Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 03:07:16 EDT
Subject: Said's Culture and Imperialism


I would have to agree with Houston Wood that Said's analysis of European 
texts seems to loom far larger in _Culture and Imperialism_ than what he 
has to say about (post)colonial writers, and this for me was a 
disappointment.  But surely Said's readings of those European texts are 
designed precisely to reveal their ideological underpinnings, their 
implication in the imperial mindset, and so to _alienate_ us from the 
stories they tell and the social formations that produced them (and that 
they helped produce)?

You can perhaps say that even such oppositional critique solidifies the 
position of these master narratives--and, yes, this is something I often 
wonder about.

But what is it that Houston Wood would have those of us in English 
departments do?  We can't forget or ignore empire and history!  I have 
grave questions about white metropolitan scholars appropriating 
postcolonial texts--critiquing such texts can become a kind of processing 
of raw materials produced elsewhere, and we should wonder about our role in 
purveying Otherness to our students.  I clutch at Said's notion of reading 
contrapuntally, hoping to find a way to locate metropolitan and 
postcolonial texts in relation to one another, to explore the circulation 
of cultures . . .

Gill Gane     English Department, UMass-Boston     gane-AT-umbsky.cc.umb.edu


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