Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure. Said's critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it's easily taken for granted. This would be foolish - Eurocentrism is alive and well, and takes new and unexpected forms in every political epoch.

LRB 20 April 2006 | PDF Download