Edward Said passed away this morning

[kara]

Edward Said passed away this morning, Thurs. Sept. 25th, 2003 around 7am, due to Pancreatic cancer. This is a huge loss for the entire world.

Edward Said Dies at 67 - By The Associated Press September 25, 2003, 11:11 AM EDT

Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor, literary critic and a leading advocate in the United States of the Palestinian cause, has died, his editor at Knopf publishers said Thursday. He was 67. Said died Wednesday night at a New York hospital, said editor Shelley Wanger. He had suffered from leukemia at least since the early 1990s.

Born in 1935 in Jerusalem -- then part of British-ruled Palestine -- Said spent almost all his adult life in the United States. He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause but also on a variety of other subjects -- from English literature, his academic specialty, to music and culture.

His books ranged from "The Question of Palestine" in 1979 and "After the Last Sky" in 1986 -- both about the Arab-Israeli conflict -- to "Musical Elaborations" in 1991, and "Cultural Imperialism" in 1993. Said was consistently critical of Israel for what he regarded as mistreatment of the Palestinians. He wrote two years ago after visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israel's "efforts toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs" had actually strengthened Palestinian determination.

"Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel's concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective," Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly,published in Cairo.

After the signing of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Said also criticized Yasser Arafat because he believed the PLO leader had made a bad deal for the Palestinians.

He said in a lecture at Tufts University that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority "have become willing collaborators with the (Israeli) military occupation, a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians."

Said first came to the United States as a student. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1957 and a master's and Ph.D. from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964 respectively. Most of his academic career was spent as a professor at Columbia University in New York, but he also was a visiting professor at such leading institutions as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

Israeli scholar Justus Reid Weiner published an article in the American magazine Commentary accusing Said of dramatizing his own background to enhance his credentials as a spokesman for the Palestinians. Weiner said Said claimed he was driven out of Palestine while actually his family was living in the Egyptian capital Cairo before the founding of Israel.

Said replied by saying he had never described himself personally as a refugee. He said he had always maintained he spent much of his youth in
Egypt and Lebanon, but that many of relatives were dislodged from Palestine as Israel came into being.

He wrote in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly: "I have been moved to defend the refugees' plight precisely because I did not suffer and therefore feel obligated to relieve the sufferings of my people."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
for more

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/Wellek/said/

Works-books:
* After the Last Sky (1986)
* Beginnings (1975)
* Blaming the Victims (1988)
* Covering Islam (1981)
* Criticism in Society
* Culture and Imperialism
* Edward Said: A Critical Reader
* Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
* Literature and Society (1980)
* Musical Elaborations (1991)
* Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
* Orientalism (1978)
* Orientalisme (1980)
* Out of Place (1999)
* The Pen and the Sword (1994)
* The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
* The Question of Palestine (1979)
* Reflections on Exile (2000)
* Representations of the Intellectual (1994)
* The World, the Text and the Critic (1983)

in response to his book called Out of Place:

Edward Said is one of the most celebrated cultural critics of the postwar world. Of his many books of literary, political, and philosophical criticism, Orientalism--a brilliant analysis of how Europe came to dominate the Orient through the creation of the myth of the exotic East--and the monumental Culture and Imperialism are the best known. His books have redefined readers' understanding of the impact of European imperialism upon the shape of modern culture. Said's career as a thinker spans
literature, politics, music, philosophy, and history. As a dispossessed Palestinian growing up in the Middle East and subsequently living in the USA, he has witnessed the impact of the Second World War upon the Arab world, the dissolution of Palestine and the birth of Israel, the rise of Nasser and the PLO, the Lebanese Civil War, and the faltering peace process of the 1990s.

As a result, the publication of Said's memoirs, Out of Place, is a particularly significant event. The book offers a fascinating account of the personal development of a critic and thinker who has straddled the divide between East and West, and in the process has redefined Western perceptions of the East and of the plight of Palestinian people.

