Eid & Ghazal: Edward Said: Agent Provocateur. 111 Edward Said: Agent Provocateur.

And this role [the intellectual’s] has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them) to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p9 Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism, (not as a modification but as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, p29 One of the most acclaimed writers in the latter part of the last century, Edward Said, who had a distinctive, irreverent approach to literature and criticism—not to mention politics--propounds a re-invention of reading against the grain. Disaffiliating from almost all orthodox literary traditions, this homme de lettres is an authentic epitome of an intellectual in opposition. In this paper, we subscribe to the premise of Edward Said as a figure of dissent. Far from claiming comprehensiveness, our task here is to critically trace some of the ideas conducive to Edward Said being the oppositional intellectual, the agent provocateur in postcolonial literary theory and practice, of which he is an indisputable progenitor. Our concern will be, in the main, focused on Orientalism (1978) as a discursive strategy that manufactures, and hence (mis)represents the Oriental Other; the complicity of culture in European imperialism; ‘contrapuntal reading ’ as a ‘counter-narrative’; the interrelation between ‘affiliation ’ and ‘worldliness ’ and ‘ secular criticism ’ being a strategy of intellectual interference