Identity In Edward Said's Essay

All throughout time people have been “the other.” Pratt refers to the other as being “Someone who is perceived by the dominant culture as not belonging, as they have been culturally constructed as fundamentally different in some way” (320). In Edward Said’s essay, the Palestinians are the other, and he is attempting to “engage the difficulty, to deny the habitually simple, even harmful representations of the Palestinians, and to replace them with something more capable of capturing the complex reality of their experience.” I interpret that when Said says ‘ harmful representations’ he is referring to western cultures representing all Palestinians as terrorists. He replaces this stereotypical representation by giving the reader an insight into the lives of everyday Palestinian refugees, and how Palestinians as a whole are misrepresented.
Said is a Palestinian, and his essay is an autoethnography. According to Pratt an autoethnography is “”a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of themselves in that engage with representations others have made of them.” (319) Said is describing what it’s like to be a Palestinian. He is also attempting to encourage the reader to not take their identity for granted. “Everything we write about ourselves, therefore, is an …show more content…
In Pratt’s essay “The Arts of the Contact Zone” she uses the word “Contact Zones” to refer “to social spaces where cultures of the dominant discourse and the “other” meet, clash, and grapple with each other.” (319) In the introduction Said sheds some light on the relationship between Palestine and the representative of Arab in the U.N, “Palestine to them was useful up to a point- for attacking Israel, for bewailing the settlement and expropriation of Arab land in occupied