Power, Politics, and Culture ─ Interviews With Edward W. Said

Edward Said has long been considered one of the world’s most compelling public intellectuals, taking on a remarkable array of topics with his many publications. But no single book has encompassed the vast scope of his stimulating erudition quite like Power, Politics, and Culture, a collection of interviews from the last three decades.

In these twenty-eight interviews, Said addresses everything from Palestine to Pavarotti, from his nomadic upbringing under colonial rule to his politically active and often controversial adulthood, and reflects on Austen, Beckett, Conrad, Naipaul, Mahfouz, and Rushdie, as well as on fellow critics Bloom, Derrida, and Foucault. The passion Said feels for literature, music, history, and politics is powerfully conveyed in this indispensable complement to his prolific life's work.

Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Orientalism (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Covering Islam, Peace and Its Discontents, The Politics of Dispossession, Culture and Imperialism, Representations of the Intellectual, The Question of Palestine, Out of Place, The Edward Said Reader, and The End of the Peace Process.

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief.