As a Professor at Colombia University, Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003) was a Palestinian-American academic, political activist, and literary and music critic. Forging a path for Postcolonial studies, Said was an ‘ amateur intellectual’ who filled the cultural and political gap that existed between the Western and Eastern worlds. Forming a bicultural voice, he was vociferous about the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East.

The Palestinian freedom struggle has resurfaced Said’s enduring fight for Gaza that forms the centre of Arab imagination. The article in The Hindu has re-emerged to uphold Said’s views that weave a compelling memory of dialogues and exchanges formed out of the Oslo Accords. His interactions with Sara Roy and Daniel Barenboim are a memorable account of courage, resistance and compromise.

Here’s an excerpt of the article; read on to enrich your understanding of the literary magnet who lived the American Dream as a Palestinian, who was an insider and an outsider at the same time.

SOURCE- THE HINDU

It has been two decades since Edward Said succumbed to cancer. In the aftermath of the events of October 7, 2023, opinions about Gaza and the Palestinians have surged. Perhaps now, more than ever, there is an imperative to revisit Said as he continues to remain the most severe critic of American-Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians.

 After all, the story of Gaza and the Palestinians is much older and harrowing.

The academic and the intellectual

In our university campuses, a particular rendition of Edward Said finds persistent mention. In this realm, Said is the author of Orientalism (1978), The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Here occasionally, the earlier works, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) and Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), find timid mention. These spaces both admired and criticised him as a Professor at Columbia University. The adulation and criticism his person invited were deserving; after all, his Orientalism was critical to ascertaining post-colonial studies as a formal academic discipline. Said prompted us to contemplate, for the first time, that the Orient (or the East) was a hypothesis fabricated by the Occident (or the West). He urged us to understand that the prevailing portrayal of Islam as the perennial Western adversary stemmed from the stubborn endeavours of post-enlightenment western explorers, poets, novelists, and professional orientalists. Said declared that the West envisioned the East before the East had the opportunity to envision itself. This is the rendition of Said that is scrutinised with meticulous, fervent attention.