Author
Edward Said
Literary critic and founder of postcolonial studies
Edward W. Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic who spent most of his career at Columbia University. Orientalism, published in 1978, argued that Western scholarship on the East had produced a body of knowledge that served empire rather than understanding, and it effectively founded postcolonial studies as a field.
He was also a working music critic and a public advocate for Palestinian self-determination, roles he refused to keep separate from the scholarship. He died in 2003, and the books have not lost their capacity to start arguments.
