Edward Said Memorial Lecture 2014

Renowned Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh delivered this year’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture titled “Is There a Language of Peace?” earlier this spring at the British Museum and last fall at Columbia University, where the West-Eastern Divan co-founder held the preeminent position of University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. The London lecture is now available to listen to streaming online. Listen to it here. Edward Said wrote more than 20 books, which have been translated into 30 languages. His ground-breaking work Orientalism opened up new horizons in the study of post-colonialism. Said was active in the editorial committees of numerous magazines and journals and lectured at more than 200 universities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. A gifted pianist, he also was the music critic for The Nation for many years. In the political sphere, he was a major voice on the situation in Palestine and an unflinching proponent of justice and self-determination for all. Edward Said was the president of the Modern Language Association as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the American Philosophical Society, and Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He also was a member of the executive board of PEN International until 1998. . In 1999, Edward Said and the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim founded the West-Eastern Divan as a workshop for Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab musicians. Meeting in Weimar, Germany – a place where the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment are overshadowed by the Holocaust – they materialized a hope to replace ignorance with education, knowledge and understanding; to humanize the other; to imagine a better future. Within the workshop, individuals who had only interacted with each other through the prism of war found themselves living and working together as equals. As they listened to each other during rehearsals and discussions, they traversed deep political and ideological divides. Though this experiment in coexistence was intended as a one-time event, it quickly evolved into a legendary orchestra.

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