Few texts could be more excessive, in terms of their production and reception, than Orientalism (1978), the best-known book of a man whose death took away from us one of the most eloquent and forceful public intellectuals of the present day (Viswanathan xi). Orientalism, although frequently seen as flawed, even as one of Edward Said's weakest efforts, is far and away the most talked-about and influential of the 20-odd books he wrote during an almost unimaginably prolific career. The book, translated at the last count into 36 languages, is the product of an equally protean personality, known alike for his ‘passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views, and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination’ (Viswanathan xi–xii). Multiple and wide-ranging contributions to the fields of literary scholarship, cultural politics and music are less suggestive of the achievements of a single figure than of several, while in the work itself the dizzying plurality of not always compatible subjects, methods and approaches similarly presents us with not one but a veritable surfeit of Saids. Given the astonishing range and lasting impact of Said's oeuvre, it is hardly surprising that there should now be a booming Said industry, in which numerous scholars from all corners of the world have taken the opportunity to engage in conversation – not all of it friendly – with his work. To adapt a phrase applied by Henry Louis Gates to the great Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon, we have been witnessing for some time now an evolved form of ‘critical Saidism’ in which very different readings are applied, and very ideological uses given, to Said's work. Like Fanon before him, Said was to become a talismanic intellectual and political figure, while Orientalism, in particular, was to be transformed over time into one of the late twentieth century's few truly totemic critical works (Gates 457–58).

Why Orientalism? In a 1995 review essay, Gyan Prakash attributes the phenomenal success of Orientalism to its capacity to unsettle ‘received categories and modes of understanding’ (n.p.).