On the Decolonial Beginnings of Edward Said

Abstract

This essay historicizes the formation of Edward Said's critique of imperial culture before the publication ofOrientalism(1978) and examines how it framed the decolonial approach that made him world-renowned. Deeply influenced by the writings of Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, an Arab tradition of anti-orientalism, existentialist thought, and the Palestinian national movement, the New York-based intellectual reconceptualized the idea of decolonization in the late 1960s in a way that shifted contemporary thinking on social relationships between racial difference and empire from the individual and interpersonal to the collective and intercultural. Through his deep historical, epistemological, and phenomenological digs into orientalism's imperial culture and its myriad ways of being, Said made it his antiracist mandate to liberate consciousnesses from Eurocentrism and empower the universalization of decolonization.