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Edward Wadie Said (1 November, 1935, Jerusalem – 25 September, 2003, New York City; ) was a well-known Palestinian-American literary theorist and outspoken Palestinian activist. He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is regarded as a founding figure in post-colonial theory. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York & London: Routledge, 1990). ISBN 0-415-05372-2.
Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father was a wealthy Christian Palestinian businessman and an American citizen, while his mother was born in Nazareth of Christian Lebanese and Palestinian descent.Amritjit Singh, Interviews With Edward W. Said (Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2004) 19 & 219. ISBN 1-57806-366-3. His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan. According to Said's autobiographical memoir, Out of Place (excerpted in London Review of Books article "Between Worlds"), Said lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12. In 1947, he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem, but his extended family ("my entire family") became (in his word) "refugees" in 1948 during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War because that family home was in the affluent quarter of Talbiya in the western part of Jerusalem that was annexed by Israel:
In "early September 1951", when he was fifteen years old, his parents (who immediately returned to the Middle East) "deposited him" in the Mount Hermon School, a private preparatory high school, in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable year" feeling "out of place" ("Between Worlds").
Said earned a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as a 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 universities. He was fluent in Arabic, English and French. 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. 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.[1]
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 U.S. foreign policy for various independent radio programs.
Said also contributed music criticism to The Nation for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim.
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 surveillance starting in 1971. Most of his records are marked as related to "IS Middle East" ("IS" = Israel) and significant portions remain "Classified Secrets."David Price, "How the FBI Spied on Edward Said," CounterPunch January 13, 2006, accessed January 15, 2006.
Edward Said died at the age of 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia.See Columbia News mourns passing of Edward Said.
In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honor.See Birzeit U.
Edward Said had often been attacked for his commitment to Palestinian rights. In the 1980's, his office was burnt down by pro-Israeli fanatics, and in 1999 a defamation campaign was launched against him by a pundit from the pro-Israeli Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The campaign questioned Said's Jerusalimite credentials and his family's ownership of a house there.
In response to this widely-publicized campaign, several respondents defended Said. In an article entitled "Defamation, Zionist-style" published in Al-Ahram Weekly, Edward Said himself responded to this campaign. In another editorial printed in Al-Ahram two years later Said claimed that the "Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques" in attempt to stop him, and that it had "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".Edward Said, "Freud, Zionism, and Vienna" Al-Ahram Weekly March 15-21 2001, accessed October 31 2006. In another published interview conducted by Amritjit Singh in 2000, Said is quoted as saying: "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. . . ."Amritjit Singh, Interviews with Edward W. Said (Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2004) 19 & 219. ISBN 1-57806-366-3.
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 described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."Keith Windschuttle, "Edward Said's "Orientalism revisited," The New Criterion January 17, 1999, accessed January 19, [1999]. 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 America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.
In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West:
Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory and cultural studies, and to a lesser extent on those of History and Oriental Studies. Taking his cue from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (acknowledging the influence of the latter, but not the formerEdward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1995) 3.), and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. TibawiA. L. Tibawi, "English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism", Islamic Quarterly 8 (1964): 25-45, Anouar Malek-AbdelAnouar Malek-Abdel, "Lâ??orientalisme en crise", Diogène 44 (1963): 109-41, Maxime Rodinson"Bilan des études mohammadiennes", Revue Historique 465.1 (1963), and Richard William SouthernRichard William Southern, Western views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1978; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962). (whose influence also went unacknowledged)(He did briefly acknowlegde Southern, check, "The scope of Orientalism chapter, pg. 55, bottom paragraph), Said argued that all 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 â??Orientalistsâ?? (a term which he transformed into a pejorative epithet). He argues that their claims to objective knowledge of the Orient are simply claims to power:
Saidâ??s contention was that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long, that in Orientalist writings a very considerable bias exists in even the most outwardly objective of texts, a bias which most Western scholars would not even be able to recognise, because it is part of their cultural make-up too. His contention was that the West has not only conquered the East politically, but that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orientâ??s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asiaâ??s past and constructed its myriad modern identities from a perspective which takes Europe as the norm from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates. Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient invariably depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West. Western writings are about creating "difference" between West and East, a difference which is attributed to the existence of certain 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. Having thus stated his central thesis, the remainder of Orientalism consists mainly of examples from Western texts designed to illustrate it.
Saidâ??s book attracted both adulation and criticism from the very outset. Historians and anthropologists such as Ernest GellnerErnest Gellner, "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism", rev. of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, Times Literary Supplement February 19, 1993: 3-4. argued that Said's contention that the West had dominated the East for over 2,000 years (since the composition of Aeschylusâ??s The Persians) was simply unsupportable. Until the late 17th century the Ottoman Empire had posed a serious threat to Europe. Furthermore, Said had chosen to concentrate largely on the Middle East, Palestine and Egypt, where his own roots lay, and these were areas that came under European control only for a relatively short period in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Said devoted much less attention to the British Raj in India, by far the lengthiest and most successful example of European hegemony in the Orient, and entirely ignored Russiaâ??s dominions in Asia, some critics have argued, because Said was more interested in making polemical points about the Middle East.Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006) 159-60, 281-2. 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 and local forms of knowledge, which were frequently subversive of Imperial aims.C.A. Bayly Empire and Information (Delhi, India: Cambridge UP, 1999) 25, 143, 282. The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Ê¿Azm also expressed reservations about Said's polemicism and his tendency to essentialize the West.Sadik Jalal al-Ê¿Azm "Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse", Khamsin 8 (1981): 6ff.
