1980s

In Edward Said’s account, the 1980s mark both an intensification of the political divisions that made Orientalism seem urgently relevant and the emergence of intellectual currents that challenged its inherited categories. The decade brought conflicts and public debates that hardened the opposition between East and West, even as post-colonial work, feminist and minority scholarship, and revisions to academic curricula made formerly marginalized histories harder to exclude. Its significance lies in this tension: old structures of domination persisted, but they no longer monopolized who could speak or what scholarship could include.

Political conflict and hardened identities

The political setting of the decade made it difficult to treat East–West antagonism as a settled historical relic. Said points to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and to challenges to the status quo by Islamic groups in countries including Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, as well as in the Occupied Territories. He also notes the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan, the Gulf War, and continuing American support for Israel. These developments fed alarmed, sometimes poorly informed journalism and scholarship about Islam.

The conflicts did more than furnish examples for public debate: they shaped the identities through which people were pressed to understand themselves. In Said’s account, people were repeatedly made to declare themselves either Westerners or Easterners. The resulting sense of opposition reinforced and hardened identities, narrowing the space for recognizing varied histories and political positions. The decade therefore carried forward the East–West binary even as new scholarship sought to question the assumptions beneath it.

Post-colonialism and the meaning of “post”

Said distinguishes post-colonialism and post-modernism as related currents that emerged as subjects of investigation during the 1980s, with both sometimes treating Orientalism as an antecedent. He stresses that “post” need not mean that colonial practices have simply been left behind. Drawing on Ella Shohat’s formulation, he describes post-colonialism as attending to continuities and discontinuities, especially the new forms taken by older colonial practices.

The distinction matters because the two currents often approached history and political struggle differently. Said characterizes post-modernism as more Eurocentrically biased and more invested in the local, the contingent, and aesthetic or theoretical emphasis that could make history seem weightless. By contrast, much post-colonial scholarship arose from analyses of domination and control, written from the standpoint of political independence or an unfinished liberationist project. Where a prominent post-modern account stressed the disappearance of grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, post-colonial artists and scholars held that such narratives remained, even when their realization was deferred or obstructed. The currents could overlap, including in the use of magical realism, but their different historical imperatives led to different approaches and results.

Curricula, disciplines, and historical revision

Across American and European campuses, students and faculty worked during the decade to broaden core curricula by including writing by women, non-European artists and thinkers, and subalterns. This effort formed part of a wider critique of Eurocentrism and patriarchy. It also changed the terms of academic inquiry: anthropology, political science, literature, sociology, and especially history encountered challenges to their sources, greater use of theory, and pressure to dislodge Eurocentric perspectives.

Area studies, long shaped by classical Orientalists and their equivalents, also felt these challenges. Said presents such changes not as the simple erasure of cultural difference but as a challenge to treating difference as proof of hostility or as a fixed opposition between essences. His concern is with the adversarial knowledge built from that assumption, which had helped sustain generations of hostility, war, and imperial control.

Subaltern history and the limits of the shift

Said identifies the Subaltern Studies group, led by Ranajit Guha, as a particularly consequential revisionist development in Indology. Its historiographic ambition was to rescue the writing of Indian history from the dominance of the nationalist elite and restore the urban poor and rural masses to an important place in that history. For Said, the project exemplified scholarship capable of revising both its historical subjects and the authority through which history was narrated.

He resists dismissing such academic work as merely co-optable or complicit with transnational neo-colonialism. Its achievements should be recognized, he argues, while remaining alert to later pitfalls. More broadly, the decade’s intellectual changes suggested that formerly colonized, enslaved, and suppressed peoples could no longer be treated as silent or represented only by senior European or American men. The growing influence of women, minorities, and marginal groups made that change visible in mainstream thought and placed new demands on the study of culture.