Meera Paul - Assignment II

                          A Review on the introduction of Said's Culture and Imperialism

Edward Said, the renowned literary and cultural critic and author of numerous books, including Orientalism, explores the aspects of imperialism and the resistance against it in the book Culture and Imperialism. Written in 1993, this work is a collection of essays that enquires the general relationship between culture and empire by exploring the great works of the Western tradition - including Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Austen's Mansfield Park, Verdi's Aida, and Camus's L'Etranger. It is considered as a sequel to his own work – Orientalism, one of the important post-colonial texts, which but did not include the resistance of the colonized that resulted in the widespread decolonization of the Third World. When Orientalism was limited to the Middle East, here he tries to expand his arguments to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories.

In the Africanist and Indianist discourses by the Europeans Said finds it striking the rhetorical representations of “the mysterious East” and the stereotypical presentations of the “African mind”. The colonialists and the imperialists considered the natives of the colonies as the ‘other’ who deserved to be ruled. These images have historically shaped the West’s negative conceptualization the “other” justifying its obligation to rule.

 Said, provides two meanings as to his use of the word “culture”. He says that, “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” (Said xii). Here he focuses on how in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the cultural forms like the novel legitimized the western imperialist attitudes, references, and experiences. Westerners used the method of narratives to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history. The power of the creation of both positive and negative narrations constitutes the connection between culture and imperialism. When through some novels and travelogues the West tried to assert their superiority, that became fruitful to an extent, the grand narratives of enlightenment and emancipation resulted in the resistance that eventually led to the decolonization. He also attributes a refining and elevating element to the word “culture”. It acts as a reservoir of the society’s best that has been known and thought. Here culture acts as a source of identity. It creates differentiation between “us” and “them” and paved way for the ‘return’ to one’s own culture and tradition. These returns are more conservative and have produced many religious and nationalist fundamentalisms. Said points out the trouble in this idea of culture as it needs to venerate one’s culture and nation. This can be seen in the idea of “white man’s burden” deep rooted in the West. Even the writers like Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray and Dickens had shown a notion of belonging to the high culture in their works. He says that in Great Expectations (1861), “what Dickens envisions for Pip, being Magwitch’s “London gentleman”, is roughly equivalent to what was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia, one social space authorizing another” (Said xvi). He further adds that, “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’ fiction testifies, is meticulously charted, spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages” (Said xvi). Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient emerges when Dickens settles everything with Australia, when Pip becomes a colonial businessman.

By the end of the nineteenth century, when imperialism gained its grip, writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide and Loti wrote about it making it a central area of concern. Said cites Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) as an example which forecasts the unstoppable unrest and misrule of the Latin American republics. Conrad’s Portrayal of Holroyd is based on the rhetoric of the ‘New World Order’ – with its highly suggestive self-congratulation, unconcealed triumphalism and grave proclamation of responsibility - that the American government promoted after the Cold War. But these warnings were rarely reflected under the benevolence of the rhetoric of power. For Said, Conrad is a precursor of the Western view of the third world. But still he seems to be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of independent history or culture for countries like Africa and South America. He seems to be saying that independence is to be wished for them as long as it is the independence that the West approves of. It makes him both an imperialist and an anti-imperialist. He could see that the imperialist schemes such as ‘making the world safe for democracy’ could never succeed as in Said’s words, “they trap the planners in more illusions of omnipotence and misleading self-satisfaction, and because by their very nature they falsify the evidence” (Said xix).

Said says that the world has changed much from Dickens’ and Conrad’s time. By the globalization that was set in motion by the imperialist structures helped immigration to the West and these populations voice their need for their narratives to be heard. To ignore this intermingling and co-existence of the colonized and the colonizer, according to Said, would be to ignore the past in the last centuries. Although the imperialist motive was to bring the world together there was a separation created. What is relevant now is that this still pertains in the post-colonial countries.

Said focuses on individual works and studies them as a part of relationship between the culture and the empire since he believes that authors are shaping and have been shaped from the historical and social experiences. His focus is mainly on the British, French, and the American empires as he thinks that their long way of literary tradition has a remarkable part in the imperial quest as the narratives do. The idea of overseas rule also gives them a privileged status and Said who was born and brought up in these countries have also remained a native of the Arab world which gives him a sense of belonging to both sides. He says that out of the many things that went into the writing of this book the appeal to power by the metropolitan centers and a national interest in the affairs of lesser people is depressing. Whenever the natives raise their voice a disclaimer comes out saying, “we” are exceptional not imperial. Said hopes that a history of the imperial adventure in cultural terms might serve a deterrent purpose. As the imperialism advanced in the nineteenth century, the resistance to it also advanced and excluding the resistance will not be just. Said says that “Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but even at their worst they are neither monolithic or deterministic” (Said xxiv).

Today there has emerged a new intellectual and political conscience. After the publication of Orientalism there have been works like Lila Abu – Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam, that are feminists but not excluvists. They demonstrate the diversity and complexity of experiences that works behind the totalizing discourses. The binaries are dissolved and we see that the old authority could not simply be replaced by a new authority. It is about the multicultural cross border alignments. Said says that “it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of ‘identity’ that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism”. The kind of identity thought where there is “us” and “them” has been the hallmark of the imperial cultures. We are still identified by the nation to which we belong to. We need to remember that because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic. The ideological understanding of ‘identity’ is now entangled with the interests and ideas of various groups. They add defensive and sometimes paranoid nationalism to the fabric of education. Said addresses these uncritical and unthinking forms of education through this work and suggests an alternative. He considers universities as a Utopian space where vital issues like this are discussed and pondered over. For Said, if the current debates over multiculturalism point a way for political changes and changes how the minorities see themselves then it is not to be defended against. Finally he also makes a point that this book is an exile’s book.

Bibliography

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