Muhammed Ajmal.P.K Assignment 2

                   A Review on Culture and Imperialism - Introduction by Edward Said.

        Edward W. Said, one of the prominent post colonialist scholars was born in Jerusalem, Palestine. He is very famous for his par excellent work Orientalism. He delivered his speech Culture and Imperialism at York University, Toronto in February 10, 1993. In his great work Orientalism, he had mentioned the Eurocentric concepts and Europe’s stereotypical notions about the East. Culture and Imperialism is actually a lecture Imperialism is a system in which one country controls the other countries; often after defeating them in war. There are various kinds of imperialism such as cultural imperialism and economic imperialism prevail in the world. When one country controls the political, economic, or cultural life of another country, there the imperialism takes place. Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism elaborately depicts the connection of these two terms. Said has his own perspective about the imperialism and culture.

There are three general categories of the definition of the term culture. First, the ‘ideal’, in which culture is a state of process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values. The second is the ‘documentary’, in which culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work in which, in a detailed way; human thought and experience are variously recorded. The third category is the ‘social’, in which culture is a description of particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. ()

According to Oxford English Dictionary, imperialism is an aggressive expansion of people at the expense of the neighbors.  It implies some kind of premeditation which means a policy formed at home by the imperialistic force before launching an offense against another nation.

To talk about the book Culture and Imperialism, it is an important document. Said explains his own concepts of culture and imperialism. He explains imperialism as the “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory.” The origin of Imperialism was with the industrial revolution in 19^th century. The British and the French held sway over a large part of the globe.  During the fifteenth century the old imperialists dominated the world. The imperialists were Spain and Portugal. The old imperialists were motivated by the three Gs; that is to say, Gold, Glory and God. These three Gs are indicating the wealth, popularity and expansion of religion respectively. During the century 1700, the imperialism became vast and expanded. The new imperialist powers are Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and America.  The motives of new imperialist powers can be summed up like this; they are militarism, industrialization, nationalism, religion and social Darwinism.

According to Said, the nineteenth century is the rise of the west for its dominating posture. He regards the industrialization as the root cause of the imperialism. America was a victim of the old imperialist power. Then, it became the strongest imperial power in the world. So, imperialism could circulate its hidden policies and agendas through the culture.

This book as Said had mentioned deals with the general relationship between imperialism and culture. The intention of exposing these ideas was formed right from the moment of his groundbreaking book Orientalism. As a result of this, numerous lectures on this topic were held in different universities. Though the stimulus of composing this book is Orientalism, this is not a sequence to it. A general worldwide pattern of imperial culture and a historical experience of the resistance of the empire, these two factors differ this book from the previous one. By the word ‘culture’ Said means two things. Firstly, culture includes all those practices which have relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms. Secondly, culture as Arnold talked a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. And then, he denotes the trouble with the concept of culture. In his own words, the idea of culture is that it entails not only venerating one's own culture but also thinking of it as somehow divorced from, because transcending, the everyday world.

As we know, novel is an important cultural form which can exert an indefinable influence on the readers. Said, gives an immense attention to the genre of novel. And he brings out the flip side of the novels of imperialist intentions. He gives some illustrations as well. Particularly, he considers the novel of Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. According to him, Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) is primarily a novel about self-delusion, about Pip's vain attempts to become a gentleman with neither the hard work nor the aristocratic source of income required for such a role.  Furthermore, he talked about the novel of Conrad, Nostromo. He explains it in a detailed way. Conrad's novel embodies the same paternalistic arrogance of imperialism that it mocks in characters like Gould and Holroyd. 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.

In this introduction part of the book Said concisely make clear his point. So to say, in his own words: ‘The point of my book is that such populations and voices have been there for some time, thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount 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’.

Shilpa U M Assignment II

                                     CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM


  “Imperialism distinguishes itself from empire, because while the establishment of empires by the active colonisation of territories has ended, imperialism lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices. It’s very investment in culture makes imperialism a force that exists far beyond a geographical empire....” (Bill Ashcroft 87).

