Edward Said’s life project was to connect culture and the literary humanism he so admired to imperialism. He outlined his main theses in three core texts: Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), and Culture and Imperialism (1993). In these works, Said strove to connect cultural forms (including the novel) to the practice of ruling over and colonizing distant territories. As Said put it in Culture and Imperialism, his aim was “to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of such practices as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, and philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other.”¹ Creativity, imagination, and the life of the mind became indelibly linked to the worldly practices of empire and domination.

In making this argument, Said advanced broad and far-reaching claims — some more controversial than others. His core assumption is the most controversial, and it became the organizing principle for the postcolonial field. Simply put, British (and Western) domestic culture in its various expressions — literary, political, and philosophical — was imperialist. He writes:

With few exceptions, the women’s as well as the working-class movement was pro-empire. And, while one must always be at great pains to show that different imaginations, sensibilities, ideas, and philosophies were at work, and that each work of literature or art is special, there was virtual unity of purpose on this score: the empire must be maintained, and it was maintained.²