Post-Colonialism

I particularly enjoyed the clarity of the excerpt from Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said. He was very careful about emphasizing the important in evaluating each text, however flippant it may appear to modern readers, in light of the Post-Colonial understanding of Imperialism. I think that too often theorist condemn certain texts instead of using them to understand the perception of the society and culture which perpetuated things like imperialism, class and racism, and other forms of oppression. Said's reading of Austen was very subtle; obviously, the spatial resonance between Mansfield Park and Antigua and England and its colonies isn't as apparent as the romance or the gender tensions in Mansfield Park. However, the analogy works well in describing the process of Nationalism and what Gayatri Spivak referred to as worlding, that the attempt to recast Western dominance as natural and without mechanism. By walking us through the entire novel, Said cast light on Imperialism as it was without explicitly condemning his findings or manipulating it to match his theory. This only proves that Imperial philosophies permeated every aspect of society, even the domestic social structures that were Austen's primary focus. Spivak's article is was not as acessible to me. It was a little more cluttered with dense terms, and it seemed to be trying to cover too much ground by discussing feminist theories of Imperialism and individualism.