CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
The literary
critic and political activist Edward Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem. The
UNO in 1947 divided Palestine into Arab and Jewish territories and placed the
city of Jerusalem under its control. This division of Palestine led to tension
and conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. According to Said, the
‘declaration of creation of Israel was the declaration of destruction of
Palestine’. Even in the midst of political turmoil, Said could receive elite
education as his father Wadie Said was a prosperous businessperson who sold
office equipments in Cairo and elsewhere. He was educated in St. George’s – an
Anglican preparatory school, the American school in Cairo. There were children
of US diplomats as students. His classmates included the future king Hussein of
Jordan at Victoria College at Cairo. Said completed his secondary education in
Massachusetts and gained US citizenship.
Said became a naturalized citizen in 1953 and
attended Princeton University and received his BA degree in 1957. At Harvard University,
he did his doctoral work in English and Comparative Literature where he worked
with the prominent scholar Harry Levin. He earned MA in 1960 and a PhD in 1964.
His academic career was remarkably successful as he joined the faculty at
Columbia University. He also held visiting professorships and fellowships at
Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Strand ford Universities. Said gained political
prominence translating Yasir Arafat’s first address to the general assembly of
UNO. His main works are Joseph Conrad and
fiction of autobiography, Beginnings:
intentions and method (i975), Orientalism
(1978), After the last sky: Palestinian lives
(1986), Culture and Imperialism (1993)
etc. Said passed away in 2003.
The work Culture and imperialism written by Edward Said can consider as a continuation
of his own earlier work Orientalism.
In Orientalism itself, Said suggests
that a general essay on the relationship of culture and empire has yet to be
written. The geographic scope of Culture
and imperialism is much greater than that of the earlier book. The book
makes an analysis of English and French literature of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries that deals with the imperial experience in the Caribbean,
in Ireland, in North and central Africa, in India and Egypt, in Latin America
and Australia. The book has four chapters. They are ‘Overlapping Territories,
Intertwined Histories’, ‘Consolidated Vision’, Resistance and Opposition’, and
‘Freedom from Domination’. Two themes dominate Culture and Imperialism.
The first is an analysis of the ‘general worldwide pattern of imperial culture’
that develops to both justify and reinforce the establishment and exploitation
of empire; the second is the counterbalance to this, ‘the historical experience
of resistance against empire’
In the first part of introduction
itself, it is mentioned that he is trying to ‘describe a more general pattern
of relationship between the modern metropolitan west and its overseas
territories’ which reflects through cultural products. He describes about the
stereotypical images that have given to the people of east and Africa. They are
represented as un-civilized barbarians and there are enough materials showing
the necessity to ‘fogging and death extending punishment’ which should charge
on them with discursive justifications. In Orientalism,
he did not mention the active resistance took place against the western
imperialism. Here, this is also a point of consideration. For Said, ‘culture’
particularly means two things. Firstly, ‘all those practices, like the art 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’. He says that it
includes the ‘popular stock of the lore about the distant part of the world and
specialized knowledge available in such learned disciplines as ethnography,
historiography, philology, sociology and literary history’.
Here the cultural form that he selected to his study,
is novel as it has a great influence in the ninetieth and twentieth century and
it played vital role in the ‘formation of imperial attitudes, references, and
experiences’. Even though there are recent theories of novel only very little
attention has been given to its role in history and world of empire. As he concentrates
his study on these kinds of narratives, which says about strange regions of the
world and its people and their resistance, it will contribute to establish the
relationship between novel and imperialism. These narratives have great role as
they reflects even decides the things going on about the imperialism and
resistance of the subjugated. As the orientalist, imperialist discourse
influenced, the narratives of emancipation and active resistance of the
colonized people and the protagonists of these narratives were celebrated by
the whole world and resulted in narratives celebrates equality even from
imperialist countries.
The second idea about the ‘culture’ is that, ‘it is
a sense of identity’. Sometimes it is closely associated with state and nation.