Strong criticism of Said's critique of "Orientalism" has come from academic Orientalists, some of whom were of Eastern backgrounds themselves. 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.Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism", in Islam and the West (London 1993) 99–118; Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2003; London: Allen Lane, 2006. Bernard Lewis is among scholars whose work Said questioned in Orientalism and subsequent works. The two authors came frequently to exchange polemics, 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.Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Natures, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); Malcolm Kerr, rev. of Orientalism, by Edward Said, International Jour. of Middle Eastern Studies 12 (Dec. 1980): 544-47; and Martin Kramer, "Saidâ??s Splash", Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Policy Papers 58 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). ISBN 0-944029-49-3. Kramer observes in "Said's Splash" that "Fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie (whose work Said had praised in Covering Islam) allowed that the book was 'important and in many ways positive.' But she also thought it had had 'some unfortunate consequences'"; in an interview published in Approaches to the History of the Middle East, ed. Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (London: Ithaca Press, 1994) 144-45, as cited & qtd. by Kramer, Keddie says:"I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too "conservative." It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So "orientalism" for many people is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan."
Some of Said's academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between the writings of poets such as Goethe (who never even travelled in the East), novelists such as Flaubert (who undertook a brief sojourn in Egypt), discredited mavericks such as Ernest Renan, and serious scholars such as Edward William Lane who were fluent in Arabic and produced work of considerable value: their common European origins and attitudes, according to Said, overrode such considerations.Said, Orientalism 87–88, 336; Ibn Warraq, Debunking Edward Said. Irwin (among others) points out that Said entirely ignored the fact that Oriental studies in the 19th century were dominated by Germans and Hungarians, from countries which, inconveniently for Said's purposes, did not possess an Eastern Empire.Irwin, For Lust of Knowing 8, 150–166. Such critics accuse Said of creating a monolithic â??Occidentalismâ?? to oppose to the â??Orientalismâ?? 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 amongst western scholars of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as Sir William Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with creating "difference", and had frequently made discoveries which would provide the foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.O.P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of Indiaâ??s Past (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1988) ix-xi, 221-233. 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 films such 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).Said, "Afterword" to the 1995 ed. of Orientalism 347, as cited by Irwin, For Lust of Knowing 3–8; cf. Kaizaad Navroze Kotwal, "Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as Virtual Reality: The Orientalist and Colonial Legacies of Gunga Din," The Film Journal no. 12 (April 2005).
Finally, 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 representationsâ?¦ 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. Thus these critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of solipsism"D.A. Washbrook, "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", in Historiography, vol. 5 of The Oxford History of the British Empire 607., unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of any objective truth.
Saidâ??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.See Terry Eagleton, Rev. of For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, by Robert Irwin (London: Penguin, 2003). ISBN 0-7139-9415-0. New Statesman Bookshop November 1, 2003. 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). His continuing importance in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies is represented by his influence on scholars studying India, such as Gyan PrakashGyan Prakash, â??Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,â?? Comparative Studies in Society and History 32.2 (1990): 383-408., Nicholas DirksNicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001)., and Ronald IndenRonald Inden, Imagining India (New York: Oxford UP, 1990)., and literary theorists such as Homi BhabhaHomi K. Bhaba, Nation and Narration (New York & London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990). and Gayatri Spivak.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987).
Prominent leftist intellectuals such as journalist Alexander Cockburn and academic Mohamed Rabie have also been close friends with Said.
Both supporters of Edward Said and his critics acknowledge the profound, transformative influence which 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.
As a pro-Palestinian activist, Said campaigned first for a creation of an independent Palestinian state and later for a single Jewish-Arab state. From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional struggles.Malise Ruthven, "Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America," The Guardian September 26, 2003, accessed March 1, 2006. He supported the two-state solution and voted for it in Algiers in 1988. He quit the PNC over the decision by Yasser Arafat and the PLO to support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, a decision he considered disastrous to the interests of Palestinian refugees living in Arab League member states who supported the American-led coalition. Thereafter, Said became critical of the role of Arafat in the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, feeling that the Oslo terms 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 Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late 70's. 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 Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit. Ultimately, Said came to prefer and to support the binational solution—the creation of one state in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and pre-1967 Israel, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights, over a two state solution with a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
On July 3, 2000, Said was videotaped lobbing a symbolic rock towards an Israeli watchtower on the Israeli-Lebanese border. "One stone tossed into an empty space scarcely warrants a second thought", he later said, responding to criticism that he had aimed the rock at people less than 30 feet away.Sunnie Kim, "Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon," Columbia Daily Spectator July 19, 2000, News. 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 Palestinian Authority and to Islamist militant groups such as Hamas.
In Al-Ahram Weekly, in April 2002, Said observes:
In August 2003, in an article published online in Counterpunch, Said summarizes his position on the contemporary rights of Palestinians vis-Ã -vis the historical experience of the Jewish people:
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).
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