Said, Edward

Said, Edward 1935-2003

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edward Said is recognized as one of the most influential literary critics of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Said’s contributions to postcolonial and critical theory, the humanities, cultural studies, social geography, and the social sciences evade easy categorization given the startling breadth and range of his thought. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Theodor Adorno and a self-proclaimed admirer of Sigmund Freud, Said was among the first to introduce American academic audiences to structuralism, poststructuralism, and to a lesser extent deconstruction.

A critical scholar nevertheless deeply committed to humanism, Said was also a public intellectual known for his eloquent commitment to Palestinian self-determination. Born in Jerusalem, Said fled with his family to Cairo in 1948 and a few years later relocated to the United States. He studied at Princeton and then at Harvard, where he wrote a PhD dissertation on Joseph Conrad, then joined Columbia in 1963. Unexpectedly moved by the profound injustice of the dispossession of the Palestinians, with whom he increasingly identified as an exiled intellectual, he found the Six Days War of 1967 a politicizing moment and significant turning point in his life. Over the next several decades Said became a frequent commentator on U.S. foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics. He was a regular contributor to Al-Hayat (a London-based Arab daily) and Al-Ahram Weekly (an Egyptian daily) as well as serving as the music critic for the Nation.

Said is best known for his groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978). Widely acknowledged as a cornerstone text for postcolonial studies, this acclaimed work has also had profound influences on social geography, cultural studies, and radical history. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse, Said exposes Orientalism as a Western system of thought that is linked to imperialism and the establishment of cultural hegemony and is an essentializing discourse that effectively produces the “Orient” as the West’s “other.” Orientalism observes the West observing the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam, and two further volumes in the triology, The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), sustain this focus. In the trilogy’s 1993 sequel, Culture and Imperialism, Said expands these insights to explore a more generalized relationship between cultural production and empire. In the latter text he draws on European writing (and one musical piece, Verdi’s Aida ) on Africa, India, the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean to show how an imperialist imagination is embedded in cultural production and how cultures of resistance to imperialism emerge in a context of decolonization.

The Question of Palestine (1979) was Said’s first major text on Palestine, and in it he endeavors to establish a broadly representative Palestinian perspective for a Western, and primarily an American, audience. This particular text documents the historical and political dispossession and erasure of the Palestinians by Zionist colonization and thus differs distinctly from Orientalism, which drew mainly on literary texts. However, in method Said effectively demonstrates that a hegemonic cultural attitude toward Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient is what makes the ongoing colonial violence against the Palestinians a possibility. Thus the “Palestinian problem” is a materialized effect of Orientalism. Covering Islam proceeds similarly but with a focus on the Western media’s role in representing, and imagining, Islam. Other books on Palestine include The Politics of Dispossession (1994), After the Last Sky (1986), Blaming the Victims (1988), and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

Said’s wide-ranging and often controversial thought is rooted in literary theory. His dissertation on Joseph Conrad’s letters was influenced by the Geneva school, a vein of literary criticism rooted in the phenomenological thought of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and became his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966). For Said, Conrad’s letters revealed the uncertainty, difficulty, and reflexive struggle of a self-exiled Pole, an articulate writer who was nevertheless disoriented and not quite sure of his place in the world. An interest in the condition of the exiled writer, a theme that continues through his life’s work, is palpably present in this first book.

Said’s second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), began to establish his reputation as one of America’s foremost literary critics, as the text drew on contemporary French theory in its concerns to shift from theological “origins” to the problem of a secular “beginning” point for critical theory, where human action makes history, and a history of change. The text explores the relation of literature to philosophy, psychology, and critical theory through an engagement with the writings of Freud, Foucault, Freidrich Nietzsche, and Vico as well as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) is an early “bridging” text of Said’s thought. This integrative and synthetic work is interested in the material contexts—the “worldliness”—of writing. Increasingly impatient with an academic domestication of poststructuralist and deconstructive theories of textuality, Said argues that critical scholarship must be situated in material struggles so that the critic does not lose sight of the political context in which intellectual pursuits become possible. The text is an early critique of the narrow confines of academic disciplinarity, which Said argues is implicated in a tamed specialization of intellectual inquiry. His deep commitments to humanism are evident in this text, and he returns again to these themes in a series of lectures given at Columbia University, posthumously published under the title Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). In this text Said reflects on the tensions between humanist, structuralist, and poststructuralist modes, and he suggests that although humanism is critiqued as essentializing and totalizing, a commitment to the humanistic ideals of justice and equality are nevertheless crucial for a critical scholar. Throughout his vast and disparate body of work, Said maintains a critical posture within humanism, a “contrapuntal” awareness perhaps made possible by the condition of being an exilic, border intellectual.

A talented pianist, Said also wrote extensively on music’s relation to society, and his critical writings often draw on musical metaphors. Musical Elaborations (1991), Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), and the posthumously published On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2006) exemplify his significant contributions to this interdisciplinary area of humanistic study. In 2003 Said died in New York after a decade-long battle with leukemia.

SEE ALSO Fanon, Frantz; Foucault, Michel; Freud, Sigmund; Gramsci, Antonio; Humanism; Justice; Lucas Critique; Music; Orientalism; Palestinians; Postcolonialism; Self-Determination

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ali, Tariq. 2006. Conversations with Edward Said. Oxford: Seagull Books.

Ashcroft, Bill, and Pal Ahluwalia. 1999. Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity. London and New York: Routledge.

Bayoumi, Moustafa, and Andrew Rubin, eds. 2000. The Edward Said Reader. New York: Vintage.

Bhabha, Homi, and W. J. T. Mitchell. 2005. Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hussein, Abdirahman A. 2002. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. London and New York: Verso.

Sprinkler, Michael, ed. 1992. Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Melissa Autumn White