                        Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism is written as a sequel to his previous work, Orientalism. Orientalism actually opened up a post colonial perspective of East Asia and other colonies. What Orientalism lacked was that it did not represent the resistance these colonised people produced against the colonisers. And because of this Culture and Imperialism studies mainly two factors-a general pattern of imperialism and the resistance against this empire. In the introduction to Culture and Imperialism Said elaborates on the aspects on which he address the two factors.

                        Colonialism and further Imperialism has created an idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in both colonised countries and among their natives. The way they created such an identity was by implementing their culture to be superior to the native people. Said gives two definition of culture, it is “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 exists in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aim is pleasure” (Said xii). And he says for the propagation of such a culture narrative is very important. Novel in the form of storytelling, explains the exotic world of the East and also the fine culture of empire. But on the other hand they are always the way in which, the colonised people asserted their own identity. Narratives have the power to mobilize and block movements which are for the good of the empire and for the fall of the empire respectively.

                        Another definition of culture which Said says is related to what Matthew Arnold said about the culture of England. He says that, “Culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s” (Said xiii). This conception of culture defined the empire with high culture and the people of the colonized land to be the one who must be taught about culture. In such a case culture becomes the question of one’s own identity. The idea of one’s own nation and the ‘other’ creates the concept of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This kind of idea of nation, asks people to venerate one’s own nation because it is different from others. The writers like Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens and Thackeray even related the colonised people to be belonging to a different area of culture and they being the apostles of the elevated area of culture.

                        Since narrative plays a very important role in such discourses Said gives a brief idea of how this difference in culture plays a major role in the works of Dickens and Conrad’s in the introduction. Said says that one should appreciate a work of art, but also should be aware of their manifested bias towards imperialism. Dickens’s Great Expectation in this sense is not only an important work in the history of British, but also is an important work as far as imperialism is concerned. When Magwitch is denied entry to London Said says, “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” (Said xvi). But eventually when everything is settled another attitude of the empire, the relation through trade and travel with the Orient emerges. This is as a result of pip’s new profession as a colonial businessman.

                        Later on when empire increased its hold, it started to appear as a central concern in writers like Conrad, Kipling, and loti etc. This is evident in Conrad’s Nostromo. He is considered to be the precursor of Western view of Third World. The proclamation of a New World Order after the cold war by America was filled with self-congratulation, unconcealed triumphalism and it gives a proclamation of responsibility. The warning contained in the character of Conrad’s Holroyd and Gould gets less reflected because of the implication of a benevolence which the statement carries. The paternalistic view of imperialism was evident in Conrad’s works also. He was both imperialist and anti-imperialist. “... he was an anti-imperialist; his belief that imperialism was inevitable made him complicit with its totalising assumptions” (Bill Ashcroft 83). Conrad saw the drawback of imperialism, he ridiculed the idea of imperialism ‘making the world safe for democracy’, because he knew that imperialism “... trap the planners in more illusion of omnipotence and misleading self-satisfaction, and because by their very nature they falsify the evidence” (Said xix).  Even though Nostromo created such an influence, the works which came after it was also disillusioned by the empire. They thought that the world outside the empire had no history, life or culture which can make them equal to West.

                        Said says, the world has travelled a long after Conrad and Dickens. Today, to ignore the commingling of the Westerners and orients is to ignore past century and history. The British and French of those times would never have thought that the people standing in command of them would eventually grab their land from their masters. The imperial aim was to bring together into a unity the whole world, but the separation which created in between is a crime. But the present concern is that this force still pertains in post-colonial countries.

