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Benjamin Disraeli, Romantic Orientalist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2005

Ivan Davidson Kalmar
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

Of Edward Said's many passions, Joseph Conrad was among the most persistent. That a Polish-English writer of nineteenth-century colonial fiction should be the hero of the author of Orientalism might challenge those, among both Said's friends and enemies, who misread his work as a condemnation of major Western writers and thinkers who shared their period's Eurocentric prejudice. Said fully recognized Conrad's “uncompromising Eurocentric vision,” yet discovered in it, perhaps paradoxically, a “felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it.” With the passage of time, what speaks to us is not Conrad's prejudices, but the way his texts “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints.”

Type
Race Relations
Copyright
© 2005 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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