Edward Said has written a powerful follow up to his masterful study of Orientalism. This encyclopedic study of culture and Imperialism focussing particularly on C19th-C20th novels and poetry challenges the reader at every point. As Terry Eagleton notes in his review, “Said’s studies range from Verdi to Gramsci, Nietzsche to Neruda, Walter Scott to Wole Soyinka! In the Introduction by Hari Kunzr! There is little in literature and philosophy that Said has nothing to say. He begins with Conrad and Rushdie and keeps on moving ever more widely. His range moves from Kenyan poet Ngugi to Tayeb Salih, Cesaire to Achebe, Neruda to Friel in what he calls “overlapping territories/ intertwined Histories.”

Everything he touches begins a new series of ideas, histories and writers. In relation to England he moves through Spenser, Shakespeare, and Defoe to Jane Austen highlighting the novel as becoming the new pre-eminent historical narrative, reminging his readers that “Pride and Prejudice” was not just a love story but a coming to terms with history. Said also reminds us that Dickens’ triumphant Pip began his ‘gentleman’s life’ by first being transported to Australia and luckily meeting up with Abel Magwitch. From Dickens Said moves to Ruskin/Tennyson/Meredith/Arnold/Thackeray/Eliot/Carlyle/Mill, what he calls “the full roster of significant Victorian novelists” at the same time reminding us of “the unchecked tyrannies of the white man!

Next we find ourselves entranced by Verdi’s massive achievement of Aida almost forgetting the English colonizing of Egypt and the assumption of English racial superiority, also found in Walter Scott and Byron.

Said moves on to Matthew Arnold’s “celebrated theory in praise of culture” ignoring Arnold’s support for the massacre of Jamaican blacks and fellow support from Ruskin, Carlyle and Arnold, with opposition coming from Mill, Huxley and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn. Next in line is Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated career in English literature many years after his early life born in India. Said notes also the astonishingly impressive numbers of English writers who wrote about India. Arnold also wrote powerfully about separating the natives ..Africans, Malays, Arabs, Berbers, Indians, Nepalese, Javanese, and Filipinos from the white man on racial and religious grounds.

Next Said turns to Camus and the French imperial experience…the acquisition of empire, and the ugly colonial turbulence of France’s twentieh century decolonizing travail. Said turns to the Ireland’s great national poet Yeats to challenge the power of the English and French colonial world which on the surface was huge indeed..India, North Africa, the Caribbean, South America, many parts of Africa, China, Japan, the Pacific, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, North America and of course Ireland! Said also writes in detail of many other poets who wrote in defence of native literature including J M Coetzee, and other leaders who opposed slavery including Diderot and Montesquieu. In later years such as the Viet Nam wars the American poets came to the fore including Noam Chomsky, Aime’,Ceaire and Fanon.

This new “pathology of power” takes on a major section of Said’s massive book and covers a vast arena of writers including Herbert Marcuse, Adorno, Enzenburger and Chomsky who wrote “It is up to us to right the wrongs of the earth!” I have left out many other writers and prophets in this extraordinary book although it it interesting to note that some of the agressive writers of the recent past have now said “they have nothing to say”…it is all too much! To put this book in simple terms Edward Said has given us so much to think about it is almost too much but if we don’t read these journey we are not seeking the truth that might just save us!