On the next Fiat Lux Redux, Tuesday, April 28 at 9 AM, and in celebration of National Arab American History Month, we present an edited RE-broadcast of a powerful and historic address at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on February 19, 2003 with Professor Edward Said, world-renowned Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist.
This event is remembered not only for the gravity of its subject matter but also for being one of Said’s final major public appearances before his death in September of that year.
The title of the lecture was “The United States, the Islamic World, and the Question of Palestine“ (also referred to in materials as “Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights”).Serving as a definitive summation of his life’s work, it blended his academic expertise in Orientalism with his tireless activism for Palestinian self-determination and his final plea for a “humanistic” and “secular” vision of justice.
Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) as part of their Spring 2003 Lecture Program, with co-sponsorship from the Office of the Chancellor, the lecture took place just weeks before George Bush’s invasion of Iraq and was one of his last major public addresses.
Because his father had lived in the U.S. and served in the U.S. Army during World War I, Edward Said had U.S. citizenship from birth. Born and raised in Jerusalem in the Talbiyya neighborhood, his family left for Egypt due to the escalating conflict in Palestine. Political upheavals in Cairo, where the political climate began to shift with the rise of nationalism and the 1952 Revolution, made his family’s status as wealthy, Western-aligned Christians increasingly precarious. Said was sent to the U.S. alone at age 15 to a boarding school in Massachusetts and he remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life, going to Princeton for undergraduate studies and Harvard for both his Master’s degree and his PhD in English Literature. He became an ‘intellectual in exile’ and joined the faculty at Columbia University in NYC in 1963 where he was a longtime professor of English and Comparative Literature and widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectuals of the late 20th century.
Fiat Lux Redux presents previously aired lectures, conversations, and podcasts originating on the campus of UC Berkeley every other Tuesday from 9am to 9:30am. These often-lengthy original programs have been edited to a 30-minute format by experienced KALX producers. The show’s name, Latin for “Let there be light”, is a reference to the University of California’s motto, which is also Fiat Lux. The show’s goal is to provide listeners with a window into the intellectual and cultural life of UC Berkeley and to showcase the wide range of subjects and diversity of thought and ideas that are present at UC Berkeley.
This episode of Fiat Lux Redux was edited by Lisa Katovich for KALX Berkeley. If you have questions or comments about Fiat Lux Redux, contact lisa.katovich@gmail.
