Edward Said

From Geography

Biography

Identity- who we are, where we come from, what we are- is difficult to maintain in exile...we are the 'other', an opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement, an exodus. Silence and discretion veil the hurt, slow the body searches, soothe the sting of loss (Said, E., 1986 in Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001, p.3)

This quotation illustrates the life of Edward Said [1] (1 November 1935- 25 September 2003), which was a very well known and often recited Palestinian-American critic, political commentator and literary and cultural theorist, which could be placed within postcolonialsm. He was born in 1935 Jerusalem, Palestine. By that time, Palestine was under British administration. After the second World War, Edward Said and his family went to Cairo. Said didn't really feel comfortable living in Cairo, and after he was expelled from highschool in 1951, his parents sent him to the United States. In America, it wasn't that easy either, but Said was very clever: he graduated at Princeton University, went to Harvard for his Ph.D and became an Assisatant Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Untill than, he maintained two identities: as a Palestinian and as an American. But "the 1967 [Arab-Israeli] war and its reception in America confronted Said with the paradox of his own position; he could no longer maintain two identities, and the experience began to be reflected everywhere in his work (...) he began to construct himself as a Palestinian" (Ashcroft & Ahluwalia, 2001, p.3). This quotation shows Saids struggle with his identity and his politicisation after the Arab-Israeli war, which have had a major influence on his important works Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981). Orientalism could be seen as his most influental and most recited work, which will be discussed here as well. The most important thing that can be concluded from Said's biography, is that his own life has been very crucial to the direction of his theory. As Ashcrof and Ahluwalia (2001) say: "The condition of his own life, the text of his identity, are constantly woven into and form the defining context for all his writing. His struggles with his dislocation, his recognition of the empowering potential of exile, his constant engagement with the link between textuality and the world, underlie the major directions ofo his theory and help to explain his uncertain relationship with contemporary theory" (p.5)

References

-Ashcroft, B. and Ahluwalia, P. (2001). Edward Said. New York, London: Routledge. -Gregory, D. (2000). Edward Said’s imaginative geographies. In Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds.) Thinking space. Routledge, London, pp.302-348.

Contributors

-Biography edited by --JikkeVanTHof 12:06, 29 September 2011 (UTC)