Said, Edward (1935—2003)
Palestinian literary and cultural critic. One of the founding figures of Postcolonial Studies. An accomplished pianist, Said also wrote extensively on music. Outside the academy, Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) from 1977 until 1991 (for which the FBI opened a file on him and kept him under surveillance). In his 1993 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio, later published as Representations of the Exile (1994), Said described himself as an exile, permanently displaced from his home, his homeland, and his language. This sense of displacement was doubled, he said, by the fact that he belonged to a people who were themselves dispossessed and displaced. In his memoir Out of Place (1999), written between treatments for the leukaemia that would claim his life at the early age of 67, Said makes clear the extent to which his complicated origins as a Palestinian are central to his thinking as a literary and cultural critic. Said was born in Jerusalem, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His family was solidly middle-class, and at that time actually lived in Cairo. His father was a businessman with American citizenship and his mother a Nazarene Christian. Although primarily based in Cairo, the family maintained a home in Talbiyah in West Jerusalem until 1947, and Said lived ‘between worlds’. Talbiyah was incorporated into the State of Israel following the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. In 1951 Said was sent to boarding school in the US. Thereafter he completed a BA and MA at Princeton, followed by a PhD on Joseph Conrad at Harvard, which was published in 1966 as Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. A year before he completed his PhD, he was appointed to a position in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his life. Although Said’s training as a literary critic was firmly New Criticism---he frequently acknowledges the influence of R.P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling---he was among the first generation of US scholars to embrace critical theory. His main theoretical interlocutors were Adorno, Theodor (particularly with respect to music), Barthes, Roland, Derrida, Jacques, Gramsci, Antonio, and Foucault, Michel. This is reflected in Said’s second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), which established him as part of the new wave of literary critics (e.g. de Man, Paul, Miller, J. Hillis, and Spivak, Gayatri) who advanced beyond, without necessarily leaving behind, the established critical practice of ‘close reading’, and became known as practitioners of theory. Said critiques Derrida and Foucault, in particular, for being insufficiently worldly, which is to say too focused on purely textual concerns and not attentive enough to underpinning historical dynamics. Beginnings was in many respects a transitional work for Said, for it was not until his third book, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), that he really found his true métier and with it worldwide fame as one of the originators of postcolonial theory. Orientalism, as Said conceives it, is almost the complete opposite of the traditional meaning of the term. In the strictest sense, Orientalism simply means any study of or fascination with the Orient, which roughly speaking encompasses North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the northern tip of India. Said’s argument is that Orientalism’s study of the Orient conceives it as a monolithic, undifferentiated region; but, more problematically, its conception of the Orient is utterly phantasmal. As he points out, many of the most famous Orientalist scholars never travelled to the Orient, and those who did arrived and departed with all their preconceptions and prejudices intact. He argued that this cultural blindness is an artefact of the discrepant power between the Orientalists (largely from European nations) and the Orient (largely under the rule of European colonial powers). Unsurprisingly, this thesis has its critics (notably Gellner, Ernest, Bernard Lewis, and Aijaz Ahmad), and it even divides opinion among those who basically support it. Nonetheless, as a way of thinking about the relation between culture and power, it has been enormously influential. Culture and Imperialism (1993) furnishes the sequel to Orientalism, extending its claims to literatures the other work did not consider. In the years following the publication of Orientalism, Said immersed himself in Palestinian politics and wrote a series of articles and books describing the situation of the Palestinian people and decrying the politics that had put them in that situation: The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine how We See the Rest of the World (1981), and an edited collection entitled Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988). Said favoured a two-state solution and he resigned from the PNC in 1991 when it became clear in the lead up to the Oslo Accords that this was not on the agenda. After 1991, he wrote several more books on Palestine, including The Politics of Dispossession (1994), Peace and its Discontents (1996), and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2003). The last decade of Said’s life was amazingly productive. Acutely aware of his limited time, Said granted several book-length interviews in this period which offer terrific insights into his life and work. He also devoted time to his other great passion, music. He wrote a column for The Nation (a selection of these pieces has been published as Music at the Limits (2007), and gave the Wellek Library lectures on this topic as well, published as Musical Elaborations (1991). More concretely, he collaborated with Daniel Barenboim to create the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which attempted to bridge the Israel/Palestine divide by means of cultural cooperation. It remains an important legacy of his work, as the orchestra continues to play and continues to defy Israeli authorities by performing in the West Bank. His last, unfinished, book fittingly enough, was On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2006). ‘Late style’ is Said’s term for the aesthetic that develops when an artist knows they have made it career-wise, that their reputation is secure, and that they can relax enough to permit themselves to experiment. Further Reading: B. Ashcroft Edward Said (2001). H. Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (eds.) Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (2005). A. Hussein Edward Said: Criticism and Society (2004). B. Moore-Gilbert Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997). I. Warraq Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (2007).