Edward Said
Literary Critic and Public Intellectual
Columbia University
Edward W. Said (1935-2003) was a Palestinian-American literary theorist, cultural critic, and political activist. Born in Jerusalem, he spent much of his early life between Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon before settling in the United States. His work transformed the study of colonialism, culture, and representation, and he remains one of the most cited scholars in the humanities.
Edward Said’s intellectual legacy extends across literary criticism, postcolonial theory, music criticism, and political advocacy. His most famous work, Orientalism (1978), fundamentally reshaped how scholars understand the relationship between Western knowledge production and imperial power, arguing that Western representations of the “Orient” served to justify and sustain colonial domination.
Said was also one of the most prominent Palestinian public intellectuals of his generation. A member of the Palestine National Council from 1977 to 1991, he was an early advocate for a two-state solution and Palestinian self-determination, though he later became a sharp critic of the Oslo Accords, which he saw as a capitulation that failed to address the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people.
His political writings, including The Question of Palestine, Orientalism, Covering Islam, After the Last Sky, The Politics of Dispossession, and The End of the Peace Process, combined rigorous analysis with personal testimony. He insisted that the Palestinian experience could not be understood apart from its colonial context and consistently challenged the erasure of Palestinian history and identity in Western media and political discourse.
At Columbia, Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and he maintained a parallel career as a music critic, co-founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim as a project of Israeli-Palestinian cultural dialogue. He died in New York in September 2003.