Mishra & Ali
pm: Not very well. These kinds of intellectual genealogies are very
superficial—sound bites, essentially. The important work of Edward
Said—the examination and overcoming of degraded and degrading
representations of the non-West—is being carried on by many writ-
ers, and it is far from finished. It has suffered serious setbacks in the
post–9/11 era, which has seen an exponential rise in bigoted ideas, so
we need many more people with his intellectual capacity and moral
courage to challenge mainstream prejudices. It is also true that Said
represented only one side of the great work undertaken by writers and
scholars from the non-Western world; there are many Western and
non-Western intellectual traditions and figures I feel much closer to.
And one has to ask why the Anglo-American press feels compelled
to make such comparisons. It has been indifferent to, if not contemp-
tuous of, the experiences and perspectives of non-white peoples and
invests too much in token gestures to diversity, anointing this or that
writer—Rushdie yesterday, Coates and Chimamanda Adichie today,
someone else tomorrow—as the representative of a nation, race, and
religion. Individual writers must reject such a dubious honor—the burden
of singularity—and insist on the great variety and complexity of the
experience that their white audience wants them to simplistically embody.