Edward Said

Edward Wadie Said, in Arabic, إدوارد وديع سعيد; (Jerusalem, November 1, 1935 – New York, September 25, 2003) was a literary and musical critic and theorist, and Palestinian-American activist. He was a world-renowned author and analyst, and a member of the Palestinian National Council (1977-1991). From 1963 until his death in 2003, he was a professor of English literature and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is considered one of the initiators of postcolonial studies. In 1999, together with Daniel Barenboim, he founded the West-East Divan Orchestra which since 2002 has been based in Seville (Spain).

His life

Said was born on November 1, 1935 in Jerusalem, at that time under British mandate, and into an Arab Christian family. His father was a merchant who acquired American nationality and his mother was a Palestinian descendant of Christians. -Lebanese. Said grew up in Jerusalem and Cairo, Egypt. In West Jerusalem he attended St. George's Anglican Academy until he was twelve.

In December 1947, after the approval of the United Nations Plan for the Partition of Palestine, Said's father decided to move the family to Cairo, where he had a branch of his company. At only 12 years old witnessed the Nakba, the expulsion or flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their lands and homes in the face of Israeli forces during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948; He was especially impressed by seeing how numerous members of his own family "became homeless, penniless, disoriented and terrified overnight." At the age of 14, Said entered Victoria School. in Alexandria (Egypt), and in 1951 at the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts (United States). He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1957, and his master's degree and doctorate in English literature from Harvard University in 1960 and 1964 respectively.

He entered Columbia University as an academic in 1963, and there he taught English and comparative literature until his death. He was appointed full professor in 1969 and full professor in 1977. The same year he was elected member of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in exile. He had met Yasir Arafat during his visit to the United Nations in 1974, the year in which he became friends with other important figures of Palestinian culture such as Mahmud Darwish and Shafiq al-Hout. In 1978 he published Orientalism. i>, his best-known work and one of the most influential studies of the XX century. In the eighties he began to appear in numerous Western media to "defend the PLO as the main instrument of the Palestinian struggle.

Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Yale universities, and lectured at more than 200 universities in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Apart from his teaching work, there are numerous collaborations in newspapers and magazines in many countries - such as his fortnightly column in Al Ahram and Al Hayat -, and he formed part of the editorial board of twenty newspapers. He was also the editor-in-chief of the book collection Convergences, edited by Harvard University Press. In 1992, he was named a member of the UNESCO Forum of Scholars.

He spoke English and French fluently, his colloquial Arabic was excellent, his formal Arabic very good and he was familiar with Spanish, German, Italian and Latin. He was awarded numerous honorary doctorates around the world and he twice received Columbia's Trilling Prize, as well as the Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. In 2002 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the American Philosophical Society, and an honorary member of King's College (University of Cambridge). He was a member of the executive board of the PEN Club International until 1998, and president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1999.

Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York in 2003, after a long fight against leukemia.

Orientalism

Said is known for describing and criticizing "orientalism", a key concept for postcolonial and subaltern theories, which is based on the observation of a constellation of false prejudices at the bottom of Western attitudes towards regarding the East.

In Orientalism (1978), Said denounces the 'persistent and subtle Eurocentric prejudices against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture.' He argues that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture have served as implicit justification for the colonial and imperial ambitions of Europe and the United States.

Themes such as the emancipation of otherness, the liberating role of subalternity from Eurocentric prejudices and the inevitable hybridization of cultures accompany the argumentation of Orientalism, which proposes a radical change "of gaze identification" cultural.

Said's proposal on orientalism

In 1978 Said published Orientalism one of his most relevant works and would give him the recognition of being one of the most important critics of the century XX. In this work he uses the term orientalism to address the false conception that has been generated of the East from the Western perspective. This false conception, says Said, has been created in the foreground by Europeans and the Middle East and in the background by North Americans and the Arab world. Regarding the foreground, Said affirms that the relationship between East and West, the East was almost an invention made by Europe, this imaginary that Europe has created about the East has its beginnings since ancient times, since that time this region was seen as a stage in the which highlighted exotic beings, extraordinary experiences. romances, memories and unforgettable landscapes.