                        In order to explain this Said takes the help of individual works. He believes that rather than being moulded by an ideology, a writer is moulded by the history of his society and social experiences. Culture and aesthetic that forms from his writing is essentially the product of these historical events. Said focuses on the British, French and American imperial experience because they have a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality. He gives two reasons, three of them had overseas rule, and their systematic imperial culture increased his curiosity. He talks about the period just after America emerging triumphant in the Cold War. Every metropolitan center that aspires to be dominant in the world, creates certain tactics, like their appeal to power is concerned with national interest of running affairs of the lesser peoples, and when things gets rough they brings out their destructive zeal. What troubles Said is the way the so called progressive individuals of their native lands works along with this movement. Thus this history of imperial adventure in cultural terms can serve some illustrative and even deterrent purpose. When imperialism advanced like this in nineteenth and twentieth century the resistance against it also advanced. Western imperialism and Third World nationalism feed off each other, but they were not monolithic or deterministic. Culture was also not monolithic or deterministic and also it was not an exclusive property of East or West.

                        Today there is an emergence of a new intellectual and political conscience. There are problems regarding the emergence of new kinds of study within the old pattern old humanistic study. For example, the works which came into being after the publication of Said’s Orientalism, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam, Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s World, created a very different idea of Islam, the Arabs and the Middle East and undermined the old despotism. “The 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” (Said xxv).  But we are still entangled in the idea of defining oneself with a nation, which is part of an unbroken tradition. The idea of identity is different for different people and groups. American identity is too variable to claim that it is unitary and homogenous. Not only America, but many other nations around the world today are neither homogenous nor unitary. Primary and partly the reason is empire, which has mingled different cultures, they are hybrid and unmonolithic.

                        But what needs to be arrested is the “defensive, reactive, and even paranoid nationalism is, alas, frequently woven into the very fabric of education, where children as well as older students are taught to venerate and celebrate the uniqueness of their tradition” (Said xxvi). This is a dangerous situation because this kind of an education can bring back the idea of Othering. Said writes against such kind of education. He says that it is better to explore history than to repress or deny it. The current idea of multiculturalism need not be neutralized, it will not lead to the dismantling of any powers, rather it would eventually bring out all the histories that was already there and which created the history of a nation. If these debates help in political changes, and change the life of women and immigrants, these need not be feared or defended against. What is important to be remembered is “that narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation....” (Said xxvi). And if the old tradition is not admitting the new group into their ‘nation’, it is better to reject this old group of nationalist.

                        Towards concluding the introduction, Said, as he did in Orientalism brings out the personal element behind Culture and Imperialism. He says “this book is an exile’s book”. But he does not address it in a sad tone. He is happy that he has been part of both post-colonial and imperial history. It enables one to understand the history more. And he conclude by leaving the judgement of his stand to the readers, “As to whether such a state can be regarded as really a salutary alternative to the normal sense of belonging to only one culture and feeling a sense of loyalty to only one nation, the reader must now decide.” (Said xxvii).

                        Said considers “culture as imperialism” (Bill Ashcroft 87). His idea of imperialism as lingering where it has always been, even after the end of colonialism is an explanation. Said shows how literature has helped forming this idea of culture and subjugation of the people. Later on we see how Said’s Orientalism has helped to deconstruct the idea of ‘identity’ in Middle East. The hegemonic practice which literature can take up in the case of spreading an ideology is significantly described in this introduction.

                        Interestingly Said gives a biographical note to both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. The inclusion of personal experience into theory is a topic of current relevance. Theory and experience debate currently alive in India can be related to Said theorising too, since both of them have the identity of a post-colonial country and citizen respectively. As Sarukkai and guru opines, Said rather than going behind western theory to define his and his nation’s experience, has theorized it indigenously. This is of primary importance and a hope that indigenous theorising is not a distant reverie. Also said including his personal identity as an exile, makes us dig further into the idea of exile theorizing one’s own idea, rather than non-exile doing it. The personal reference which Said makes is in this sense highly important.

