The Place of Servants in Edward Said’s Out of Place

Abstract

This article reflects on Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place, and the ways that in constructing a sense of the intellectual-in-exile it elides other affective shaping forces in his life, particularly that of the servants. That the most expressly emotional encounter offered in the text is placed in the preface and involves the Said family’s suffragi (butler), invites a reading that attends to the more fleeting signs of the presence of servants within the text itself. The article concludes by suggesting that tracing the elision of the servants enables a more complex, if less austere, representation of the intellectual.

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