On the other hand, Said clarifies that the term Orientalism has not had a single meaning; therefore, Said in his work highlights three major meanings that the term Orientalism has had. The first of them refers to the way in which the East has served Europe to define itself, this definition is achieved by cataloging the East as the contrast of European values and ideals (by this Said refers to the image, idea, personality and experience that Europe has of itself). Despite this, Said clarifies that the East cannot be understood only as an imaginary since the East is an integral part of European civilization and culture.

The second meaning comes from the academy, Said defined it in the following way “It is a style of thought that is based on the ontological and epistemological distinction that is established between the East and - most of the time - the West. ” With this definition, what Said proposes is that academics (politicians, poets, novelists, economists and administrators of the empire) have accepted that determining a basic difference between East and West can be a starting point for carrying out work on the East. That is to say, the difference between the West and the East that is imposed thanks to the European perspective causes this difference to be the starting point to constitute the work that the West carries out on this region. That is to say, the works on the East do not start from the understanding of the East and its customs, but from the differences that the East has with the Western world. Said assures that this logic can be seen represented in the works made by intellectuals such as Dante, Karl Marx Victor Hugo, among others.

The third meaning that the term Orientalism can have, according to Said, differs from the others since it has historical characteristics, which have as their starting point the end of the century XVIII. Said defines it as follows: “Orientalism can be described and analyzed as a collective institution that relates to the Orient, a relationship that consists of making statements about it, adopting positions with respect to it, describing it, teaching it, colonizing it and deciding about it.”; In short, orientalism is a Western style that seeks to dominate, restructure and have authority over the East.”

In the aforementioned quote, Said states that there is a dynamic which starts from the West to relate to the East, which consists of the West, through a collective institution (which is not made up of a single organization) manages to dominate and impose a vision about this region, this vision is imposed based on the European experience. Furthermore, through this imposition an authority figure is also restructured and imposed on the East. The authority figure describes the logic in which Europe thinks of the East, from the imposition and not from the understanding of the East and its components.

It is necessary to clarify that Said not only poses as responsible for the imposition of Orientalism and the effects with respect to the ideas and practices that emerged in Europe, Said clarifies that the United States also plays an important role in the conception that is held regarding to Orientalism. For Said, the United States, unlike Europe, does not have a constructed conception like that of Europe, which occurs thanks to the relationship between colonies and territory located in the Middle East. For Said, the United States has created an image of the East through the media. Said adds that thanks to the Second World War, the United States began to have another role, according to Said "Since the Second World War, the United States has dominated the East and relates to it in the same way as "France and Great Britain. They did it in another era."

Another characteristic that according to Said differentiates the experience between Orientalism in Europe and that of the United States, is the political influence that this concept has in the United States, which it causes due to its political relationship with Israel. This relationship with Israel, according to Said, directly influences the experience that the United States has had with the Near East, and when comparing the United States and its experience with European experiences, it is differentiated by the direct contact that having colonies entailed. of Europeans in the Middle East. Despite this, the United States has had direct contact of another type, Said describes a closeness in the economic aspect which has given another type of knowledge to the United States, which has decisively influenced the knowledge it has about the Middle East. Furthermore, Said mentions that the experience that the United States has had with Japan, Korea and Indochina is possibly influencing its conception of the oriental, according to Said this experience that the United States has had with these countries can probably create a more realistic and serious awareness about the oriental. The last difference to highlight is the role that public organizations play in the relationship with the East, in the case of the United States they play an important role with respect to the relationship that this nation has with the Middle East, because through these The United States demonstrates the strategic and economic importance that this region has.

