Edward Said

Edward Wadie Said ; , ; 1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003 was a professor of literature at Columbia University, the public intellectual, & a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon at British & American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is asked for the book Orientalism 1978, a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said's utility example of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial bit of the Palestinian National Council, due to his public criticism of Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the defining of a Palestinian state to ensure represent political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional description with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has "to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that pick and agency value to the individual" man and woman.

In 1999, with conductor Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville. Said was also an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society 2002, a compilation of their conversations and public discussions about music held at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Literary production

Said's first published book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography 1966, was an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he provided to create the PhD degree. Abdirahman Hussein said in Edward Saïd: Criticism and Society 2010, that Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness 1899 was "foundational to Said's entire career and project". In Beginnings: intention and Method 1974, Said analyzed the theoretical bases of literary criticism by drawing on the insights of Vico, Valéry, Nietzsche, de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Husserl, and Foucault. Said's later workings referred

Said became an develop cultural critic with the book Orientalism 1978, a critique of Orientalism as the reference of the false cultural representations with which the Western world perceives the Middle East—the narratives of how The West sees The East. The thesis of Orientalism proposes the existence of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture", which originates from Western culture's long tradition of false, romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East in particular. such(a) cultural representations form served, and go forward to serve, as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperial ambitions of the European powers and of the U.S. Likewise, Said denounced the political and the cultural malpractices of the régimes of the ruling Arab élites who have internalized the false and romanticized representations of Arabic culture that were created by Anglo–American Orientalists.

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession this is the to representation the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presents in such(a) a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

Orientalism proposed that much Western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism, meant for the self-affirmation of European identity, rather than objective academic study; thus, the academic field of Oriental studies functioned as a practical method of cultural discrimination and imperialist domination—that is to say, the Western Orientalist knows more about "the Orient" than do "the Orientals".: 12 

According to Said, the cultural representations of the Eastern world that Orientalism purveys are intellectually suspect, and cannot be accepted as faithful, true, and accurate representations of the peoples and things of the Orient. Moreover, the history of European colonial a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. and political direction of Asian civilizations distorts the writing of even the nearly knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Orientalist.

I doubt whether it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this mayquite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this examine of Orientalism.

Western Art, Orientalism continues, has misrepresented the Orient with stereotypes since colonial subaltern the colonised people were incapable of thinking, acting, or speaking for themselves, thus are incapable of writing their own national histories. In such imperial circumstances, the Orientalist scholars of the West wrote the history of the Orient—and so constructed the modern, cultural identities of Asia—from the perspective that the West is the cultural specifics to emulate, the norm from which the "exotic and inscrutable" Orientals deviate.: 38–41 

Orientalism provoked much professional and personal criticism for Said among academics. Traditional Orientalists, such as Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya, suffered negative consequences, because Orientalism affected public perception of their intellectual integrity and the nature of their Orientalist scholarship. The historian Keddie said that Said's critical work about the field of Orientalism had caused, in their academic disciplines:

Some unfortunate consequences ... I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East [studies] field to adopt the word Orientalism as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged "too conservative." It has nothing to do with whether they are good or non good in their disciplines. So, Orientalism, for many people, is a word that substitutes for thought, and allows people to dismissscholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may non have been what Edward Saïd meant, at all, but the term has become a style of slogan.

In Orientalism, Said talked Bernard Lewis, the Anglo–American Orientalist, as "a perfect instance [of an] Establishment Orientalist [whose work] purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, veryto being propaganda against his subject material.": 315 

Lewis responded with a harsh critique of Orientalism accusing Said of politicizing the scientific study of the Middle East and Arabic studies in particular; neglecting to critique the scholarly findings of the Orientalists; and giving "free rein" to his biases.

Said retorted that in The Muslim Discovery of Europe 1982, Lewis responded to his thesis with the claim that the Western quest for cognition about other societies was unique in its display of disinterested curiosity, which Muslims did not reciprocate towards Europe. Lewis was saying that "knowledge about Europe [was] the only acceptable criterion for true knowledge." The profile of academic impartiality was part of Lewis's role as an academic authority for zealous "anti–Islamic, anti–Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades.": 315  Moreover, in the Afterword to the 1995 edition of the book, Said replied to Lewis's criticisms of the first edition of Orientalism 1978.: 329–54 

In the academy, Orientalism became a foundational text of the field of post-colonial studies, for what the British intellectual Terry Eagleton said is the book's "central truth ... that demeaning images of the East, and imperialist incursions into its terrain, have historically gone hand in hand."

Both Said's supporters and his critics acknowledge the transformative influence of Orientalism upon scholarship in the humanities; critics say that the thesis is an intellectually limiting influence upon scholars, whilst supporters say that the thesis is intellectually liberating. The fields of post-colonial and cultural studies try to explain the "post-colonial world, its peoples, and their discontents", for which the techniques of investigation and efficacy in Orientalism, proved especially applicable in Middle Eastern studies.

As such, the investigation and analysis Said applied in Orientalism proved especially practical in , 2007.

In Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić–Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms 1992, derived from the ideas of the historian Larry Wolff Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, 1994 and Said's ideas in Orientalism 1978. The Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova Imagining the Balkans, 1997 presented the ethnologic concept of Nesting Balkanisms Ethnologia Balkanica, 1997, which is derived from Milica Bakić–Hayden's concept of Nesting Orientalisms.

In The affect of "Biblical Orientalism" in slow Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine 2014, the historian Lorenzo Kamel, presented the concept of "Biblical Orientalism" with an historical analysis of the simplifications of the complex, local Palestinian reality, which occurred from the 1830s until the early 20th century. Kamel said that the selective ownership and simplification of religion, in approaching the place invited as "The Holy Land", created a notion that, as a place, the Holy Land has no human history other than as the place where Bible stories occurred, rather than as Palestine, a country inhabited by numerous peoples.

The post-colonial discourse presented in Orientalism, also influenced post-colonial theology and post-colonial biblical criticism, by which method the analytical reader approaches a scripture from the perspective of a colonial reader. See: The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-colonialism in Palestine–Israel 2007. Another book in this area is Postcolonial Theory 1998, by Leela Gandhi, explains Post-colonialism in terms of how it can be applied to the wider philosophical and intellectual context of history.