[lbo-talk] Edward Said

[dredmond at efn.org]

Said was that rarest of all things, an intellectual of genuinely multinational 
stature. He was the scourge of undemocratic Middle Eastern regimes near and 
far, and the unremitting champion of a progressive, democratic and egalitarian 
Palestinian nationalism. He was a fierce critic of Israeli ethnic cleansing, 
but an equally fierce critic of the corruption and hypocrisy of the 
Palestinian Authority. But he'll be remembered most for his cultural 
scholarship -- his classic text, "Orientalism", almost single-handedly 
jumpstarted the field of postcolonial studies, one of the liveliest zones of 
theory, politics and economics today. My own field, Comparative Literature, 
owes him an enormous debt. 

-- DRR