Edward Said was and remains famous as a major American (and indeed, global) intellectual - a scholar-academic who stepped outside of his professional expertise in comparative literature to intervene in important discussions about Palestine, the wider Middle East, Islam, Zionism and Israel, American foreign policy, imperialism, justice and democracy. His books most often split his academic concerns from his political ones, though a couple - most famously Orientalism - brought those interests together. But in the early 1970s, Said could still describe himself as a kind of split personality, a Homo Duplex as Conrad called himself, who did everyday academic things in his workplace but who had all sorts of complex and controversial Middle Eastern connections.
Timothy Brennan's recent biography of Said, Places of Mind, tells us something rather different. Said was, from the late 1960s on, an inveterate activist, organiser, facilitator, agitator, networker, on Palestinian and Arab issues in the United States and also in the Middle East. Not merely this, but the activist work was not at all a contradiction or a mere sideline to the scholarly work - rather the academic work found one of its most important roots in his activism. Writing and reading, the production and reception of texts - be those texts a policy statement or newspaper op-ed, or the most refined and arcane works of literature or philosophy - was to be understood, Said argued, as a 'worldly', streetwise, consequential activity.
I have just published an essay on this theme in Jacobin, America's best leftwing magazine. Warm thanks are due to Daniel Finn for inviting me to do this work, and for his support and patience in its production.
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