The Elephant We Don't See: A Diversity Dialogue "Out of Place" by Edward Said

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

The Elephant We Don’t See Diversity Dialogue celebrates Arab American Heritage Month with Edward Said’s autobiography, "Out of Place".

Edward Said highlighted “othering” in his work Orientalism, recognizing it as the invention of difference used to separate a “dominant” group from the “inferior” other. Understanding othering, how we do it, and how it is done to us, and disrupting it in ourselves and others continues to be the work of our time. Reading Said’s autobiography for this month’s Diversity Dialogue is one of the ways we honor and appreciate Said’s contribution to global understanding and relationships.

From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, and often profound, "Out of Place" depicts a young man’s coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.

 Edward W. Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he was a University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He died in 2003 in New York City.

He is the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into 35 languages, including "Orientalism" (1978); "The Question of Palestine" (1979); "Covering Islam" (1980); "The World, the Text, and the Critic" (1983); "Culture and Imperialism" (1993); "Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East Peace Process" (1996); and "Out of Place": A Memoir (1999). Besides his academic work, he wrote a twice-monthly column for Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram; was a regular contributor to newspapers in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and was the music critic for The Nation.