Edward Said (1935-2003), my Princeton University classmate, is known for his book Orientalism, tracing the march of empire through Western literature. (1). We shared a common interest: how literature could be a way of understanding a culture. He was interested in Joseph Conrad, the English author of Heart of Darkness. Said later wrote his PhD theses at Harvard on Joseph Conrad.
I was interested in Indian and Chinese writers. At the time, I was an under-graduate assistent to a professor of Chinese philosophy, Y.P. Mei, who had been president of a university in China during the war and came to the U.S.A. when the Communists gained political control in China. 1954 was his first year in the U.S. and I became his assistent.
I had long talks with Edward Said as understanding social and economic structures through literature was a new approach. His university career was as professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.
For Edward Said, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was a turning point in his intellectual interests which shifted from 19th century English literature to the Middle East and especially the role of the Palestinians. He had been born in Jerusalem in a Palestinian Protestant family. His father had lived in the U.S.A. and was very interested in U.S. culture. With the birth of the state of Israel, the family moved to Cairo. In 1951, Edward Said was sent to a prep school in New England and then entered the class of 1957 at Princeton. Later, the rest of his family moved to Lebanon, and Edward Said became interested in the complex structures of Lebanese society.
Edward Said became interested in the ways that intellectuals in Europe saw the Middle East - the Orient as it was then called - and the ways these view colored Western Middle East politics. He developed his ideas in his book Orientalism which was widely discusssed and set the stage for what is called "postcolonial studies." He followed up this book with Culture and Imperialism where he sets out how literature gave a moral underpinning to colonial mentalities. (2)
Through his writings, Edward Said became the best known Palestinian intellectual living in the U.S. and was increasingly asked to write and speak on Palestinian-Israeli issues. He began to advocate a "one-state approach " - a secular democracy guaranteeing equal rights to Jews and Palestinians.
He wrote "Israelis and Palestinians should work for a unified state that upholds the right and dignity of all its diverse people. This vision holds the promise of lasting peace built not on separation and segregation but on the foundations of justice and mutual respect.
"We need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception, we need time, and patient and skeptical inquiry."
Edward Said is a voice for our time, moving beyond old images and concepts toward a fresh view of the future.
Notes
1) Orientalism (New York: Parthenon, 1978)
2) Culture and Imperialism ( New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1993)
René Wadlow, Association of World Citizens
#The_UN_Goals #safeforall #apart
