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chapter3 21/12/04 11:14 am Page 51 3 Empire’s culture in Fredric Jameson, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak Aijaz Ahmad’s landmark 1992 book In Theory argues that materialist and postcolonial cultural studies are fundamentally incompatible projects.1 Whatever Ahmad may aver, relations between materialism and postcolonialism are more complex than mere incompatibility. For instance, Said’s essay on empire in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park appears in a recent book titled Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, where the editor Francis Mulhern defines Said as
I will read John Winthrop‘s Model of Christian Charity against and through Edgar Allan Poe‘s poem ‘The City in the Sea’. Winthrop and Poe both localize a ‘city’ to represent an extreme form of society. The koine Greek of Matthew 5 uses the word polis to describe a ‘city on a hill’. Christ says this city must not be hidden, but rather should shine so that the world may see it. The New Testament‘s merging of ‘politics’ and ‘city’ in the word polis makes it unsurprising that many Anglophone writers invoke ‘city’ in a title or phrase when making political innuendoes. Winthrop was a devotee of scripture, and Poe knew Greek, so their allusions to a representative human city are fraught with cultural meaning. To contextualize and compare their particular evocations of the city metaphor, I incorporate the theories of Edward Said and present cross-references to Eugène Delacroix, the prophecies of Ezekiel, and Shelley‘s poem ‘Ozymandias’. The Holy Land is at once fixed in the exotic Middle East yet necessary for America‘s quotidian social mores. Winthrop and Poe romanticize, appropriate, and exploit Middle Eastern symbolism. The interesting twist, however, is that Poe Orientalizes Winthrop‘s city on a hill, and in so doing, he Orientalizes Winthrop, and perhaps America‘s own religious fanaticism.
This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization, medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction, language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.
With a selected focus on Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Knowledge production in higher education presents a reflexive understanding of how Europe is taught and studied at MENA universities and how knowledge about the MENA is produced in Europe. This focus is based on the observation that higher education is rarely an apolitical space and an acknowledgement of how ‘every view is a view from somewhere’. It therefore explores the politics of institutes of higher education in view of often competing scholarly practices. Furthermore, it examines the historical evolution of French, German and Italian scholarship on the MENA; analyses the cases of Malta, Palestine and Turkey with their respective liminal characteristics in between the MENA and Europe, and how these impact on higher educational approaches to the study of the Other; considers critique as the driving force not only of the higher educational establishment but of liberal and illiberal contexts, with a specific focus on Denmark, the Netherlands and Egypt; and examines influences upon knowledge production including gender, the COVID-19 pandemic (with a focus on the UK and Syria) and think tanks.
This book seeks to reclaim E. A. Freeman (1823–92) as a leading Victorian historian and public moralist. Freeman was a prolific writer of history, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and outspoken commentator on current affairs. His reputation declined sharply in the twentieth century, however, and the last full-scale biography was W. R. W. Stephens’ Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895). When Freeman is remembered today, it is for his six-volume History of the Norman Conquest (1867–79), celebrations of English progress, and extreme racial views.
Revisiting Freeman and drawing on previously unpublished materials, this study analyses his historical texts in relationship to the scholarly practices and intellectual preoccupations of their time. Most importantly, it draws out Thomas Arnold’s influence on Freeman’s understanding of history as a cyclical process in which the present collapsed into the past and vice versa. While Freeman repeatedly insisted on the superiority of the so-called ‘Aryans’, a deeper reading shows that he defined race in terms of culture rather than biology and articulated anxieties about decline and recapitulation. Contrasting Freeman’s volumes on Western and Eastern history, this book foregrounds religion as the central category in Freeman’s scheme of universal history. Ultimately, he conceived world-historical development as a battleground between Euro-Christendom and the Judeo-Islamic Orient and feared that the contemporary expansion of the British Empire and contact with the East would prove disastrous.
Background Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s. It is not mentioned, for instance, in the first edition of Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985) or Jeremy Hawthorn's A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (1992). It gained currency through the influence of such books as In Other Worlds (Gayatri Spivak, 1987); The Empire Writes Back (Bill Ashcroft, 1989); Nation and Narration (Homi Bhabha, 1990) and Culture and Imperialism (Edward Said, 1993). An important collection of
Western colonialism which suppressed the contribution of the Arabs; through a consideration of Frantz Fanon, Abdelkabir Khatibi, Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said, I will argue that a genuine decolonization must be sought at the level of European thought. Tradition, translation and colonization 199 The appropriative economy of Orientalism as a corporate institution of colonialism Translation was a vehicle which carried cultural artefacts from Greek and other traditions into Arabic. It was part of a complex infrastructure which helped develop the economy of the
claims to his ancestral land are dismissed and his attempts to enter Israel are characterized as ‘clandestine immigration’. That Bakri has to break immigration rules to be intelligible to Israeli authorities takes shape in the scene selections Costa-Gavras makes for the film. When Edward Said speaks of the Palestinian experience being cubistic, he captures the various ways Palestinian experience is refracted through multiple frames of reference, the Holocaust, resistance struggles, and the effects of internal colonialism. In After the Last Sky , a reflection
consciously constituted the East in relationship to the West, this chapter positions his work within the discourse of Orientalism identified by Edward Said . While Said’s thesis that Europeans consistently depict the East as ‘other’ will be applied in my reading of the Saracens , it is necessary to challenge Said’s assertion that religious prejudices were displaced by racial prejudices in nineteenth-century representations of the Orient. Various narratives about Islam were in circulation during the Victorian period, ranging from the ‘conciliatory’ to the ‘confrontational
Part II Culture and conflict According to Edward Said, ‘culture is sort of a theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another. Far from being a placid realm of Apollonian gentility, culture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another’ (Said, in Edwards, 1999 : 249). This quotation from Said shows how culture