BOOK REVIEW 125 often vindictive and vague readings of European writers presented in Orientalism. It is strange, however, that most of Said's non-European texts are by activists or historians, and not novelists. In discussing European imperialism, he adopts an almost exclusively literary approach but when discussing the resistance to imperialism, he moves into a more political and historical account. In so doing, he omits even mentioning the truly great anti-imperialist novelists from the British and French colonies, e.g. Prem Chand in India and Osmane Sembene in Senegal. Most of the non-European novelists he does mention are modern day 'cosmopolitan* novelists whose writing is more for consumption in Europe than in the countries of their origin, e.g. Salman Rushdie, a particular favorite of Said. It is encouraging to read Said's discussions of C.L.R. James and Fanon, two great anti-imperialist activists who are routinely ignored or vilified in European and American writings. But when the book's focus is on level, almost 200 pages to Dickens, Conrad, Austen, Kipling, and Camus, it is disheartening to see virtually no discussion of non-European novelists. The study of British and French novels is actually the core of the book and the section concerning the non-European 'resistance' to empire—a confused rambling and repetitive section covering only ninety pages— appears to be tacked on as an afterthought. Thus, after reducing the study of culture to the novel. Said is not even consistent enough to study the non-European novel and compare it with the European. Said repeatedly insists on the need to place British and French novels in an earthly, global context' and, more specifically, in the context of empire. As a criticism of old-school literary studies which wished to see art as a purely aesthetic object, in a world apart, Said's argument is valid. But it is also platitudinous. The difficult question is the method in which the connection is made between literature and the 'real world.' So let us consider 'imperialism', the phenomenon to which Said says European literature should be affiliated. Said defines the term 'imperialism' as the practice of 'dominating a distant territory'. If Said was studying imperialism from ancient Egypt to the present then perhaps this would have been a sufficient definition. But he is studying nineteenth century imperialism of that century's two leading capitalist powers. That imperialism was not just about 'dominating distant territories'; it was about exploiting them within a capitalist economy. European imperialism of the nineteenth century obviously had something to do with capitalism. Said does mention a list of writers on the political economy of imperialism, Lenin, A.G. Frank, Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Harry Magdoff, among others, writers whose works precisely turned upon the question of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. Said avoids taking any position in their debate upon the excuse of studying