Edward SAID (1935-2003) was an outspoken critic of the field of orientalism and was hugely influential in redefining how scholars approach the field. Born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem, Said attended the Egyptian branch of Victoria College in Cairo and then North Field Mount Herman in Massachusetts. As an Arabic-speaking Palestinian in these heavily English-dominated schools, Said frequently felt like an outsider, caught between identities in a space that denied his very existence. These boyhood experiences proved highly formative for Said, and by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1957 Said had become an insightful literary critic.
His most famous work is Orientalism (1978), a deconstruction of the field of “oriental” scholarship, which had long been dominated and shaped by western interpreters. Said’s primary argument is that the very notion of the “Orient” presupposes certain assumptions about the superiority of the west and deprives people who actually live there (“Orientals”) from telling their own stories, by means of a process of othering, in which non-western peoples come to be understood as “other” and fundamentally different or lacking in some way (compared to Westerners), often culminating in the elevation of trivial (superficial and/or cosmetic) differences to the level of constituting different natures. In this manner, people who have been “othered” can cease to be considered human and lose any associated human rights and dignities. Because this Orientalists perform this othering subconsciously, Said takes it upon himself to demonstrate the various ways in which these presupposed power-relations have shaped the west’s creation of the “Orient,” in large part through contrast to the West (or “Occident”). Said’s goal in writing Orientalism was to change discourse within the field of orientalism and more broadly, so as to allow “Oriental” voices to be heard and enable those voices to take the lead in shaping how their history is taught and understood, through new, authentic perspectives. After all, shouldn’t a people be allowed to shape its own legacy?
FURTHER READING
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2019.