Edward Said

(1936—Sept. 29, 2003)

Postcolonial Theory

The Edward Said Archive

Bibliography compiled by Eddie Yeghiayan

“We defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place”
(Secular Criticism [1968], 605).

“My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (607).

“In this book I shall use the word culture to suggest and environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes” (609).

“The dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society and the State is based on a constantly practiced differentiation of self from what it believes to be not itself” (611).

“All this, then, shows us the individual consciousness placed at a sensitive nodal point, and it is this consciousness at that critical point which this book attempts to explore in the form of what I call criticism” (613).

“If a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict— the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms-- such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of "life", whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society” (616).

“Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism ... it would be oppositional....its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method” (621).

Select Bibliography

Acts of Aggression: Policing "Rogue States".
Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Edward W. Said (Seven Stories Press, Feb. 1999.
Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (Vintage, 1997).
Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993);
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson; Edward W. Said (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990).
Orientalism (Random House, 1979)
.
Out of Place: A Memoir (Vintage Books, Sept. 2000).
Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (Vintage Books, 1996).
The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian. Introduction by Eqbal Ahmad (Common Courage Press, 1994).
The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 (Vintage Books, 1995).
The Question of Palestine (Vintage Books, 1992).
Representations of the Intellectual (Vintage Books, 1996); The 1993 Reith Lectures.
The World, the Text, and the Critic. (Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).

* * * * * * *

“What I am criticizing is two particular assumptions. There is first the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities actually represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar.... Second is the assumption that the principal relationships in the study of literature-- those I have identified as based on representation-- ought to obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally upon acquisition and appropriation.... Two alternatives propose themselves for the contemporary critic. One is organic complicity with the pattern I have described.... The second alternative is for the critic to recognize the difference between instinctual filiation and social affiliation, and to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms” (617-8).