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Edward Said

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Full name	Edward Saïd
School/tradition	Postcolonialism, Postmodernism
Notable ideas	Orientalism "The Other"
Influenced by Derrida, Vico, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Gramsci, Adorno, Conrad, Blackmur, Williams, Foucault, Chomsky.
Influenced Hamid Dabashi, Homi K. Bhabha, John Esposito, Gayatri Spivak, Robert Fisk, Mahmood Mamdani, Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, Nigel Gibson.

Edward Wadie Saïd MRSL (Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد‎, transliteration: Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist, political activist, intellectual warrior, cultural critic, and an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He was a founding figure in postcolonial theory^[1] and during his lifetime was referred to as Palestine's "most powerful political voice."^[2]

Contents 1 Life 2 Orientalism 2.1 Main argument 2.2 Criticism 2.2.1 Debates with Bernard Lewis 2.3 Supporters and influence 3 Criticism of US foreign policy 4 Pro-Palestinian activism 4.1 Claims about Said's early life 5 Publications 6 Interviews 7 See also 8 Notes 9 External links 9.1 Critical

[edit] Life

Said was born in Jerusalem^[3] (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father was a US citizen with Protestant Palestinian origins who had moved to Cairo in the decade before Edward's birth. His father was a businessman and had served under General Pershing in World War I, while his mother was born in Nazareth, also of Protestant^[4] Christian Palestinian descent.^[5] His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan.

Said referred to himself as a "Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture". He experienced a crisis of identity growing up and was quoted as saying that:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.^[6]

According to his autobiographical memoir, Out of Place,^[6] Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until age 12. He has stated that he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy in 1947 in Jerusalem, although records conflict about whether or not this was the case, and indicate Said and his family may have been most closely connected to an affluent area of Cairo.^[7] As the Arab League states declared war on Israel in 1947/1948, his family moved from the neighborhood of Talbiya in Jerusalem and returned to Cairo. Said has given a number of histories for his early years^[8], including:

I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schools designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to go to the United States was Victoria College in Alexandria, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading businessmen, as well as such glamorous figures as Michel Shalhoub, head prefect of the school and chief tormentor when I was a relatively junior boy, whom everyone has seen on screen as Omar Sharif.^[6]

In 1951, Said was expelled from Victoria College for being a "troublemaker",^[6] and was consequently sent by his parents to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year of feeling "out of place".^[6] Said later reflected that the decision to send him so far away was heavily influenced by 'the prospects of deracinated people like us being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible'.^[6] Despite this dissonance, Said did well at the Massachusetts boarding school often 'achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of about a hundred and sixty'.^[6]

Said earned an Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude (1957) from Princeton University and an Master of Arts (1960) and a Ph.D. (1964) from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as Professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. In 1977, Said became the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992, he attained the rank of University Professor, Columbia's most prestigious academic position. Professor Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale University. He was fluent in English, French, and Arabic.^[9] In 1999, after his earlier election to second vice president and following its succession policy, Said served as president of the Modern Language Association.

Said was bestowed with numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice received Columbia's Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. In 1999, he was the first to receive the prestigious Spinoza Lens [1], a bi-annual prize for ethics in The Netherlands. His autobiographical memoir Out of Place won the 1999 New Yorker Prize for non-fiction. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society.^[10]

Said's writing regularly appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. He gave interviews alongside his good friend, fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky regarding US foreign policy for various independent radio programs.

Said also wrote a music criticism column for The Nation magazine for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim. The orchestra is made up of musicians from Israel, Palestine, and the surrounding Arab countries.

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.^[11]

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor.^[12]

[edit] Orientalism

Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."^[13] He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and the US' colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

In 1980, Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:

“	So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.	”

[edit] Main argument

Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,^[15] Anouar Abdel-Malek,^[16] Maxime Rodinson,^[17] and Richard William Southern,^[18] Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term that he transformed into a pejorative):

“	I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact – and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.	”
—Orientalism 11

Said argued that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years, since the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus. Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that even most Western scholars could not recognize. His contention was not only that the West has conquered the East politically but also that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.

Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up. In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia. After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.

[edit] Criticism

Orientalism and other works by Said have sparked notable controversy in the academic community, with criticism ranging from details of his argument, to the contention that he "got it exactly wrong", i.e. Orientalists were overwhelmingly sympathetic to Islam, and helpful to its causes.^[19]

Ernest Gellner^[20] argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, noting that until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe. Mark Proudman notes that Said had claimed the British empire extended from Egypt to India in the 1880s, when in fact the Ottoman and Persian empires intervened.^[21] Others pointed out that even at the height of the imperial era, European power in the East was never absolute, and remained heavily dependent on local collaborators, who were frequently subversive of imperial aims.^[22] Another criticism is that the areas of the Middle East on which Said had concentrated, including Palestine and Egypt, were poor examples for his theory, as they came under direct European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia, because Said was more interested in making political points about the Middle East.^[23]

Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism has come from academic Orientalists, including some of Eastern backgrounds. Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya address what Keddie retrospectively calls "some unfortunate consequences" of Said's Orientalism on the perception and status of their scholarship.^[24] Lewis is among scholars whose work Said questioned in Orientalism and subsequent works. The two authors came to often exchange disagreement, starting in the pages of the New York Review of Books following the publication of Orientalism. Lewis's article "The Question of Orientalism" was followed in the next issue by "Orientalism: An Exchange". Other scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, also regarded Orientalism as a deeply flawed account of Western scholarship.^[25]

Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never travelled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who briefly toured Egypt), Ernest Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic. According to these critics, their common European origins and attitudes overrode such considerations In Said's mind; Said constructed a stereotype of Europeans.^[26] Irwin says that Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by Germans and Hungarians, from countries that did not possess an Eastern empire.^[27] Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic ‘Occidentalism’ to oppose to the ‘Orientalism’ of Western discourse, arguing that he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment; that he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and who had often made discoveries that would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.^[28] More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar with the same brush).^[29]

Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern". Ironically, given Said's largely Anglophone upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own arguments that "any and all representations … are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer … [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation" (Orientalism 272) could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism",^[30] unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.

By the end of his life, Said found himself "increasingly impatient" with the turn postcolonial theory had taken.^[31]

[edit] Debates with Bernard Lewis

Said is known for his criticisms of historian Bernard Lewis. Said asserts that the western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation rather than objective study,^[32] a form of racism, and a tool of imperialist domination.^[33] He further questioned the scientific neutrality of some leading Orientalist scholars such as Bernard Lewis on the Arab world. In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said suggested that Lewis' knowledge of the Middle East was so biased that it could not be taken seriously, and claimed "Bernard Lewis hasn't set foot in the Middle East, in the Arab world, for at least 40 years. He knows something about Turkey, I'm told, but he knows nothing about the Arab world." ^[34]

Edward Said considered that Lewis treats Islam as a monolithic entity without the nuance of its plurality, internal dynamics, and historical complexities, and accused him of "demagogy and downright ignorance."^[35]

Rejecting the view that western scholarship was biased against the Middle East, Lewis responded that Orientalism developed as a facet of European humanism, independently of the past European imperial expansion.^[36] He noted the French and English pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet not in an organized way, but long before they had any control or hope of control in the Middle East; and that much of Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of imperialism. "What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?"^[37]

[edit] Supporters and influence

Said’s supporters argue that such criticisms, even if correct, do not invalidate his basic thesis, which they say still holds true for the 19th and 20th centuries and in particular for general representations of the Orient in Western media, literature and film.^[38] His supporters point out that Said himself acknowledges limitations of his study's failing to address German scholarship (Orientalism 18-19) and that, in the "Afterword" to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he, in their view, convincingly refutes his critics, such as Lewis (329-54).

