Summary
Scholar and teacher of English literature, a Columbia doctoral student from India when Edward Said discusses her, whose The Masks of Conquest uncovered the political origins of modern English studies in the system of colonial education imposed on natives in nineteenth-century India (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.69 / printed p.42).
Details
- Her central point, as Said presents it: what has conventionally been thought of as a discipline created entirely by and for British youth was first created by early-nineteenth-century colonial administrators for the ideological pacification and re-formation of a potentially rebellious Indian population, and then imported into England for a very different but related use there (PDF p.69 / printed p.42).
- Said calls the evidence incontrovertible and free from “nativism”, and takes the study as mapping a varied and intertwined archaeology for knowledge whose actualities lie below the surface hitherto assumed to be the true locus of what we study as literature, history, culture and philosophy (PDF p.69 / printed p.42).