Maria Jose - Assignment II

                      Edward Said is a pre eminent 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. Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1935. His mother was of Lebanese descent and his father was a successful Palestinian book merchant. The family had homes in Palestine, Cairo, Egypt, and a vacation home in Lebanon. In 1948, while Said was a grade school student (at a private English school in Cairo) the state of Israel was created and 80 percent of the Palestinian population was left without a home. Said did not return to Palestine until 1990.

             Said was a privileged child and had little interest in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. His educational life was one of private school wealth, but perhaps most importantly; it was in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community. Later he got caught up in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. He became part of a community of academics and writers who were involved in various colonial and postcolonial struggles. During this time Said translated the speeches of Yasser Arafat into English for the Western press. He became an articulate voice for the liberation of Palestine in Europe and the U.S. He remained independent and never affiliated with a political party. However in 1977, Said was elected to the Palestinian National Congress in exile. In 1975-1976 Said was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University. It was while he was at Stanford that he wrote Orientalism. Over the next three years, he published Covering Islam (1981) and The Question of Palestine (1979), which, in conjunction with Orientalism, has been called his trilogy.

In 1993 Said published his most comprehensive works on postcolonial study, Culture and Imperialism, and in 1994, Representations of the Intellectual. These two books, in his field of comparative literature, brought him again into prominence in the academic community. Said became the president of the Modern Language Association in 1998.Despite his illness, Edward Said has continued to be an activist for the peace, human rights and social justice.

                             Introduction to Culture and Imperialism

The writing of Orientalism prompted Said to gather some ideas about the general relationship between culture and empire. It was an idea originated from the book and was clear after its completion. Based on that observation he made so many lectures on various universities of U.S, Canada and England during 1985 and 86. These observations and elocution prompted him to write the next book. His arguments of the early book were limited to Middle East. So in this book he has expanded those arguments to describe a more general pattern of relationship between the modern Metropolitan west and overseas territories.

   There are some non Middle Eastern materials constructed in this book. They are European writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean’s.  Said saw these Africanist and Indianist discourses as part of the general tendency of Europe to rule distant lands and peoples. Said observes that the imperialist’s have used High Flown Style to describe about the ‘Mysterious East’. They used the same kind of rhetoric styles in developing stereotypes about the African/ Indian /Irish/Jamaican/ Chinese mind. They also used disturbing ideas about flogging or death or the harsh punishments when they commit any mistake or misbehaviors. It is because according to the imperialists they were not like ‘us’ and for the reason they are deserved to be ruled by violent and forceful methods. So the coming of white man caused some kind of resistance everywhere and the reason was clear.

     There were great responses to the western domination ‘practiced’ in the third world countries. There were armed resistance, formation of groups, parties etc. All kinds of resistance political economical and cultural were made. In the political dominance, the creation of associations and parties whose goal was self determination and national independence. Though there were immense insufferable pressures and finally, the resistance won out. We can see this won out in the Indian Independence. Said confirms that these two factors; ‘a general worldwide pattern of imperial culture and a historical experience of resistance against empire’ is not only a sequel to Orientalism but an attempt to do something else.

    Said used culture to mean two things. First of all it means 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 exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure. Though the primary aim is pleasure, it also includes the knowledge about distant part of world. This knowledge available is of course on ethnography, historiography, philology, sociology and literary history. Since he had focused on modern western empires of nineteenth and twentieth century, he looks at the cultural forms like the novel. He believes that novels play an important role in the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences.This doesn’t mean that novel is the only important one. He considers novel especially because the aesthetic object relating to expanding societies of Britain and France is very interesting to study. For that he took the novel’s The Great Expectation of Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad’s Nostrumo. As an example he sets Robinson Crusoe.

   Said had a great appeal to novel due to several reason’s and this appeal can be read from this particular books. This narrative technique helps to identify their history. He use’s Homi Bhabha’s comment that ‘Nation themselves are narratives’. He pulls out some of the advantages and disadvantages, also some of the techniques used by the imperialist in writing.

      The second meaning of culture is that it is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. He has referred to Arnold to substantiate his argument. Said in relation to Dante and Shakespeare says that Culture is a source of identity and rather a combative one at that as we see in recent returns accompanying rigorous codes of intellectual and moral behavior. This are opposed to the granting related to that philosophies of multiculturalism and hybridity. In the colonized world this had produced varieties of religious and nationalist fundamentalism. In these sense, to Said culture is a kind of theatre where there are engagements of political and ideological causes with the quoting of example from the universities proposing to read their national classics at first, he proves that ‘Blood will always be Thicker than Water’.

  Said then finds a trouble in the idea of culture, that the culture not only venerates one’s own culture, that the culture not only but also the whole world’s culture. This is the main reason for which one could not 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, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other hand.

           Said is concerned with the officials especially those who ruled India and Algeria, who would took the issue whether with the notion of subject or inferiority. Since they had dealt with the ideas about colonial expansion, inferior races or niggers to a very different department from that of a culture, he felt very deprived of them, the officials who consider the inferior as merely slaves.

  Said then gives his reason for choosing novels for analyzing. There are two reasons. First of all he find them estimable and admirable works of art and learning, in which he and many

Other readers take pleasure and from which we derive profit. Second, “the challenge is to connect them not only with that pleasure and profit but also with the imperial process of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a pan; rather than condemning or ignoring their participation in what was an unquestioned reality in their societies, he suggest that what we learn about this hitherto ignored aspect actually and truly enhances our reading and understanding of them”.