Said's continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash,^[39] Nicholas Dirks,^[40] and Ronald Inden,^[41] and literary theorists such as Hamid Dabashi, Homi Bhabha^[42] and Gayatri Spivak.^[43]

Both supporters and critics of Edward Said acknowledge the profound, transformative influence that his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the humanities. But whereas his critics regret his influence as limiting, his supporters praise his influence as liberating.^[44]

[edit] Criticism of US foreign policy

In a 1997 revised edition of his book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the Western press and, in particular, media “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.”^[45]

Said opposed many US foreign policy endeavors in the Middle East. During an April 2003 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said argued that the Iraq war was ill-conceived:

“

My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative.... I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. [US Undersecretary of State Marc] Grossman and [US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest. The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.[46]

”

[edit] Pro-Palestinian activism

Part of a series on

Palestinians

Demographics · Geography

Definitions · Palestine People · Diaspora Territories · Refugee camps West Bank (geography) Gaza Strip (geography) Electoral districts · Governorates Arab localities in Israel Arab citizens of Israel Cities · East Jerusalem

Politics

Hamas · PLO · PNC · PLC · PFLP Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Political parties in the PNA Palestinian flag · Law

Religion and religious sites

Islam · Christianity Dome of the Rock · Al-Aqsa Mosque Great Mosque of Gaza Cave of the Patriarchs Church of the Holy Sepulchre Church of the Annunciation Church of the Nativity Joseph's Tomb · Rachel's Tomb Lot's Tomb · Nabi Samwil

Culture

Art · Costume and embroidery Cinema · Cuisine · Dance · Handicrafts · Language · Literature Music ·

Notable Palestinians

Mahmoud Abbas · Ibrahim Abu-Lughod · Yasser Arafat Hanan Ashrawi · Rim Banna · Tawfiq Canaan Mahmoud Darwish · Emile Habibi Ismail Haniya Atallah Hanna · Faisal Husseini Mohammed Amin al-Husseini Abd al-Qader al-Husseini Ghassan Kanafani · Ghada Karmi Leila Khaled · Walid Khalidi · Ahmad Shukeiri · Edward Said Khalil al-Sakakini · Elia Suleiman · Khalil al-Wazir Ahmed Yassin · May Ziade

v • d • e

As a pro-Palestinian activist, Said campaigned for a creation of an independent Palestinian state. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional struggles.^[47] He supported the two-state solution and voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine in Algiers in 1988. In 1991, he quit the PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that the terms of the accord were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to a plan Yasir Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 1970s. In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. Said's relationship with the Palestinian Authority was once so bad that PA leaders banned the sale of his books in August 1995, but improved when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Ehud Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit.

On July 3, 2000, Said was photographed lobbing a rock across the Lebanon-Israel border. Although he denied aiming the rock at Israeli soldiers, an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir asserted that he had positioned himself less than 30 feet (9.1 m) from Israeli soldiers manning a two-story watchtower before throwing the rock over the border fence, though it instead hit barbed-wire. Said later said, "One stone tossed into an empty space scarcely warrants a second thought", labeling the stone-throwing as "a symbolic gesture of joy". The stone throw was witnessed by Israel-based television journalist Dennis Zinn.^[48]

While the photo provoked criticism from some Columbia faculty members and students and from the Anti-Defamation League, the provost issued a statement defending Said's act on the grounds of freedom of expression, a position echoed by his supporters on campus.^[49] Said also wrote many books and articles in which he denied any violence.

In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both the established Fatah and Islamist militant groups, such as Hamas.

In Al-Ahram Weekly, in April 2002, Said observes:

Above all we must, as Mandela never tired of saying about his struggle, be aware that Palestine is one of the great moral causes of our time. Therefore, we need to treat it as such. It's not a matter of trade, or bartering negotiations, or making a career. It is a just cause which should allow Palestinians to capture the high moral ground and keep it.^[50]

In August 2003, in an article published online in Counterpunch, Said summarizes his position on the contemporary rights of Palestinians vis-à-vis the historical experience of the Jewish people:

“

I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial.[51]

”

Said was seen - and is often appropriated by various Islamic groups - as a global intellectual defender of Islam. Yet he himself denied this claim several times, most notably in republications of Orientalism. Said's primary objectives were humanistic and not Islamic; his vision for Palestine and Israel's peaceful co-existence necessarily took Islam into consideration, but emphasized the needs of Palestinians and Israelis as two ethnic groups whose basic needs, such as food, water, shelter and protection, were to be valued above all else.

