Video / Audio  Edward W. Said

Edward W. Said remained, for over forty years, concerned with Conrad. A fascinating conversation emerges between the two men’s work, one concerned with aesthetics, displacement and empire, and sheds an interesting light on the present moment. Performance by Ibrahim Alshaikh (14 years old), clarinet, studying at Barenboim-Said Foundation Ramallah Opening Remarks by David Freedberg and Gauri Viswanathan Introduction by Safwan Masri The Fall 2018 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture was given by Hisham Matar. Matar is the author of two novels and a memoir. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016) won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, the PEN America Book of the Year Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize. The Return was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Costa Awards, and was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. The memoir tells of his father’s kidnapping when Matar was 19 and studying in London: one of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent opponents in exile, his father was held in a secret prison in Libya and Hisham would never see him again. And yet The Return is an uplifting memoir; Matar recounts his journey home to Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance; he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. “Hope,” as he writes, “is cunning and persistent.”

Professor Richard Falk delivered the annual Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture. His talk focused on the present reality and future direction of the Palestinian struggle, taking account of the continuing relevance of Edward Said's views of the grounds of a sustainable peace and proceeding from his prophetic premise that the two-state approach should no longer becloud our judgment.

Raja Shehadeh’s lecture on the 10th anniversary of Edward Said’s death will reflect on the cages of categorization that imprison Palestinians in contemporary Palestine perhaps more than even the physical matrix of borders, checkpoints, and the Wall. Shehadeh will explore how Palestinians themselves deploy these categories in a language of despair in our post-Oslo landscape, as well as a search for a new language, remembering as Edward Said noted in one of his most moving and lyrical texts, After the Last Sky, that “We are more than someone else’s object.”