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Portrait of Edward Said

Philosophy

Edward Said

1935–2003 · Palestinian-American

Postcolonial theory; literary and cultural criticism

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic who founded postcolonial studies with Orientalism (1978), a book arguing that Western scholarship invented "the Orient" as a backward opposite against which Europe could define itself, and that this knowledge was never separable from the power to rule. He spent his career at Columbia, was the best-known advocate for Palestinian rights in the United States, delivered the 1993 Reith Lectures, and founded a youth orchestra of Arab and Israeli musicians with the conductor Daniel Barenboim.

How to spot them

  • ▸Orientalism (1978) and the founding of postcolonial studies
  • ▸'Contrapuntal reading' — reading the empire back into the European novel
  • ▸University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia for four decades
  • ▸Member of the Palestinian National Council; a fierce critic of the Oslo Accords
  • ▸A trained pianist and music critic for The Nation; co-founder of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra

Key works

A 1978 book arguing that a whole scholarly tradition invented the East as the West's backward opposite, and that such knowledge was inseparable from the power to govern it (1978)

Orientalism — the founding text of postcolonial studies, and one of the most cited humanities books ever written.

A 1993 sequel tracing empire through the European novel, including a famous reading of the offstage Caribbean sugar estate that pays for a Regency country house (1993)

Culture and Imperialism — the estate is Sir Thomas Bertram's Antigua plantation in Mansfield Park.

The 1993 BBC Reith Lectures, on the intellectual as amateur, exile and outsider whose job is to speak truth to power (1993)

Representations of the Intellectual — broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in 1994.

A 1999 memoir of a Cairo and Palestinian boyhood by a child given an English first name and an Arabic surname, at home in neither (1999)

Out of Place: A Memoir — written after his leukaemia diagnosis.

A 1979 book putting a dispossessed people's national claims to an American readership for the first time in mainstream publishing (1979)

The Question of Palestine.

A youth orchestra founded in 1999 with an Argentine-Israeli conductor, taking its name from a Goethe poetry collection and made up in equal parts of Israeli and Arab musicians (1999)

The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, co-founded with Daniel Barenboim; first workshops in Weimar.

A 1981 study of how American news coverage of one religion works as a form of manufactured expertise (1981)

Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World.

Key ideas

  • Orientalism: a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the East — a discourse, not just a set of prejudices
  • Knowledge and power are entangled: philology, travel writing, painting and colonial administration formed one system
  • The 'imaginative geography' by which a culture draws a line between 'our land' and 'the land of the barbarians'
  • Contrapuntal reading: reading a metropolitan text and the colonial history that sustains it as two lines of the same music
  • 'Worldliness': texts are events in the world, tied to institutions and circumstances, not free-floating
  • The intellectual should be an amateur and an exile, refusing the comforts of expertise and national loyalty

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Jerusalem in 1935 and raised largely in Cairo; educated at Victoria College there, then in the United States
  • •Took his BA at Princeton and his PhD at Harvard; his first book (1966) was on Joseph Conrad
  • •Was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
  • •Orientalism draws on Michel Foucault's idea of discourse and Antonio Gramsci's hegemony
  • •Sat on the Palestinian National Council from 1977 but broke with Yasser Arafat over the 1993 Oslo Accords, which he called 'a Palestinian Versailles'
  • •His 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC were titled 'Representation of the Intellectual'
  • •A photograph of him throwing a stone across the Lebanese border in 2000 caused a long controversy
  • •Co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim in 1999; it is named after a collection of poems by Goethe
  • •Died in New York in September 2003 after a long illness with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia

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Sources