Edward Said

the notions about bringing civilization to primitive or barbaric peoples, the disturbingly familiar ideas about flogging or death or extended punishment being required when “they” misbehaved or became rebellious, because “they” mainly understood force or violence best; “they” were not like “us,” and for that reason deserved to be ruled.

my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism

My recollection is that this idea—writers’, musicians’, and other artists’ “late works,” “late style,” “Adorno and lateness,” etc.—became part of Edward’s conversation sometime at the end of the 1980s. He had begun to be interested in this phenomenon and was engrossed in reading about it. He discussed it with many friends and colleagues and began to include examples of late works in many of his articles on music and literature. He even wrote specific essays on the late works of some writers and composers. He also gave a series of lectures on “late style,” first at Columbia and then elsewhere, and in the early 1990s he taught a class on the topic. Finally he decided to write a book and had a contract in hand.

We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?

Thus the interpreter’s mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter’s philological mission.

In the demonization of an unknown enemy, for whom the label “terrorist” serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced.

, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt.

Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority.