Culture and Imperialism: Introduction-Review
Edward Said is a
Palestinian American literary theorist, prominent scholar and important figure
in postcolonial studies. He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and exiled to America
in 1950s, and then was for many years he was America’s foremost spokesman for
the Palestinian cause. His writings have been translated into 26 languages,
including his most influential book, Orientalism (1978), an
examination of the way the West perceives the Islamic world. Much of his
writing beyond literary and cultural criticism is inspired by his passionate
advocacy of the Palestinian cause, including The Question of Palestine
(1979), Covering Islam (1981), After the Last Sky (1986)
and Blaming the Victims (1988). In 1993 Said published his
most comprehensive works on postcolonial study Culture and Imperialism, in 1994 Representations of the Intellectual. Said was described by
journalist Robert Fisk as the Palestinian people’s ‘most powerful political
voice’. Even though he was not supported for the Palestinian issues but also
criticized the Arab and Muslim regimes who acted against the interests of their
peoples. He died of leukemia in September 25th 2003 at New York
City.
Culture and
Imperialism was written in 1993, which shows Edward Said’s views on the
formation of Western Culture as a result of imperialism. Said here argues about
the emergence of the Western culture as a dominant power in the world during
the 19th century due to industrial revolution.
About after publishing Orientalism in 1978, Said had a plan to
write about the relationship between culture and empire. As an initial step,
Said gave a series of lecture at Universities in the United States, Canada, and
England in 1985 and 1986. It was from these lectures that the core argument of Culture and Imperialism is made on.
Since Orientalism was presents the
Western view of Islamic world, it is only limited to the Middle East and their
issues. While preparing Culture and
Imperialism, Said expanded the arguments in Orientalism to describe a general pattern of relationship between
the modern Metropolitan West and its overseas territories.
Non- Middle Eastern
materials such as European writing on Africa, India, parts of Far East,
Australia, and the Caribbean; European effort to rule distant lands and
peoples, and Europe’s special ways to represent the Caribbean islands, Ireland
and the Far East are portrayed in this book Culture
and Imperialism. There is always a notion prevailed that people of these
countries are considered to barbaric or uncivilized one. Unlike the European’s
these ‘barbaric’ people were rebellious and misbehaved, and they have to be
ruled by the so called civilized people, ‘Europeans’.
In non-European
world the coming of white man brought some sort of resistance. Said, mentions
that Orientalism was a response to
Western dominance and a great movement of decolonization all across the Third
World. In the 19th century there was several armed resistance
against this Western dominance to establish nationalist identities and national
independence. There were several active resistances happened against this
imperial world and always had success in the end.
Culture and Imperialism was not only a sequel to Orientalism, but more than that there is
something in it. In this book Said’s main focus is on the modern Western
empires of the 19th and 20th centuries and how cultural
forms like the novel influenced the formation of imperial attitudes, references
and experiences. It is not only novel is important in this circumstances but
its connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is made as an
objective of this study. Said called Robinson
Crusoe as a prototype of modern realistic novel. He draws his argument
particularly from this novel because he believes that “narrative
is crucial to my argument here, my basic point being that stories are at the
heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world;
they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and
the existence of their own history”.
The main battle in imperialism is that
over land; the authority and dominance over one land is always reflected in the
narrative forms. The power to narrate or to block other narratives from forming
and emerging is very important to culture and imperialism. Said argues that
grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the
colonial world to rise against the yoke of imperialism. As a result of which
Europeans and Americans were stirred by these stories and their protagonists
and tried to form new narratives of equality and human community. Said cites
the word of Matthew Arnold who says that culture is each society’s reservoir of
the best that has been known and thought. Culture is associated with words of
great people and what they thought about culture, and sees ‘our culture’ in
their perspective. This association or comparison with the best known notion of
culture differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’. Said says various version of
definition to culture; as a source of identity, a sort of theater where various
political and ideological causes engage one another, can even a battleground on
which causes expose themselves to the light of the day and contend with one
another…etc.
