Politics & Power Quote by Edward Said

The pivot Edward Said stages here is both memoir and manifesto: a self-portrait of an intellectual jolted out of professional enclosure by history’s blunt force. “Completely caught up” is a quietly damning phrase, the kind that makes ordinary ambition sound like a moral alibi. Said isn’t disowning literature; he’s exposing how easily “the life of a young professor of English” can become a cocoon, a way to stay safe inside institutions that reward distance and decorum.

The context is doing heavy work. The June 1967 war didn’t just redraw borders; it rewired identities across the Arab world and in diaspora, sharpening the sense that Palestinian dispossession wasn’t an episode but a condition. Said’s “Beginning in 1968” marks the aftershock: politics turns from background noise into a vocation. The sentence structure mirrors that conversion. The first clause is static and self-contained; the second becomes kinetic: “think, write, and travel.” Movement replaces dwelling, and writing is recast as action rather than commentary.

The subtext is a challenge to the Western model of the detached scholar. Said suggests that neutrality is often just an inherited comfort, especially when the subject is Palestine, a cause routinely filtered through other people’s narratives. Calling Palestinian life and politics a “renaissance” is pointed: it rejects the patronizing assumption that Palestinians only enter history as victims. He’s aligning himself with a collective reawakening while also claiming a particular role within it: the public intellectual who turns cultural authority into political insistence.