Truth to Power:
A Bibliography of Edward Said Online

Undreamt by Tyrants and Orthodoxies: Edward Said, Orientalism, and the Politics of Cyberspace (link to abstract), which may be considered an introduction to this bibliography, may be found in Reorienting Orientalism, edited by Chandreyee Niyogi (New Delhi: Sage, 2006).

1. Primary materials

1.1. E-texts: Articles
1.1.1. 2003~2002
1.1.2. 2001~2000
1.1.3. before 2000
1.2. E-texts. Interviews
1.3: Audio (perhaps to follow someday)
1.4. Video
1.5. Translations

2. Secondary materials

25 July 2005 note: URLs have come and gone so regularly with this material that I have stopped trying to keep track. The fullest accounting of secondary online material is at The Edward Said Archive. I have left up this page, but I am no longer checking or verifying links.

Read Edward Said’s last essay, Dreams and Delusions, Al-Ahram, 21~27 August 2003.

Read Edward Said’s last Preface to Orientalism, Al-Ahram, 7~13 August 2003.

Links on this page have been verified 25 July, 2005.

Introductory notes, 23 October 2003

By far the largest collection of Edward Said primary materials on-line is maintained at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram, a journal for which Said wrote more than 100 articles between January 1998 and August 2003. The Al-Ahram materials are cited and linked in the lists that follow here, and Al-Ahram itself provides a linked list in its 25 September 2003 tribute to Said. That page may be found here.

As a general principle I have not listed material that requires a registration to access, such as that in on-line versions of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, Outlook India, and El Pais, unless it does not appear elsewhere on-line.

It should not go without saying that the bibliography that appears here is deeply indebted to the longstanding efforts of those responsible for The Edward Said Archive.

1.1 Primary / E-texts: Articles, 2003~2002

Dignity, Solidarity, and the Penal Colony, Counterpunch, 25 September 2003, an excerpt from The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St, Clair (available here), and a considerably expanded version of Punishment by Detail, AMIN, 8 August 2002. ‘Where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those white writers who spoke out unequivocally and with unambiguous clarity against the evils of South African apartheid?’

Untimely Meditations, The Nation, 1 September 2003. Review of Late Beethoven, by Maynard Solomon, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, by Esteban Buch, and Beethoven, by Lewis Lockwood. ‘Beethoven has been particularly fortunate in his recent critics and biographers.’

Dreams and Delusions, Al-Ahram, 21~27 August 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 21 August 2003. ‘Hyperbole . . . has ruled the public realm [in the United States], beginning of course with Bush himself whose metaphysical statements about good and evil, the axis of evil, the light of the almighty and his endless . . . effusions about the evils of terrorism, have taken language about human history and society to new, dysfunctional levels of pure, ungrounded polemic.’

Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire Builders, AMIN, 6 August 2003. Appears also as Preface to Orientalism, Al-Ahram, 7~13 August 2003. ‘Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of “the Orient” lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me.’

Rule by the Blind, Counterpunch, 21 July 2003. Appeared first as ‘Blind Imperial Arrogance’, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 22 July 2003, and as Imperial Perspectives in Al-Ahram, 24~30 July 2003. ‘Every empire . . . tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.’

The Meaning of Rachel Corrie: Of Dignity and Solidarity, Counterpunch, 23 June 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 23 June 2003, and as Dignity and Solidarity in Al-Ahram, 26 June~2 July 2003, and Dignité et Solidarité in Solidaires du peuple palestinien, 1 July 2003. ‘Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans, and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from ISM . . . have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.’

Archaeology of the Roadmap, Al-Ahram, 12~18 June 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 12 June 2003, and in expanded form as The Latest Peace Plan: A Roadmap to What and Where? Counterpunch, 14 June 2003, and A Road Map to Where? London Review of Books, 19 June 2003. ‘The road map, in fact, is not a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification.’

An Unprecedented Crisis: The Arab Condition, AMIN, 21 May 2003. Appears also as The Arab Condition, Al-Ahram, 22~28 May 2003. ‘It is . . . of the utmost importance that we recall in the first instance that, despite their many divisions and disputes, the Arabs are in fact a people not a collection of random countries passively available for outside intervention and rule.’

Give Us Back Our Democracy, The Observer, 20 April 2003. Appears also in expanded form at AMIN, 21 April 2003, as ‘What is Happening in the United States’ in Counterpunch, 22 April 2003, and Al-Ahram, 24~30 April 2003, and in Arabic here. ‘Let us examine what the US’s Middle East policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power.’

The Academy of Lagado, London Review of Books, 17 April 2003. ‘Full of contradictions, flat-out lies and groundless affirmations, the torrent of reporting and commentary on the “coalition” war against Iraq has obscured the negligence of the military and policy experts who planned it and now justify it.’

The Other America, Al-Ahram, 20~26 March 2003. Appears also in Counterpunch, 21 March 2003, and as The Alternative United States, AMIN, 20 March 2003. ‘Is America indeed united behind this president, his bellicose foreign policy, and his dangerously simple-minded economic vision?’

Always on Top, London Review of Books, 20 March 2003. Review of Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, by Catherine Hall. Includes in addition to a generally favourable review of Hall’s work an overview of the successes and failures of post-colonial writing.

Who is in Charge? Al-Ahram, 6~12 March 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 6 March 2003, Counterpunch, 8 March 2003, and as ¿Quién está a cargo? in Rebelion, 10 March 2003. ‘An immensely wealthy and powerful republic [the United States] has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure, and simply turned on its head.’

A Monument to Hypocrisy, Al-Ahram, 13~19 February, 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 13 February 2003, and as A Monumental Hypocrisy, Counterpunch, 15 February 2003, and Un monumento a la hipocresía, CSCA web, 13~19 February 2003. ‘It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in [the United States]. I’ve told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what “the country” is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits.’

An Unacceptable Helplessness, Al-Ahram, 16~22 January 2003. Appears also at AMIN, 16 January 2003, Counterpunch, 18~19 January 2003, and as When Will We Resist?, Guardian, 25 January 2003, When Will Arabs Resist?, Counterpunch, 25 January 2003, and Una impotencia inaceptable, CSCA web, 16~21 January 2003. ‘Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world?’

Immediate Imperatives, Al-Ahram, 19~25 December 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 19 December 2002, and Counterpunch, 21 December 2002. ‘For all sorts of reasons, among them that the cause of Palestine (like the liberation of apartheid South Africa) has always served as a model for Arabs and fair-minded idealistic people everywhere, it is today imperative that Palestinians take steps to restore the fashioning of their destiny to their own hands.’

Misinformation about Iraq, Al-Ahram, 28 November~4 December, 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 28 November 2002, Counterpunch, 3 December 2002, and as Desinformación sobre Iraq, CSCA web, 4 December 2002. ‘The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq continues unabated.’

Europe Versus America, Al-Ahram, 14~20 November 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 14 November 2002, and Counterpunch, 16 November 2002. ‘Certainly Europe generally and Britain in particular have a much larger and more demographically significant Muslim population [than the United States], whose views are part of the debate about war in the Middle East and against terrorism. So discussion of the upcoming war against Iraq tends to reflect their opinions and their reservations a great deal more than in America, where Muslims and Arabs are already considered to be on the “other side”, whatever that may mean.’

Israel, Iraq, and the United States, Al-Ahram, 10~16 October 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 10 October 2002, Counterpunch, 19 October 2002, and as ‘We’ Know Who ‘We’ Are, London Review of Books, 17 October 2002. ‘The initial step in the dehumanization of the Other is to reduce him to a few insistently repeated simple phrases, images and concepts.’

Low Point of Powerlessness, Al-Ahram, 26 September~2 October 2002. Appears also as Arafat the Hunted, Counterpunch, 5 October 2002. ‘One universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and tragic collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion.’

Disunity and Factionalism, Al-Ahram, 15~21 August 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 15 August 2002, and Counterpunch, 20 August 2002. ‘Underlying most of the findings in the much cited 2002 UNDP Arab Human Development Report is the extraordinary lack of coordination between Arab countries.’

