Edward W. Said

Life
1935-2003; Palestinian-American and celebrated post-colonial critic; b. Lebanon, of Christian parents; ed. US, where he chiefly taught; author of Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus; NY: Knopf, 1993); his lecture given at Yeats Summer School (Sligo) in the early eighties at the invitation of Declan Kiberd was afterwards published in the Field Day Pamphlet series, an earlier version having been given at the Princess Grace Irish Library “Yeats the European” conference, where Kiberd was a key-note speaker on an occasion convened by A. N. Jeffares.

Commentary
Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994), writing on his version of the similitude of Ireland to the Caribbean countries: ‘the land of saints, scholars, missionaries and imperial civil servants seems to have gone float about’.

Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish (1995): ‘He assumes that colonials, except for rare individuals, are everlasting tools of the power that sent them over to occupy, settle, and dominate. I assume that an [entire] colony gets cut off from its extraterritorial roots, becoming as Irish as everybody else, though the cultural contribution it makes remains distinctive as long as there are enough self-identified Anglo-Irish people on Irish ground to constitute a “critical mass”.’ (p.xi.) Further, Moynahan calls Said’s decision to characterise Ireland as a ‘sort of honorary third-world territory’ a ‘serious miscalculation [...] in his otherwise magesterial of the imperial and cultural incursions’ of white European nineteenth and twentieth century powers. (Cites Culture and Imperialism, xii; Yeats and Decolonisation, [?Deane ed.] p.75.)

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