Out of his academic base at Columbia
University, from the perspective of a displaced Palestinian,
both in Arabic and English, languages which were and were not
his own, Edward Said has written on a wide range of subjects.
His passion for cosmopolitan New York, his commitment to the
Palestinian cause, his focus, as a comparatist, on Western
literatures can seem incongruous. And yet, the negotiation of
place – the location of reading, the localization of
narrative, the locale of the intellectual – is not only a
result of biographical circumstance or readerly preference: it
is emblematic of a politics of reading, and a politicisation
of reading, for both of which Said’s work stands.
Thirty years after the
publication of Orientalism, fifteen years after Culture and
Imperialism, five years after Edward Said’s death, this
symposium brings into focus Said’s politics of reading in
diverse fields, from his literary criticism in English to his
political columns in Arabic.
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