Shilpa U M Assignment II

                                     CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM


  “Imperialism distinguishes itself from empire, because while the establishment of empires by the active colonisation of territories has ended, imperialism lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices. It’s very investment in culture makes imperialism a force that exists far beyond a geographical empire....” (Bill Ashcroft 87).

                        Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism is written as a sequel to his previous work, Orientalism. Orientalism actually opened up a post colonial perspective of East Asia and other colonies. What Orientalism lacked was that it did not represent the resistance these colonised people produced against the colonisers. And because of this Culture and Imperialism studies mainly two factors-a general pattern of imperialism and the resistance against this empire. In the introduction to Culture and Imperialism Said elaborates on the aspects on which he address the two factors.

                        Colonialism and further Imperialism has created an idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in both colonised countries and among their natives. The way they created such an identity was by implementing their culture to be superior to the native people. Said gives two definition of culture, it is “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” (Said xii). And he says for the propagation of such a culture narrative is very important. Novel in the form of storytelling, explains the exotic world of the East and also the fine culture of empire. But on the other hand they are always the way in which, the colonised people asserted their own identity. Narratives have the power to mobilize and block movements which are for the good of the empire and for the fall of the empire respectively.

                        Another definition of culture which Said says is related to what Matthew Arnold said about the culture of England. He says that, “Culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s” (Said xiii). This conception of culture defined the empire with high culture and the people of the colonized land to be the one who must be taught about culture. In such a case culture becomes the question of one’s own identity. The idea of one’s own nation and the ‘other’ creates the concept of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This kind of idea of nation, asks people to venerate one’s own nation because it is different from others. The writers like Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens and Thackeray even related the colonised people to be belonging to a different area of culture and they being the apostles of the elevated area of culture.

                        Since narrative plays a very important role in such discourses Said gives a brief idea of how this difference in culture plays a major role in the works of Dickens and Conrad’s in the introduction. Said says that one should appreciate a work of art, but also should be aware of their manifested bias towards imperialism. Dickens’s Great Expectation in this sense is not only an important work in the history of British, but also is an important work as far as imperialism is concerned. When Magwitch is denied entry to London Said says, “the prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but imperial: subjects can be taken to places like Australia, but they cannot be allowed a “return” to metropolitan space, which, as all Dickens’s fiction testifies, is meticulously charted, spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages” (Said xvi). But eventually when everything is settled another attitude of the empire, the relation through trade and travel with the Orient emerges. This is as a result of pip’s new profession as a colonial businessman.

                        Later on when empire increased its hold, it started to appear as a central concern in writers like Conrad, Kipling, and loti etc. This is evident in Conrad’s Nostromo. He is considered to be the precursor of Western view of Third World. The proclamation of a New World Order after the cold war by America was filled with self-congratulation, unconcealed triumphalism and it gives a proclamation of responsibility. The warning contained in the character of Conrad’s Holroyd and Gould gets less reflected because of the implication of a benevolence which the statement carries. The paternalistic view of imperialism was evident in Conrad’s works also. He was both imperialist and anti-imperialist. “... he was an anti-imperialist; his belief that imperialism was inevitable made him complicit with its totalising assumptions” (Bill Ashcroft 83). Conrad saw the drawback of imperialism, he ridiculed the idea of imperialism ‘making the world safe for democracy’, because he knew that imperialism “... trap the planners in more illusion of omnipotence and misleading self-satisfaction, and because by their very nature they falsify the evidence” (Said xix).  Even though Nostromo created such an influence, the works which came after it was also disillusioned by the empire. They thought that the world outside the empire had no history, life or culture which can make them equal to West.

                        Said says, the world has travelled a long after Conrad and Dickens. Today, to ignore the commingling of the Westerners and orients is to ignore past century and history. The British and French of those times would never have thought that the people standing in command of them would eventually grab their land from their masters. The imperial aim was to bring together into a unity the whole world, but the separation which created in between is a crime. But the present concern is that this force still pertains in post-colonial countries.

