Richard Wright

intellectual exile

Hazel Rowley

pp. 302-312

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

The public intellectual, according to Edward Said, is an "outsider", a "disturber of the status quo",¹ 'someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma… 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."²