CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
-EDWARD W. SAID
Edward Said was a prominent
literary critic, theorist as well as significant political figure. He was an
eminent advocate of rights of Palestinians because he has a Palestinian origin.
He has experienced the refined relationship between east and western
imperialism. As a political activist, he examines the roots of imperialism in
the Western culture and traces the relationship between culture and
imperialism. Imperialism has always attracted the literary writers and
political thinkers as a discipline. It was a major idea of thought among the
nineteenth and twentieth century native and non-native writers. Different
writers have different perception on imperialism. A lot of persons have already
written on imperialism but Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism
attracted everyone’s attention. It was read and criticized in all over the
world and critics and reviewers considered it as a significant work. Edward
Said stated that, his former work Orientalism was limited to Middle East
and the book Culture and Imperialism wanted to describe a more general
pattern of relationship between the modern West and its overseas territories,
and he also said that this book is not a sequel of Orientalism, as it
aims at something different.
In his work Culture and
Imperialism, he advocates two types of culture. According to Said culture
is “those practices which includes description, communication and
representation that have relative autonomy from the economic, social and
political realms that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal
aim is pleasure”. He considers novel as a form of culture which is important in
the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences. He believe
that the novel Robinson Crusoe is a modern realistic novel, and it is
about a European who creates fiefdom for himself on a distant, non- European
island. The narrative power is very important to culture and imperialism. This
kind of narratives make people stand up in the colonial world against imperial
subjection. Likewise many Europeans and Americans were also evoked by these
stories and their protagonists, and they fought for new narratives of equality
and human equality.
Secondly the culture is a
concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s
reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. Culture is closely
associated with aggression, with the nation or state; this differentiate ‘us’
from ‘them’. In this sense culture is a source of identity, in which we are
going back to culture and tradition. It includes intellectual and moral
behavior that is opposed to liberal philosophies as multiculturalism and
hybridity. In this sense culture is a sort of theatre where various political
and ideological causes engage one another. The students from America, French or
India who must taught and read their own national classics before they read
others.
Edward Said sees the
European writing on Africa, India, Ireland and other lands as part of European
effort to rule distant lands. The colonial and post colonial fiction is central
to his argument. These writings describe colonized lands as ‘mysterious lands’,
inhabitated by uncivilized barbarians who know only the language of violence
and deserved to be ruled. Here he will deal with parts of the British and
French empires only and culture will be represented by a small number of novels
and opera.
Edward Said bring up two
novels in order to explain what he had in mind: Dickens’ Great Expectation
and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Dickens’ Great Expectation is
primarily a story about Pip’s vain attempt to become a gentle man, neither with
hard work nor the aristocratic source of income required for such a role. Early
in life he helps a condemned convict, Abel Magwitch, who after being
transported to Australia, pays back Pip with huge sums of money through his
lawyer. Magwitch appear again illegally in London after sometime. Now Pip
rejects him as an unpleasant animal. After that a penal colony planned for
rehabilitation of English criminals. According to Said this is a remarkable
novel, but it concentrates on the narrative of London not Australia. He says
that the prohibition placed on Magwicth’s return is not only penal but also
imperial. These people could not be allowed to return back to England.
The second example is
Conrad’s Nostromo; it is set in Central American Republic. It is
independent but dominated by outside interests because of its immense silver
mines. One of the characters in the novel named, Holroyd, the American financer
tells Charles Gould, the British owner of a mine: “We shall run the world’s
business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it- and
neither can we, I guess”. This is the general idea of imperialists. Edward Said
says that, the problem with Conrad is that he writes as a man whose Western
view of non-Western world is so ingrained in as to blind him to other
histories, other cultures and other aspirations. He will not understand that
India, Africa, South Africa had their own culture; they are not completely
controlled by the imperialists. In his view, Conrad was both imperialist and
anti-imperialist.
He argues that source of
World’s significant action and life was the West, rest of the world has no
importance. They don’t have any life, history or integrity of its own. The
drawback of the third world countries is that their inability to take any
alternatives to imperialism. The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens due
to imperialistic globalization. Now different cultures coming together and they
are interdependent. The colonizers and the colonized do not exist in separate
worlds. Towards the end of the introduction, he makes some other points too.
The aim of this book is to trace the relationship between culture and
historical experience. Here he is not giving the list of books and authors;
instead he gives important and essential things only. He hopes that the readers
and critics will use this for further enquiry on historical experience of
imperialism. Here he has not discussed all the empires, he has focused on three
imperial powers; which are British, French and American. Actually the book is
about past and present, about ‘us’ and ‘them’. The current policies of America
can be seen in the past. All those who wish for global domination have done the
same things. Said concludes the introduction to culture and imperialism by
saying that the book is an exile, and he relates the book to his personal
experiences in the multicultural circumstances.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Said, Edward. Culture
and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.
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