Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World

Ranjan Ghosh

It was as part of a long-standing concern to situate ‘critical consciousness’ within the frameworks of interdisciplinary concerns—negotiations around ‘interconnectedness’—that this book saw its fi rst pillar erected; it gained in size to explore how Said inspires us to ‘think’ and to make thinking an ‘act’ that always struggles to remain aberrative, autonomous and audacious. In the years following its genesis, the book evolved in different ways by inter-rogating Said the critical ‘intellectual’, although this was something he, himself, experienced during his life. In being prepared to question Said’s ‘scrupulous subjectivity’, it also explored the legitimacy of the controver-sies surrounding him, the ambiguities which, I felt, required fi rm strate-gies of intervention. In its current form, the book works around a web of consciousness that urges keenness of interrogation and, at the same time, ambushes the preserve of the consensus-builders; it brings before us Said as an ambivalent provocateur of ‘authority’, leading a life that is archetypical of the intellectual.