Continental · 1935–2003
Edward Said
Palestinian-American literary critic at Columbia University
Said argued that Western scholarship, art and policy created “the Orient” as an exotic, inferior Other, a body of knowledge that served imperial power and still shapes how the Middle East is seen.
Life and thought
Edward Said (1935–2003) was born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate to a Palestinian Christian family, grew up mostly in Cairo and was sent to boarding school in the United States. He studied at Princeton and Harvard and taught comparative literature at Columbia University for four decades. He was also a leading advocate of Palestinian rights, a member of the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991, and a gifted pianist who co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim.
Orientalism argued that Western scholars, novelists and officials did not simply describe “the Orient” but constructed it: as exotic, irrational, unchanging and in need of Western rule. Drawing on Foucault’s idea that knowledge and power are entwined, Said showed how this discourse, from Napoleon’s scholars in Egypt to modern area studies, made empire seem natural. Culture and Imperialism read Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad alongside the colonies their worlds depended on. The book helped found postcolonial studies; critics still debate how far its picture of a single Orientalism holds.