The theory in the concept of Orientalism

For Said, the statement made by Vico is the theoretical starting point for his development of the concept of Orientalism. Said understands that if men are the ones who make their own history and at the same time are in charge of making it known, this dynamic can also be present in the field of geography. Said states in relation to this idea that “Consequently, to the same extent as the West itself, the East is an idea that has a history, a tradition of thought, images and a vocabulary that have given it a reality and a presence in and for the West.” The conception we have of the East can be argued from Vico's proposal, since the imaginary that is understood about the East is nothing more than the result of how men tell history. Another author mentioned in Said's proposal in Grasmsci, Said cites this author to relate his concept of the existence of predominant cultural forms in non-totalitarian societies. For Said, this proposal allows us to understand how there is a hegemony in Western society with respect to the idea of the oriental. In Said's words "It is hegemony - or, better, the effects of cultural hegemony - that gives orientalism the durability and strength that I have been talking about until now."

On the other hand, Said compares the idea of orientalism proposed by him, with the approach made by Denys Hay, which Said mentions in his text Orientalism (1971) in the following way "the existence of a collective notion that defines what who are called like us (Europeans), who are against everything that is not European.” We can understand the relationship between this statement and Said's proposal in the following way that the conception of Europe at the time of determining a “we” is the same as that used to understand the other, therefore, based on the difference that exists between our own conception and the comparison with the practices of the other (the East) is that what is non-European is determined, which can be concluded is the dynamic that has governed the East-West relationship. Said adds that there is a hegemony of European ideas, which can be translated as an idea of superiority in the European components compared to what is not European and that causes the East to be backward from this perspective. Given this, the multiple scenarios in which the West can relate to the East are never unrelated to having the logic that places the West with a certain superiority over the East.

Continuing with his theoretical analysis, for Said there is a specific characteristic that can describe the relationship that the West has maintained with the East. For Said, the relationship between these two cultures can be described as follows: “The relationship between the West and the East is a relationship of power, and of complicated domination: the West has exercised different degrees of hegemony over the East.” Said refers to a power relationship since in this case one of the participants has exercised a dynamic of domination over the other. A fact to highlight in this relationship of hegemony is the intervention of Napoleon, for the first time scientific knowledge of Europe was given, in his work Said describes it in the following way "It is true that, after William Jones and Anquetil- Duperron, and after Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, Europe came to know the East in a more scientific way and to live in it with an authority and discipline that it had never had before. “, and after this the one that occurred thanks to the creation of colonies in Middle Eastern territories by Europeans, mainly France and the United Kingdom.

Said concludes with his theoretical relationship with the concept of Orientalism mentioned that although he agrees that there is a power relationship between the West and the East, Orientalism should not be seen as limited by this statement. Said wants to pay special attention to the solidity that exists in the discourse that he has forged on Orientalism, and how it relates to the existing socioeconomic and political institutions, finally the durability that it has had. Said ends by defining that “Orientalism, then, is not a fantasy that Europe created about the Orient, but a body of theory and practice in which, over many generations, considerable investment has been made. Because of this continuous inversion, Orientalism has become a system for knowing the Orient, an accepted filter that the Orient passes through to penetrate Western consciousness.” What Said defines in this quote is that orientalism has mutated into a system through which we try to know the Orient, and that within the Western consciousness it enjoys such acceptance that it fulfills this role that has not been present in a single generation, on the contrary., has endured.

Said clarifies that orientalism is overall the distribution of a type of geopolitical consciousness that is present in the works of different disciplines, which are based on a basic distinction: the world is divided geographically between the West and the East. Regarding the time that this discourse has lasted, Said argues that this is not due to a single cause; on the contrary, there is more than one power that has allowed this discourse to endure in Western culture. To be the unequal exchange of different types of power is what has allowed Orientalism to endure in this culture. Political power is one of the types of power that has allowed this for Said, this power was presented unevenly in the colonial or imperial stage that related European states to the Middle East. On the other hand, there is this intellectual power that uses the predominant sciences (linguistics, anatomy or sciences related to modern politics) as a medium. After raising the aforementioned, Said presents the thesis of his text in which he proposes that orientalism can be classified as a political and cultural reality, which does not mean that it lacks a basis, on the contrary, for Said it is possible to demonstrate that what What is said and thought about the East follows very strict lines that can be verified intellectually.

