Aleena Abraham  A2                                                

                               A review of Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism”

            Edward W. Said, a Palestinian American was born in Jerusalem in 1935. He was educated at Cairo’s Elite Victoria College and Harvard University. Said was bestowed with numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He died in 2003. He wrote the book “Culture and Imperialism” (1993) when he lived as an exile in America. By necessity he was in a position to be objective in his approach, as he lived most part of his life in exile and had the personal experience of both the cultures. Said says “Ever since I remember, I have felt that I belonged to both the Worlds, without being completely of either one or the other”.  But when he says “exile” he is not sad or deprived. On the contrary belonging, as it were, to both sides of the imperial divide enables him to understand them more easily.  

              The argument of this book was first presented in various lecture series given at universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada from 1985 to 1988.  “Culture and Imperialism” is Said’s most ambitious work after “Orientalism” (1978). He uses two well known and very great novels namely Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” (1861) and Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” (1904) to explain the relation between Culture and Imperialism. He argues that cultural forms like the novel were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences. Novels being the aesthetic object were interesting to study. These stories represent the attitude of the explorers and novelists towards the strange regions of the world. They are also used by the colonized people to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.

          The power to narrate and blocking others from coming up is something central to Imperialism as it constitutes to the connection between them. The grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonized world and they demanded for new narratives that showed equality. By the end of the nineteenth century the empire became a major area of concern in the works of writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide and Loti. Writers like Conrad cannot understand that India, Africa and South America also had lives and culture and that they also were human beings instead they believed that it was they who had taught them to speak and think. 

            One of Said’s reasons for writing this book is to show how far the quest for, concern about, and consciousness of overseas dominion extended not just in Conrad but in figures we practically never think of in that connection like Thackeray and Austen. “Culture and Imperialism” is indebted to Gramsci in several respects. The book focuses on how power and ideology work, both consciously and unconsciously, to form and maintain a system of domination that goes beyond military force. The work also points out new directions for cultural criticism in the 1990’s.

  Culture is a word that is familiar to everyone, but its sharp and exact meaning is difficult to describe. Geert Hofstede noted Social Scientist defined culture as a set of shared mental programs that condition individuals’ responses to their environment. Thus it implies a unique set of norms, behaviors, traditions, language etc that differentiate one community from another. Culture is not a static phenomenon; rather it is a dynamic one changing within and throughout.

    In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said recognizes culture as “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exists in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aim is pleasure”.  According to Said there are two types of attitudes towards culture. He considers culture as a dual paradigm. One considers culture as a concept that includes refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of best that has been known and thought. The other is the aggressive, protectionist attitude viewing culture as a source of identity that differentiates between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Culture conceived in this way becomes a protective enclosure that divorces us from the everyday world. Culture is a source of identity. Culture is a theatre where political and ideological causes come to terms with one another.

               Imperialism too is a complex phenomenon. According to Said, it is the “practice, theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory”. Colonialism which is almost always a consequence of imperialism is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. This definition signifies a direct rule over the political, economic and the socio-cultural sovereignty over the unlawfully usurped territories. He tries to establish a connection between Literature and Culture on the one hand and Imperialism on the other. Through this his aim is to set works of art of the imperialist and the post colonial eras into their historical context. His method is to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative and interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire.

            One of the achievements of Imperialism was that it brought the world together but the separation between the Europeans and the natives was an unjust one. He examines the roots of imperialism in Western culture and traces the relationship between culture and imperialism. Imperialism has always fascinated the literary writers and political thinkers as a subject. It was a major theme of nineteenth and twentieth century native. Different writers have different perception about the phenomenon but it was Said’s Culture and Imperialism that became a monumental work.

              During the nineteenth century, the European powers especially Britain gained control of an enormous proportion of the earth’s surface. Said’s central claim is that even while acknowledging the brutal realities of empire as earlier generations could not, we have failed to grasp the impact of imperialism not on the colonized but also on the colonizers. Said says he has omitted many empires in this book but it doesn’t mean that they are less imperialist but because the British, French and American imperialist experiences had a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality. Moreover the idea of overseas rule was a thing of privilege for them.

            In the Introduction to “Culture and Imperialism”, Said states that his previous work “Orientalism” was limited to Middle East, and in the present book he wanted to describe a more general pattern of relationship between the modern West and its overseas territories. It is not a sequel of “Orientalism”, as it aims at something different. Edward Said sees the European writings on Africa, India, Ireland, Far East and other lands as part of European effort to rule distant lands and people. He has focused on three imperial powers: British, French, and American. The book is about past and present, about ‘us’ and ‘them’.

              He takes Colonial and post-Colonial fiction for his argument. These writings present the colonised lands as ‘mysterious lands’ inhabited by uncivilized barbarians, who understood only the language of violence, and deserved to be ruled. This is a misrepresentation of the native people and their cultures and it needs to be readdressed. Edward Said finds a connection between these narratives and the imperial process, of which they are a part. These writing ignore the important aspect of the reality i.e. the native people and their culture. Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but even at their worst they are neither monolithic nor deterministic. Besides, culture is not monolithic either, and is not the exclusive property of East or West, or of small groups of men or women. He says that through literature of these type defensive, reactive, and even paranoid nationalism frequently woven into the very fabric of education, where children as well as older students are taught to venerate and celebrate the uniqueness of their tradition.

         In the last part of the Introduction to ‘Culture and Imperialism’ Said makes some other points about the book. The purpose of his book, he says, is so trace the relationship between culture, aesthetic forms and historical experience. His aim is not to give a catalogue of books and authors, “Instead, I have tried to look at what I consider to be important and essential things.” A narrow approach to culture can be as dangerous to culture as is imperialism. Culture is not the property of the East or the West. Said’s message is that imperialism is not about a moment in history; it is about a continuing interdependent discourse between subject peoples and the dominant discourse of the empire. Despite all of its internal contradictions and complexities, “Culture and Imperialism” remains an essential contribution to political, cultural and literary criticism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·       Bruce Robbins, Mary Louise Pratt, Jonathan Arac, R. Radhakrishnan and Edward Said. "Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium." Social Text (1994): 1-24.

·       Lyons, Harriet D. "Presences and Absences in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism." Canadian Journal of African Studies (1994): 101-105.

·       Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1st Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

·        Leitch, V.B. (2001).The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Newyork: W.W. Norton & Company.