Home > assh > kunapipi > Vol. 15 (1993) > Iss. 2
Abstract
What does our conference theme, nationalism versus internationalism, mean in the contemporary Canadian context?1 In deploring the way the 'four major Western news agencies operate' to knit the world together through the production of what he terms 'out-of-scale trans-national images that are now reorienting international social discourse and process', Edward Said calls in Culture and Imperialism for 'an internationalist counter-articulation'.2 This counter-articulation would develop 'a way of regarding our world as amenable to investigation and interrogation without magic keys, special jargons and instruments, curtained-off practices' .3 Instead of such magic keys, this counter-discourse that he proposes would articulate 'the contrapuntal lines of a global analysis, in which texts and worldly institutions are seen working together'.4 To complete this analysis, 'we must take into account all sorts of spatial or geographical and rhetorical practices- inflections, limits, constraints, intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions -all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography' .5 Writing within the United States, Said sees national experience as a limit to be transcended, and argues that to achieve his ideally contrapuntal global perspective the writer must work through such attachments to an appreciation of post-imperial global mixings.
Recommended Citation
Brydon, Diana, No (Wo)man is an Island: Rewriting Cross-Cultural Encounters within the Canadian Context, Kunapipi, 15(2), 1993.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol15/iss2/10