                        The idea of a world where no one is in exile can be seen as a farfetched dream, but so was bringing forth the theory of the Orients. In the current situation, where the world is witnessing millions people becoming refugees due to situations in their homelands, Said’s idea of existence of an individual can make a lot of changes. Rather than planning to keep on creating boundaries, claiming the land to be everyone’s and coming out this false nationalism is what Said talks about. Calling it a ‘universal brotherhood’ will be belittling it. What Said envisions is more than brotherhood, it is to recognize oneself, only then will we understand we are all the same, land is the same and it is the boundaries which is separating us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·         "Culture as Imperialism." Bill Ashcroft, Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said. New York: Routledge, 1999. 82-87.

·         Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

·         Karpinski, Eva C. College Quarterly. 1993. 12 November 2015 <http://collegequarterly.ca/1993-vol01-num02-winter/reviews/karpinski1.html>.

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

Maria Jose - Assignment II

                      Edward Said is a pre eminent scholar and an important figure in postcolonial studies. A professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, he is also well known as an activist in Middle Eastern politics. Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1935. His mother was of Lebanese descent and his father was a successful Palestinian book merchant. The family had homes in Palestine, Cairo, Egypt, and a vacation home in Lebanon. In 1948, while Said was a grade school student (at a private English school in Cairo) the state of Israel was created and 80 percent of the Palestinian population was left without a home. Said did not return to Palestine until 1990.

             Said was a privileged child and had little interest in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. His educational life was one of private school wealth, but perhaps most importantly; it was in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community. Later he got caught up in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. He became part of a community of academics and writers who were involved in various colonial and postcolonial struggles. During this time Said translated the speeches of Yasser Arafat into English for the Western press. He became an articulate voice for the liberation of Palestine in Europe and the U.S. He remained independent and never affiliated with a political party. However in 1977, Said was elected to the Palestinian National Congress in exile. In 1975-1976 Said was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University. It was while he was at Stanford that he wrote Orientalism. Over the next three years, he published Covering Islam (1981) and The Question of Palestine (1979), which, in conjunction with Orientalism, has been called his trilogy.

In 1993 Said published his most comprehensive works on postcolonial study, Culture and Imperialism, and in 1994, Representations of the Intellectual. These two books, in his field of comparative literature, brought him again into prominence in the academic community. Said became the president of the Modern Language Association in 1998.Despite his illness, Edward Said has continued to be an activist for the peace, human rights and social justice.

                             Introduction to Culture and Imperialism

The writing of Orientalism prompted Said to gather some ideas about the general relationship between culture and empire. It was an idea originated from the book and was clear after its completion. Based on that observation he made so many lectures on various universities of U.S, Canada and England during 1985 and 86. These observations and elocution prompted him to write the next book. His arguments of the early book were limited to Middle East. So in this book he has expanded those arguments to describe a more general pattern of relationship between the modern Metropolitan west and overseas territories.

   There are some non Middle Eastern materials constructed in this book. They are European writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean’s.  Said saw these Africanist and Indianist discourses as part of the general tendency of Europe to rule distant lands and peoples. Said observes that the imperialist’s have used High Flown Style to describe about the ‘Mysterious East’. They used the same kind of rhetoric styles in developing stereotypes about the African/ Indian /Irish/Jamaican/ Chinese mind. They also used disturbing ideas about flogging or death or the harsh punishments when they commit any mistake or misbehaviors. It is because according to the imperialists they were not like ‘us’ and for the reason they are deserved to be ruled by violent and forceful methods. So the coming of white man caused some kind of resistance everywhere and the reason was clear.

     There were great responses to the western domination ‘practiced’ in the third world countries. There were armed resistance, formation of groups, parties etc. All kinds of resistance political economical and cultural were made. In the political dominance, the creation of associations and parties whose goal was self determination and national independence. Though there were immense insufferable pressures and finally, the resistance won out. We can see this won out in the Indian Independence. Said confirms that these two factors; ‘a general worldwide pattern of imperial culture and a historical experience of resistance against empire’ is not only a sequel to Orientalism but an attempt to do something else.