However, as the title suggests, Said's memoir is a far more ambivalent and at times personally painful account of his early years in Palestine,
Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as the often paralyzing embrace of his loving but overbearing parents. Said's memoirs are powerfully informed by his sense of personally, geographically, and linguistically "always being out of place." Born to Christian parents and caught between expressing himself in Arabic, English, and French, he evokes a vivid, but often very unhappy, portrait of growing up in Cairo and Lebanon under the crushing weight of his emotionally intense and ambitious family. The early sections of the book paint a poignant picture of the oppressive regime established over the awkward, painfully uncertain young Edward by his loving mother and expectant, unforgiving father, both of whom cast the longest emotional shadows over the book. Those expecting an account of Said's subsequent intellectual development will be disappointed; apart from the final 50 pages, which deal with Said's education at Princeton and Harvard, Out of Place is, as Said himself says, primarily "a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, my early life." It is this carefully disclosed record that accounts for Said's deeply ambivalent relationship with both his family and the Palestinian cause. Composed in the light of serious illness, Out of Place is an elegantly written reflection on a life that has movingly come to terms with "being not quite right and out of place." --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
An influential literary critic (Culture and Imperialism, etc.), writes movingly and honestly about his life of dislocation and exile. Prompted
by a diagnosis of leukemia in 1991, Said's new book is infused with a desire to document not only a life, but a time and place, Palestine in the 1930s and '40s, that has since vanished. Born in 1935 to a Lebanese mother and Palestinian father who had American citizenship, and raised in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, Said has always lived with a divided identity. Even as a child he realized that his first name was British, his last name was Arabic and his nationality was American. In a straightforward, often poetic
style, Said charts his family history, his education in British and American schools and his move to the U.S. in 1951 to attend Princeton and begin what was to become a distinguished career as an academic and intellectual.

The memoir's most engaging elements are the little personal details that help us understand his later work: the young Said's love of such Hollywood films as Arabian Nights, with Maria Montez, or the novels of Twain and Cooper, offer fresh insights into his later writings about orientalism. Said can be frank about his personal life, whether it's learning about masturbation or his intense relationship with his mother, whom he identifies as Gertrude to his Hamlet, which gives the book moments of deep, intimate openness. In the end, this memoir is less a tidy summing-up than an acceptance and exploration of what has been. As Said says, he has "learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place." Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Possibly the best-known Arab American Intellectual of his generation, Said (English and comparative literature, Columbia University) offers a riveting account of a tough but successful youth caught between two very different worlds. Said's writings range widely from classical music criticism and political commentary to groundbreaking research in comparative literature; Orientalism (1978), an examination of the way the West perceives the
Middle East and Islam, is arguably his most influential book and continues to enjoy
worldwide success. To many, especially Middle Easterners, he is also famous for his advocacy of Palestinian self-determination. In this new memoir, Said sheds light on his formative years, from his childhood as the son of a wealthy Palestinian Christian businessman in Jerusalem and his days as a young exile in Cairo to his graduate education at Harvard. A sense of
sadness permeating this book may result from his having written most of it while recovering from leukemia in the mid-1990s. Highly recommended for
large collections.AAli Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Said, a Columbia University professor,Palestinian advocate, and groundbreaking author, prefaces his lapidary and poignant memoir by explaining that he felt impelled to preserve the lost world of his childhood after being diagnosed with leukemia. Born in Palestine in 1935 and raised in Cairo's small Christian community, he witnessed the obliteration of his country and the creation of Israel before leaving for the U.S. Using his family history as a microcosm of those upheavals, Said devotes most of his analytical, self-revealing, and witty narrative to his parents. His stern Palestinian father, who never disclosed his origins, was an innovative and immensely successful businessman. Said's mother, a Palestinian of Lebanese descent, was his closest confidante. But both were so strict and critical, they made Said feel as "out of place" within his own skin as he did in the world at large. It was this ingrained sense of outsiderness, matched by a restless intellect, that led him, as he so eloquently explains, to the solace and challenges of art, scholarship, and politics. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
Said's compassionate and lyrical memoir explores his feelings of displacement in both his cultural setting and his family, revealing the roots of his intellectual, political, and personal unfolding. A distinguished cultural critic (The Politics of Dispossession, 1994, etc.), Said has gained a reputation as a bold intellectual and a noted spokesperson for the Palestinian cause.

