Within cultural studies, literary studies took a different path from the traditional approach, revolutionizing literary perspectives and achieving new awareness by opening vast realms of interpretation and reading that grant discourses broad semantic dimensions difficult to confine. This allowed the emergence of a set of intellectual and philosophical references forming a hybrid knowledge, since cultural studies or cultural criticism essentially represent a variety of currents—including “new Marxism,” “cultural materialism,” “new historicism,” and “postcolonialism”—which converged to create a rich epistemic field. This field invests in a precise strategy based on uncovering and exploring hidden or buried structures within cultures through a new and different intellectual space, aiming deeply to deconstruct the structure and internal foundations of those cultures, searching for their semantic systems and interrelated patterns, leading to productive and effective readings.

Thus, the field of criticism in cultural studies witnessed a profound methodological breakthrough, fundamentally changing the course of literary criticism by shifting from text criticism to institutional criticism. Cultural studies had a significant impact on the global critical scene, contributing clearly to the emergence of many marginal counter-discourses to the central discourse, such as “postcolonialism,” “feminist criticism,” “new historicism,” and “cultural materialism,” which are products of contemporary critical theory. It is no secret that the Palestinian thinker and critic Edward Said (1935-2003) is one of the foremost pioneers of postcolonial studies; he sought to establish an intellectual and critical project based on utilizing the principles and aims of cultural studies in interpreting literary texts and reading their implications and hidden discourses.

All this led Edward Said to reject traditional theories of literary understanding and to criticize various tendencies that insist on placing Western culture in a position of dominance and centrality over other cultures. This compelled him to study and interpret many texts constructed by the West about the East and colonized and African peoples, as well as to interpret the entirety of literary texts written by resistance or postcolonial writers. Ultimately, he affirmed that literary texts are not innocent, as they conceal latent ideologies invisible to the reader, hiding behind aesthetic discourses. Moreover, these texts contain covert and cunning patterns capable of evasion, which can only be revealed through the practical nature of the cultural structures of the society itself.

Accordingly, Edward Said examined Orientalism as a form of discourse, which required him to interpret the West’s view of the East. In his works such as “Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the East” and “Culture and Imperialism,” he raised awareness of the Other and their culture and highlighted the connection between literature, culture, and imperialism, based on interpreting the novel as one of the literary genres most expressive of reality.

Through his 1978 book “Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the East,” Edward Said sought to unveil the agendas the West seeks to consolidate on one hand, and the stereotypical image taken of the East on the other. For the West, the East is backward and uncivilized, which led to a wide gap between Western society and other societies.

Indeed, the book “Orientalism” remains influential today in postcolonial criticism. It examines European perceptions of the East to show how the Orientalist mindset formed the academic discipline. The book also emphasizes that imperial domination relies on power, superiority, authority, and knowledge. Imperial authorities exported their knowledge, colored by their interests, to colonies and imposed on the dominated the view of themselves as inferior. Europe exported its language, literature, and science as a civilization gifted to others, which led to the displacement and suppression of the cultural richness in the colonies to consolidate the culture of the center.

This centrality prompted marginalized intellectuals to revolt against this situation and seek to form a counter-critical discourse, aiming to create a humane literature fundamentally defending the rights of weak peoples, such as those in the Far East, Black Africans, and women in Third World countries, to establish the principle of equality among cultures and reshape their relationships based on equity and justice. Overall, postcolonial writings rewrite the history of colonial civilization from the perspective of the colonized.

Edward Said deconstructed the discourse of Orientalism and employed it as a Western authoritarian discourse that grew around the East and acquired its institutions, rules, and specialists, to explain the collusion of power and culture in marginalizing peripheral cultures; thus, dismantling the center and making the margin its alternative, humanizing various cultures. Said confirmed this hypothesis by explaining “how the West’s image of the East was formed by generations of scholars, attaching myths of laziness, slander, and irrationality to Easterners.” To achieve this, he called for digging into the layers and structures of the text and linking it to its spatial and temporal conditions to reveal a complex network of political and social relations. He concluded the necessity of connecting texts to the existential realities of human, political life, societies, and events, linking the text to its historical contexts.

Therefore, Said requires critics to return to the historical structures of the possibilities that allowed the text to exist and form within a particular architecture. In his view, literature does not merely have an aesthetic function of pleasure, as some believe, but involves aesthetic, historical, and political missions, forming what is known as the historicity of the text.

Said’s concept of historicity means that the text is a realistic phenomenon connected to time, place, and historical and cultural context, not an isolated entity from the outside world. Accordingly, he rejects the idea of the text detached from reality and stresses the necessity of understanding it in light of the conditions that produced it, i.e., in the “world.” Thus, historicity in Said’s critical project serves as a reference framework for understanding his cultural theory, aiming to integrate creative human efforts within their historical, social, cultural, and political contexts, believing in the organic interconnection between various human activities and fields.

In any case, Said focused on revealing the relationship between structure, event, and the conflict between domination and imperialism with its various cultural systems and patterns. Accordingly, the text in Said’s critical discourse shifted from singularity to plurality, becoming “a document reflecting prevailing ideological and political values on one hand and serving as a starting point to reimagine and reconstruct those values amid an ongoing cultural class struggle on the other.” Thus, the text becomes a cultural sign that is part of a cultural and political context that produced it. Said aims to uncover the internal systems of this sign within cognitive analysis methods, textual interpretation, historical backgrounds, and institutional analysis. Therefore, he places the text within its political context on one hand and within the reader’s or critic’s context on the other, granting it semantic multiplicity and productivity.

Said’s reading of texts attempts to reveal the institution’s effect in producing texts and culture, thereby revisiting cultural discourse by criticizing Western centrality.