Mu'tah Lil-Buhuth wad-Dirasat, Humanities and Social Sciences Series, Vol. 30, No.4, 2015 9   Postmodernism and Subjectivity Reconstructed in Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir Rabab Taha Al-Kassasbeh*

 Abstract:

This paper studies the connection between the textual politics of ethnic autobiography and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). It explores the complexities of the relationship between the dominating western discourses of identity and constructing subjectivity. This paper shows that Said is rewriting the diasporic model of subjectivity as a position of difference, by doing so he challenges both the traditional prevailing notion of a coherent universal transcendental subject, and the essentialist concepts of the other. It also examines the way in which Out of Place as a postmodern autobiography provides insights into the contemporary dilemmas about the limits of an autobiographical discourse attempting to speak in the name of truth and yet of difference.