The Subject in Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories

Abstract

This chapter dwells principally on the resistant nature of colonized subjectivity, which Edward Said leaves partially unanalyzed in Orientalism. There was a general tendency among some critics like Aijaz Ahmad to portray Said’s critique of Orientalism as a discourse that does not take into account the political agency of the colonized subject.¹ But it should be considered that the immediate aim of Orientalism, as Bart Moore-Gilbert rightly points out, was “to expose the degree to which Western systems of knowledge and representation have been involved in the long history of the West’s material and political subordination of the non-Western world” (38). The focus of this chapter is therefore on Said’s subsequent work, Imperialism, which addresses the question of resistance more elaborately. As the question of resistant subjectivity is connected to the question of nationalism, the problematic interrelation between them is also discussedin the last section of the chapter.