            The reason for the choice of two novels by Said is already discussed. Now he explains about the first novel, which he took for analyzing that is The Great Expectation of Dickens’s. He gave a brief summary of the novel. His characters include Abel Magwitch, Pip, and Miss Havisham etc. The reason for the selection of this book is that the work situates within the metropolitan history of British fiction, and so it belongs to a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow. In relation to this subject matter he introduces two more books. One of Robert Hughes's magisterial The Fatal Shrew and Paul Carter's brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay, to reveal a vast history of speculation about and experience of Australia, a "white" colony like Ireland. He notes down the important features and its implication in relation to that of Dickens’s.

       The Great Expectation was not written with anything like the concern for native Australian accounts that Hughes or Carter has, nor did it presume or forecast a tradition of Australian writing, which in fact came later to include the literary works of David Malouf, Peter Carey, and Patrick White. He relates the plot undertook in the novel with that of the political scenario of Australia. He is explaining the situation in novel with that of the socio historical background.

“Dickens settles the difficulty with Australia, another structure

Of attitude and reference emerges to suggest Britain's imperial intercourse

through trade and travel with the Orient. In his new career as colonial

Businessman, Pip is hardly an exceptional figure, since nearly all of Dickens's

Businessmen, wayward relatives, and frightening outsiders have a fairly

Normal and secure connection with the empire”(xvi).

Only on later years these connections took interpretative importance. “A new generation of scholars and critics-the children of decolonization in some instances, the beneficiaries (like sexual, religious, and racial minorities) of advances in human freedom at home-have seen in such great texts of Western literature a standing interest in what was considered a lesser world,populated with lesser people of color, portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoe’s”(xvi). By the end of nineteenth century works of writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide and Loti became central area of concern.

     Then he moves to his second example, Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). At first he gives the background. He also gave the feature of his writing. The major characters in this are Holroyd, Charles Gould etc. Said then praises Conrad, his works, features, reception. According to him Conrad is the precursor of the western views on the third world. He quotes similar examples like Naipaul, Greene, Robert stone, theoreticians, travelers, film makers and polemicists. But in the later part he counterparts Conrad for his imperialistic writing. From the reading about Conrad we will understand that Conrad was both anti imperialist and imperialist. Likewise said also supports and deports Conrad.

     Nostromo has an anti imperialist irony. Said says that many had done their work after learning Conrad’s ironies especially film maker’s. Said’s mentioning of both novel made a remark, a finding that “The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens in ways that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans, who now confront large non-white immigrant populations in their midst, and face an impressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard”(xx). He points out that result of Globalization put those population and voices to ignore or discount the overlapping experience of westerners and Orientals through various Methodologies. Said then speaks about Kipling as an example for those who not just read one side. In his novel Kim, Kipling depends on a long history of Anglo- Indian perspective and also forecast the Indian realities.

  The culture of imperialism was not visible, nor did it conceal its worldly affiliations and interests. Often culture is not paid much clarity. Imperialism, like globalization has tried to bring the world together. Said’s method is to focus on individual works to read them first as great products of creative and interpretative imagination and then to show them as part of relation between culture and empire. He discussed about many empires. He took British, French and American empires. The reason for this selection is that; one, the idea of overseas rule because these three had jumped beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands, contributing to its cultural development. Second is very personal as I think these three were the orbits in which he was born, grew and now living.

     Said hopes that history of the imperialist adventure rendered in cultural terms might serve illustrative and deterrent purposes. He was subjected to many political pressures for the closing of culture instead of other relevant matters. The binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise are gone. We began to sense that old authority cannot be replaced by new authority. The exchange process between Europeans and other’s, contributed to one idea that there is an ‘Us’ and a ‘Them’. Actually this was originated from the Greek thought of Barbarians.

      Towards the last part Said refers to the main ideas discussed in the book. This book tells us of what to read of recent history and how to read it. The American identity is a unitary and homogenous thing but at the same time a complex thing. This implies two perspectives, two historiographies, one linear and subsuming, other contrapuntal and nomadic. Said argues that the second perspective is fully sensitive to reality of historical experience. Then he speaks of United States and its cultural diversity.  Finally he admits that this book is an exile’s book because he lived in the Arab World. He was an ‘outsider’.

     Said through this introduction is  giving at the same time an introduction to his work Culture and Imperialism and an extension to the former work Orientalism He is demonstrating the relation between culture and empire. Empire constituted the imperialist’s which the world has ever seen. Throughout this introduction he has shown the two side of any problem or whatever discussed, he gave us a double understanding. He had either two reasons or supporting arguments. He had coined it clearly. Sometimes one may feel like comprising of positives but other time negatives. Introduction can be taken on the basis of different realms or notions. Each part considers each idea's. As like his method he has focused on all the important matters in writing the subject of enquiry. Said through the introduction proves that his aim is to set works of art of the imperialist and post colonial eras into their historical contexts. He took individual work as his practical’s and tries to prove the relation of Culture and Imperialism. I think it is essential to give such a descriptive introduction because it will help in the reading procedure. It will help in better understanding of the author’s perspectives and also the books.
References

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New york: W.W.Norton and Company, Inc, 2001.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New : Vintage Books, 1994.