Teaching literature historically consolidated British and American imperial power
Evidence
In Said, Kaplan, and Viswanathan we have a body of scholarship that puts forward a persuasive argument as to how the teaching of literature has historically been definitive of British—and now American—imperial proclivities. Again, none of these scholars reduces the literary event to the political fact; rather, they posit a political interlocutor next to the work of literature. One can similarly offer a feminist or an anti-racist critique of the same texts without compromising their literary significance. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 368
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism framework already central in this reading list; also echoes Viswanathan’s argument about English literature as colonial control. — connects to: Literature strategically served race, gender, and empire representation — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 243
Related
- Literature strategically served race, gender, and empire representation (similarity 0.80)
- Islam is integral to but not definitive of Muslim literary cultures (similarity 0.80)
- Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.79)
- Colonialist literature criticism serves as imperial propaganda on multiple fronts (similarity 0.79)
- Black anti-imperialist intellectuals centered their struggle in the British metropole (similarity 0.79)
- Said’s Orientalism overshadowed the sociology-of-knowledge tradition it drew on (similarity 0.78)
- Orientalism is chiefly a British and French cultural enterprise (similarity 0.78)