Edward Said
Edward Said (November 1st 1935 - September 25th 2003) was one of the founding figures of Postcolonial studies, whose work, Orientalism, published in 1978, lead the charge into the analyzing the discourse between the West and East. Key concepts proposed by Said include the binary opposition between East and West, and the subsequent feminization of the East, and the Orientalist discourse as leading to a construction of characteristics attributed to both the East and West. Said drew inspiration from and was influenced by several theorists across the fields of Deconstructionism, Marxism and New Historicism, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx
Early Life and Education
Said was born into a Palestinian family on November 1st, 1935, within the British Mandate of Palestine. He would later serve within the U.S. Expeditionary Force in World War I. He was literary theoretician, professor of English, history and comparative literature, and an outspoken proponent of political rights of the Palestinian people. Said graduated at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts 1951, achieved a B.A at Princeton University in 1957, followed by an M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1964) at Harvard University. He became a lecturer at Columbia University in English (1963), and then an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature (1966). He became a full professor at Columbia in 1969, and worked there until his death in 2003.
List of Other Works
- The Question of Palestine (1979)
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981)
- Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988)
- The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
- Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995).
- The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983)
- Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988)
- Musical Elaborations (1991)
- Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Theoretical Approach
Said argues that the West, through colonization has led to the creation of a colonial discourse that purports to characterize the East - or the Orient. Said's Orient, strictly in terms of his proposed theory, refers more to the Indian Subcontinent and the Middle East, although his proposed ideas are readily applied to most colonial discourse as a whole. Said argued that the West, through observation and recounting, has characterized the East as sensual, exotic, promiscuous, excessively emotive and decadent. Said then goes on to argue that, as a result of this characterization, the West has produced a set of traits that serve as the anti-thesis of the East: rational, logical, restrained, moderated, progressive, modern. This back and forth has then resulted in a discourse between the West and the perceived East. This division between East and West has come to be recognized as a binary opposition.
Said's analysis of this discourse has also led to the drawing of parallels between East and West onto misogynistic female and male representations, respectively. The East, and the colonized, is typically feminized as being promiscuous, lazy and irrational, while the West perceives itself as clear-headed, dependable and strong. Said argues, then, that colonization is not only the domination of land and culture, but also the impression of an identity onto the colonized that presents them as the dependent and subservient "feminine" figure, with the colonizers taking on a stereotypically "masculine" controlling figure. Said also argues that this process of feminizing and exoticising of the East is the projection of Western insecurities and fears onto a physical and opposable "Other".
Criticism
Said has come under criticism for distinction between two clear "sides" in colonial and cultural discourse, arguing that the form of binary opposition is too clean-cut and insufficient in accounting for the blur of cultures that take place during colonization (as expressed by Bhaba) and also fails to build off of and account for the New Historicist views of cultural complexity and the impulse to break down and challenge binaries in favour of multiplicity. Said's ideology also bases itself on the idea of a "constructed" East, or Orient, that fails to create any definitive or substantial statement that speaks to the nature of the East independent of a Western perspective or discourse.