Edward W. Said: Overcoming Orientalism

EDWARD SAID was a prolific author who made major contributionsto various aspects of modern scholarship. These disparate contri-butions to literary theory, the history of ideas, music, the sociology of intellectuals, and political analysis were integrated around a critique of western assumptions about other cultures, namely around his critique of Orientalism. In 1978 Orientalism launched his international academic repu-tation and it has remained central to understanding his work, including his more overtly political journalism on Israel and the Palestinian movement. His study, which applied Michel Foucault’s methods to the textual analysis of the history of western (predominantly French) interpretations of the Orient, has often been narrowly interpreted. At one level Orientalism examined the literary conditions by which a static and regressive Orient was constantly reproduced in western literature, but Said had a larger purpose which was to see how scholarship could transcend simple dichotomies of East and West. He looked to the history of philology and Oriental sciences to see how negative Otherness could be transcended by a broader moral vision of the common culture of humanity. His work on Orientalism radi-cally transformed the field of Oriental studies. This intellectual quest was closely related to his personal history in which he experienced the modern world from the standpoint of an exile. A major component of his discussion of intellectuals and Orientalism has been somewhat neglected, namely his tentative and uncertain moves towards what we may refer to as ‘an ethic of cosmopolitan care ’ which charted a way out of Orientalism. His recent autobiography Out of Place (1999) captured his persistent mood of exile and dislocation. He was partly situated in the West in his identity as ‘Edward ’ and partly in the East in his role as ‘Said’. His scholarly concerns were consistently focused on such