The relationship between Said's context and orientalism

One of the reasons why Said decided to do this work was his own personal experience in relation to how orientalism is understood in Western culture, as featured in a documentary made Sut Jhally, which focuses on a interview with Said in which he talks about his work Orientalism (1971). In this documentary, Said states that what he saw represented in art (in artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme or Eugène Delacroix) did not relate to Said's personal experience as an Arab, which raised doubts in Said regarding why his personal experience was not related to what the artists reflected about the East, especially Arab culture. These thoughts motivated Said to carry out work on what he calls "orientalism", in order to understand this phenomenon.

For Said, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 was one of the first reasons that pushed him to begin a study about what he would later call "orientalism". Said considered it peculiar how the media covering the conflict had a common general conception about Egypt's military inability to fight Israel, assessments that ended up being proven wrong by the media since Egypt managed to defeat Israel in a series of battles. On the other hand, Said considered that in different representations there was a common pattern, which Said describes as constant images that were related to the imaginary of the East. Said points out in the interview that among these images, the attractive woman from the East and the East seen as a mysterious place that hides secrets stand out. What caught Said's attention the most was that these descriptions had not been made by people who had had real contact with the Middle East and that, even if that contact existed, the descriptions did not change, so it could be deduced that these descriptions They were true.

In the documentary, Said comments how, during his reading of a work by Nerval titled Voyage to the Orient (1851), he noticed that what was told in the work seemed familiar to him until the end. point that he realized that Nerval was using the concept that it does not matter which part of the East you travel to, since there is no difference between the populations that make up this region. The approach to art in his different presentations was the first experience that Said would have with respect to the phenomenon of "orientalism."

Pro-Palestinian activism and pacifism

Said's active commitment to the Palestinian cause began in 1968, after the impact caused by the Six Day War in 1967. In 1979 he published 'The Palestinian Question', a book in which reviews his political ideology. As a Palestinian activist, Said defended the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. In his writings from 1980, Said anticipated an eventual policy of aggression by the United States in the Middle East. Said opposed the use of violence to achieve political objectives and was in favor of recognizing the State of Israel, which is why he was harshly criticized by both Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

For many years he was a member of the Palestinian National Council, but broke with Arafat over disagreement with the Oslo Accords. Said considered them a fraud, and noted that there was no mention of the end of the Israeli occupation, nor the fate of Jerusalem, nor was a solution proposed for the Israeli settlements. But even after breaking with Arafat, his fight for Palestinian rights continued, and in 2000 he was photographed by chance throwing a stone towards the fence that marks the border between Lebanon and Israel.

Due to his pro-Palestinian activism, he was accused by hard-line pro-Israel sectors of being anti-Semitic and even a terrorist. At one point they left a bomb in his office, and at another they tried to strip him of his job as a university academic. But, in 1999, together with his friend, the musician Daniel Barenboim, he founded the East-West Divan Orchestra, an initiative to bring together a group of talented young people from Israel and Arab countries every summer. For this reason, they both received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in 2002.

In 2002, Said co-founded, along with Haidar Abdel Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian National Initiative party and social movement (Al Mubadara), an attempt to create a third Palestinian political force that could be an alternative democratic and reformist to Fatah and Hamas.

Music

Said was not only a lover of music but was an excellent pianist. He wrote extensively about music, and was the music critic for the American magazine The Nation for years. He wrote three books on music: Musical elaborations: essays on classical music, Parallelisms and paradoxes: reflections on music and society (jointly with Daniel Barenboim), and his latest book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Said often saw in music a reflection of his ideas about literature and history. A posthumous collection of his essays was published in 2007 in the United States and in 2011 in Spain, with the title Música al limit.

The Arab American composer Mohammed Fairouz has been deeply influenced by the writings of Edward Said. His first symphony takes as its reference the essay Homage to a Belly Dancer , and his piano sonata is titled Reflections on Exile , the title of the collection of essays by Said.

In honor of Edward Said, in 2004 the Palestine National Conservatory of Music changed its name to the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music).

