Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Shakespeare Studies

Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.

Article Excerpt
Postcolonial Studies and Beyond Edited by AINA Lombi et al. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005

Twenty-seven years ago Edward Said published Orientalism. (1) Its account of the ways language in statecraft, academia, and literature creates and maintains exploitative attitudes toward Asia and the Middle East was comprehensive, magisterial, and foundational. It is, more than any other work, responsible for the creation of a field of study we now call "postcolonial."

Since then that field has been cast with many seeds and has also attracted more than a few hands eager to uproot any public voices critical of neo-con propaganda. Dines DeSousa, (2) Keith Windschuttle, (3) and Roger Kimball, (4) among many others, have made careers ferreting out instances of critical or pedagogical excess to hold up as synecdoche's for all that ails our culture. The barbarians, these conservatives wail, aren't at the gate; they're in the Senior Common Room, and the words they use are hard to understand. Kimball and others find in postcolonial practice and multicultural esthetics threats to universalism, Western triumphalism, and Great Art. As Kimball puts it in an interview about his recent book The Rape of the Masters,...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!