Content area
Full Text
Edward Said's latest book, Culture and Imperialism, is, as the title more or less announces, a study of the ways in which the culture of imperialism preceded and undergirded the colonial enterprises of the big European powers of yesteryear, England and France, and, in today's world, how the same process continues with America playing the role of imperial giant. In many ways, the book is a continuation of the kind of "worldly" scholarly criticism Said inaugurated in his groundbreaking study, Orientalism, and in both books he is at pains to show how "great" works of Western literature have not been produced in a sociopolitical vacuum dubbed "objective art" but rather have been cultural expressions of the age's zeitgeist. Such a thesis allows Said to proffer what he himself calls "situated" or "contrapuntal" readings of texts as varied as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and Kipling's Kim. Thus, he is able to show how the so-called domestic novel of manners--of which Mansfield Park is such a typical example--derives from and is dependent for much of its value-coding on Britain's imperial activities abroad, a connection or "collusion" which has not been much commented upon by critics until very recently (or much noted in contemporary cultural work of the West): "More clearly than anywhere else in her fiction, Austen here synchronizes domestic and international authority, making it plain that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitabe association with it. What assures the domestic tranquillity and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other."
Reading Said's prose is a most gratifyingly lucid experience for the critic and...