Edward Said (1935 –2003) was a Palestinian literacy theorist and a well-known public intellectual. He was born in Jerusalem. He spent his childhood between Jerusalem and Cairo and it was in Cairo where he attended both British and American schools. Later on, he left to the United States where he obtained a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a doctorate in English literature from Harvard. In 1963 he joined the faculty of Columbia University and in 1991 he became professor of English and comparative literature at the same university until 2003.
Said wrote dozens of books, lectures, and essays. Anthologies of his essays have been published, and several of his interviews and conversations have also been edited into book form.
Said helped found the critical-theory1 field of postcolonialism2. . Joseph Conrad is the subject of Said´s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography3.
In 1975 he wrote Beginnings: Intention and Method and 1978 he created his master piece Orientalism –In this highly acclaimed seminal work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. In his new preface, Said examines the effect of continuing Western imperialism after recent events in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 1979 The Question of Palestine, 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), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990), Musical Elaborations (1991), Culture and Imperialism and Edward Said: A Critical Reader (1993), The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995), Out of Place: A Memoir(1999), The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After and Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), Freud and the Non-European and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2003), Humanism and Democratic Criticism4(2004), Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said edited by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain foreword by Mariam C. Said, introduction by Michael Wood (2006).
Said was an accomplished pianist. He worked as the music critic for The Nation magazine, and wrote four books about music: Musical Elaborations (1991), Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002, with Daniel Barenboim), On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006), and Music at the Limits (2007). In the latter book he spoke of finding musical reflections of his literary and historical ideas in bold compositions and strong performances.
In 1999, Said and Daniel Barenboim founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is composed of young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. They also established The Barenboim–Said Foundation in Seville, to develop education-through-music projects.
Awards
Besides honors, memberships, and postings to prestigious organizations world-wide, Edward Said was awarded some twenty honorary university degrees in the course of his professional life as an academic, critic, and Man of Letters. Among the honors bestowed to him was the Bowdoin Prize by Harvard University. He twice received the Lionel Trilling Book Award; the first occasion was the inaugural bestowing of said literary award in 1976, for Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974). He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and was awarded the inaugural Spinoza Lens Prize. In 2001, Said was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais Prize. The autobiography Out of Place (1999) was bestowed three awards, the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature
Video
Edward Said The Last Interview 2004
Further reading:
– Remembering Edward Said: In the name of Humanism
Reference:
1- Critical theory is a type of social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it.
2- Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land.
3- Edward W. Said locates Joseph Conrad’s fear of personal disintegration in his constant re-narration of the past. Using the author’s personal letters as a guide to understanding his fiction, Said draws an important parallel between Conrad’s view of his own life and the manner and form of his stories. The critic also argues that the author, who set his fiction in exotic locations like East Asia and Africa, projects political dimensions in his work that mirror a colonialist preoccupation with “civilizing” native peoples. Said then suggests that this dimension should be considered when reading all of Western literature. First published in 1966, Said’s critique of the Western self’s struggle with modernity signaled the beginnings of his groundbreaking work, Orientalism, and remains a cornerstone of postcolonial studies today.
4- Humanism and Democratic Criticism – In the radically changed and highly charged political atmosphere that has overtaken the United States–and to varying degrees the rest of the world–since September 11, 2001, the notion that cultures can harmoniously and productively coexist has come to seem like little more than a quaint fiction. In this time of heightened animosity and aggression, have humanistic values and democratic principles become irrelevant? Are they merely utopian fantasies? Or are they now more urgent and necessary than ever before? Ever since the ascendancy of critical theory and multicultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s, traditional humanistic education has been under assault. Often condemned as the intolerant voice of the masculine establishment and regularly associated with Eurocentrism and even imperialism, the once-sacred literary canon is now more likely to be ridiculed than revered. While this seismic shift–brought on by advances in technological communication, intellectual specialization, and cultural sensitivity–has eroded the former primacy of the humanities, Edward Said argues that a more democratic form of humanism–one that aims to incorporate, emancipate, and enlighten–is still possible. A lifelong humanist, Said believed that self-knowledge is the highest form of human achievement and the true goal of humanistic education. But he also believed that self-knowledge is unattainable without an equal degree of self-criticism, or the awareness that comes from studying and experiencing other peoples, traditions, and ideas. Proposing a return to philology and a more expansive literary canon as strategies for revitalizing the humanities, Said contends that words are not merely passive figures but vital agents in historical and political change. Intellectuals must reclaim an active role in public life, but at the same time, insularity and parochialism, as well as the academic trend toward needless jargon and obscurantism, must be combated. The “humanities crisis,” according to Said, is based on the misperception that there is an inexorable conflict between established traditions and our increasingly complex and diversified world. Yet this position fails to recognize that the canonized thinkers of today were the revolutionaries of yesterday and that the nature of human progress is to question, upset, and reform. By considering the emerging social responsibilities of writers and intellectuals in an ever more interdependent world and exploring the enduring influence of Eric Auerbach’s critical masterpiece, “Mimesis,” Said not only makes a persuasive case for humanistic education but provides his own captivating and deeply personal perspective on our shared intellectual heritage.
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