Works

• Parallels and Paradoxes (with Daniel Barenboim) (2004)
• CIA et Jihad, 1950-2001: Contre l'URSS, une disastreuse alliance (2002) with John K. Cooley
• The End Of The Peace Process (2000)
• Reflections on Exile (2000)
• Out of Place (1999) (a memoir)
• Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Contributor) (1999)
• Jewish Religion, Jewish History (Introduction to the 1997 edition)
• The Pen and the Sword (1994)
• Representations of the Intellectual (1994)
• The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
• Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Musical Elaborations (1991)
• Blaming the Victims (1988)
• After the Last Sky (1986)
• The World, the Text and the Critic (1983)
• Covering Islam (1981)
• Literature and Society (1980)
• The Question of Palestine (1979)
• Orientalism (Orientalism(1978)
• Beginnings (1975)
• Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)

Spanish translations

• Gaza and Jericho, American Pax [Internet Archive] Txalaparta Argitaletxea, 2011 ISBN 978-84-8136-819-2.
• Music at the limit: three decades of essays and musical articles, prologue of Daniel Barenboim, New Editions of Bolsillo, 2011, ISBN 978-84-9908-883-9.
• Conversations with Edward Saidby Tariq Ali (1943-), Alliance, 2010, ISBN 978-84-206-6989-2.
• About the late style: music and anti-current literature, Debate, 2009 ISBN 978-84-8306-783-3.
• The world, the text and the critic, New Bolsillo Editions, 2008 ISBN 978-84-8346-785-5.
• Musical productions: essays on classical music, Debate, 2007 ISBN 978-84-8306-725-3.
• Representations of the intellectual, Debate, 2007 ISBN 978-84-8306-726-0.
• Humanism and Democratic Criticism Debate, 2006, ISBN 978-84-8306-671-3.
• Covering Islam Debate, 2005, ISBN 978-84-8306-644-7.
• Freud and non-European, Global Rhythm Press, 2005, ISBN 978-84-934213-6-6.
• Reflections on exile: literary and cultural essays, Debate, 2005, ISBN 978-84-8306-608-9.
• The world, the text and the critic, Debate, 2004, ISBN 978-84-8306-555-6.
• Culture and imperialism, Anagrama, 2004 ISBN 978-84-339-0537-6.
• Orientalism. New Bolsillo Editions, 2003 ISBN 978-84-9759-767-8.
• New Palestinian Chronicles, New Editions of Bolsillo, 2003, ISBN 978-84-9759-478-3.
• Out of place, New Editions of Bolsillo, 2003, ISBN 978-84-9759-291-8.
• Parallelisms and paradoxes: reflections on music and society, Debate, 2002, with Daniel Barenboim, ISBN 978-84-8306-962-2.
• New Palestinian Chronicles: the End of the Peace Process, Mondadori (2002) ISBN 978-84-397-0934-3.
• Palestine: peace without territoriesTxalaparta Argitaletxea (2002) ISBN 978-84-8136-054-7.
• Palestinian Chronicles, Grijalbo (2001), ISBN 978-84-253-3604-1.
• Representations of the intellectual, Paidós Ibérica, 1996 ISBN 978-84-493-0242-8.

About Edward Said

• Ashcroft, Bill; Ahluwalia, Pal, Edward Said, the paradox of identity, Bellaterra, 2000 ISBN 978-84-7290-151-3
• Cortés Ramírez, Eugenio Enrique, The cultural revolution of orientalism: an aesthetic of the graffiti-foucaultian approach to the work of Edward W. Said (1935-2003), [Electronic resources] Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Publications Service, 2008 ISBN 978-84-8344-127-5
• VV. AA., Converse Orientalism: tribute to Edward W. Said, The Books of Qatar, 2007 ISBN 978-84-8319-327-3
• Walia, Shelley, Edward Said and historiography, Gedisa, 2004, ISBN 978-84-9784-031-6
• Castro-Gómez, Postcoloniality explained to children, Editorial Universidad del Cauca, Popayán, Colombia; Instituto Pensar Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2005. ISBN 958-9475-89-2

Predecessor: World Biosphere Reserve Network

Princess of Asturias Award of Concordia 2002

Successor: Aimé Césaire