This special issue of Social Text pays tribute to the work of Edward Said, an admired colleague and friend. The almost three years since Said’s untimely death (September 25, 2003) have made his achievements and interventions only more relevant. Though his work represents both monumental scholarly activity and tireless public intellectual energy, it refuses to be monumentalized. Instead, in an increasingly bleak political landscape, Said continues to inspire a rich variety of oppositional practices and committed scholarship. As befits his remarkably productive and multivarious career, this tribute offers contributions that cross geographical and disciplinary boundaries, and pursues Said’s stubbornly out-of-place critical practice, which displayed an intense awareness and frequent suspicion of the politics of knowledge. Indeed, for Said, the intellectual was defined by his or her refusal to accommodate to the agendas of state power. As he declared in a 1995 interview collected in The Politics of Dispossession, “The intellectual must maintain a margin of independence and must be an instrument of resurrecting ‘lost memory.’ “1 This oppositional logic also characterized his ambivalent relation to the disciplinary fields and practices in which his work found its greatest resonances. While Orientalism (1979) was a founding intervention in what came to be called “postcolonial studies,” Said maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the field’s institutionalization within the U.S. academy. Though Said produced a rich body of theoretically sophisticated criticism of the European novel and its relations to colonialism, he remained ambivalent both about the novel as a genre and about the domestication of critical theory within literary studies. While his role as a public intellectual was a frequent inspiration to practitioners of cultural studies, he was apt to proclaim himself, jokingly, a “high culture guy.” Yet this humane, secular critique applied as much to his work on literature, music, or theory as to his tireless advocacy in print and other media of the Palestinian cause. Said’s dazzling erudition was often subjected to his own alienation of the knowledge he possessed, insisting on the need to cross discursive and institutional boundaries, to take up the burden of rigorous theoretical and political challenges, to write from our own displaced positions with precision and clarity.
