Edward Wadie Said (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd]; Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; November 1, 1935 – September 25, 2003) was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and public intellectual who helped found the field of critical theory of postcolonialism. . Born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, to Palestinian parents residing in Egypt, he was an American citizen through his father. Said spent his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, where he attended elite British and American schools. Subsequently, he went to the United States, where he obtained a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a doctorate in English literature from Harvard. Said then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963, where he became professor of English and comparative literature in 1991.
As a cultural critic, Said is best known for his 1978 book Orientalism. In it, he analyzes the cultural representations that underlie orientalism, a term he redefined to refer to the condescending perceptions and representations that West has societies from the Middle East, Asia and North Africa – “the Orient/”. He argued that Orientalist scholarship was and remains inextricably linked to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of his work inherently political, subservient to power, and therefore intellectually suspect. Orientalism is based on Said's knowledge of colonial literature, literary theory, and poststructuralism. Said's work has proven influential in the humanities, particularly literary theory, and has had a transformative impact on Middle Eastern studies, whose practitioners have begun to study how it examines, describes, and defines the cultures of the Middle East. . Said vigorously discussed and debated the cultural topics comprised in Orientalism, particularly as they are applied to history and regional studies; nevertheless, some mainstream scholars disagreed with this theory, notably Bernard Lewis.
As a public intellectual, Said has discussed culture, literature, music, and contemporary politics. Drawing on his family experiences as Palestinian Christians in the Middle East around the time of Israel's creation in 1948, Said advocated for the creation of a Palestinian state. Additionally, he was an advocate for equal political and human rights for Palestinians in Israel and urged the United States to pressure Israel to grant and respect these rights. Said was described by journalist Robert Fisk as the "most powerful political voice" of the Palestinian people. However, he also criticized Arab and Muslim regimes for acting against the interests of their people. Intellectually active until the last months of his life, he died of leukemia at the end of 2003.
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