Culture and Imperialism was published by Knopf in 1993, fifteen years after Orientalism, and it represents Said’s most ambitious attempt to bring literary criticism and political analysis together into a single argument. Where Orientalism focused on explicit representations of the East — Orientalist scholarship, travel writing, colonial fiction — Culture and Imperialism argues that imperialism pervades the entire Western cultural tradition, including works that seem to have nothing to do with empire.
The book’s most famous chapter reads Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a novel about empire. The Bertram family’s wealth derives from sugar plantations in Antigua — a fact mentioned in passing in the novel but never examined. Said argues that Austen’s silence about the source of the Bertrams’ income is not an oversight but a structural feature of the novel’s worldview: empire is the condition of possibility for English country-house culture, and the novel’s ability to ignore it is precisely what makes it an imperial text. This reading was controversial — critics accused Said of anachronism and political reductionism — but it opened a rich vein of scholarship that examined the imperial dimensions of canonical literature.
Said extends the analysis to Dickens (whose Great Expectations depends on Australian transportation), Conrad (whose Heart of Darkness Said reads as both a critique of imperialism and an unwitting participant in its ideology), Kipling, Verdi (Aida as an opera about colonial Egypt), and Camus (whose Algeria is a landscape without Arabs). In each case, Said argues that the literary work participates in the culture of empire not through explicit advocacy but through assumptions about geography, race, and the right to narrate — assumptions so deeply embedded in Western culture that they are invisible to readers who share them.
The book’s second half examines resistance literature — the writing produced by colonized peoples in response to imperial culture. Said reads Chinua Achebe, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and the Latin American novelists as writers who used Western literary forms to challenge Western cultural assumptions, creating a counter-tradition that reclaimed the right of colonized peoples to tell their own stories. This section of the book is less contentious than the first — the existence of anti-colonial literature is not in dispute — but Said’s readings are characteristically incisive.
Collecting Culture and Imperialism
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15