Edward Wadie Said ( 1 November 1935 -- 25 September 2003)
was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, a literary theorist, and a public intellectual who was a
founding figure of the critical-theory field of Post-colonialism. Born a
Palestinian Arab in the city of Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine
(1920--48), he was an American citizen through his father. Said was an
advocate for the political and the human rights of the Palestinian
people and has been described by the journalist Robert Fisk as their
most powerful voice.
As a cultural critic, academic, and writer,
Said is best known for the book Orientalism (1978), an analysis of the
cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, a term he
redefined to mean the Western study of Eastern cultures and, in general,
the framework of how The West perceives and represents The East. He
contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably
tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of
the work inherently political, servile to power, and therefore
intellectually suspect. Orientalism is based upon Said's knowledge of
colonial literature, literary theory, and post-structuralist theory.
Orientalism, and his other thematically related works, proved
influential in the fields of the humanities, especially in literary
theory and in literary criticism. Orientalism proved especially
influential upon the field of Middle Eastern studies, wherein it
transformed the academic discourse of the field's practitioners, of how
they examine, describe, and define the cultures of the Middle East. As a
critic, he vigorously discussed and debated the cultural subjects
comprised by Orientalism, especially as applied to and in the fields of
history and area studies; nonetheless, some mainstream academics
disagreed with Said's Orientalism thesis, most notably the
Anglo-American Orientalist Bernard Lewis.
As a public
intellectual, Said discussed contemporary politics and culture,
literature and music in books, lectures, and articles. Drawing from his
family experiences as Palestinian Christians in the Middle East at the
time of the establishment of Israel in 1948, Said argued for the
establishment of a Palestinian state, for equal political and human
rights for the Palestinians in Israel—including the right of return—and
for increased U.S. political pressure upon Israel to recognize, grant,
and respect said rights. Moreover, he also criticized the political and
cultural politics of the Arab and Muslim regimes who acted against the
interests of their peoples. Intellectually active until the last months
of his life, he died of leukemia in late 2003.
Edward Said was
born on 1 November 1935, to Hilda Said and her husband, the businessman
Wadie Said, in the city of Jerusalem in the British Mandate of Palestine
(1920--48).[10] Edward's father was a Palestinian man who soldiered in
the U.S. Army component of the Allied Expeditionary Force (1917--19),
commanded by General John J. Pershing, in World War I; Wadie Said and
his family were granted U.S. citizenship due to his military service,
and after acquiring citizenship Wadie Said moved to Cleveland before
returning to Palestine in 1920. His mother Hilda, who was born in
Nazareth, had a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. After the war,
in 1919, Wadie Said moved to Cairo and established a stationery
business with a cousin. Although his parents practiced the Jerusalemite
variety of Greek Orthodox Christianity, Edward was agnostic. He had four
younger sisters.
Verso Books published Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said (2008), edited by Müge Gürsoy
Sökmen and Bașak Ertür; the essayists include Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid
Khalidi, and Elias Khoury. Routledge published Edward Said: The Charisma
of Criticism (2010), by Harold Aram Veeser, a critical biography. The
University of California Press published Edward Said: A Legacy of
Emancipation and Representations (2010), edited by Adel Iskandar and
Hakem Rustom, and featuring contributions about Said's intellectual
legacy by Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Ghada Karmi, Noam
Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, among others.
Academic
establishments such as Columbia University, the University of Warwick,
Princeton University, the University of Adelaide, the American
University of Cairo, and the Palestine Center have instituted annual
series of lectures about the subjects, topics, and themes that Edward
Said discussed in his works; notable among the speakers have been Daniel
Barenboim, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Cornel West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said
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