1990s

The 1990s mark a tense setting in Edward Said’s account of the persistence of East–West divisions and the intellectual efforts to question them. Rather than treating cultures as sealed, timeless essences, Said places the decade within histories of political conflict, imperial power, and cultural mixture, while emphasizing scholarship that revises who can appear as a historical actor.

Political and Intellectual Context

Said describes the 1980s and 1990s as a period in which Islamic groups in countries including Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Territories challenged the status quo. These developments unfolded alongside the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan, the Gulf War, and continued American support for Israel. Journalism and scholarship increasingly treated Islam as a subject of alarm, often without precise or informed understanding. Together, these circumstances intensified the pressure on people to identify themselves as either Western or Eastern and hardened an “us” and “them” opposition.

That opposition persisted even after the Cold War ended. Said argues that the end of bipolar politics did not end the conflicts represented as struggles between Arabs and Islam on one side and the Christian West on the other. He connects such divisions to a broader tendency to describe peoples through stable, opposing identities, a tendency that obscures changing historical circumstances and the interests served by those descriptions.

The Clash of Civilizations Argument

Said situates the 1990s within renewed arguments that cultural and civilizational difference defines political conflict. He criticizes Samuel Huntington’s proposition that the Cold War’s bipolar order had given way to a clash of civilizations. In Said’s account, the thesis imagines Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations as watertight compartments whose adherents are chiefly occupied with resisting one another.

Against this model, Said stresses that cultures are hybrid and heterogeneous, and that their histories are interdependent. The United States, in particular, cannot be understood as a culturally pure or detached civilization: its mixed identity reflects conquest, immigration, travel, and the mingling of peoples, alongside a history that includes exterminations and major cultural and political achievements. Treating civilizations as separate essences therefore misrepresents their histories and helps produce the very opposition it claims merely to describe.

Revisionist Scholarship and Historical Recovery

Said also presents the 1990s as part of a period of substantial postcolonial scholarship. Across campuses in the United States and Europe during the 1980s, students and faculty pressed to broaden core curricula to include women, non-European artists and thinkers, and subalterns. Critiques of Eurocentrism and patriarchy accompanied changes in area studies and in anthropology, political science, literature, sociology, and history, where scholars reassessed sources, introduced theory, and challenged Eurocentric perspectives.

He singles out the Subaltern Studies group, led by Ranajit Guha, for an ambitious revision of Indian historiography. Its immediate purpose was to recover Indian history from the dominance of the nationalist elite and restore the historical importance of urban poor people and rural masses. Said calls for acknowledging this achievement while remaining alert to its later pitfalls; he rejects the reduction of such work to something easily absorbed into transnational neocolonialism.

This scholarship also reconsiders histories once framed as belonging exclusively to one people or group. Ammiel Alcalay’s account of the Levant, for example, presents it as a Mediterranean culture shared by Arabs and Jews rather than only a battleground between them. Such approaches challenge inherited geographical divisions without denying that national and cultural differences shape human relations.

Historical Perspective and Significance

Looking back across the fifteen years after the publication of Orientalism, Said observes that animosities and inequalities remain, but argues that they are increasingly recognized as historical experiences rather than an eternal order. He describes a substantial new interpretive and scholarly enterprise aimed at loosening imperial constraints on thought and human relations. The period’s importance thus lies not in the disappearance of conflict, but in the possibility of understanding its divisions as historically made and potentially subject to change.

For Said, Orientalism openly joined a continuing struggle involving both West and East. His account of the 1990s holds together two developments: the hardening of political identities under the pressure of conflict, and the revisionist work that questions essentialized divisions, recovers marginalized histories, and makes a less adversarial understanding of cultural difference possible.