Edward W. Said and William V. Spanos

Abstract

I came to know the work of Edward Said in the early 1970s, when I invited him to contribute an essay to the first issue boundary 2 on the question of the postmodern. He informed me that he was a Palestinian student at Mount Hermon Preparatory School during the time between 1951 and 1953 when I was teaching there, and that he, an alien Arab in a New England Puritan environment, admired me, a Greek-American, for my reputation as a rebel against the Mount Hermon Puritan work ethic. After that inaugural conversation, we became friends, a turn that led me to read his work avidly. It was the centrality of the exilic consciousness and the contrapuntal critical perspective that in-betweenness enabled that I found profoundly attractive: the impulse to put back into play the stories—the Palestinians’, for example—that the dominant Western truth discourse must repress to articulate its own commanding narrative.