CULTURE AND
IMPERIALISM
-
Edward Said
Edward Said is a prominent scholar and an important figure in
postcolonial studies. A professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, he is also well known as an activist in Middle Eastern politics.
His important works in literary contributions include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, After the Last
Sky and Cultural Imperialism. Said was an influential writer, teacher and
speaker. Among his works, Orientalism is the most famous one which played an
important in the formation of a new field of study. It is one of the very
controversial books of the last thirty years. Cultural Imperialism is also one
of the most important and worldwide discussed book. Edward Said first delivered
his speech on this topic at York University, Toronto, and February 10, 1993. In
this particular speech he explained his own concept of culture and imperialism.
Said's study focuses on the struggles of empire and imperialism at the heart of
culture.
In this book, Edward Said describes his notion of culture as "those practices, like the arts of
description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy
from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in
aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure" (xii). He wanted
to project the “relative autonomy” of the culture. Again he describes
Imperialism as “the practice, the theory, and the attitude of a dominating
metropolitan centre that rules a distant territory.” In this book, Said gives his attention on
three major metropolitan cultures- British, American and French in order to
show how their cultural identities become the products of power. Said intended
to say that the relation between culture and empire can study not only the third
world countries, but also can help in the study of “ the formation and meaning
of western cultural practices themselves”.
In the beginning of the introduction, Said talks about the
context in which he wrote Culture and
Imperialism. After the publication of Orientalism
in1978, he tried to explore more relationships between culture and empire. He
says that Orientalism was limited to
the Middle East, so that he wanted to
expand his arguments in Orientalism
in order to describe the relationship between modern metropolitan west and its
near territories. The entire Western concept is that “others” deserved to be
ruled because “they are not like us”. But what happened was their ruling
resulted in the movement of decolonization all across the third world. In many
countries this cultural resistance led to national independence. Edward Said,
for studying western empire, looks especially at cultural forms like novel
which according to him helps in the formation of “imperial attitudes, references
and attitudes.” Here he says 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.” In Said’s point of view Narrative/ narration has the
strength to connect culture and imperialism.
Edward Said says that in time culture started to
differentiate “us” from “them”. Non western culture in the recent time showed a
tendency to return to the tradition. This going back to tradition bought many
codes of intellectual and moral behavior which often produce national and
religious fundamentalism. He shows that the students of countries like America,
India and France are taught to study their national classics before they read
others. They are expected to appreciate it without being critical to their
nations and traditions and also encouraged fight against others. But the
problem with this idea of culture is that it will make citizen to believe that
their own culture is divorced from the everyday world. Said mentions that the
ideas of writers like Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin and Thackeray, about colonial
expansion and inferior races as examples.
Next he explains why he trying to analyze the novels and
other books in the coming section. He says there are two main reasons for that.
One is the pleasure of readers and critics achieved from reading those
admirable works of art. Second is their close connection with imperial process.
He then talks about the works The Great Expectations, The Fatal Shore and The
Road to Botany Bay written by Dickens, Robert Hughes and Paul Carter
respectively. He analyses the portrayal of Australia being a “white” colony. Australia
was established as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century so that
England could send the excess population of criminals to a place. According to Said, Dickens’s writing evidently
took the side of metropolitan cultures. His work contains no sympathy or
concern for native Australians unlike Hughes and Carter. By the end of
nineteenth century, Said says, the empire started to appear in the works of
many writers like Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Gide etc in the name of
concern. By saying this, Said turns to his second example which is set in
Central American Republic. He says that Conrad has devinated the miserable
conditions of Latin American countries. His portraits of Holroyd and Gould implicitly
carried the un resistible structures of feelings of North Americans. According
to Edward Said, Conrad is the precursor of writers like Graham Greene, V. S.
Naipaul, and Robert Stone, who wrote about non European world only to judge, or
to satisfy North American/ European readers. His western view over “others”
prevented him to see the culture and aspirations of other countries. Only he
could see the world dominated by the colonial west. Edward Said point out that
ironically Conrad was both an imperialist and anti imperialist. He was
progressive when talk about the “self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of
overseas domination.” His anti imperialist irony can be seen in his wok Nostromo in which he says “the source of
the world's significant action and life is in the .West, whose representatives
seem at liberty to visit their fantasies and philanthropies upon a
mind-deadened Third World.” In this sense, the third world has no life, culture
history or liberty to speak of in the absence of the west. But ultimately, Said
says, we can see Conrad as a man of his age. It is to be noted that the
scholars have studied about this aspect only after de colonization and after
the deconstruction of western portrayal of “others.” In Edward Said’s words, “Conrad
both criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time.”
Said says that the west has now alarmed because of the
migration of non- white people in to their socio- politico economic fields.
They are now forced to hear the narratives of the suppressed. He mentions that
globalization which is introduced by modern imperialism, also helped in overlapping
western- non western cultures. According to Said, imperialism’s culture is
always visible. In one way it bought the whole world close on the other way it
caused to the separation between west and non west.
Said has concentrated his research on individual works. First
he wanted to read them as creative products and then to see them as a part of
culture and empire. There are many empires about which he didn’t mention. Said
gives the reason for this. According to him, the metropolitan cultures, ie, the
British, French, American cultures have a “cultural centrality.” Another reason
behind that is the author himself has an affiliation to these countries. Said
was born in Palestine, An Arab, Middle East country, but grew up in the west.
Being connected to both edges, he could mediate between them. He says he tried
to see two forces as equal because both of them are interlinked.
In the coming paragraphs, Said mentions how ‘identity’ becomes
the hallmarks of imperialist cultures. As the last point, he point out that his
work can be seen as an exile’s book. He says that he always felt that he
belonged to both places. During his life time, his native land was shattered
due to war. According to Said, it is good to stand in the both side of the
imperial world as it will makes some one feel that that they are not belonging
to any single culture, or group.
In his famous work Culture
and Imperialism, Edward Said explores the relationships between culture and
empire. This work is criticized for the inconsistency in formulating the
relation of the culture and the political. One of the scholar Marie-Paule Ha
argued in her article that “this inconsistency can be traced to Said's
confusing definitions of culture and his rather narrow view of imperialism.”Anyhow,
this work is recognized as a great contribution to cultural, political and
literary criticism despite of all internal controversies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- · Fisch, Audrey a. "Culture and Imperialism by Edward W Said." Victorian Review 19 (n.d.): 97-100.
- · Ha, Marie-Paule. "Reviw article." Research in African Literatures, 26 (1995): 154-157.
- · Lyons, Harriet D. "Presences and Absences in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism." Canadian Journal of African Studies (1994): 101-105.
- .
- · Leitch, V.B. (2001).The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Newyork: W.W. Norton & Company.
- · Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1st Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
No comments:
Post a Comment