Edward Said

Edward Said Edward Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic and intellectual whose Orientalism (1978) founded postcolonial studies by demonstrating how Western scholarship, literature, and art constructed a distorted, exotic, and inferior "Orient" that served to justify European imperial domination. A professor at Columbia University for decades, he was also a powerful advocate for Palestinian rights and a distinguished music critic and pianist. Culture and Imperialism (1993) extended his analysis to the complicity of canonical Western literature in colonial projects.