Winter 1989
Volume 15, Number 2

Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors
Edward W. Said

I do not think that the anti-imperialist challenge represented by Fanon and Césaire or others like them has by any means been met; neither have we taken them seriously as models or representations of human effort in the contemporary world. In fact Fanon and Césaire - of course I speak of them as types - jab directly at the question of idenity and of identarian thought, that secret sharer of present anthropological reflection on "otherness" and "difference." What Fanon and Césaire required of their own partisans, even during the heat of struggle, was to abandon fixed ideas of settled identity and cultural authorized definition. Become different, they said, in order that your fate as colonized people can be different. I cannot say whether it is now possible for anthropology as anthropology to be different, that is, to forget itself and to become something else as a way of responding to the gauntlet thrown done by imperialism and its antagonists. Perhaps anthropology as we have known it can only continue on one side of the imperial divide, there to remain as a partner in domination and hegemony.

On the other hand, some of the recent anthropological efforts critically to reexamine the notion of culture top to bottom may be starting to tell a different story. If we no longer think of the relationship between cultures and their adherents as perfectly contiguous, totally synchronous, wholly correspondent, and if we think of cultures as permeable and, on the whole, defensive boundaries between polities, a more promising situation appears. Thus to see Others not as ontologically but as historically constituted would be to erode the exclusivist biases we so often ascribe to cultures, our own not least. Cultures may then be represented as zones of control or abandonment, of recollectin and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sharing, all taking place in the global history that is our element.¹ Exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms or, in John Berger's phrase, with other ways of telling. Whether such novel movements are more easily available only to exceptional visionary figures like Jean Genet or to engaged historians like Basil Davidson, who scandalously criss-cross and trangress the nationally constructed barriers, than to professional anthropologists is not for me to say. But what I want to say in any case is that the instigatory force of such examples is of startling relevance to all the humanities and social sciences as they continue to struggle with the formidable difficulties of empire.

1 See Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980), pp. 37-47.