This essay historicizes the formation of Edward Said's critique of imperial culture before the publication of Orientalism (1978) and examines how it framed the decolonial approach that made him world-renowned. Deeply influenced by the writings of Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, an Arab tradition of anti-orientalism, existentialist thought, and the Palestinian national movement, the New York-based intellectual reconceptualized the idea of decolonization in the late 1960s in a way that shifted contemporary thinking on social relationships between racial difference and empire from the individual and interpersonal to the collective and intercultural. Through his deep historical, epistemological, and phenomenological digs into orientalism's imperial culture and its myriad ways of being, Said made it his antiracist mandate to liberate consciousnesses from Eurocentrism and empower the universalization of decolonization.

本文将爱德华·赛义德在《东方学》出版之前对帝国文化的批判的形成历史化（1978 年）并研究了它如何构建使他享誉世界的非殖民主义方法。深受马提尼克出生的精神病学家和阿尔及利亚革命家弗朗茨·法农的著作、阿拉伯反东方主义传统、存在主义思想和巴勒斯坦民族运动的影响，这位纽约知识分子在 1960 年代后期重新定义了非殖民化的概念。这种方式将当代关于种族差异和帝国之间社会关系的思考从个人和人际转变为集体和跨文化。通过他对东方主义帝国文化及其无数存在方式的深刻历史、认识论和现象学挖掘，赛义德将意识从欧洲中心主义中解放出来并赋予非殖民化普遍化权力作为他的反种族主义使命。