Said says that it leads to a consciousness of culture and tradition (based on
nation or state) which causes ‘xenophobia’ to the others, and religious and
nationalist fundamentalism against the notions of all liberal philosophies. Here ‘culture is a sort
of theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another’.
It is not simply the well behavioral pattern but a ‘battle ground’ where one
fights over other. Then Said is making the connection between the ‘prolonged
and sordid cruelty of such practices as slavery, colonialist and racial
oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand’ and the role-played by arts
and philosophy in these practices. He makes the point that he selected some
particular works, as they are ‘admirable works of art and learning’ and the
tools for imperial discourse also.
Firstly, Said says
about the narratives about Australia in Great
Expectations by Charles Dickens, The
Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, and The
Road to Botany Bay by Paul Carter. Here The
Great Expectations is imperial in nature when compared to the other two. Said says 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’s fiction testifies, is
meticulously charted, spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan
personages”. The attitude to the orient is also clear in the work.
When the western imperialism reached in its
extreme, writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide, and Loti started to reflect the
imperialist discourse through their writings. This is apparent in Nostromo written by Conrad. The expression
about the superiority of America is also an expression showing his mental
alliance with imperialism by superior races.
The work also brought the western idea of ‘third world’ that should be ruled
and controlled by others. It stresses that they do not have their own history
or existence. Said says that Conrad seems to be saying, “We westerners will decide who is a good
native or bad, because all natives have sufficient existence by virtue of our
recognition. We created them, we taught them to speak and think, and when they
rebel they simply confirm our views of them as silly children duped by some of
their western masters”. According to Said, he was both imperialist and anti-imperialist
in his writing. Sometimes he criticizes imperialism, and reproduces imperialist
ideology. However, the dominant one is that of an imperialist.
Now the scenario has
changed from that of Conrad’s and Dickens’s time. Both the Occidents and
Orients are living together with interdependence of ‘cultural terrains’. Said
makes clear that, how important is to understand the other ones voice also. He
says that ‘Imperialism’s culture was not invisible, nor did it conceal its
worldly affiliations and interests’.
His
method of study ‘focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them
first as great products of the creative or interpretative imagination, and then
to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire’. He believes
that, authors are determined by the history of their societies and social
experience, and not mechanically determined by ideology, class or economic
history. His focus goes mainly on England, France and America as France and
Britain have an unbroken tradition of novel writing, and the systematic
imperial culture and attitude is evident for these three nations than other
imperial countries.
In the contemporary
world, America has emerged as a super power. Against the advanced imperialism
and new world policy, we should find advanced methods of resistance. The worse
thing about it is the discouraging attitude of some intellectuals. For said
western imperialism and third world nationalism feed off each other. He says
that culture is not an exclusive property of anybody. After the publication of Said’s Orientalism
some works such as Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, Leila
Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam, Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Woman’s
Body, Woman’s World were created with very different idea
of Islam, the Arabs and the Middle East and undermined the old despotism. Said
says that they are ‘feminist’ but not exclusivist. All of them are pointing to
different kind of experiences. The binary opposition of imperialist and
nationalist has started to fade. Instead of replacing the old authority by new
authority, and ‘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’. However, we could not completely come out from the
idea of identity associated with nation.
Said
criticizes the inclusion of ‘defensive, reactive, even paranoid nationalism’ in
the education system. He is arguing for a multi-cultural society. He says that
it is better to ‘explore history than to repress or deny it’. It will not badly
affect the existence of any nation. Such political changes where women,
minorities, and recent emigrants see themselves in a positive way should be encouraged.
‘Narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also
narratives of integration not separation’.
Said
is concluding the introduction by saying that ‘this book is an exile’s
book’. But he is not sad about of being
exile. For him being in exile is being in both sides. In both his life and writing,
he belongs to more than one history and culture.
·
BIBLIOGRAPHY
·
Bill Ashcroft, Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said.
London: Tylor and Francis, 1999.
·
McCarthy, Conor. The
Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
·
Said, Edward W. Culture
and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993.
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