Edward Said

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Edward Said (left) and Daniel Barenboim, 2002
Poster with a picture of Edward Said

Edward William Said , actually Edward Wadie Saïd ( Arabic إدوارد وديع سعيد, DMG Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd , born November 1, 1935 in Jerusalem , League of Nations Mandate Area of Palestine ; † September 25, 2003 in New York City ), was an American literary theorist and critic of Palestinian origin. His book Orientalism , published in 1978 , is generally one of the most influential and widely received non-fiction books in the recent history of science. He was seen as an advocate for the Palestinians in the United States .

biography

Said was born in Jerusalem to Hilda and William A. (Wadie) Said. The family lived in Talbiyah, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem that was built for wealthy Palestinian Christians . His mother was the daughter of a Baptist pastor from Nazareth. His father Wadie Said had left Palestine in 1911 and had come to the USA via Liverpool. He fought in the US Army in World War I and was granted US citizenship. In 1920, the father returned to his home in Palestine as a successful businessman, bought the property in Jerusalem and had other apartments and houses in Cairo and Dhour el-Shweir, now Lebanon. Said first attended St. George's School of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem. In 1948 the family lost their property in Jerusalem when the State of Israel was founded. Edward switched to the British-run elite school Victoria College in Alexandria (Egypt). When he had to leave this school, his parents sent him to Mount Hermon School in New Hampshire, USA to complete his school education. He then studied at Princeton and Harvard. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University in 1957 and his Master of Arts (1960) and Ph.D. (1964) from Harvard University . In 1963 he became assistant professor (associate professor) at Columbia University , New York and in 1966 there full professor (professor for life) for English literature and comparative literature (comparative literature). In 1970 he married Mariam Cortas, an Arab Christian and daughter of a professor at the American University of Beirut, for a second marriage. The marriage resulted in two children, the lawyer Wadie E. Said (born 1972) and the writer and playwright Najla Said (born 1974). In 1991, Said was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia as an incurable and slowly progressing disease. Edward Said founded in 1999 together with Daniel Barenboim and the Commissioner-General of the then European Cultural Capital Weimar , Bernd Kauffmann , the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra . He died on September 25, 2003 in a hospital in New York.

Orientalism

Said's best-known work is the 1978 book Orientalism . For Said, "Orientalism is to be understood as a kind of conscious human work" that relates politics and knowledge in a way that enables the West to dominate colonialism. Orientalism is "a system of knowledge about the Orient" that has proven itself as an instrument of imperialism and colonialism. The work is not least a critical analysis of the British and French science of oriental studies . Their representatives would take for granted the superiority of European culture and view the political subjugation of the studied peoples as an unquestioned necessity. Even the idea of ​​a fundamental dichotomy between the Occident and the Orient is misleading. Said developed his ideas with Foucault's concept of discourse analysis . The book met with a positive response from Homi K. Bhabha , John Esposito , Mahmood Mamdani , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Robert Fisk, among others .

The work was considered the founding document for the establishment of post-colonial studies as a research direction. Said himself ascribes the greatest merit in the development of post-colonial historiography not to Middle Eastern studies but to Indology , especially to a group of researchers around Ranajit Guha . He states that many postmodern and postcolonial works seem to fall back on approaches such as the one in “Orientalism”, but distinguishes the postcolonial studies of the first generation from postmodernism because, unlike the postmodernists, they clung to the great narratives of emancipation and enlightenment.

criticism

Said's early works on Joseph Conrad or William Butler Yeats were not yet shaped by the idea that the forms of expression and perspectives in art, culture and science are closely related to the exercise of political rule. Nevertheless, in dealing with these two Polish and Irish writers of British colonialism, Said gained the insight that the exiled and the oppressed recognize the political power relations and their consequences for cultural life particularly clearly. From these observations, Said developed the idea of ​​exile as the standpoint of the intellectual. From this position he is in a position to “speak truth to power”. This attitude also explains why Said's work, beginning with Orientalism in 1978, was highly polarized. His demand on intellectuals, artists and scientists to evade affirmative knowledge production for the rulers, to pass from power to truth, on the one hand offended many liberal scientists and artists and on the other hand transformed politically committed literary scholars, especially from the formerly colonized countries, loyal supporters of his theory about the politically hegemonic production of knowledge in the West.

