Two Giant Brothers 
Amit Chaudhuri
- Selected Poems by Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri Buy this book
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.
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Amit Chaudhuri’s collection of essays, Clearing a Space, will be published by Peter Lang. He teaches contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter · R.K. Narayan
The View from Malabar Hill · My Bombay
In the Waiting-Room of History · ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’
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