Reading Notes
1. Difference between Edward Said Michel Foucault
Said deviates from Foucault in respect of the relationship of individual authors to the discourse. For Foucault,
a discourse is a system of linguistic rules and protocols that govern what it is possible to say or write in a
specific field. The individual author, for Foucault, will always be subsumed within this wider system: his or her
work will always be shaped, channelled, and finally restricted by the order of discourse. But Said declares that
he does believe ‘in the determining imprint of individual authors upon the otherwise anonymous collective
body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism’. (McCarthy, 2010, p. 76)
2. Structure of Edward Said’s Orientalism
Orientalism is divided into three major chapters, with twelve subdivisions. ‘The Scope of Orientalism’, the first
chapter, sets out a broad overview of Orientalism, with a focus on the issue of representation and certain
typical tropes, such as those of Oriental cruelty, Oriental splendour, and Oriental despotism. The second major
chapter is entitled ‘Oriental Structures and Restructures’, and it is concerned with the rise of the institutions of
Orientalism – its development as an academic discipline, its founding fathers, its learned societies, and its
relationship to the rise of European empire, from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century.
The third chapter, ‘Orientalism Now’, maps the development of Orientalism against the shift of power
between the great European colonial empires and the United States. (McCarthy, 2010, p. 77)
3. Two Visions in Heart of Darkness
On the one hand, this is the consequence of self-inicted wounds, critics like V. S. Naipaul are wont to say: they
(everyone knows that “they” means coloreds, wogs, niggers) are to blame for what “they” are, and it’s no use
droning on about the legacy of imperialism. On the other hand, blaming the Europeans sweepingly for the
misfortunes of the present is not much of an alternative. What we need to do is to look at these matters as a
network of interdependent histories that it would be inaccurate and senseless to repress, useful and
interesting to understand. (Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 55-6)
What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons
having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial
system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. (Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 61)
Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is
no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing
as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent,
acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation. (Said, Culture and Imperialism,
p. 61)
Conrad could probably never have used Marlow to present anything other than an imperialist world-view,
given what was available for either Conrad or Marlow to see of the non-European at the time. Independence
was for whites and Europeans; the lesser or subject peoples were to be ruled; science, learning, history
emanated from the West. (Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 62)
References
McCarthy, Conor. (2010). The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge University Press.
