When I was in graduate school in English literature during the 1980s, Edward Said was in many ways the exemplary intellectual. He was a serious scholar of literature who'd done much to introduce the heady work of that time's major continental philosophers and theorists -- especially Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida -- to American audiences. Furthermore, Said was that rare academic who was also politically engaged, not just an activist but a real participant in meaningful politics. And in 1978 he'd written a book that brought all these currents together: Orientalism was a study of Western art and literature detailed with 20th-century critical insights that had political resonance in the real world.