Critics accuse Said of historical inaccuracies and a one-sided interpretation of the sources. The British historian Clive Dewey writes of Orientalism : “[Said's book] was technically bad in every way, both in its use of sources and in its conclusions, and in its lack of rigor and balance. The result was a caricature of Western knowledge about the Orient, which was driven by an openly political objective. ” Ibn Warraq criticizes that Said himself misrepresents fundamental historical developments. In Orientalism, for example, Said claims that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before North Africa. In fact, the Islamization of Anatolia by the Turkish Seljuks took place in the 11th century, i.e. four centuries after the conquest of North Africa. According to Robert Graham Irwin , Said's idea of ​​a homogeneous European discourse on the Orient that can be traced back from antiquity to the present day cannot be historically proven. James Clifford criticizes Orientalism because of contradictions in terms of content and methodological and theoretical weaknesses. For example, at the beginning of the work the Orient is described as a construction with no real content, but later portrayed as a subject, distorted space in the discourse. Further criticism is directed against Said's alleged fading out of counter-discourses and his focus on individual people who cannot be regarded as representatives of Oriental Studies. For example, the Islamic philosophy professor Sadik al-Azm Said accuses him of neglecting the influence that Orientalism has had on Islam itself. Said subsequently dealt with many of these reviews, some in detail. He repeatedly pointed out that he had not written a book about the history of the Orient, but about the political foundations of knowledge production in Western cultures. His book does not deal with the Orient, but with the views of colonial societies and their sciences on the Orient. In Said's opinion, the criticism of individual historical statements does not apply to his core thesis, since he examines the regularities of European-colonial knowledge production and its relationship to colonial rule, but not the sequence of historical events.

Politics and Political Publications

The American citizen of Palestinian origin with his outstanding British and American educational career met the educational establishment of the United States as a university professor at the prestigious Columbia University, which vacillated between liberal openness and stereotyping ignorance of the "Arab". Said felt on the one hand integrated and established, but also excluded and discriminated, in one word: “Out of place”. This attitude towards life had accompanied the Christian Palestinian with American citizenship from childhood: "Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place." These experiences intensified after the Six Day War, which was also a victory in the USA of the West was celebrated over Arab nationalism. Said came to the conclusion that the Western perception of the Arab world was completely distorted. He developed a political position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which as binationalism was also used by a minority of Jewish intellectuals such as B. Martin Buber was represented and is known today as the "one-state solution". Said became the most important intellectual point of contact for Western media for an “Arab” perspective on the Middle East. Through him, the fact that the establishment of the State of Israel as a home for the Jewish people also brought about the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians ("Nakba") was brought up in leading western media such as the New York Times. Said was considered the most important advocate of the rights of the Palestinian people in the USA. This also made him the target of hostile actions. He and his family received regular death threats, and in 1985 his university office was set on fire. He was also constantly exposed to attacks and slander from pro-Israel media such as the Wall Street Journal .

Many of Said's essays have appeared in Le Monde diplomatique . Said fully recognized the importance of the Holocaust for the Jewish people, but refused that the Palestinians should answer for the consequences of the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Said was a member of the Palestine parliament in exile for several years. However, in 1993 he fell out with Yasser Arafat over the Oslo Agreement , which Said rejected. In his view, the separation of Jews and Palestinians into two states could not be a solution to the conflict. In addition, he did not see that the agreements would actually bring more than one state-like entity ("Bantustan") still dominated and controlled by Israel for the Palestinians. Rather, the Oslo Agreement allows Israel to further expand its settlements and to consolidate the dependence of the Palestinian autonomous areas on Israel. Said represented the idea of ​​a binational state Israel / Palestine, which should guarantee all its citizens equal rights on the basis of a secular constitution. Said consciously placed himself in the tradition of the European Enlightenment and its critical continuation by Jewish intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas. When asked about these Jewish roots of his thinking in an interview with Avi Shavit, Said replied approvingly that he was a "Jewish Palestinian" and the "last Jewish intellectual". Said's persuasiveness and integrity were strengthened by his complete rejection of terror and violence. His political critics shied away from intellectual controversy and focused on questioning his credibility. The lawyer Justus Reid Weiner researched Said's childhood in Jerusalem for three years for a pro-Israel think tank (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs). His findings, which were supposed to relativize Said and his family's relationship to Jerusalem and to deny Said the status of a refugee, were published in the Wall Street Journal under the title "The False Prophet Palestine". The affair about a stone's throw on the border between Lebanon and Israel was also used to attack his personality and his position as a university lecturer while at the same time drawing attention away from his political positions. On July 3, 2000, Said was photographed throwing a stone on the border between Lebanon and Israel. He was then criticized in several media and among others Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League called for a reaction from the university against Said. Said emphasized that he had not aimed at anyone, not even at Israeli soldiers: "A stone thrown into the empty space hardly needs reflection". The throw was a "symbolic gesture of joy" due to the withdrawal of the armed groups at the border. Said was against the 2003 Iraq War . The FBI had been monitoring Said since 1971 and created an extensive dossier on him.

Honors

Said was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, the American Philosophical Society in 2000, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002. In 2002, Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim were awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for his services to Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation . In November 2004 Birzeit University named its music school "Edward Said National Conservatory of Music".

Works

  • Orientalism. Pantheon Books, New York NY 1978, ISBN 0-394-42814-5 , last reissued and provided with a foreword by the author (2003) and the afterword from 1995 in Penguin Books, London 2003, ISBN 0-14-118742- 5
    • German: Orientalism , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1981, ISBN 3-548-35097-6 , last reissued and provided with the author's foreword from 2003 and the afterword from 1994 in S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009 (translation by Hans Günter Holl), ISBN 978-3 -10-071008-6
  • The World, the Text, and the Critic , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983
    • German: The world, the text and the critic. Translated from the English by Brigitte Flickinger. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993.
  • Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, New York NY 1993, ISBN 0-394-58738-3
    • German: culture and imperialism. Imagination and Politics in the Age of Power. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-071005-3
  • Recognize the Holocaust as a fact. In: Le monde diplomatique , German edition Berlin, August 14, 1998; abbreviated in: Rainer Zimmer-Winkel (Ed.), Götz Nordbruch (Red.): The Arabs and the Shoa. About the difficulties of this conjunction. Kulturverein AphorismA, Trier 2000, ISBN 3-932528-37-9 , p. 34f., Literature catalog . Pp. 80–86 ( Kulturverein AphorismA. Kleine Schriftenreihe 23).
  • Representations of the intellectual. Vintage, New York NY 1994, ISBN 0-09-942451-7 ( Reith Lectures 1993), (German: Gods who are none. The place of the intellectual. Translated from the English by Peter Geble. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3 -8270-0238-9 ).
  • Covering Islam. How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. Pantheon Books, New York NY 1981, ISBN 0-394-74808-5 .
  • Out of place. A memoir. Knopf, New York NY 1999, ISBN 0-394-58739-1 (German: At the wrong place. Autobiography. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-8270-0343-1 ).
  • The end of the peace process. Oslo and after. Pantheon Books, New York NY 2000, ISBN 0-375-40930-0 (German: The end of the peace process. Oslo and after. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8270-0419-5 ).
  • (with Daniel Barenboim ): Parallels and Paradoxes. Explorations in Music and Society. Pantheon Books, New York NY 2002, ISBN 0-375-42106-8 (German: Parallels and Paradoxien. About Music and Society. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8270-0514-0 ).
  • Freud and the non-European. Verso, London 2003, ISBN 1-85984-500-2 (German: Freud and the non-European. With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a replica by Jacqueline Rose. German by Miriam Mandelkow. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-908777- 07-0 ).
  • with Jean Mohr : After the Last Sky - Palestinian Lives , Columbia University Press 1986/1998, ISBN 978-0-231-11449-3 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Edward Said  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

