Edward W. Said, 'Culture and Imperialism'
In: map. Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, 1-19.
Edward W. Said
[...] most cultural historians, and certainly all literary scholars,
have failed to remark the geographical notation, the
theoretical mapping and charting of territory that underlies
western fiction, historical writing, and philosophical discourse
of the time. There is first the authority of the European
observer - traveller, merchant, scholar, historian, novelist.
Then there is the hierarchy of spaces by which the
metropolitan centre and, gradually, the metropolitan economy
are seen as dependent upon an overseas system of territorial
control, economic, exploitation, and socio-cultural vision;
without these stability and prosperity at home - 'home'
being a word with extremely potent resonances - would
not be possible. The perfect example of what I mean is to
be found in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, in which
Thomas Bertram's slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously
necessary to the poise and beauty of Mansfield Park,
a place described in moral and aesthetic terms well before
the scramble for Africa, or before the age of empire
officially began.