Punishment by Detail, Al-Ahram, 8~14 August 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 8 August 2002, and Counterpunch, 13~19 August 2002. Enlarged as Dignity, Solidarity, and the Penal Colony, Counterpunch, 25 September 2003. ‘The location of Palestinian terror—of course it is terror—is never allowed a moment’s chance to appear, so remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate violence against a population of three million Palestinian civilians.’

One-Way Street, Al-Ahram, 11~17 July 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 11 July 2002. ‘Even by the terribly low standards of his other speeches, George W Bush’s 24 June speech to the world about the Middle East was a startling example of how an execrable combination of muddled thought, words with no actual meaning . . . [and] preachy and racist injunctions against the Palestinians . . . now sits astride US foreign policy.’

Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified, Harper’s Magazine, July 2002. No longer online. Review of Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong, and What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis. ‘The history of trying to come to terms with this somewhat fictionalized (or at least constructed) Islam in Europe and later in the United States has always been marked by crisis and conflict, rather than by calm, mutual exchange. There is the added factor now of commercial publishing, ever on the lookout for a quick bestseller by some adept expert that will tell us all we need to know about Islam, its problems, dangers, and prospects.’

Palestinian Elections Now, Al-Ahram, 13~19 June 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 13 June 2002, Counterpunch, 17 June 2002, and as Las elecciones palestinas, La insignia, 17 June 2002. ‘Six distinct calls for Palestinian reform and elections are being uttered now: five of them are, for Palestinian purposes, both useless and irrelevant.’

Crisis for American Jews, Al-Ahram, 16~22 May 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 16 May 2002, Counterpunch, 19 May 2002, and as La crisis de los judíos estadunidenses, Rebelión, 18 May 2002. ‘The moral . . . is that public American Jewish support for Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism, violence, evil and fanaticism.’

What Israel Has Done, Al-Ahram, 18~24 April 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 18 April 2002, The Nation, 6 May 2002, and as Lo que ha hecho Israel, Rebelión, 17 April 2002, and Quello che ha fatto Israele, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 16 October 2003. ‘Despite Israel’s effort to restrict coverage of its destructive invasion of the West Bank’s Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through.’

Thinking Ahead, Al-Ahram, 4~10 April 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 4 April 2002, and as The Future of Palestine, Counterpunch, 7 April 2002. ‘Anyone with any connection at all to Palestine is today in a state of stunned outrage and shock. While almost a repeat of what happened in 1982, Israel's current all-out colonial assault on the Palestinian people (with George Bush's astoundingly ignorant and grotesque support) is indeed worse than Sharon's two previous mass forays in 1971 and 1982 against the Palestinian people.’

What Price Oslo? Al-Ahram, 14~20 March 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 14 March 2002, Miftah, 18 March 2002, Counterpunch, 24~30 March 2002, and as Il prezzo di Oslo, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 15 March 2002. ‘Swept away are all the Enlightenment precepts by which we attempt to educate our students and our-fellow citizens, replaced by a disproportionate orgy of vindictiveness and self-righteous wrath of the kind that only the wealthy and the powerful, it would seem, have the right to use and act upon.’

Thoughts about America, Al-Ahram, 28 February~6 March 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 28 February 2002, and Counterpunch, 5 March 2002. ‘I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility.’

The Screw Turns, Again, Al-Ahram, 31 January~6 February 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 31 January 2002. ‘While the main media and the government echo each other about the Middle East, there are alternative views available through the Internet, the telephone, satellite channels, and the local Arabic and Jewish press. Nevertheless . . . what is readily available to the average American is drowned in a storm of media pictures and stories almost completely cleansed of anything in foreign affairs but the patriotic line issued by the government.’

Emerging Alternatives in Palestine, Al-Ahram, 10~16 January 2002. Appears also at AMIN, 10 January 2002, Counterpunch, 14 January 2002, as A New Current in Palestine, The Nation, 4 February 2002, and Alternative palestinesi, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 18 January 2002. ‘A silent majority of Palestinians is neither for the Authority’s misplaced trust in Oslo (or for its lawless regime of corruption and repression) nor for Hamas’s violence.’