Introduction

One of the trademarks of Edward Said's Orientalism, arguably the foundational text of postcolonial studies, is Said's willingness to crash through boundaries of genre and form. Early in the Introduction, he writes:

Said's own starting point, of course, is that many different sorts of writing have fed into ‘Orientalist discourse’, irrespective of the substantial distinctions between them – and irrespective too of Said's own enduring attachment to high literary culture. Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that Said hesitates to tar Flaubert, say, with the same brush as everyone else, because he considers him a literary genius.

In my view that hesitation is not an idiosyncrasy of Said's. There are wider anxieties and ambivalences among critics, notably postcolonial critics, around what may broadly be called literary ‘form’, and the way it mediates ideologies or discourses such as ‘Orientalism’. I have discussed this issue in previous publications, and hope that the aims of the present essay will be clearer if I restate briefly some points made at greater length elsewhere. First, although I admire much of the work that has emerged as critics have shifted attention away from canonical literature, I would encourage a certain scepticism about what has been at stake in that shift, above all for those who remain committed to writing about literature at all.