Summary
Edward Said’s term, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), for the modern social bonds and forms of authority that replace traditional ‘filiative’ forms — which Anna Bernard stresses are, for Said, a substitution of one set of power relations for another, not a liberation from coercive identification (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.64, p.67-68).
Details
- Said’s list of affiliative forms: ‘guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture’ (1983, 20, quoted PDF p.64).
- ‘It should go without saying that this new affiliative structure and its systems of thought more or less directly reproduce the skeleton of family authority supposedly left behind when the family was left behind’ (1983, 22, quoted PDF p.64). Affiliation, in this formulation, is not the choice to side with the powerless, but an endorsement of the rule of the powerful (PDF p.64).
- Bernard applies the term to the young Said’s formation: his English name and schooling signalled his family’s affiliation with the colonizing power, as an Anglicized native elite in the waning years of the British empire and the start of American neo-imperial rule (PDF p.63-64), and the ‘reconciliation’ his family and schools offered him was acquiescence to the colonial order (PDF p.64-65).
- Said’s metaphorical Exile denotes, in Bernard’s reading, an alternative to affiliation understood as passive acquiescence to the social order (PDF p.67-68).
- Out of Place as National allegory seeks to undo the ‘natural,’ filiative relationship between the protagonist and the imagined community and replace it with the political goal of ending Palestinian statelessness (PDF p.56).