Hari Kunzru at Literary Hub:
When Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, was published in 1978, it became an instant landmark of scholarship about the European imagination of “the East.” The construction of an alternate world of passion, sensuousness, despotism, and irrationality flattered Western sensibilities during the colonial period, and licensed brutality that otherwise might have seemed to run counter to the ideals of Christianity and the Enlightenment. After its publication, Said realized he wanted to think further about imperialism and the various ways in which colonized people resisted it. He also wanted to understand how the experience of empire marked the culture of the colonizers.
Culture and Imperialism, the book that resulted from this research, is above all about the novel, “the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study.” Said’s readings have become canonical. No scholar of Heart of Darkness can avoid reckoning with the way Conrad’s “exilic marginality” complicates the novel’s imperialist politics and aesthetics. Likewise the écriture blanche of Camus’s The Stranger no longer seems like the innocent vehicle for the expression of existentialist universals about “the human condition” but a style invested in a certain sort of willful silence about history.
More here.
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