SOURCE: "On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said," in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, Granta Books, 1991, pp. 166-84.

In the following interview which took place at the PEN Congress in New York in 1986, Said discusses the identity of the Palestinian conscious based on historical and literary themes in his writings.

For those of us who see the struggle between Eastern and Western descriptions of the world as both an internal and an external struggle, Edward Said has for many years been an especially important voice. Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and author of literary criticism on, among others, Joseph Conrad, Edward has always had the distinguishing feature that he reads the world as closely as he reads books. We need only think of the major trilogy which precedes his new book, After the Last Sky. In the first volume, Orientalism, he analysed 'the affiliation...