Orientalism

Born in 1935 in British-occupied Palestine, Edward Said relocated to Egypt and then the United States after the 1948 Palestine War. His father was a US citizen. He studied English Literature at Princeton and earned an MA and a PhD from Harvard University. He began teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University in 1963, where he taught until 2003. In his long academic career, he wrote dozens of books and articles and helped create the field of postcolonial literature.

Alongside Orientalism, which introduced many key themes and topics in postcolonial studies, Said explored the concept of the cultural archive in his later books like Culture and Imperialism (1993). The cultural archive is the body of cultural production—such as narratives and history—that helps define and shape a culture. Under imperialism, the colonizer’s cultural archive replaces the colonized one, creating cultural legitimacy for the oppressor and cultural erasure for the oppressed. Said examined ideas like these through the lens of comparative literature and literary criticism, such as Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981) and Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990).

As one of the world’s most preeminent Palestinian scholars, Said also wrote widely about Palestine, including texts like The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1994).