International Journal of Development in Social Sciences and Humanities

Edward Said analyses all the ideological apparatuses which helped in the maintenance and perpetuation of the hegemony of the imperial West over the rest of the world. It is not the novel form only but the entire ‘cultural topography’, as Said calls it, which includes all areas of humanistic discourse. In going through this cultural topography of the major metropolitan cultures, one comes across a distinct ‘structure of attitude and reference’, a term resonating with Raymond William’s ‘structures of feeling’. This structure of attitude and reference cuts across fields and disciplines as also ages. Said gives the example of the British culture where there is a consistency of concern in Spenser, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens and Austen, which places socially desirable, empowered space in the metropolitan center and connects it by design, motive and development to distant and peripheral worlds (Ireland, Venice, Jamaica) conceived of as desirable but subordinate. From these references come attitude - about rule, control, dominion, enhancement and suitability. These structures of attitude and reference are bound up with the formation and development of Britain’s cultural identity, as that identity imagines itself in a geographically conceived world. Such ‘structures of attitude and reference’ are to be seen in French and American cultures too.