Faced with a diagnosis of leukemia in 1991, Said decided to recapture the world of his early childhood in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, followed by what turned out to be a permanent move to the US. The result is a ``record of an essentially lost or forgotten world.'' This is a bittersweet memoir of a boyhood in a sleepy summer town in Lebanon, of the cosmopolitan, colonial world of Cairo in the 40s and 50s, and of the dramatic changes in Palestine before Israel gained statehood. Its also the story of Said's early sense of alienation, the distinct (and eventually cherished) feeling of being an outsider. A Christian Palestinian in Cairo with a proper British name and a father with American citizenship, the young Said felt out of place early on. Said is an insightful and close observer of the details of daily life that create an entire mood in a people or family. The subject of his own family, a pampered and eerily sheltered group is equally central to Said's critical yet tender account of his growth from the confused and insecure ``Edward'' (a creation of his parents) into an emotionally and intellectually mature man. Said devotes enormous
lyrical and emotional energy to presenting his parents' role in his life, describing in heart-wrenching detail the domineering father and the influential, manipulative mother who watched his every move. Both culturally and emotionally, maturity for Said could only come from a separation from his early life. A beautiful and moving account that stands on its own as a
classic in the art of memoir and as a key to understanding the genesis of Said's intellectual work. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP.

Book Description
From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the
mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.

Book Description
Edward Said, the renowned literary and cultural critic and passionately engaged intellectual, is one of our era's most formidable, provocative,
and important thinkers. For more than three decades his books, which include Culture and Imperialism, Peace and Its Discontents, and the seminal study Orientalism, have influenced not only our worldview but the very terms of public discourse.

From the Back Cover
"One of the leading thinkers of the age."--The New York Observer
"Edward Said is the most distinguished and cultural critic now writing in America." --Cornel West
"Said is a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete, and political activist...[He] challenges and stimulates our thinking in every area." --Washington Post Book World
"No one studying the relations between the metroploitan West and the decolonizing world can ignore Mr. Said's work." --The New York Times
Book Review

[ September 25, 2003, 01:49 PM: Message edited by: kara ]

[lyot]

damn, that's said news..I'm really touched by this ..RIP Edward.. Another intelligent voice that won't be heard anymore in the conflict

:(

[manfred]

i really dug his post-colonial works while in undergrad. he was a great mind. rest in peace.

[Leslie]

Edward Said, Leading Advocate of Palestinians, Dies at 67
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Edward Said, a polymath scholar and literary critic at Columbia University who was the most prominent advocate in the United States of the cause of Palestinian independence, died in New York City today. He was 67.

The cause of death was leukemia, which Mr. Said had been battling for several years.

Mr. Said, who was born in Jerusalem during the British mandate in Palestine and emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager, spent a long and productive career as a professor of comparative literature at Columbia and was the author of several widely discussed books.

He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic and English, but, as he once put it, "a man who lived two quite separate lives," one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause.

Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Mr. Said was an Episcopalian married to a Quaker. He was also an excellent pianist who for several years was the music critic for The Nation.

From 1977 to 1991, he was as an unaffiliated member of the Palestine National Conference, a parliament-in-exile. Most of the conference's members belong to one or another of the main Palestinian organizations, most importantly the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir Arafat, but some were members of smaller organizations believed responsible for terrorist operations against Israelis and Americans, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

"The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim," Mr. Said told Dinitia Smith in New York magazine in 1989, making the kind of statement that put him at the center of the roiling debate about the Middle East.

"They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and terrorism is understandable," he said. " But what the Israelis do, in killing Palestinians on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the horrific and unjust dispossession of the Palestinian people."

He added: "'I totally repudiate terrorism in all its forms. Not just Palestinian terrorism — I'm also against Israeli terrorism, the bombing of refugee camps."

Mr. Said was a widely recognized figure in New York, a frequent participant in debates on the Middle East, and an outspoken advocate of a Palestinian homeland. For many years he was an ardent supporter of Mr. Arafat, whom he called "the leader of a genuinely national and popular movement, with a clearly legitimate goal of self-determination for his people."

But Mr. Said became a bitter critic of Mr. Arafat after the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the P.L.O., believing that the agreement gave the Palestinians too little territory and too little control over it.

In the years after Oslo, he argued that separate Palestinian and Jewish states would always be unworkable and, while he recognized that emotions on both sides were against it, he advocated a single binational state as the best ultimate solution.

