Culture and Imperialism
As we look back at the cultural archives, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. In the same way, I believe, we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization, resistance and finally native nationalism. At this point alternative or new narratives emerge, and they become institutionalized or discursively stable entities.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993) p.51
[...] Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artists in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective also, one can see "the complete consort dancing together" contrapuntally.
Ibid., p.332
No one today is purely one thing. [...] Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the "other echoes [that] inhabits the garden." It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and symphathectically, contrapuntally, about others than only about "us." But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarches, above all not constantly reiterating how "our" culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do without that.
Ibid., p.336