harvard

This is the nineteenth in Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Contributing writer, John Mason depicts our nineteenth pathbreaker, Edward Wadie Said. A Palestinian American, he was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate period in 1935 to parents Wadie and Hilda Said, a business family. Said is a renowned scholar, literary critic, political activist, ad musician. As a professor of literature at Columbia University, he is known as one of the founders of postcolonial studies, a school of thought which is highly critical of the ill effects of western colonialism.