"I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New York Times. "There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such."

Among the criticisms leveled against Mr. Said by Jews and others was his failure to condemn specific acts of terrorism by Palestinian groups, including some that served alongside him on the Palestine National Council.

One such person, for example, was Abu Abbas, a member of the P.L.O. executive committee who is believed responsible for the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of a wheelchair-bound American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

In his interview with New York, Mr. Said called Abu Abbas "a degenerate," but he then argued that important Israeli leaders, like former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, had been terrorists responsible for the killing of women and children.

Among the political views of Mr. Said that were cited by his defenders was his unambiguous condemnation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran for his call on his followers to assassinate the writer Salman Rushdie.

Mr. Said, while opposing the American-led Persian Gulf War in 1991, called the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein "an appalling and dreadful despot," and he made similar statements at times about the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. But Mr. Said was throughout his long career far more critical of the West and of Israel and their attitudes and practices in the Arab world than he was of the Arabs or their leaders.

While Israel and its supporters saw the crux of the Middle East conflict as the Arabs' unwillingness to accept the existence of Israel and the constant Arabic threat to Israeli security, Mr. Said saw matters in terms of Zionist atrocity and Palestinian victimhood.

"In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists," he wrote in "The Question of Palestine" (1979).

Mr. Said's best-known and most influential book was "Orientalism," published in 1978, which was an amalgamation of his scholarly position and his political views. In it, Mr. Said laid out a vision of history in which cultural power — the power to define others — is inextricably linked with the political power to dominate. The theory he outlined in "Orientalism" was that the Western view of the East as sensual and corrupt, vicious, lazy, tyrannical and backward, exemplified this power.

"The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination of varying degrees of a complex hegemony," Mr. Said wrote in Orientalism." The idea, which seemed to be anchored in Mr. Said's own sense of belonging to a dispossessed people, was that the West invented the East as a way of reinforcing the power of colonialism over the colonized. Influenced by French thinkers like Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss, Mr. Said was one of the first scholars to introduce such notions of culture and power into the American academy.

In one of his later books, "Culture and Imperialism," Mr. Said argued that 19th-century and 20th-century British novelists — even so apparently nonpolitical a writer as Jane Austen — provided a cultural legitimization for colonialism.

Mr. Said maintained that writers like E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling engaged in a "novelistic process, whose main purpose is not to raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy attention, but to keep the empire more or less in place."

Mr. Said's entire life's work drew on his experiences in both East and West.

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his childhood in a well-to-do neighborhood of thick-walled stone houses that is now one of the main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a prosperous businessman who had lived in the United States, took the family to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves.

The 12-year-old Edward went to the American School in Cairo, then to Victoria College, an elite institution where among his classmates were the future King Hussein of Jordan and the actor Omar Sharif.

In 1951 his parents sent him to the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. He went on to Princeton University and then to graduate school at Harvard, where he got his Ph.D. in English literature in 1964. The year before that, Mr. Said became an assistant instructor in the English Department of Columbia, moving up to full professor in 1970.

In 1977 he was appointed to an endowed chair, becoming the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and later the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, a position he held until he was named a university professor, the highest academic position at Columbia.

Mr. Said's first book was "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography," in which he began to explore some of the themes that led to his theories about culture and imperialism.

His second book, "Beginnings," was an examination of literary inspiration, the way a writer lives out what Mr. Said called the "new and the customary."

The book, praised by Richard Kuczkowski in The Library Journal as "an ingenious exploration of the meaning of modernism," won Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award in 1976. His next book was "Orientalism" with its theory that the Orient and especially the Arab world have been created by the Western imagination, as a series of demeaning, reductive stereotypes.

John Leonard, reviewing the book in The New York Times praised the book as "not merely persuasive, but conclusive."

"Orientalism" established Mr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger faculty and graduate students on the left for whom "Orientalism" was a kind of intellectual credo, the founding document of the field that came to be called post-colonial studies.

Central to Mr. Said's argument was the notion that there was in essence no objective, neutral scholarship on Asia and especially on the Arab world. The very Western study of the East, in his view, was bound up in the systematic prejudices about the non-Western world that turned it into a set of clichés. Since the Enlightenment, Mr. Said wrote, "Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."

