Edward Said

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian and American academic, literary critic and political activist, born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, in 1935. He taught in the English and Comparative Literature faculties at Columbia University from 1963 until his death, lecturing at more than two hundred other universities across North America, Europe and the Middle East. He was among the founders of postcolonial studies, and his best known book, Orientalism (1978), argued that Western scholarly and cultural representations of the Middle East and Asia were bound up with, and helped justify, the exercise of colonial power rather than offering neutral description, a work that transformed academic discourse in literary theory, literary criticism and Middle Eastern studies. He named Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno among his principal influences. As a public intellectual, Said served on the Palestinian National Council supporting a two-state solution before resigning in 1993 over his criticism of the Oslo Accords, and by 1999 he argued that a sustainable peace required a single binational state. He died in 2003.