Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism

This is Said's most important and complex work since Orientalism. Some have used Rushdie's novels as a metaphor, saying that if Orientalism is Said's Midnight's Children, then Culture and Imperialism is his The Satanic Verses. In stark contrast to Orientalism, which largely avoids literary texts, Culture and Imperialism's problematic is grounded in a deeper inquiry: "How do novel writing and lyric poetry... contribute to the construction of the pervasive imperialist worldview within Orientalism?" The resulting discussion of the relationship between "novel and empire" not only links the rise of the modern novel with modern capitalism, as Ian Martin did in The Rise of the Novel, reconstructing the imperialist expansionist context of the "birth of the modern European novel," but also controversially extends his analysis of Western culture's complicity with imperialism to the level of novel form and style, arguing that the European novel, in its genealogical sense, combines two qualities: on the one hand, the authoritative narrative style that constitutes the novel, and on the other, the complex ideological structure inclined towards imperialism. Perhaps we may not fully accept Said's views, but his interpretation and analysis of a series of classic works such as Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Yeats and Camus based on this view is truly amazing.

2016-08-01

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