This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the Middle East who acknowledged that there was much in the book that was true but who rejected many of its assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic, and over-simplistic.

"It is a pity that it is so pretentiously written, so drenched in jargon, for there is much in this book that is superb as well as intellectually exciting," wrote the British historian J. H. Plumb in The New York Times Book Review. But Mr. Plumb and others contended that Mr. Said made no effort to actually examine the real, historical relations between West and East, or to sort out what was true "in the Western representation" of the East from what was false and caricatural.

They argued that Mr. Said's assumption was that the Orientalists simply invented the East to satisfy the requirements of cultural superiority and Western imperialism and he ignored the vast body of scholarship that grappled with the East on its own terms.

"The tragedy of Mr. Said's `Orientalism', '` wrote Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of the Middle East who is criticized in Mr. Said's book, "is that it takes a genuine problem of real importance and reduces it to the level of political polemic and personal abuse."

During his years at Columbia, Mr. Said also came to play a more active role as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, becoming a member of the Palestine National Council in 1977 and helping, in 1988, to draft a new Palestinian constitution.

Though seen by most American supporters of Israel as a radical, many Palestinians identified him as a moderate, a figure who reportedly urged Mr. Arafat to help break the Middle East impasse by acknowledging Israel's right to exist. In interviews, he identified himself as a kind of perpetual outsider, a man influenced by two cultures, the Arabic and the American, but belonging fully to neither.

"I've never felt that I belonged exclusively to one country, nor have I been able to identify `patriotically' with any other than losing causes," Mr. Said wrote in The Nation in 1991. As Mr. Said became more prominent, defending Palestinians in written statements and in interviews, as victims of Israeli brutality, he came under attack from supporters of Israel who accused him of supporting terrorism. He was at one point reportedly put on a "hit list" by the Jewish Defense League.

It was in its way an acknowledgement of Mr. Said's importance that an Israeli scholar, Justus Reid Weiner, spent some three years researching his early life in order to show that Mr. Said had falsified his biography. In an article in Commentary magazine in 1999, Mr. Weiner argued that Mr. Said had cultivated a moving personal story of a Palestinian childhood brought to an abrupt and tragic end by the creation of Israel in 1947, when, in fact, according to Mr. Weiner, Mr. Said's childhood home was Cairo.

Interviewed by a reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Said replied that he had never denied that he had grown up in Cairo as well as Jerusalem. "I don't think it's that important in any case," Mr. Said said. "I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I've represented the case of my people, which is something quite different."

Another, earlier article in Commentary, entitled "Professor of Terror," elicited a spirited response, with both Jews and non-Jews coming to Mr. Said's defense. "To portray Said as a devotee of terrorist politics is a gross distortion of his life's work as a scholar and militant," wrote Richard A. Falk, a political scientist at Princeton.

In 1991, Mr. Said, who learned during a routine visit to his doctor that he had leukemia, quietly stepped down from the Palestine National Council. But when Israel and the P.L.O. signed a peace agreement in 1994, Mr. Said spoke out angrily against the leadership of Mr. Arafat, not only, in his view, for giving away too much to Israel but also for the corruption and tyrannical nature of his rule.

"He's sold his people into enslavement," Mr. Said said of Mr. Arafat in 1994. Speaking of the P.L.O., he said, "They're a leadership without credibility and without moral authority, and I don't know any Palestinian today who considers the P.L.O. in its current form anything but an organization of losers and has-beens."

In his last years, Mr. Said's literary production became more and more political. In 1979 he published "The Question of Palestine" and two years after that, "Covering Islam" in which he tried to show how Westerners depicted Arabs as "synonymous with trouble — rootless, mindless, gratuitous trouble."

Mr. Said's last book was "The Politics of Dispossession," which extended his criticism of Western attitudes toward the Palestinians but also portrayed the Palestinian leadership as profligate and corrupt.

Reviewing that book in The New York Times, David Shipler wrote: "Reading Mr. Said is like being yelled at for hours on end, and it takes a good and willing ear to appreciate his calmer passages of insight, to hear the essential melodies that run beneath the discordant onslaughts."

Mr. Said's first marriage, to Maire Jaanus, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Mariam Cortas, a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.


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[kara]

married to a quaker?!

that i didnt know