Shahal kk Assignment II

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM- ANALYSIS

Throughout the book, Said takes a stab at critically and analytically evaluate the relation between culture and imperialism. In order to analyze how culture and imperialism interconnected and co-existed in the 19th and 20th century, Said analyze French, British and American imperialist projects which had been hitherto controlled the major share of colonial territories. Contrary to Orientalism, which discusses the western attitudes towards the Middle East,  Culture and Imperialism is an attempt to extend this theory to further South, North Africa, and Latin America. Said says that “a substantial amount of scholarship in anthropology, history, and area studies has developed arguments I put forward in Orientalism, which was limited to the Middle East. So I, too, have tried here to expand the arguments of the earlier book to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories”

As he discussed in Orientalism, Said explores how these distorted images like the mysterious third world, a place of fantasy, imagination and desire incorporated in cultural forms like literary works that was produced and published in these imperialist nations. Said opines that, West never limited their cultural supremacy over the Middle East, besides, they are also maintained the same notion towards North Africa and Latin America.  As we know, by portraying non-western regions as a place of mysteries, uncultured people, barbaric and savage they not only justified their colonial and imperial conquest but also reduced and defended domestic antipathy towards their imperialist projects. Said investigates how works written by Shakespeare and Dante represent the high culture which was regarded as ‘each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought’.

As mentioned above, fictional narratives, novels played an important role in forming ground to nurture the imperialist attitudes and sentiments across the world.  The novel titled Great Expectation written by Charles Dickens and   Paul Carter's the Road to Botany Bay are portrays Australia as an inferior and uncivilized distant land. In ‘Great Expectation’, Abel Magwitch is unwelcomed in London only for being an ‘Australian’, which is used as a place rehabilitation of English criminals. Said also analyze the concealed imperialist agenda behind Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). The novel is very much discussed for Conrad’s prejudiced towards the Central American republic. Said says, “For a contemporary American the most compelling aspect of the work is Conrad's prescience: he forecasts the ,unstoppable unrest and "misrule" of the Latin American republics (governing them, he says, quoting Bolivar, is like plowing the sea), and he singles out North America's particular way of influencing conditions in a decisive yet barely visible way”.

In this particular novel, Joseph Conrad portrays western imperialistic nation are number one, those are bound lead and one who stands for freedom and order. Said observes that “Conrad writes as a man whose Western view of non- Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations”. Furthermore, Conrad failed to understand that India, Africa, and South America also had lives and their own culture which was not totally controlled by so-called reformers, who were busy in their ‘civilizing mission’. These arrogant imperialistic notions were obvious in the novel. Said opines that throughout the novel Conrad seems to be saying, “"We Westerners will decide who is a good native or a 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”. In a nutshell, it is the common notion that all Americans felt about their southern neighbours.

Even in this 21st-century ‘democratization and civilization mission’ which was put forward by Conrad in his work. Today, the American government is busy with their venture that aimed at “making the world safe for democracy” and perfect. Said says that, the United States government is still unable to perceive, as it tries to implement its wishes all over the globe, especially in the Middle East. Said further explores how these imperialistic sentiments and attitudes later influenced other writers like Graham Green and V.S Naipaul. Said also stands for an alternative writing and reading from a third-world point of view. Most of these novelists and literary giants never depicted the counter movement erupted in those colonies. Obviously, these national struggles for independence never recorded in any so-called canonical texts. Actually it was a conscious process of neglect and hatred, and selective history writings.

Said rejects the notion that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history. But they are shaped by their respective social circumstances and social experience. Then he justifies why he deliberately incorporated imperialistic expansions that was carried out by Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the Spanish and Portuguese. He asserts;

“These omissions, however, are not at all meant to suggest that Russia's domination of Central Asia •and Eastern Europe, Istanbul's rule over the Arab world, Portugal's over what are today's Angola and Mozambique, and Spain's domination in both the Pacific and Latin America have been either benign (and hence approved of) or any less imperialist. What I am saying about the British, French, and American imperial experience is that it has a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality. England of course is in an imperial class by itself, bigger, grander, more imposing than any other; for almost two centuries France was in direct competition with it”.

            Then he further adds that “jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands--has a privileged status in these three cultures” and these countries are where Said born and brought up. As an Arab Muslim, this has enabled him in a sense to live on both sides, and to try to mediate between them.

Then Said makes a debatable observation that “Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but even at their worst they are neither monolithic nor deterministic”. According to Said, it was eastern aggressive nationalism and separatism which accelerated western colonialism to certain extend. The emergence of a new intellectual and political conscience also motivated him to write this book. Writers like Leila Ahmed, Sara Suleri, and Lira Lowe demonstrated the diversity and complexity of experience that works beneath the totalizing discourses of Orientalism and of Middle East (overwhelmingly male) nationalism. Said asserts that these works were attuned to the best theoretical and historical scholarship, engaged but not demagogic, sensitive to but not maudlin about women's experience; finally, while written by scholars of different backgrounds and education, they are works that are in dialogue with, and contribute to, the political situation of women in the Middle East.

Throughout this introductory part, Said gives a preface to the book. He explains how culture and imperialism incorporate together, which dates back from 19th century. He also asserts the methodology of analyzing and the reason behind writing the book. When reading the introductory part we could see the similarities themes incorporated in his magnum opus Orientalism. But when reading further, we could see how cultural forms like novels set to ground and nurtured a pro-imperialistic sentiments and attitudes across the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·       Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1st Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

·        Leitch, V.B. (2001).The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Newyork: W.W. Norton & Company.