INTRODUCTION- CULTURE AND
IMPERIALISM BY EDWARD SAID
-A READING
In introduction of the text Culture
and Imperialism by Edward Said discusses about the relationship between
culture and empire. Initially he got this stimulus from his series of lectures
that he had given at the universities in the United States, Canada and England
in 1985- 1986. In his previous text Orientalism (1978), he has treated
only the Middle East. In Culture and Imperialism he tries to develop those
arguments in the previous book about the relationship between modern
metropolitan West and its overseas territories.
In this book Said focuses on the
individual works, to read them first as great products highly creative authors
and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire.
He does not believe that the authors are not mechanically shaped by ideology,
class or economic history. But he believes in the importance the high influence
of history and culture over writers. Culture and aesthetic forms that every
text contains actually derived from its historical experiences and that is the
main subject in this book.
European
writing on Africa, India, Australia and the Caribbean can be seen as a part of
the European’s urges to rule other part of the world. Through these kinds of
writing they consciously create a unique images to Europe, as in Said words
“the mysterious East”. And they generate various stereotypical images about the
colonized world. They tried to emphasis the civilization as something primitive
or include the barbaric people. Said opines that they understood force or
violence is the best and they deserved to be ruled because they are not similar
to the others from the subjugated nations.
Said admits that he has begun this book
from the background Orientalism and it reads the socio- political
background of the colonized world. Unlike Orientalism text Culture
and Imperialism concentrates mainly in some of the important fictional
works from the European world which were published at the time of colonization.
He discusses the treatment and the representation of the Third World countries
in those texts. With the emergence of armed resistance in colonized worlds,
there were also many struggles through cultural resistance.
Many Associations and parties formed
with common goals that are, self determination and national independence. In
many time such active resistances had won its goals. Said put forwards two main
issues in this book that are the world wide pattern of imperial culture and the
historical resistance against the experience of empire. Through this book wants
to do something more than Orientalism has presented.
In both books he gives his own
definitions for Culture. According to Said, Culture means two things in
particular. Culture means all those practices, like the arts of description,
communication, and representation that have relative autonomy from the
economic, social and political realm and that often exist in aesthetic forms,
one of whose principle aim is pleasure.
Said’s main concern in this book is the
modern Western Empires of 19th and 20th century. And he
has selected the cultural form, novel to read the cultural history of West
because he believes novel form is very vital in the formation of imperial
attitudes, references and experiences. He selects the novel Robinson Crusoe as
the prototypical modern realist novel and which narrates a person’s story from
Europe and how he has earned freedom in a non- European land.
Though the recent criticism has mainly
concentrated on the narrative fiction, it no more focuses on its position in
history and the world empire. Said’s emphasis on the narration of the fictional
work. Sometimes the fiction itself became the colonized people’s methods to
establish their identity and the existence of their own history.
Said mentions an opinion by an
anonymous critic that nations themselves are narrations. Said finds the power
of narration and the prevention of other narratives from forming and emerging
are very important to culture and imperialism. At a one point of time the works
from colonial world with the elements of subjugation and power stimulated the
Europeans and also the Americans. They had struggled for the new narratives
with equality and human community.
Said’s second definition of Culture is,
a concept that includes a defining and elevating element, each societies
reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. In other words, Culture
differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’. In that sense Culture is the source of
identity. Now the present era is ‘returning’ to their own culture and
tradition. Said finds that this kind of returns produces varieties of religious
and nationalist fundamentalism. In such cases, according to Said culture is a
sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one
another.
In most
areas Culture is something worshiped by the natives but in the opposite side it
cannot stay with the human life. In Said’s opinion this is the most important
problem that Culture now faces. Most of the thinkers in the Humanist discipline
could not find any logic in the practices of slavery, racial oppression and
also the writing of literary works which carries these kinds of cruelties from
the imperial hand. Among such works Said finds works of Dickens, Thackeray,
Ruskin, and Carlyle are the exceptional because which treats the colonialism in
a different way.
As a
person who has to spend the life in many countries and also has got opportunity
to teach literature for years, Said assumes that it is a very challenging
experience because his experience as human being and the human experiences in
literary works are contradictory in nature. One the one hand every literary
work gives pleasure while reading it and helps to earn money. But we cannot
connect them with the society because each of them directly or indirectly
carries the imperial hands. Said argues that this unquestioned reality in the
narration of a text itself is something which enhances the reading and
understanding of them.
Firstly
Said put forwards Charles Dickens’s novels like Great Expectations, David
Copper Field, etc… In the late 19th century Australia was
established as a penal colony. He suggests that Dickens’s attempt to portray
the land of Australia is not a mere representation, but a participation in the
lives of that society. Carter’s book The Botany Bay explores relatively
similar experiences of Dickens’s book which goes through a narration of travel
and discovery. He envisions a social space in it and that is what Dickens has
already planned for Pip in David Copper Field and which created a
free system for the laborers in the 1840 s colonized worlds.
Dickens’s
texts foreshadow Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel
through the Orient. By the end of 19th century the Empire was become
an unwelcome presence in most of the countries and this issue was the main
concern in the works of Conrad, Kipling, Gide and Loti. Said selects Joseph
Conrad’s novel Nostromo (1904) and in his opinion it would be incomplete
to read Conrad’s work as a mere prediction of the future of Latin America with
its liberation forces. Conrad is said to be the precursor of the western view
of the Third World. Conrad paradoxically views imperialism as something which
doomed by its own pretensions and impossible ambitions.
Said suggests that what Conrad sees is a
world totally dominated by the West. He could not see the Third World and its
lives and cultures with integrity. And he never allowed himself to trust the
anti- imperialist independence movements. So for Conrad as a man having Western
view over non- Western areas actually blinds him to notice other culture, histories
and aspirations. So in Said’s opinion, at the same time Conrad was an
imperialist and also a non- imperialist.
In Said’s
view today’s world does not exist as a spectacle over the texts to find whether
it is ingenious or boring. But in all such attitudes involves the elements of
power and interest. While Conrad criticizing and reproducing the imperial
ideology of his time, Said states that we can also characterize our own present
attitudes to all issues and also the energy to comprehend and engage with other
societies, traditions and histories.
Now the
world has changed and the alarming of Conrad’s and Dickens’s books to the
Europeans and Americans has ended. And they now faces newly empowered voices asking
about their narration. Said points out that such populations and voices will
miss what is essential about the world in the past centuries.
Said
winds up the Introduction with a statement that this is an Exile’s book. He
admits that he have felt that he had belonged to many worlds, many histories
and many groups. And these circumstances are the motifs to make this book
possible. Finally he argues that because of empire all cultures are involved in
one another. All are hybrid, heterogeneous and un monolithic. To substantiate
this point he takes the example of Arab world with the dangers of un-
Americanism and also the threats to Arab ism.
References
Said, Edward W. Culture
and Imperialism. New : Vintage Books, 1994.
No comments:
Post a Comment