By Clara Kaul

Edward Said was a prolific Palestinian public intellectual and professor who helped found the field of postcolonial studies.

Said was born on November 1st in Jerusalem, a city in British-governed mandatory Palestine to wealthy parents.

1935

1951

Said was expelled from Victoria College in Alexandria, a British Colonial school designed to educate the ruling class. He was sent to the United States to study at Northfield Mount Hernon School in Massachusetts.

On his education, Said said:

"I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity, at all."

--Between Worlds, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2002)

Said received his Phd in English Literature from Harvard University. 

1968

1978

Said published Orientalism with Pantheon Press. The book was met with both praise and critique and was a founding text of postcolonial studies.

The thesis of Orientalism proposed that Western study of the Arabic and Islamic civilizations (the discursively-produced "East") was a practice of Western self-affirmation and identity shaping. Said argues that Western political thought constructs non-Western countries (known as the Orient) as opposites to Western countries, thus reifying Western national identity and creating an East vs West binary.

Said wrote:

"Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.”

-- Orientalism (1978)

Said publishes seven books including The Question of Palestine (1979) and Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990). These books, among his others, expand the field of postcolonial studies.

1979-1992

1993

Said published Culture and Imperialism, which expanded on his arguments established in Orientalism. While Orientalism functioned as a diagnosis of the major problems in Western intellectual thought focused on the MENA region, Culture and Imperialism expanded Said's argument to other regions of the world. It also included colonized countries' responses to Western dominance, specifically the cultures of decolonization that emerged in the face of imperialism.

Said wrote:

"What I left out of Orientalism was that responses to Western dominance which culminated in the great of movement of decolonization."

-- Culture and Imperialism (1993)

1994-2003

Said published a number of other books that expanded the field of postcolonial studies in the following years, including two memoirs and The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000). He continued writing and speaking on Palestine and postcolonial philosophy until his death in 2003.