I spent a few days at Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library with the collected papers and correspondence of the late Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said (1935 – 2003). An errant scrap fell from one of the files. On it, Said made a list with the names of two of his love interests, and the costs and benefits of pursuing those relationships. One was white, and the other with ties to the Middle East. ‘Fitting-in’ with Said’s Anglo-Saxon academic set, on the one hand, and with his network of Palestinian and Lebanese colleagues, family, and friends on the other hand, was the main concern, as I recall. I didn’t photograph it so I can’t be sure. It seemed irrelevant, an odd bit of archival gossip, or worse, a diminishing look at the merely pragmatic reasoning of a giant of 20th century thought. But looking back on this intrusion of Said’s private, romantic life into the record of his professional one, that little piece of paper has steered my sense of his work as a critic of Orientalism in literature, policy, film, and occasionally art. His anxious exercise in family planning resonates with writing on the “affiliative bonds” amongst European and American experts on the Arab-Islamic world – on the way in which those bonds have constituted something like the authority of family relationships for white authors who regard the minds, customs, and bodies of Arabs as essentially, or “ontologically and epistemologically” distinct from those of Europeans.