Said notes that "in all my works I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism.... My view of Palestine ... remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested instead a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war." He notes that every Arabic publisher who was interested in his book on Palestine "wanted me to change or delete those sections that were openly critical of one or another Arab regime (including the PLO), a request that I have always refused to comply with".^[52]

He was one of few Palestinian activists who at the same time acknowledged Israel and Israel's founding intellectual theory, Zionism. Said was one of the first proponents of a two-state solution, and in an important academic article entitled "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" Said argued that both the Zionist claim to a land - and, more importantly, the Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a homeland - and Palestinian rights of self-determination held legitimacy and authenticity.

Said's books on the issue of Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under FBI surveillance as early as 1971. He and his family were aware that any support towards the Palestinian cause would provoke such investigations. No records were available on the last dozen years of his life.^[53]

[edit] Claims about Said's early life

In 1999, Justus Weiner, a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published an article in Commentary, arguing that Said's family did not permanently reside in Talbiya or live there during the final months of the British mandate, and therefore that they could not be considered refugees. According to Weiner, it was only Said's aunt who owned a house in Talbiya, while Said's family visited Jerusalem only occasionally. "On [Said's] birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate," Weiner states, "his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo," leaving blank the space for a local address. Weiner suggests Said grew up in Cairo, and probably never attended St. George's Academy in Jerusalem except during brief stays in that city. Weiner argues that Said's name is not on the school registry and that David Eben-Ezra, whom Said mentioned as a classmate, has no recollections of him.^[54]

Following Weiner's widely publicized article, several respondents came to Said's defense. In The Nation, Christopher Hitchens writes that schoolmates and teachers confirmed Said's stay at St. George's, and quotes Said stating as early as 1992 that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo.^[55] In another commentary by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch, Haig Boyadjian confirmed that he had been Said's classmate at St. George's in 1947, and chastised Weiner.^[56] In an article entitled "Defamation, Zionist-style," Said explained himself, responding that "the family house was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership," and that his name could not be on the school's registry, which was terminated a year before his attendance.^[57] Said charged that the "Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques", criticizing the Jerusalem Center for having "hired an obscure Israeli-American lawyer to 'research' the first ten years of my life and 'prove' that even though I was born in Jerusalem I was never really there".^[58] Said later stated: "I was born in Jerusalem, my family is a Jerusalem family. We left Palestine in 1947. We left before most others. It was a fortuitous thing. . . . I never said I was a refugee, but the rest of my family was. My entire extended family was driven out. . . ."^[59]

[edit] Publications

• Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
• Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975)
• Orientalism (1978)
• The Question of Palestine (1979)
• Orientalism (1980)
• Literature and Society (editor) (1980)
• The Middle East: What Chances For Peace? (1980) [co-contributor with Joseph J. Sisco, Shlomo Avineri, Saburo Okita, Udo Steinbach, William Scranton, Abdel Hamid Abdel-Ghani and H.R.H. Prince Saud]
• Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981)
• The World, the Text and the Critic (1983)
• After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) [with photographs by Jean Mohr]
• Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988) [contributor and co-editor with Christopher Hitchens]
• Yeats and Decolonization (1988)
• Musical Elaborations (1991)
• Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
• Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994)
• The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward W. Said (1994) [Conversations with David Barsamian]
• Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996)
• Entre guerre at paix (1997)
• Acts of Aggression: Policing "Rogue States" (with Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark) (1999)
• Out of Place (1999) (a memoir)
• Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884-1891 (Editor) (1999)
• The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000)
• Reflections on Exile (2000)
• The Edward Said Reader (2000)
• Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (2001)
• CIA et Jihad, 1950-2001: Contre l'URSS, une désastreuse alliance (2002), with John K. Cooley
• Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (2003) [Interviews by David Barsamian]
• Freud and the Non-European (2003)
• From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (Collection of Essays) (2003)
• Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with Daniel Barenboim) (2003)^[60]
• Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2005)
• On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006)
• Music at the Limits (2007)
• Criticism in Society (year of publication unknown)
• Edward Said: A Critical Reader (year of publication unknown)
• Jewish Religion, Jewish History (Introduction) (year of publication unknown)
• Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (year of publication unknown)

