A lifelong humanist, Said believed that self-knowledge is the highest form of human achievement and the true goal of humanistic education. But he also believed that self-knowledge is unattainable without an equal degree of self-criticism, or the awareness that comes from studying and experiencing other peoples, traditions, and ideas....

In the radically changed and highly charged political atmosphere that has overtaken the United States—and to varying degrees the rest of the world—since September 11, 2001, the notion that cultures can harmoniously and productively coexist has come to seem like little more than a quaint fiction. In this time of heightened animosity and aggression, have humanistic values and democratic principles become irrelevant? Are they merely utopian fantasies? Or are they now more urgent and necessary than ever before?

"Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between 'the West' and 'the Other.' "

Orientalism:
Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism," which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said decried the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture". He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions.

The Terms:
The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.

Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.

Biography:
Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) to a Christian Arab family and raised in both Jerusalem and Cairo, Egypt. Until age 12, he lived between Cairo and West Jerusalem where he attended the Anglican St. Georges Academy in 1947. His family became refugees in 1948 just prior to the capture of West Jerusalem by Israeli forces. At age 14, Said entered Victoria College in Cairo, and then Mount Hermon School in the United States. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades. Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities. He spoke English and French fluently, excellent colloquial and very good standard Arabic, and was literate in Spanish, German, Italian and Latin. Said was bestowed numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice received Columbia's Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York after a long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia.


See also:
Edward Said and Orientalism
Columbia.edu
guardian.co.uk
wikipedia - Edward Said