Summary
Edward Said’s name in Chapter One, IV of Culture and Imperialism for experiences that are discrepant — each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships — yet co-existing and interacting, and therefore to be thought through and interpreted together contrapuntally (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.59 / printed p.32).
Details
- The notion is set against essentialism and exclusiveness: to posit Africanness, Jewishness, Germanness, Orientalism or Occidentalism as essential, integral and comprehensible only to their own is to defend an essence rather than promote full knowledge of it and its entanglements, and to demote the different experience of others (PDF p.58-59 / printed p.31-32).
- It is not intended to circumvent ideology: no interpreted experience is immediate and no critic holds an Archimedean perspective; juxtaposing discrepant experiences makes concurrent views that are ideologically and culturally closed to each other, and highlights ideology’s cultural importance (PDF p.59-60 / printed p.32-33).
- The exemplary pair is Fourier’s introduction to the Description de l’Égypte and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s ‘Aja’ib al-Athar, two roughly contemporary texts of the 1810s giving discrepant experiences of Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt — the one normalizing conquest within European cultural assumptions, the other recording it as devastation borne as a conquered Egyptian (PDF p.60-62 / printed p.33-35).
- Kim and the movement for Indian independence stand in the same relation: either represented without the other misses the crucial discrepancy between them given by the actual experience of empire (PDF p.59 / printed p.32).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Contrapuntalism, Intertwined and overlapping histories, Description de l’Égypte, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti