Said's latest book largely reiterates his familiar argument for
cultural recognition of the "Other" (more cogently marshalled in
his Orientalism, 1978), particularly the colonized "Other" that has
been molded in popular perception by the crucial (to Said) element
of Western imperialism. Perusing Verdi's Aida, Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, Kipling's Kim, even Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Said
insists that the fact that one culture has dominated another is the
subtext for any 19th-century exploration of the exotic - or even,
in Austen's case, for "the ordination" of the colonizer's rights
and local freedoms. Said, though a gifted professor, is a gluey
stylist ("Moreover, the various struggles for dominance among
states, nationalisms, ethnic groups, regions, and cultural entities
have conducted and simplified a manipulation of opinion and
discourse, a production and consumption of ideological media
representations, a simplification and reduction of vast
complexities into easy currency, the easier to deploy and exploit
them in the interest of state politics") - and he is certainly
subject to his own charges of simplification. Didn't colonized
cultures have, in turn, their own colonies, imperialisms,
dominations? Has there ever been a human society in which the
"Other," the "impure," the "raw," the "strange" hasn't been used as
a lever for advantage? Is culture, for that matter, supposed to be
complex and fair - or is it, rather, self-essential and reflective?
Said spends no time weighing these questions, which he sends out
onto the field but never puts in play. It's following the sections
of highly tenuous lit-crit here that Said's lack of focus and
ill-thought-out positions become most apparent. Drifting screeds
and apologies - against the Gulf War, for Oliver Stone's JFK and
the equally astigmatic Salman Rushdie - plus ever more academic
recommendations of scholarly books Said agrees with give his own a
tiresome, soapboxy sensibility, undercutting its formality and most
of its seriousness. (Kirkus Reviews)
'Edward Said helps us to understand who we are and what we must do if we aspire to be moral agents, not servants of power.' Noam Chomsky. Following his profoundly influential study, Orientalism, Edward Said now examines western culture. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism is a broad, fierce and wonderfully readable account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.
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