Edward Said Interview: Out of Place

Edward Said talks with writer Phillip Lopate about his book, Out of Place, a memoir of his childhood and formation into the itinerate conscience of the intelligentsia and figurehead of postcolonial politics that we know him as today.
(BOMB 69/Fall 1999, LITERATURE) 

http://bombsite.com/issues/69/articles/2269

"Edward Said has been for decades a major literary critic and, in academic circles, a pioneer of postcolonial studies. His seminal work includes Orientalism, Covering lslam and Culture and Imperialism. He is also a noted, sometimes controversial, political activist, championing the Palestinian cause. His own background, raised in a Christian Palestinian family in Egypt and Lebanon, with English and American cultural aspirations, led to a richly confused sense of identity and displacement, which he has now explored in a compelling memoir, Out of Place —perhaps his best book, certainly his most personal and least polemical. Having known Said casually for years as an exquisitely charming if somewhat testy man, I interviewed him at his Riverside Drive apartment (courtesy of Columbia University, where he is a distinguished professor), whose interior with its spectacular river views handsomely follows the curve of the building’s facade."