It seems strange to put it this way, but had Edward W. Said been a Marxist, he would have been one of the most important Marxist critics of his era. In his writings and interviews, he made it clear that he was not a Marxist, and he frequently criticized both existing communism and Marxist literary criticism. And yet, as any reader of his vast and variegated corpus readily discovers, Said’s thought and work is thoroughly infused with Marxist theory, critical practice, and general discourse. His most admired predecessors in literary history include a number of writers who are either self-described Marxists or sympathetic fellow travelers, and his heroes include major figures from a recognizable tradition of Western Marxism, including, notably, Karl Marx himself. Indeed, Said’s writings are filled with references to a veritable who’s who of twentieth-century Marxist cultural critique. And although Said never identified himself or his work as Marxist, many Marxist critics of his own generation and since, not only those engaged in postcolonial studies but also those working in other areas of literary and cultural criticism, have found his work to be valuable to their own. Said’s work thus resonates with Marxism in fruitful ways, and such resonance is worth examining more closely in our present moment of neoliberalism and globalization when critics are struggling to come to terms with the state of humanistic inquiry. Said’s “oppositional criticism,” as he preferred to call it, along with Marxist theory and criticism, remains well suited to analyzing our present situation. The elective affinities between Said’s positions and Marxism suggest productive avenues for critical theory today.

This essay examines Said’s anti-Marxism in the broader context of his distinctively spatial approach to literature and culture, which is tied, in large part, to his affinities toward Marxist theory. While Said does not embrace Marxism as an ideology, methodology, or epistemology, he derives much of the force of his critical investigations and discoveries from a Marxist tradition, drawing inspiration from, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s committed aesthetics and politics, Georg Lukács’s narrative theory, Antonio Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and the function of intellectuals, the Frankfurt School’s critique of everyday life, and Raymond Williams’s cultural studies. Understanding Said’s spatially oriented criticism helps to square the circle of his ambiguous relationship with Marxism and locate his quasi-Marxist theory amid his broader sense of oppositional criticism as well as his humanism and democratic criticism more generally.