[edit] Interviews

• Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday (1999-11-06, National Public Radio) [2]
• Christopher Lydon on The Connection (2000-04-07, WBUR 90.9 FM, Boston) [3]
• Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday 'Barenboim and Said: 'Parallels and Paradoxes' (2002-12-28, National Public Radio)

[edit] See also

• The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, named in his honor
• A land without a people for a people without a land
• Daniel Barenboim

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edward Said

• Edward W. Said: A Bibliography, compiled by Eddie Yeghiayan.
• Edward M. Said Selected Bibliography (includes reviews of publications by Said)
• Edward Said dossier (Le Monde diplomatique)
• "The Legacy of Edward Said" by Andrew N. Rubin, talk at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
• "Writing to the moment" Review of Edward Said's work on the occasion of the anniversary of his death in The Guardian.
• Columbia News mourns passing of Said
• A Devil Theory of Islam Edward Said's commentary on writings by The New York Times journalist Judith Miller
• The Edward Said Archive Unofficial fansite.
• Edward Said index on The Electronic Intifada.
• Obrad Savic "Edvard Said: Razbastinjeni intelektualac", a tribute by Professor Obrad Savić (founder of the Belgrade Circle).
• South End Press, Said's publications by South End Press and a brief biographical account.
• Islam Through Western Eyes, article by Said explaining the main thesis of Orientalism.
• Zmag.org/Middle East Watch Tributes posted in ZMagazine.
• A Mighty and Passionate Heart, obituary by Alexander Cockburn posted in Counterpunch.
• Edward, a tribute by Dr. Hanan Ashrawi.
• Tribute and archive of Said's Democracy Now! appearances
• "Edward W. Said, 1935 - 2003" Memorial tribute to Said on the first anniversary of his death.
• Talk at Berkeley on "Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights". Hosted on tucradio.org: Part 1, Part 2. Single downloadable file with Lecture by Edward Said (mp3 file in compressed rar format).
• "The Rootless Cosmopolitan", obituary by Tony Judt published in The Nation.
• Edward Said and The Production of Knowledge, by Sethi, Arjun (University of Maryland) April 2007
• "Remembering Edward Said (1935-2003)," obituary and tribute by Tariq Ali published in The New Left Review.
• Mural Debate: Moratorium Resembles 1994 Malcolm X Incident Controversy over Edward Said's Mural proposed for the student center at San Francisco State Universtity.
• 1980 review by Malcolm Kerr, in International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, of Said's book Orientalism.
• Review of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays and Edward Said: The Last Interview, in Other Voices, vol. 3, no. 1.
• Edward Said at the Internet Movie Database

[edit] Critical

• Edward Said article by David Frum published in National Review, September 29, 2003, re-posted on Campus Watch
• Debunking Edward Said criticism of Orientalism by Ibn Warraq
• Edward Said's Splash Said's impact on Middle Eastern studies, by Martin Kramer.
• "Edward Said's Documented Deceptions" by pro-Israel group CAMERA
• Edward W. Said, intellectual by Bruce Bawer, The Hudson Review, Winter 2002
• Where the Twain Should Have Met by Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly, September 2003 (theatlantic.com subscriber excerpt)

Persondata
NAME	Saïd, Edward Wadie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American literary theorist, political activist
DATE OF BIRTH	November 1, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH	Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
DATE OF DEATH	September 25, 2003
PLACE OF DEATH	New York City, New York, United States