Edward W. Said RAHUL RAO 16.1 Introduction Edward Said is typically regarded as a founding figure of postcolonial studies. There is some irony to this claim, partly because influential currents of postcolonial theory would develop as criti- cal responses to his work, and partly because Said would distance himself from some of these currents. Yet the claim is sound enough insofar as it honours the ground-breaking impact of his best-known work, Orientalism (Said, 1995 [1978]). In this book as well as in subsequent works, Said explores the dialectical relationship between knowledge and power in structuring imperial relations between the geopolitical abstraction that we have long referred to as the ‘West’ and its Other—once named the ‘Orient’ and more recently the Third World, the developing world, the Global South, and sometimes rather more negatively the ‘non-West’. Drawing on Michel Fou- cault’s notion of discourse, Said’s major innovation in the study of imperialism was to supple- ment Marxist conceptualizations of imperialism in terms of the global extraction of resources and exploitation of labour by drawing attention to the constitutive force of culture. The argument was controversial from the very outset. Critics on the right bristled at Said’s exposition of the racism and supremacism that lurked at the heart of metropolitan Western culture. Critics on the Marxist left took Said to task for supplanting Marxism’s materialist focus on questions of politi- cal economy with the analysis of discourse. Voices across the ideological spectrum wondered whether a scholar of modern Western literature had the requisite disciplinary competence with which to make sweeping statements about the historical relationship between the West and the non-West over several centuries. Chapter guide This chapter focuses on the major intellectual contributions of Edward Said, many of which laid the foundations for what would become the field of postcolonial studies. Sections 16.2 and 16.3 explore Said’s views on how knowledge and power structure relations between Western imperial powers and non-Western states and societies, through critical readings of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, respectively. Section 16.4 explores Said’s writings and activism as a spokesperson for Palestinian self-determination. Finally, Section 16.5 examines Said’s views on what it means to be a public intellectual. While Said’s ideas have become so influential as to be al- most ubiquitous in cultural and postcolonial studies, the apparent familiarity of his ideas has allowed a forgetting of the nuance and complexity with which they were originally articulated. By offering a close re-reading of Said’s best-known texts, the chapter aims to encourage a more careful appreciation of the ideas that were central to his political thinking. 16 RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_16.indd 273 13-12-2022 13:22:24