Edward Said

Edward Wadie Said lived from 1 November 1935 to 24 September 2003 and was a Palestinian and American academic, literary critic and political activist; as a professor of literature at Columbia University he was among the founders of post-colonial studies. As a cultural critic he is best known for his book Orientalism, published in 1978, a foundational text critiquing the cultural representations underlying Orientalism, how the Western world perceives the Orient, whose model of textual analysis transformed academic discourse in literary theory, literary criticism and Middle Eastern studies. Born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, in 1935, Said was a United States citizen by way of his father, who had served in the United States Army during World War I; after the 1948 Palestine war he relocated with his family to Egypt, where they had previously lived, and then to the United States, graduating from Princeton University in 1957 and receiving a doctorate in English literature from Harvard University in 1964, with his principal influences being Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno. In 1963 he joined Columbia University's English and Comparative Literature faculties, where he taught until 2003, lecturing at more than 200 other universities across North America, Europe and the Middle East. As a public intellectual Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council supporting a two-state solution incorporating the Palestinian right of return, before resigning in 1993 over his criticism of the Oslo Accords, and by 1999 he argued that sustainable peace was only possible with one Israeli-Palestinian state, defining his own oppositional relation to the Israeli status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has, in his words, to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual.