Huge as American academe is, it has few public intellectuals -- men or women ( whose views carry weight with general readers off-campus. Near the top of any list of such people is a tall, elegantly tailored, 57-year-old American of Palestinian descent who for the past 30 years has taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City: Edward Said.
Said (pronounced Sigh-eed) owes his fame partly to his cultural criticism, notably his 1978 book Orientalism, a study of how ideas and images about the Arab world were contrived by Western writers and why. Now comes Culture and Imperialism (Knopf; $25). A plum pudding of a book, with excursions on such matters as Irish-nationalist poetry and the building of an opera house in Cairo for the launch of Verdi's Aida, it is the product of a culturally hypersaturated mind, moving between art and politics, showing how they do or might intermesh -- but never with the coarse ideological reductiveness of argument so common in America nowadays. Said's theme is how the three big realities of empire -- imperialism, "native" resistance, decolonization -- helped shape, in particular, the English and French novel. Culture and Imperialism includes brilliant readings of Conrad, Kipling, Camus, Yeats and other writers. It has been extolled by such critics as Camille Paglia and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and roundly damned by others, especially English ones, who fixated on Said's suggestion that an awareness of Caribbean slavery ran under the ironic tranquillity of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. In England you can dump on God, Churchill or Prince Charles, but touch Jane Austen and you're toast.
So is Jane Austen why Said's office at Columbia has been vandalized, and why he has received death threats from Jews, Iraqis, Palestinian extremists and Syrians? Is his dislike of poststructuralism the reason why thousands of American Jews think of him as an enemy, the P.L.O.'s man in New York? Guess again.
The fact is that Said, though by no means the only public Arab intellectual in America, is the most visible one: the voice of Palestine-in-exile. For more than 20 years he has been writing in defense of Palestinian rights and against the usurpation of Palestine territory by Jordan and Israel. His books on the subject, like The Question of Palestine (1979), are written, he says, "to bear witness to the historical experience of Palestinians."