Said, Edward W.
SAID, EDWARD W. (1935–2003) is best known as the author of the influential and widely read Orientalism (1978), a study of the modes of thought and writing which have created a Manichean and essentialist divide between "the Orient" and "the Occident" since the eighteenth century. In his introduction to the book Said argues that one must grasp the remarkable consistency of thought and method which underpins Western representations of the Arab Muslim world across the centuries if one is to understand properly "the enormously systematic discipline by which European [and later American] culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period" (p. 3). No other single work has had a greater formative influence than Orientalism on debates about the representation of non-Western cultures within the discourses of the West, on the historical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of culture and power between center and periphery in colonial and postcolonial contexts, or, more specifically, on the ways in which knowledge of Islam and the Arab Muslim world has been shaped or misshaped in Europe and America.
But Said's writing career was a long and productive one and his intellectual interests were marked by a rare and impressive range.
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