Edward Said: 1935-2003
by Joshua Adams

Said was an example of that elusive and much speculated-about beast: the public intellectual. Although he made his name with the 1978 tome "Orientalism" — a book that made deep impressions in the fields of history, literature and cultural studies — he wrote on a dizzying array of subjects in a range of publications and for a wide audience. Equally at home writing about Beethoven in The Nation, literary theory in Critical Inquiry and the situation in Palestine in Al Hayat, Said was comfortable speaking to, and being spoken to by, the public.

Nevertheless, every discussion of Said comes back to "Orientalism," not only because of the book's critical and political significance, but also because it is a reflection of Said's own life. Twenty-five years of appropriation has dulled the book's revolutionary suggestion, but its importance remains. By 1978, it was widely recognized that colonial powers exploited people and nations around the globe, particularly the Middle East, but this was hardly all that Said intimated. Rather, he argued that the literary and artistic production of the West imagined a colonial East that both obviously needed and which secretly desired an imperial master. Said found texts that seemed to lack a global politics, but that actually served as a buttress to power and a cage for the powerless. To him, culture was not the experience of the aesthete, nor was it solely the class struggle of the Marxist. It was the by-product of transnational empires, a corollary of ideologies, including imperialism, racism, sexism and exoticism. The West did not merely exploit the East as such; it invented it.

So much of this seems intuitive now, but cultural self-awareness has come a long way in 25 years — thanks, in no small part, to Said. But scholarship only brought him so far; politics did the rest. For Said, politics and activism were only and always Palestine. After the Six Days' War of 1967, he began to speak out and write for the Palestinian cause. But it wasn't until the late 1980s, his academic career secure, that Said turned to the politics and activism that would eventually take precedence in his work.

Although his origins were investigated and disputed by an Israeli scholar who sought to discredit him, Said was, in fact, born in Jerusalem under the British mandate in Palestine in 1935. When he was 12, his family moved to Cairo. This was the same year that the United Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab partitions, and a year before the war that would see the emergence of the modern state of Israel and the beginning of the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Said emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a new kind of cosmopolitan exile, one simultaneously appreciative of the cultural forms of the West and bitter at the colonial legacy these forms abetted.

Said was always unrelenting toward the Israelis vis-à-vis their treatment of the Palestinians, and this more than anything else divides people about him. For him, the central feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was always its asymmetry, expressed in the basic fact that while the Palestinians were stateless and therefore politically illegitimate, the Israelis had a state of their own, an army of their own and powerful allies of their own, to boot. The charge that Israel had morphed from a haven for the victims of genocide to a perpetrator of historical crimes was too much for many to bear, and Said faced accusations of anti-Semitism from the both the right and from the pro-Israel left until his death. Commentary, ever a model of subtlety, entitled a piece about Said "Professor of Terror," hysterically arguing that the learned and compassionate scholar was an apologist for the murder of innocents.

But these criticisms have little basis in fact. Yes, Said threw a rock at an unmanned Israeli army outpost in Lebanon in 2000. But he was hardly a shill for Hamas or Fatah, and he always deplored violence directed at noncombatants. Yes, he opposed the Oslo Accords, but only because he thought Oslo would not generate an independent Palestinian state, not because he denied Israel's sovereignty. In fact, Said urged Arafat to acknowledge Israel's right to exist, and then soured on the Palestinian leader, calling his government an amalgam of corruption and dictatorship. Writing in The Nation, Said memorably argued for a nonviolent movement of Palestinian moderates to wrest control of the Palestinian Authority from thugs and murderers. He also provided a detailed account of the one ultimate obstacle to peace: Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Gandhi he certainly was not, but he was the best available option at the time.

Unfortunately for Said's legacy, and doubly so for us, no one seems poised to take up his work. The field of postcolonial studies has not continued to spawn theoretical giants, but this is understandable as the field's one great insight is also just that — one great insight. Some scholars, such as Gayatri Spivak, supplement this problem by taking seriously their commitment to activism, to the point where they don't just write about politics but actually make things happen on the ground. But for every example of political commitment, legions of seminar soldiers abound. The old slogans of solidarity and engagement generally fall on deaf ears. The hardy souls who get Ph.D.s nowadays are too worried about finding a job to advocate for the dispossessed.

It's all the rage to say that the postcolonial moment has passed us by. Empire is what people want to talk about now, not imperialism. But our contemporary thinkers risk much when they ignore Said's lessons. In the mind of would-be occupiers, the desire of the occupied is for the security and stability and progress and wealth brought by a benevolent empire, but that pliable image is always partly a projection, a fantasy. One hard look at the events on the ground will tell us so.