S aid, E dward

Abstract

Born in Jerusalem in 1935, the literary critic, campaigner, and postcolonial scholar, Edward Said, spent his early childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, before studying in the United States at Princeton and Harvard universities. In 1963, he took up a professorship in comparative literature at Columbia University. From his father, a Protestant Palestinian with US citizenship, and his mother, who had been born in Nazareth, Said inherited a lasting attachment to the Middle East and he remained a committed campaigner for Palestinian rights throughout his life. For Said, the childhood experiences of displacement and deracination cultivated an adult sensitivity to cultural and political acts of exclusion and awakened in him the possibility of a resistant, exilic form of identity. These experiences informed Said's thinking and surface repeatedly in his work, most visibly in Out of Place , his memoir of an Arab childhood and an American education, which was awarded the New Yorker Book Award for Non‐Fiction in 1999. This biographical outing offered variations on the themes of exile and marginalization that run through Said's many works. A foundational thinker for postcolonial studies, Said became an internationally recognizable public intellectual. A prolific essayist, his work ranged across the fields of literature, politics, and music. His literary criticism considered the works of canonical writers such as Swift, Austen, and Conrad, as well as contemporary writers such as Soueif and Naipaul, while his musical criticism included meditations on Wagner, Verdi, and Gould. Said's writing reflects the broad span of his influences, which extend to the early Marxist criticism of Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno, and the later poststructuralist theory of Michel Foucault. In 1999 he co‐founded the West‐Eastern Divan Orchestra with Israeli musician Daniel Barenboim. He was president of the Modern Languages Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Said's damning critique of the Western disfiguration of the “Orient,” his insistence on understanding aesthetic works in social and political contexts, and his conception of contrapuntal reading made a lasting contribution to modern literary theory. He died in 2003.