Partly due to having read a few old entries of %%diary-odalisk%%'s last week and partly out of shameless tokenism- one suspects that the oeuvres of Palestinian Protestant literary critics go largely ignored- I picked up a copy of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, which I spent most of Saturday reading. It's a ludicrously generous study of imperialism as reflected in American and English literature from Dickens and Austen up through Conrad and the Modernists to now. Said seems pretty anomalous to me, in that he (thankfully) doesn't get into the facile arguments over canonicity that some postcolonial scholars do, and finds the literature of Empire worthy of empathetic critique. Plus, he quotes Eliot, and I've never seen a postcolonial literary critic do that before.

And while it gently analyzes, C&I also falls prey to many of the pomo tics that I find most distracting: exhaustive, unhelpful, grocery lists of all academic friends/foes who might have ever mentioned a particular topic in some journal somewhere ("...including the work of Cherrie Moraga, Toni Morrison, William Appleton Williams, Marxist critics such as Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the works of Francois Lyotard and Michel Serres and Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the later films of Rene Clair and a recent series of commercials for Johnson and Johnson products and a partridge in a pear tree..."- he doesn't actually say that, but could well have); a skill for anecdote thorougly smothered with reminders of what he will discuss in Chapter Nine or did discuss in Chapter One and/or descriptions of elaborate epistemological devices which could, in a book written by a more focused person, have been used to profitably examine imperial literature, but will not be so employed here because we are far too busy describing the top hat to pull many rabbits out of it, thank you very much.

There was one unobscured anecdote in the first hundred pages that I really enjoyed. Said describes running into a Palestinian Christian vicar by chance in New York. When he asks the vicar what he's doing in the U.S., this guy tells him that he's there essentially to beg for his job.

As it turns out, in the nineteenth century, a few American sects sent missionaries into the Middle East to try to win a few converts. While these missionaries were "utterly unsuccesful in converting Muslims or Jews," they did manage to make Baptists/Presbyterians/etc. out of some Arabs who were members of the Greek Orthodox Church. The missionaries went home, time passed, and the newly-minted Protestants continued the missionaries' work, starting their own rectories and churches and so on.

Then, in the 1970s, several of the American churches abruptly sent Dear John letters to the Arab preachers, saying that they wanted to cut all ties and requesting that the vicar encourage his flock to revert to Greek Orthodoxy. The vicar (I really like that word, vicar) flew to the United States to try to explain to the higher-ups in the church that it's not a game of tiddlywinks and you don't just quit after 150 years, and besides, Said's friend wants to know, weren't we contributing members of the church? Weren't we doing God's work? Said uses this to illustrate what he believes to be one of the characteristics of imperialism: the spread of a religion may provide a pretext for economic expansion and everything that goes with it, but once the colonized are no longer part of the game, it's most expedient for the colonizer to pretend the whole thing never happened. Make converts, yes, save souls, yes, but never lose sight of the fact that the people to whom you are preaching are your salvation and their own is a secondary matter.

I haven't finished the book yet, and my vast readership will have to wait for any further carping about Edward Said, but this story was in the forefront of my mind all weekend.

My cousin and his wife are selling the home they bought for $60,000 fifteen years ago at a monumental profit. It's worth six to seven times that now, and the house they're buying will cost far less than the one they're selling; long story short, by moving, S. and fam, who are far from wealthy, are going to be making a hundred grand nearly overnight. S. is trying to come up with things he can do with the money.

Some of the ideas he's floated: building a home on his new property for abandoned children, becoming a foster parent for as many kids as possible, doing missionary work in Africa. "T. is a nurse, and I'm good at building things. That's what people over there need most, I guess. Maybe we'll both just take a few years off when Troy graduates and fly over and do what we can."

S. is really a well-intentioned person of utmost gentleness. I believe he has genuine respect for his fellow person. But when he mentioned that he might go to Africa to be a missionary, I couldn't help but wonder, first of all, where in Africa? It's a big place, after all. Moral fastidiousness aside, I have trouble imagining S. as an agent of Capitalism. I don't think he's ever earned more than twenty thousand dollars in one year, and now that he is, of course he's trying to figure out how he can use it to help other people. He hates TV because he says it keeps him from doing things that actually matter. He scrupulously buys the cheapest clothes possible. S's Really Not a Colonizer credentials are pretty good. If I could send anyone to "Africa" to build houses and administer to the sick it'd certainly be my cousin S. and his wife T., and I don't see S. and T. disowning any possible converts.

Naturally, my loathing for evangelical Christianity is why I have been spending so much time immersed in evangelical Christianity lately. I'd like to figure out whether there's something profoundly wrong with them or with me or with all of us. And while there is certainly plenty to loathe about evangelical Christianity I do not find it easy to square the conventional wisdom with the reality.