Assignment
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Culture and Imperialism – review of
introduction
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by
Submitted
to Sisitha
kv
Dr.
Shalini Moolechalil lcl051422
Dpt.
English and of Comparative Literature cuk
cuk
Culture and Imperialism
Edward
said began to think the general relationship between culture and empire five
years back after the publication of his Orientalism
he develops some arguments, which he mentioned earlier in orientalism. Here
he tries to expand those arguments. In the book, mostly he describes about
imperial culture and a historical experience of resistance against empire.
According to Edward said, culture means two things in particular. First of all
it means all those practices like the arts of description, communication and
representation. Here he focuses on the western empires of 19th and
20th centuries; he also looks at cultural forms like the novel which
he considered important thing in the formation of imperial attitudes,
references and experiences. But he do not mean the only the novel was important
but the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain
and France is particularly interesting to study. He is saying that, a great
deal of recent criticism has concentrated on narrative fiction, yet very little
attention has been paid to its position in the history and world empire.
Edward
sad arguing that, the main battle imperialism is over land. But there are many issues,
which are; when it come to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and
work on it, who kept it going, who won it back and who now plans its future. He
also says that, as one critic suggested, nations themselves are nations. One of
the main connections between the culture and imperialism is the power to
narrate or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, it is very
important to culture and imperialism. Secondly he describes culture is a
concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s
reservoir of the best that has been known and thought with Matthew Arnold.
Culture is a source of identity and rather combative one at that as we see in
recent returns to culture and tradition. Most professional humanists are unable
to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such
as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the
one hand, and the poetry, fiction, and philosophy of the society that engages
in these practices on the other. He told
that, one of the difficult truths he discovered in working on this book is how
very few of the British or French artists whom he admire took
issue with the notion of subject or inferior races so prevalent among officials
who practiced those ideas as a matter of course in ruling India or Algeria.
They
were widely accepted notions; and they helped fuel the imperial acquisition of
territories in Africa throughout the nineteenth century. I believe, relegated these
writers' ideas about colonial expansion, inferior races, or "niggers"
to a very different department from that of culture. He believes that American
fiction belongs in a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such
interpretations allow. It has been left to two more recent books than Dickens's
Robert Hughes's magisterial The Fatal Shrwe and Paul Carter's
brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay. It
reveals a vast history of speculation about and experience of Australia,
a "white" colony like Ireland. The end of the nineteenth century the
empire is no longer merely a shadowy presence.
He
says that, he shamelessly availed himself of various intellectual, political,
and cultural associations as he worked on this book. Those include close
personal friends. In the preparation of the manuscript, he has been very ably
helped in different ways by Yumna Siddiqi, Aamir Mufti, Susan Lhota, David
Beams, Paola di Robilant, Deborah Poole, Ana Dopico, Pierre Gagnier, and Kieran
Kennedy. These are the thing he says in the introduction of Culture and Imperialism.
Bibliography
Said
Edward.Culture and Imperialism, A
Division of Random House, Inc. 1993
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