swell

  1. ↑ Interview with Mariam C. Said, A world that I loved, Utrecht 2015
  2. ↑ Wadie E. Said, Crimes of Terror. The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, Oxford 2015; Najla Said, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family, New York 2013.
  3. ^ Conor McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, Cambridge 2010, p. 4 and 10.
  4. ↑ Reinhard Schau: The Belvedere Castle Music High School in Weimar: Past and present. 2010, Böhlau Verlag, ISBN 978-3412205560 , p. 255
  5. ↑ Georg Diez: A very German matter. In: Der Spiegel , 40/2017, p. 120
  6. ^ Edward Said, Orientalismus, Frankfurt 1981, p. 24.
  7. ^ Edward Said, Orientalismus, Frankfurt 1981, p. 14.
  8. ^ Edward Said: Orientalism , Frankfurt am Main 2009 (translation by Hans Günter Holl), ISBN 978-3-10-071008-6 , epilogue from 1994, p. 401
  9. ↑ Said 2009, p. 400
  10. ^ Conor McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, Cambridge 2010, p. 18.
  11. ^ Conor McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, Cambridge 2010, pp. 123-138.
  12. ↑ See Robert Irwin (see above); Clifford James (above); Sadik Jalal al-Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse, in: Macfie (Ed.), Orientalism, pp. 217-238; Daniel Varisco, Reading Orientalism. Said and the Unsaid, Seattle 2007.
  13. ^ Clive Dewey, How the Raj Played Kim's Game, Times Literary Supplement, Apr 17, 1998, p. 10.
  14. ↑ a b Cf. Irwin, Robert: Dangerous Knowledge. Orientalism and its Discontents, Woodstock, 2006.
  15. ^ Said, Edward: Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978
  16. ↑ See Clifford, James: Orientalism, in: History and Theory 19, 1980, pp. 204-223.
  17. ↑ See Abdulla Al-Dabbagh: Orientalism, Literary Orientalism and Romanticism, in: ders .: Literary Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and Universalism, New York u. a. 2009.
  18. ↑ See al-Azm, Sadik Jalal .: Orientalism and Orientalism in Revers e. In .: Alexander L. Macfie: Orientalism - A Reader , Edinburgh, 2000, pp. 217-238.
  19. ^ Conor McCarthy, The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, Cambridge 2010, pp. 136-138.
  20. ^ Edward W. Said, Out of place: a memoir, New York 2000, p. 3.
  21. ↑ Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exile and Binationalism: from Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt to Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2011, pp. 56–58.
  22. ^ Georg Wright, World-renowned scholar Edward Said dies, the guardian, September 25, 2003
  23. ↑ Julian Borger, Friends rally to repulse attack on Edward Said, the guardian, 23 August 1999
  24. ^ German translations of a selection of these articles in: Edward W. Said, Peace in Middle East? Essays on Israel and Palestine Peace and its discontents], Heidelberg 1997
  25. ↑ Edward Said: The Morning After . London Review of Books Vol. 15 No. October 20-21, 1993
  26. ↑ Haidar Eid: Said, Edward. 2000. The End of the "Peace Process": Oslo and After. ( Memento of the original from November 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Review, in: Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 , Volume 3, Number 2, Spring, 2000 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / clogic.eserver.org 
  27. ↑ Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exile and Binationalism: from Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt to Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, Berlin: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2011, p. 56.
  28. ^ "Justus Reid Weiner, The False Prophet of Palestine, Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999."
  29. ^ Sunnie Kim: Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon , in: Columbia Daily Spectator 2000
  30. ↑ Syrian Expert Patrick Seale and Columbia University Professor Edward Said Discuss the State of the Middle East After the Invasion of Iraq , in: Democracy Now! |, April 15, 2003
  31. ↑ David Price: How the FBI Spied on Edward Said , in: Counterpunch, January 2006.
  32. ^ Member History: Edward W. Said. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 26, 2019 .
  33. ^ Members: Edward Said. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 24, 2019 .
  34. ↑ ESNCM , website
personal data
SURNAME Said, Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Said, Edward William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary theorist and critic of Palestinian origin
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Jerusalem , Palestine
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 2003
Place of death new York