P ro f . D r. M e n a M a r k H a n n a
“Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers,”1 Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political theorist writes in The Wretched of the Earth. It is a chilling sentiment, one written with annihilating concision. Those who no longer think for themselves and abdicate the responsibility of colonial struggle for the mythic and religious are more dangerous than those recognized as enemies or interlopers. Fanon is pressing forward: do not relinquish an inch of territory to the past but push the present to independence and equal justice. On top of this already substantial charge, Fanon pitches the struggle to be not only between the colonizer and the colonized, but also between the colonized and the colonized-cum-zombie, turning a binary power structure normally painted in brushstrokes of self and other into a multiplicated free-for-all of immanent threats. Edward W. Said, too, in his urgent delivery and tempered philosophical outlook, exhorts basic human justice for everyone. He finds the contours and arguments for this fundamental right litigated in the cultural products of the past, be they the pages of Victorian novels, the theories of French historiography, the scenes of Italian opera, or the philosophies of German metaphysics. One could make the mistake to presume that Said’s work regarding culture and power is historiographical. That is not the case. Though the era of high– 19th century imperialism is over, as Said points out in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism, the imperial past—as political, social, cultural, and psychic presence—is still very much with us. It has
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