Edward Said (1935–2003) was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family; the family moved to Egypt in 1948 and he went on to the United States, studying literature at Princeton and Harvard before joining Columbia University in 1963, where he spent the rest of his life. As a professor of comparative literature he wrote subtle work on Conrad and Auerbach; after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war he began to defend the Palestinian cause publicly. Orientalism was written at the intersection of these two veins — high literary criticism and a position of political exile.

The book's central claim is simple but its consequences are sharp: there is no 'Orient' to be discovered; there is a field of knowledge that the West constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Renan's philology of the Semitic languages, Edward William Lane's observations of Egypt, Massignon's studies of Islamic mysticism — all produce a discourse entangled with the administrative needs of colonialism. Said takes Foucault's link of discourse and power but ties it to something Foucault left vague: a concrete geography and an imperial administration. Knowledge of the Orient is knowledge for ruling it.

The impact quickly crossed disciplines. Gayatri Spivak's question 'Can the subaltern speak?', Homi Bhabha's hybridity, Dipesh Chakrabarty's project of 'provincialising Europe' — all flow in the channel Orientalism cut. Literary criticism became a political discipline; anthropology, history, and area studies were forced to interrogate their founding categories. Said's position of exile — 'always outside' — was legitimised as a theoretical position in its own right.

The critiques are also strong, and Said knew them. Bernard Lewis replied with 'The Question of Orientalism', defending the academic objectivity of the field; from the left Aijaz Ahmad argued that Said homogenised the West. More tangled still: the book has been used at once by the anti-imperialist left, to critique the epistemic legacy of colonialism, and by Islamist politics, to shield the critique of the West from internal critique. As long as he lived Said rejected both readings; in the 1993 Reith Lectures, Representations of the Intellectual, he redefined for himself the only position he claimed — exile, amateur, against authority.