October 28, 2025

In Edward Said's Shadow

1 hour 8 minutes

Edward Said famously wrote most of "Orientalism" during his 1975-76 CASBS fellowship. The book criticized Western worldviews and representations of the East (or 'Orient') and their perpetuation of romanticized or colonial mindsets. A half-century later, "Orientalism" continues to shape scholarship, frame debates, and resonate in disparate regions and contexts. Four 2024-25 CASBS fellows representing different disciplines – A. Shane Dillingham, Thomas Blom Hansen, Camilla Hawthorne, and Shirin Sinnar – discuss the enduring influence and impact of Said and his landmark book.

EDWARD SAID WORKS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)
"The One State Solution," New York Times, 10 January 1999
Representations of the Intellectual (Penguin Random House, 1996)

Other works emerging from Edward Said's CASBS fellowship

EPISODE GUESTS
A. Shane Dillingham: ASU faculty page | Personal website | CASBS page
Camilla Hawthorne: UCSC faculty page | Personal website | CASBS page
Thomas Blom Hansen: Stanford faculty page | CASBS page
Shirin Sinnar: Stanford faculty page | CASBS page

Edward Said on CASBS
In evaluating his CASBS fellowship in 1976, Edward Said noted that "...the Center does not pay enough attention (in its selection of Fellows) to revisionist and/or radical scholars in the humanities and social sciences. There are a great many intellectual developments taking place, many of them because of thinkers whose work departs from (if does not explicitly reject) the conventions of Establishment scholarship."

In addition to this constructive criticism, Said remarked in general that "...the quiet and the absence of immediate pressures were, for me, a very welcome change from past years, when deadlines, a thousand daily commitments, and the mad pressures of teaching in a large university (in a large city) made continuity of work and reflection almost impossible." Said further reported that Orientialism was "exactly four-fifths complete." In accounting for his "extremely valuable and productive year," he wrote: "I do not think I could have done this sort of work anywhere else...the working conditions are...comfortable in the best way for a scholar..."

Of his work on Orientalism, Said further noted: "The other more or less special advantage to this year was to have time to change directions in my work, to move from a highly theoretical kind of speculation to a very concrete historical investigation. Many of my ideas about such matters as the history of traditions, the growth of scientific and disciplinary knowledge, the ideology of scholarship, the relationship between “knowledge” and the imagination took new, concrete forms. Without such a year – and it is impossible to say where else I could have had such a year – I would still be making statements without being sure as their historical and concrete validity. Moreover, I found that I had the time to pursue leads only to prove that they were the wrong ones; the important thing was to have the time to let my work take me where it would, and not be afraid.”

Excerpted from Edward Said, "Evaluation of fellowship year 1975-76," letter to CASBS director Gardner Lindzey, August 19, 1976 (CASBS files)

Other works referenced in this episode
Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Stuart Hall, "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power," in Essential Essays, Vol. 2 (Duke Univ. Press, 2018 [1992])
Camilla Hawthorne, "Mapping Black Geographies," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2024)
Sophia Azeb, "The 'No-State Solution'," The Funambulist (2017)
Sophia Azeb, "Who Will We Be When We are Free?" The Funambulist (2019)