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Deborah Shapple's British Colonial Realism In Africa: Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains (Review), Hamish Dalley

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Excerpt:

Since the publication of Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism in 1994, postcolonial literary critics have usually treated nineteenth-century European fiction as ideologically and imaginatively complicit with the major powers’ attempts to occupy, control, and reorganise distant territories. Deborah Shapple Spillman’s British Colonial Realism in Africa adds weight and nuance to this argument. She demonstrates how late nineteenth-century colonial realist texts—both literary and ethnographic—drew upon structures of thought that allowed unfamiliar peoples to be subsumed within Eurocentric world views.