Culture and Imperialism

Product Information

There are strikingly important points that Edward Said makes at the very end of this book that were reminiscent of Amin Maalouf’s “In the Name of Identity, Violence and the Need to Belong. Said says that West has positioned itself as a self-evidently superior, independently developed culture that naturally should share its civilization with inferior others via colonization, which is almost always a product of imperialism.

In this way, the exile represents “an experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the classic canonic enclosures, however much its loss and sadness should be acknowledged and registered” (317). He's largely un-jargony, with the exception of some mentions of "universalizing discourses" here and there.Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Against the backdrop of globalization I don’t see how that is a sound methodology to preserve one’s culture and language.

No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Considered an unofficial 'sequel' to Saïd's famous "Orientalism", "Culture and Imperialism" vastly expands the scope and scale of the former work. I’m not even close to being able to have an educated opinion on this but I liked the way he made his case.This brought forth the realization that it would have to take an American a "personal interest" to choose to read "something else.

Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism employs a “contrapuntal” reading strategy by which he asserts the needs to examine texts from the perspectives of both colonized and colonizer. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.To answer such questions you must have independence and detachment of someone whose homeland js ‘sweet’, but whose actual condition makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness and even less possible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma, whether deriving from pride in one’s heritage or from certainty about who ‘we’ are. Said believes that diversity is valuable and complex and cannot be reduced to simple identity symbiology. Our colonisers told us who to be, how to think and how to run the country years after they have left. austen + forster, rather than examining the disparity in purpose between mansfield park and a passage to india and a book like kim that falls more in the domain of 'popular' literature.