Edward Said, the radical humanist in the roots of post-colonial thought

In an era characterized by the fragmentation of social bonds and widespread suspicion of the political class, the issue of the meaning of "coexistence" imposes itself urgently. Racism, identity tensions, and memories of colonization still continue to influence our societies. How do we respond to the current demands of social vision, the problem of recognition, and what place do we give to that unvanishing past? To think about "coexistence," there are fundamental issues that impose themselves: Who is the other? What place do we leave in our societies for alterity or difference? What representation do we build for the stranger, the migrant, and the person haunted by a culture other than our own? How do we think about the relationship with the other coming from our old colonies, who—through an racial perspective—may be woven into a caricatured image that makes harmony and accord with him impossible? Our globalized societies reveal a paradox: on one hand, our societies open up to diversity and allow in many cities the intertwining of cultures (variety of restaurants, exhibitions about different cultures...), but on the other hand, cultures reveal a form of identity insularity that confines citizens within false reductive representations of the other. The image of the Arab or Muslim person seems to be a new cause of our anxiety, a reason that attracts a flood of racist prejudgments and anti-Islamic attitudes. Edward Said describes how Western scholars and writers, since the eighteenth century, built the mythic and mysterious image of the East, the opposite of the enlightened reason of the Age of Enlightenment, which served to justify colonization. Orientalism allows us to see signs of European and Atlantic power and sovereignty over the East instead of an honest discourse about it. The deconstruction pioneered by Edward Said lifts the mask and reveals the power of the colonial language's distortion, where links between rhetoric and ideology are intertwined. The deconstruction that Said relied on shows us that what happened with European humanist tendencies was received in the colonies in a form of hypocrisy, linguistic duality, and distortion of reality.