Palestinian-American literary critic, musician, and public intellectual — the founding figure of postcolonial studies and the principal Palestinian voice in English-language public life in the late 20th century. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 into an Anglican Palestinian family (his father an American citizen through First World War service), Said spent his childhood between Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, was educated at elite English-language schools in Cairo and then at Princeton and Harvard, and spent virtually his entire academic career at Columbia, where he held the University Professorship — Columbia's highest rank — and taught comparative literature until his death from leukemia in 2003.
Orientalism (1978) is the book. Drawing on Foucault's account of discourse and knowledge-power and on Gramsci's hegemony, Said argued that "the Orient" is not a place Western scholarship discovered but a discursive object Western scholarship produced — over two centuries of philology, travel writing, colonial administration, and imaginative literature — and that this production was inseparable from the imperial project that depended on it. The book reshaped not only literary studies but Middle East studies, anthropology, and history, and provoked a counter-literature that has not yet closed the argument. Culture and Imperialism (1993) extended the method to the great 19th- and early-20th-century European novel (Austen, Conrad, Kipling), arguing — contra his critics — that the implication was not to stop reading these works but to read them with attention to the imperial histories they depend on and sometimes obscure.
Said's second career as a public intellectual on Palestine was inseparable from the first. The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), and dozens of essays over three decades — in The Nation, The London Review of Books, the Arabic press, and his late After the Last Sky (1986) — made him the most visible Palestinian voice in American and European public debate, at considerable personal cost. He served on the Palestine National Council from 1977 until his very public resignation over the Oslo Accords, which he opposed from the left. His late turn toward humanism — articulated in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) and in his long collaboration with Daniel Barenboim on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra — unsettled some of his earlier followers and clarified what the critique of Orientalism had always been for.