Edward Said

Edward ( William) Said, Edward Wadie Said actually ( born November 1, 1935 in Jerusalem, the League of Nations Mandate of Palestine; † 25 September 2003 in New York City ) was an American literary theorist and critic of Palestinian origin. He was regarded as the voice of the Palestinians in the United States.

Said was born the son of Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem, where he attended St. George 's School, but spent most of his childhood and youth in Cairo. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University and his Master of Arts and Ph.D. at Harvard University. He taught as a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and at Harvard and Yale.

Edward Said founded in 1999 with Daniel Barenboim and the Commissioner-General of the then European Capital of Culture in Weimar, Bernd Kauffmann, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

" Orientalism "

Edward Said's best-known work is the 1978 published book Orientalism, in which he attempts to prove that the Western world has always been to tend to conceive the Orient as a static image represented and false construct. The work does not last a settlement with the British and French science of Oriental outline their representatives would often an ideologically predetermined destination - the political subjugation of the nations studied - track; an " enlightened West" wants to dominate a "mysterious Orient ". Even the idea of ​​a fundamental dichotomy between Occident and Orient lead astray. His ideas developed Said with Foucault's concept of discourse analysis. Positive response came across the book, among others, in Homi K. Bhabha, John Esposito, Mahmood Mamdani, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Robert Fisk.

The work was considered a founding document for the establishment of postcolonial studies as a research direction.

Criticism

The unfolded by Said in Orientalism theses have also taken care of much controversy. Known Said's critics are William Montgomery Watt, Albert Hourani, Bernard Lewis, Ernest Gellner, Sadiq al -Azm, Hazem Saghieh and Ibn Warraq, the " textual behavior " also criticized Said's term.

Edward Said had also omitted academically systematically in his critique of Orientalism as eurozentrischem, condescending superior knowledge in the context of British and French colonial activities of Germany and the German research in the area as clean. Suzanne L. Marchand shows the importance and significant intellectual role of the relevant research in German-speaking and distanced himself equally from the general application of Michel Foucault's methods and the pair of opposites "Europe" and "Orient". Not least, they imputed Said and access other, in the design of a modern post- imperialist world view essentially on the underlying in traditional Oriental methods. Said's observations were thereby made ​​much in question. Marchand's book is Sabine Mangold, according to a landmark for the transition to a postsaidische consideration of Orientalism.

The British historian Clive Dewey writes about Orientalism: " [ Said's book ] was at a technical level in all respects bad, both in the manner of use of sources in its conclusions, as well as its lack of rigor and balance. The result was a caricature of Western knowledge about the Orient, which was driven by an open policy objective. " Ibn Warraq says that Said himself reproducing basic historical developments wrong. So Said in Orientalism argue about, Muslim armies had conquered Turkey before North Africa. In fact, the Islamization of Anatolia by Turkish Seljuks in the 11th century, that takes place four centuries after the conquest of North Africa was.

For the Dutch writer Leon de Winter Said's based career "on two remarkable facts: the set by him in the world fiction, he had been a child of Palestinian refugees, and his impressive performance, the great adventure of Western civilization to a neo-colonial, racist endeavor to degrade. "

Political struggle

Said was a strong supporter of Palestinian rights in Israel and the occupied territories, and was for several years a member of the parliament -in-exile of Palestine. However, he fell out with Yasser Arafat because of the Oslo agreement, which he thought was wrong. State solution: Said preferred a single state for Israelis and Palestinians, he became so unpopular with the Palestinian leadership that some even called for the banning of his books. In 2000, he compared the situation in Israel with apartheid in South Africa.

Many of Said's essays have appeared in Le Monde diplomatique.

On 3 July 2000 Said was photographed in the act of throwing a stone on the border between Lebanon and Israel. He denied it to have targeted at Israeli soldiers: " One throw into the empty space stone is hardly necessary reflection"; the union was a "symbolic gesture of joy."

Honors

For his services to the Israeli- Palestinian reconciliation Edward Said in 2002 with Daniel Barenboim was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award. In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school in " Edward Said National Conservatory of Music."

Works

  • Orientalism. Pantheon Books, New York, NY 1978, ISBN 0-394-42814-5, recently reissued and with a foreword by the author (2003) and with an afterword in 1995 by Penguin Books, London 2003, ISBN 0-141-18742 - 5 German: Orientalism, Ullsteinhaus, Frankfurt am Main, inter alia, 1981, ISBN 3-548-35097-6, recently reprinted and issued with an Introduction by the author of 2003 and the epilogue from 1994 by S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009 ( translation by Hans Günter Holl ), ISBN 978-3-10-071008-6
  • German: Culture and imperialism. Imagination and politics in the age of power. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-071005-3
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