Said
also adds that ‘One of the difficult truths I discovered in working on this
book is how very few of the British or French artists whom I admire took issue with
the notion of "subject" or" inferior" races so prevalent
among officials who practiced those ideas as a matter of course in ruling India
or Algeria. They were widely accepted notions; and they helped fuel the
imperial acquisition of territories in Africa throughout the nineteenth
century. In thinking of Carlyle or Ruskin, or even of Dickens and Thackeray,
critics have often, I believe, relegated these writers' ideas about colonial
expansion, inferior races, or "niggers" to a very different
department from that of culture, culture being the elevated area of activity in
which they "truly" belong and in which they did their ''really" important
work”(p.14).
The novels that Said choose to analyze in
this book is because, these novels are estimable and admirable works of art and
learning for pleasure seeking; and the challenge with the imperial process of
which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part; rather than condemning or
ignoring their participation in what was an unquestioned reality in their
societies. Literature is, no doubt the
mirror that faithfully captures and reflects the picture of culture. In Culture and Imperialism Said was looking
for the imperialistic implications in the stories. He says that in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens “what
Dickens for Pip, being Magwitch’s London gentleman, is roughly equivalent to
what was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia.’ The Great Expectations was not written for
the concern of native Australian accounts that of Robert Hughes's The Fatal
Shrwe and Paul Carter's brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay. In Dickens’s fiction, this is spoken
for and inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages. On the other hand
Hughes and Carter expand the attenuated presence of Australia in 19th
century British writing. Said believes that nearly all Dickens businessman,
wayward relatives and frightening outsides have a fairly normal connection with
the Empire.
Said, and
then talks about the great Victorian novelist Joseph Conrad and his criticism
of Imperialism. Said discuss the novel Nostromo (1904) by Conrad, which
is set in Central American republic, independent, but at the same time
dominated by others because of its immense silver mine.
Said says that ‘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’ (17). It is ‘incomplete
to read Conrad's great work simply as an early prediction of what we see
happening in twentieth-century Latin America, with its string of United Fruit
Companies, colonels, liberation forces, and American-financed mercenaries’
(17). Said says that Conrad is the precursor of the western views of the Third
World which can be seen in the works of novelists like Graham Greene,
V.S.Naipaul, and Robert Stone, of theoreticians of imperialism like Hannah
Arendt and of travel writers, filmmakers, and polemicists whose specialty is to
deliver the non-European world either for analysis and judgement or satisfying
the exotic tastes of European and North American audiences. The imperialist
character of both Europe and United States (which come supreme after the fall
down of Russia) criticized throughout works Conrad and above mentioned authors.
Joseph 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." This is in effect' what Americans have felt about their southern
neighbors: that independence is to be wished for them so long as it is the kind
of independence we approve of. Anything else is unacceptable and, worse,
unthinkable’ (18).
The world has changed now. Metropolitan
Europeans and Americans confront with large number of non-white immigrant
populations in their countries and asking their narratives to be also heard.
The point of this book is that to mention the overlapping experience of
Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which
colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections
as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is
essential about the world in the past century.
Said says that ‘If you were British or
French in the1860s you saw, and you
felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance,
but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives,
histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as
the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of
colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples. Above all, your
sense of power scarcely imagined that those "natives" who appeared
either subservient or sullenly uncooperative were ever going to be capable of
finally making you give up India or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might
perhaps contradict, challenge, or otherwise disrupt the prevailing
discourse’(20).
One of imperialism's achievements was to
bring the world closer together, and although in the process the separation
between Europeans and natives was an insidious and fundamentally unjust one, most
of us should now regard the historical experience of empire as a common one.
The task then is to describe it as pertaining to Indians and Britishers,
Algerians and French, Westerners and Africans, Asians, Latin Americans,
and Australians despite the horrors, the bloodshed, and the vengeful
bitterness.
Through Culture
and Imperialism Said tried to analysis the various novels of that period
and further develops the relationship between culture and empire. As Said says
‘I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or
economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the history of
their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience
in different measure. Culture and the aesthetic forms it contains derive from
historical experience, which in effect is one of the main subjects of this
book’.(21)
Said also mentions that he was included
several empires like Austro- Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman, and the
Spanish and Portuguese. Further says that these Empires domination in several countries
have been either benign or any less imperialist. Why Said give much focus on
British, French, and American imperial is that it has a unique coherence and a
special cultural centrality. Narrative plays an important part these
Imperialist countries to impart their imperial characteristics over others.
Said’ message through this book is that imperialism is not about a moment in
history, it is about a continuing interdependent discourse between subject
peoples and the dominant empire.
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.
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