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Contemporary Cultural Theory

deliberate refusal to join the ‘anti-Marxist concert’ of the post-1968
period in France (Fraser, 1984, p. 133). But the necessity for this
resort to strategic essentialism—in Spivak, in Derrida, even in
Showalter (Showalter, 1989, p. 369)—surely casts doubt on the
wider anti-humanist enterprise. For what use is a theory that
requires, for its effective application, that we pretend not to
believe in it?

Postcolonialism, post-structuralism and radical humanism
Said canvassed a very different solution in his Culture and Imp-
erialism, a book that takes as its theme the ‘general relationship
between culture and empire’ (Said, 1993, p. xi). His conclusions
warrant repetition at some length:

there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep
insisting on... separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all
human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections
between things...It is more rewarding—and more difficult—
to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about
others than only about “us”. But this also means not trying to
rule over others, not trying to classify them or put them in
hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our”
culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that
matter) (p. 408).

This wasn’t so much strategic essentialism as essentialism itself,
a clear affirmation, in short, of the continuing political and
intellectual relevance of a radicalised humanism. Yet it is a
humanism as capable as any post-structuralism of undermining
the Eurocentric certainties of the older liberal humanisms. Said’s
reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, as ‘part of
the structure of an expanding imperialist venture’, was both
powerfully demystifying and indisputably ‘anti-imperialist’. But
it also deliberately avoided the ‘rhetoric of blame’, in favour of
what Said himself described as the ‘intellectual and interpretive
vocation to make connections...to see complementarity and
interdependence’ (pp. 114–15).
Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian academic working in India, has

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