Edward Said and How the West Went Woke

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 216 In the late 1970s, a Palestinian-American postcolonial theorist and Columbia University literature professor named Edward Said wrote a book that changed the Left forever. That book was called Orientalism (https://amzn.to/45eMnE2). In this book, he brought the postmodernist deconstructive tools of Michel Foucault to a variety of Marxist and Critical Theory analyses to criticize and transform the way scholars study "other" cultures. His basic thesis is that there is no way for a scholar embedded in an imperialist context to study another culture without bringing his imperialism (and preference for its benefits) into the analysis. Exploring his treatment offers us much today in terms of understanding Woke, including how it could be that so many of our central institutions caved in to the ideology. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads a section from Said's own introduction to Orientalism to explain. The Postmodernist, Critical Marxist, and broadly establishment-liberal mondialist projects share so much foundational overlap that they serve as not just parallel projects but an intellectual-cultural symbiosis that opened the door to the Woke takeover. Join him for yet another groundbreaking episode and insight into what happened to the West over the last century of Western Marxist incursion. Join us for the Preserving Liberty Conference at Sea!: https://ndcruise.com Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2026 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Woke