Edward Said

the notions about bringing civilization to primitive or barbaric peoples, the disturbingly familiar ideas about flogging or death or extended punishment being required when “they” misbehaved or became rebellious, because “they” mainly understood force or violence best; “they” were not like “us,” and for that reason deserved to be ruled.

my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism

the narrow confines of performance and display into a discursive realm where performance and demonstration present an argument about intellectual liberation and critique that is quite impressive and radically at odds with the aesthetics of performance as understood and accepted by the modern concert audience.

was, he said many times, his way of escaping precisely the kind of artificiality and distortion

I think, really outlined his own program as a performing musician. He spoke to the young graduates of the need to realize that music “is the product of the purely artificial construction of systematic thought,” the word artificial signifying not a negative but a positive thing, “that it does relate to an obverse” and is not at all an “analyzable commodity,” but rather that “it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation that surrounds it

Music is a rational, constructed system; it is artificial because it is humanly constructed, not natural; it is an assertion against the “negation” or senselessness of what everywhere surrounds us; and most important, it depends on invention as something that involves venturing beyond system into the negation

Gould is doing the difficult and surprisingly ambitious task of stating a credo about striving for coherence, system, and invention in thinking about music as an art of expression and interpretation.

What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that “true” knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not “true” knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced.

that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions—in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility.