Culture and Imperialism

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, May 31, 1994 - Political Science - 416 pages
A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.
 

Contents

Empire Geography and Culture
3
Images of the Past Pure and Impure
15
Discrepant Experiences
31
Connecting Empire to Secular Interpretation
43
CHAPTER
62
Jane Austen and Empire
80
The Cultural Integrity of Empire
97
Verdis Aida
111
Themes of Resistance Culture
209
Yeats and Decolonization
220
The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition
239
Collaboration Independence and Liberation
262
CHAPTER FOUR
282
Challenging Orthodoxy and Authority
303
Movements and Migrations
326
Notes
337

The Pleasures of Imperialism
132
The Native Under Control
162
Camus and the French Imperial Experience
169
A Note on Modernism
186
RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION
191
xi
363
15
370
162
377
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About the author (1994)

Edward W. Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He died in 2003 in New York City.

He is the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into 35 languages, including Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); Covering Islam (1980); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); Culture and Imperialism (1993); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East Peace Process (1996); and Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). Besides his academic work, he wrote a twice-monthly column for Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram; was a regular contributor to newspapers in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and was the music critic for The Nation.

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