And Just Who Is Reconstructed?

This is a very real dilemma for the gifted, intelligent young person. To adopt the intellectual and creative advantages offered by the colonizers, and become like the colonizer in the process, or to hold him/herself apart. Not easily solved. And never answered to the exclusion of continued questioning of self as well as others.

Benjamin Graves perceives Said as failing to recognize the privilege that his talents and position offer him, when he "perhaps overlooks the intellectual's responsibilities to the proletarian class in the struggle for decolonization." This is a question to which none of us, including Said, may have a definitive answer. And it is a question that reminds us that we must not cease to self-reflexive in our judgments.

In Bruce Robbins on Edward W. Said's "Voyage In" Benjamin Graves speaks of Said's suspicions of the power of the collectivity:

" In Culture & Imperialism, in the chapter entitled "Resistance and Opposition," Said critiques nationalist models (namely Fanon's) with an eye toward the way in which fetishized national solidarities can be just as constraining to a population's multiple, plural interests as colonial rule. "Nationality, nationalism, nativism: the progression is, I believe, more and more constraining" (277)."

Homi K. Bhabha: an Overview by Benjamin Graves '98, Brown University.

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