Edward Said.
A target and warrior of the culture wars.
The following originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars: Issues, Voices, and Viewpoints (First Edition), published December 15, 2009.
Edward Wadie Said was an influential and controversial Palestinian-American literary theorist and critic whose life was as much an object of dispute as his scholarship and his pro-Palestinian politics. Of his twenty-three books, his best known is Orientalism (1978), a critical attack on the Eurocentric attitudes found in Western scholarship, art, education, and policymaking as well as the West’s perspective of the Orient as the “Other”—the binary opposite of the West.
Said was born on 1 November 1935 in Jerusalem to affluent Christian parents. For several years he lived and attended school in both Cairo and Jerusalem until the 1948 Arab-Israeli War made refuges of his extended family. He later moved to the United States and earned degrees from Princeton (B.A., 1957) and Harvard (M.A., 1960; Ph.D., 1964) and became a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University (1963-2003).
In 1999 Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, challenged the details of Said’s biography. Weiner argued that Said’s family never lived in Jerusalem, that he never studied there, and that the 1948 Arab-Israeli War could not, therefore, have rendered Said’s family refuges. But Said and numerous defenders vigorously refuted those accusations.
But it is for Orientalism that Said is best known. Said defines “Orientalism” as the intellectual and editorial means by which scholars, imaginative writers, and political officials have defined, restructured, and dominated the East while obfuscating the inherent and universal humanity present therein. Orientalists define the Islamic World and Asia as static, backward, tyrannical, incapable of reform, and empirically inferior—racially and culturally—to the more advanced West. Said blames colonization and its associated modes of thought for encouraging this uneven comparison, explaining Orientalism in terms of binary opposition and a pervasive post-Napoleonic’s state of colonial inequality. Said proposes that the only honest portrayal of the non-European world is one that emphasizes humanity and individuality without relying on generalization and categorization to define one population in terms of the other.
Said did not confine his criticism to historical texts but also attacked contemporary scholars. The public exchange between Said and Bernard Lewis, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, debated the merits of Orientalism in numerous academic journals. Indeed, a din of criticism continues to attack Said’s thesis as a profoundly flawed account of Western scholarship while Said’s supporters continue to contend that Western scholars remain so heavily influenced by Orientalist tradition that they are unable to present a fair and clear image of their subjects.
Said was also a passionate supporter of Palestinian statehood and served as an independent member of the Palestinian National Council until Yasser Arafat threw the Palestinian Authority’s support behind Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. After that, he became an increasingly vocal critic of Arafat’s leadership. Since 1971 Said was under FBI surveillance. Shortly after his death to leukemia on 25 September 2003, Columbia University established the Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies.
See also: Domestic Surveillance; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Israel; Lewis, Bernard; Multiculturalism; Muslim Americans; Othering; Saudi Arabia; September 11.
Bibliography.
Bernstein, Richard. “Edward Said, Leading Advocate of Palestinians, Dies at 67.” New York Times, 26 September 2003.
Price, David. “How the FBI Spied on Edward Said.” CounterPunch, 13 January 2006. www.counterpunch.org.
Said, Edward. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Singh, Amritjit. Interviews With Edward W. Said. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Weiner, Justus Reid. “‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said.” Commentary Magazine, September 1999.
Williams, Patrick, ed. Edward Said, 4 vols. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