                        In order to explain this Said takes the help of individual works. He believes that rather than being moulded by an ideology, a writer is moulded by the history of his society and social experiences. Culture and aesthetic that forms from his writing is essentially the product of these historical events. Said focuses on the British, French and American imperial experience because they have a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality. He gives two reasons, three of them had overseas rule, and their systematic imperial culture increased his curiosity. He talks about the period just after America emerging triumphant in the Cold War. Every metropolitan center that aspires to be dominant in the world, creates certain tactics, like their appeal to power is concerned with national interest of running affairs of the lesser peoples, and when things gets rough they brings out their destructive zeal. What troubles Said is the way the so called progressive individuals of their native lands works along with this movement. Thus this history of imperial adventure in cultural terms can serve some illustrative and even deterrent purpose. When imperialism advanced like this in nineteenth and twentieth century the resistance against it also advanced. Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but they were not monolithic or deterministic. Culture was also not monolithic or deterministic and also it was not an exclusive property of East or West.

                        Today there is an emergence of a new intellectual and political conscience. There are problems regarding the emergence of new kinds of study within the old pattern old humanistic study. For example, the works which came into being after the publication of Said’s Orientalism, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam, Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s World, created a very different idea of Islam, the Arabs and the Middle East and undermined the old despotism. “The new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the ore of cultural thought during the era of imperialism” (Said xxv).  But we are still entangled in the idea of defining oneself with a nation, which is part of an unbroken tradition. The idea of identity is different for different people and groups. American identity is too variable to claim that it is unitary and homogenous. Not only America, but many other nations around the world today are neither homogenous nor unitary. Primary and partly the reason is empire, which has mingled different cultures, they are hybrid and unmonolithic.

                        But what needs to be arrested is the “defensive, reactive, and even paranoid nationalism is, alas, 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” (Said xxvi). This is a dangerous situation because this kind of an education can bring back the idea of Othering. Said writes against such kind of education. He says that it is better to explore history than to repress or deny it. The current idea of multiculturalism need not be neutralized, it will not lead to the dismantling of any powers, rather it would eventually bring out all the histories that was already there and which created the history of a nation. If these debates help in political changes, and change the life of women and immigrants, these need not be feared or defended against. What is important to be remembered is “that narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation....” (Said xxvi). And if the old tradition is not admitting the new group into their ‘nation’, it is better to reject this old group of nationalist.

                        Towards concluding the introduction, Said, as he did in Orientalism brings out the personal element behind Culture and Imperialism. He says “this book is an exile’s book”. But he does not address it in a sad tone. He is happy that he has been part of both post-colonial and imperial history. It enables one to understand the history more. And he conclude by leaving the judgement of his stand to the readers, “As to whether such a state can be regarded as really a salutary alternative to the normal sense of belonging to only one culture and feeling a sense of loyalty to only one nation, the reader must now decide.” (Said xxvii).

                        Said considers “culture as imperialism” (Bill Ashcroft 87). His idea of imperialism as lingering where it has always been, even after the end of colonialism is an explanation. Said shows how literature has helped forming this idea of culture and subjugation of the people. Later on we see how Said’s Orientalism has helped to deconstruct the idea of ‘identity’ in Middle East. The hegemonic practice which literature can take up in the case of spreading an ideology is significantly described in this introduction.

                        Interestingly Said gives a biographical note to both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. The inclusion of personal experience into theory is a topic of current relevance. Theory and experience debate currently alive in India can be related to Said theorising too, since both of them have the identity of a post-colonial country and citizen respectively. As Sarukkai and guru opines, Said rather than going behind western theory to define his and his nation’s experience, has theorized it indigenously. This is of primary importance and a hope that indigenous theorising is not a distant reverie. Also said including his personal identity as an exile, makes us dig further into the idea of exile theorizing one’s own idea, rather than non-exile doing it. The personal reference which Said makes is in this sense highly important.

                        The idea of a world where no one is in exile can be seen as a farfetched dream, but so was bringing forth the theory of the Orients. In the current situation, where the world is witnessing millions people becoming refugees due to situations in their homelands, Said’s idea of existence of an individual can make a lot of changes. Rather than planning to keep on creating boundaries, claiming the land to be everyone’s and coming out this false nationalism is what Said talks about. Calling it a ‘universal brotherhood’ will be belittling it. What Said envisions is more than brotherhood, it is to recognize oneself, only then will we understand we are all the same, land is the same and it is the boundaries which is separating us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·         "Culture as Imperialism." Bill Ashcroft, Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said. New York: Routledge, 1999. 82-87.

·         Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

·         Karpinski, Eva C. College Quarterly. 1993. 12 November 2015 <http://collegequarterly.ca/1993-vol01-num02-winter/reviews/karpinski1.html>.

·         Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.