Life & Background
Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a Palestinian Christian family; his father was a businessman with American citizenship, and the family left for Cairo in 1947, a displacement Said described as formative and never resolved. He was educated at Victoria College in Cairo, at a New England boarding school, then Princeton and Harvard, and taught comparative literature at Columbia from 1963 until his death. He was a serious pianist and wrote music criticism, collaborating with Daniel Barenboim on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. He served on the Palestinian National Council for fourteen years and was a prominent public advocate for Palestinian rights, which brought him sustained hostility and death threats; he later broke with the Oslo Accords, arguing they conceded too much. He was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991 and continued writing until his death in 2003.
Orientalism
Said argues that Orientalism is not a body of accumulated knowledge about the East but a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over it. He traces a discourse running from eighteenth-century philology through Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, British and French colonial administration, and into modern area studies and journalism, in which the Orient is consistently produced as the West's opposite: static where Europe is dynamic, sensual where Europe is rational, despotic where Europe is free, and above all unable to represent itself. He shows how this scholarship served administration directly — the study of languages, laws, and religions was an instrument of rule — and how literary and imaginative writing carried the same assumptions. His examples range from Dante and Flaubert to Lane's Modern Egyptians, Renan, Lord Cromer, and Bernard Lewis.
Said takes his account of discourse from Foucault and his notion of hegemony from Gramsci, and the combination is what gives the book its reach: Orientalism operates as consent rather than coercion, and as knowledge rather than propaganda. The objections have been substantial and are examinable in their own right. Historians including Bernard Lewis and Robert Irwin disputed his handling of individual scholars; Aijaz Ahmad, in In Theory, argued from the left that Said's account is too literary and neglects class and capitalism; others have noted that a book demonstrating that the Orient cannot represent itself in Western discourse offers little account of how the colonised did in fact speak, a gap Spivak took up directly. Said addressed some of this in Culture and Imperialism, which reads canonical novels — Mansfield Park above all — for the imperial economy at their edges.
Key Concepts
Why Said Matters
Orientalism effectively founded postcolonial studies as a field, and it changed how the humanities read the archive: after it, scholarship on other cultures became something whose own conditions of production required examination. Culture and Imperialism extended the argument into practical reading method, and its concept of contrapuntal reading — attending simultaneously to the metropolitan narrative and to what empire made possible off-page — is a standard technique in examination answers on nineteenth-century fiction. Said also wrote influentially on the role of the intellectual, on exile, and on late style.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Beginnings1975
- Orientalism1978
- The Question of Palestine1979
- Covering Islam1981
- The World, the Text, and the Critic1983
- Culture and Imperialism1993
- Representations of the Intellectual1994
- Out of Place1999