SOURCE: A review of Culture and Imperialism, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 229-30.

Below, Afzal-Khan favorably reviews Culture and Imperialism, noting the lucidity of Said's prose style.

Edward Said's latest book, Culture and Imperialism, is, as the title more or less announces, a study of the ways in which the culture of imperialism preceded and undergirded the colonial enterprises of the big European powers of yesteryear, England and France, and, in today's world, how the same process continues with America playing the role of imperial giant. In many ways, the book is a continuation of the kind of "worldly" scholarly criticism Said inaugurated in his groundbreaking study, Orientalism, and in both books he is at pains to show how "great" works of Western literature have not been produced in a sociopolitical vacuum dubbed "objective art" but rather have been cultural expressions of the age's zeitgeist...