"I’ve always been interested in what gets left out. That’s why I’m interested in the figure from the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “silent form” that “dost tease us out of thought.” That’s why I’m interested in Raymond Williams’s discussion of the country house poems, where the representation of the country house necessarily excludes the silence of the peasants who have been driven off the land; or the fields that have been manicured to produce the beautiful spaces that Jane Austen exploits in her novels, where livelihood is transformed into property. I’m interested in the tension between what is represented and what isn’t represented, between the articulate and the silent. For me, it has a very particular background in the questioning of the document. What does the document include? What doesn’t it include? That’s why I have been very interested in attempts of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and others, to talk about excluded voices."
Edward Said

January 1, 1970