Edward W. Said

Edward Wadie Said was born on 1 November 1935 in the Talbiyya quarter of Jerusalem, to Wadih Said and Hilda Moussa. His father had moved to Cairo in 1929 and built a stationery business there, so Said’s schooling was divided between the two cities: Gezira Preparatory School in Cairo, a year at St. George’s School in Jerusalem in 1947, and then Victoria College in Cairo after most of the family left Jerusalem in 1948. Expelled from Victoria College in 1951, he was sent to Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, graduating in 1953. He completed his undergraduate degree at Princeton in 1957 and took an MA (1960) and a PhD in English literature (1964) at Harvard. In 1963, a year before finishing his doctorate, he joined the English and Comparative Literature faculty at Columbia University, where he remained until his death.

Orientalism, published in 1978, argued that Western scholarship on the East had produced not knowledge of it but a system of representation bound to imperial power — and in doing so helped bring into being the field now called postcolonial studies. Said wrote roughly thirty books, translated into more than thirty-five languages, among them The Question of Palestine and Culture and Imperialism. He insisted that the intellectual’s task was to speak, in his phrase, truth to power, and that criticism could not be conducted from inside a position of power without ceasing to be criticism.

His Palestinian politics ran alongside the scholarship rather than beneath it. He translated Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech for the United Nations, and met Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq al-Hout for the first time that year. In 1977 the thirteenth Palestine National Council elected him as an independent intellectual; he attended the nineteenth PNC in Algiers in 1988 and fully endorsed the Declaration of Independence. Five years later he broke publicly and sharply with the Oslo agreement, and the rupture with the PLO leadership was never repaired. He also served as music critic for The Nation, and with Daniel Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, recruiting young Palestinian musicians for it.

Said died in New York on 24 September 2003 after a long illness and was buried in Broumana, Lebanon. In 2004 the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music was established in Ramallah and other Palestinian cities, and Ramallah named a street for him.

Selected works

• Orientalism (1978)
• The Question of Palestine (1979)
• Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Out of Place: A Memoir (1999)

Sources

• Edward W. Said — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Edward Said — contributor archive, London Review of Books
• Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, Birzeit University