Edward Said: From academic to global icon

In an intellectual scenario dominated by western thinkers, Edward Said (1935-2003) stands out as a remarkable exception — of Palestinian Arab origin, he towered as a literary critic and political philosopher in the US’ most important Ivy League institutions. He was also a political activist and a powerful voice in support of the Palestinian struggle, at a time when US political, academic and media circles were robustly pro-Israel and actively hostile to Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians.
He combined these two aspects of his persona in writing two of the most influential books of the twentieth century — Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism — that challenged time-honoured western cultural perceptions of the “Orient” and exposed threadbare the assumptions, prejudices and atrocities that have shaped the West’s encounter with the East over the last few centuries.
This book is not a conventional biography; it is an intellectual history that explores the diverse influences that shaped Said’s thinking, his deep intellectual engagement with western writers and philosophers, past and contemporary, and how he attempted to balance in his life his roles as thinker, writer and teacher and as an active votary of the Palestinian cause.
Coming from an affluent, even privileged, background and an American citizen from birth, Said was a student at Princeton and Harvard and taught English Literature at Columbia. The early part of this book shows Said gradually placing himself at the centre of the debates in American academia on literary theory and the impact on these discussions of European thinkers such as Foucault, Sartre, Derrida and Claude Levi-Strauss. Said and his colleagues, most of them polarised between left and right, vigorously debated among themselves language, grammar, semantics, meaning and creativity.
By 1968, Said was accepted in the US and Europe as the “face of Continental theory.” At the same time, Said’s political awareness, nurtured within his family from childhood, sharpened after the 1967 debacle for the Arabs. But it was the Pakistani-origin Marxist intellectual and activist, Eqbal Ahmad who instilled in him the zeal of an intellectual revolutionary. Said even addressed students at Columbia protesting about the Vietnam War on the Palestine issue.