Postcolonial Criticism: A Cultural Approach to the Book Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said

There is a clear overlap between postmodern theories such as postfeminism, poststructuralism, and postindustrialism. An exception to this overlap is postcolonialism where the time frames of these theories and movements intersect at a contradictory point, even though the texts of each theory contain literary techniques from the other theories, as is the case in the relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism. For instance, postmodernism attempts to dismantle the structures and restrictions imposed by the theories of literary genre, power, and value, even if they are prevalent traditions. As for the postcolonial approach, it is, to a large extent, politically oriented and seeks to dismantle the structures that consecrate hegemony, control, and power, and to establish relations between unequal forces through bilateral encounters such as I/the other, we/they, the first world/the third world, and white/black or yellow. Edward Said has been considered the founder of postcolonialism since he wrote his famous book Orientalism. We find traces of this critical field in his biographical book Out of Place: A Memoir. His works, especially his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, opened new horizons to various fields of knowledge. The books of this Palestinian-born writer and intellectual have revolutionized Middle Eastern studies and contributed to the creation of new areas of knowledge, such as postcolonial theory. In Culture and Imperialism, he contends that global imperialism has used its dominance in literature, especially the novel which Western imperialism has effectively employed to gain domination over colonized people. He investigates the compatibility of goals between the novel and colonialism and asserts that the novel in particular and narratives in general play important roles in the issue of identity and belonging, as the novel was employed by imperialist powers in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a vital medium in order to extend their imperial control, subjugate the colonized people, and rob them of their identities.