On Edward Said: Places of Mind with Timothy Brennan, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, and Leslie Fernandez

<p>SWANA collective member David Lloyd hosts a roundtable on Timothy Brennan’s new biography of Edward Said, the great Palestinian intellectual, scholar and activist. Brennan’s biography, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374146535" target="_blank"><em>Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said</em></a> is, as the title suggests, not only a work that recounts Said’s intellectual development as one of the major theorists and cultural critics of the twentieth century, whose book <em>Orientalism</em>, a sustained critique of Western representations of the so-called East, launched what is known now as “postcolonial theory” and whose brilliant analyses of Zionist colonialism in Palestine furnished the intellectual groundwork for the Palestinian movement for liberation. It is also a book that is—as Said’s own work was—grounded in geographies of movement and border-crossing. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, lived his first years in the typical Levantine circulation between places, from Cairo to Jerusalem to Beirut, that Israel’s colonial state has interrupted. As a teenager he moved for school to the United States, which became his home thereafter. But he never ceased to circulate between the Levant and Egypt, New York, and Europe, engaging in the intellectual and cultural life of each of those places. Place and movement mark his work deeply with the stamp of exile on which he reflected so deeply, both in terms of the secular, skeptical location of the critic and in terms of the Palestinian diaspora of which he was so important a member and which was, for him, defined in terms of that experience of exile and dispersal.</p> <p>Timothy Brennan’s biography beautifully captures the complex formation of Said’s work and eventual political practice with a deep understanding of their emplacement in the world, in a way that would surely have delighted Said. We discuss the book and Said’s life, work and impact with Tim and R. Radhakrishnan, an important scholar of Said in his own right, and Leslie Fernandez, a graduate st