    Said used culture to mean two things. First of all 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. Though the primary aim is pleasure, it also includes the knowledge about distant part of world. This knowledge available is of course on ethnography, historiography, philology, sociology and literary history. Since he had focused on modern western empires of nineteenth and twentieth century, he looks at the cultural forms like the novel. He believes that novels play an important role in the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences.This doesn’t mean that novel is the only important one. He considers novel especially because the aesthetic object relating to expanding societies of Britain and France is very interesting to study. For that he took the novel’s The Great Expectation of Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad’s Nostrumo. As an example he sets Robinson Crusoe.

   Said had a great appeal to novel due to several reason’s and this appeal can be read from this particular books. This narrative technique helps to identify their history. He use’s Homi Bhabha’s comment that ‘Nation themselves are narratives’. He pulls out some of the advantages and disadvantages, also some of the techniques used by the imperialist in writing.

      The second meaning of culture is that it is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. He has referred to Arnold to substantiate his argument. Said in relation to Dante and Shakespeare says that Culture is a source of identity and rather a combative one at that as we see in recent returns accompanying rigorous codes of intellectual and moral behavior. This are opposed to the granting related to that philosophies of multiculturalism and hybridity. In the colonized world this had produced varieties of religious and nationalist fundamentalism. In these sense, to Said culture is a kind of theatre where there are engagements of political and ideological causes with the quoting of example from the universities proposing to read their national classics at first, he proves that ‘Blood will always be Thicker than Water’.

  Said then finds a trouble in the idea of culture, that the culture not only venerates one’s own culture, that the culture not only but also the whole world’s culture. This is the main reason for which one could not make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other hand.

           Said is concerned with the officials especially those who ruled India and Algeria, who would took the issue whether with the notion of subject or inferiority. Since they had dealt with the ideas about colonial expansion, inferior races or niggers to a very different department from that of a culture, he felt very deprived of them, the officials who consider the inferior as merely slaves.

  Said then gives his reason for choosing novels for analyzing. There are two reasons. First of all he find them estimable and admirable works of art and learning, in which he and many

Other readers take pleasure and from which we derive profit. Second, “the challenge is to connect them not only with that pleasure and profit but also with the imperial process of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a pan; rather than condemning or ignoring their participation in what was an unquestioned reality in their societies, he suggest that what we learn about this hitherto ignored aspect actually and truly enhances our reading and understanding of them”.

            The reason for the choice of two novels by Said is already discussed. Now he explains about the first novel, which he took for analyzing that is The Great Expectation of Dickens’s. He gave a brief summary of the novel. His characters include Abel Magwitch, Pip, and Miss Havisham etc. The reason for the selection of this book is that the work situates within the metropolitan history of British fiction, and so it belongs to a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow. In relation to this subject matter he introduces two more books. One of Robert Hughes's magisterial The Fatal Shrew and Paul Carter's brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay, to reveal a vast history of speculation about and experience of Australia, a "white" colony like Ireland. He notes down the important features and its implication in relation to that of Dickens’s.

       The Great Expectation was not written with anything like the concern for native Australian accounts that Hughes or Carter has, nor did it presume or forecast a tradition of Australian writing, which in fact came later to include the literary works of David Malouf, Peter Carey, and Patrick White. He relates the plot undertook in the novel with that of the political scenario of Australia. He is explaining the situation in novel with that of the socio historical background.

“Dickens settles the difficulty with Australia, another structure

Of attitude and reference emerges to suggest Britain's imperial intercourse

through trade and travel with the Orient. In his new career as colonial

Businessman, Pip is hardly an exceptional figure, since nearly all of Dickens's

Businessmen, wayward relatives, and frightening outsiders have a fairly

Normal and secure connection with the empire”(xvi).

Only on later years these connections took interpretative importance. “A new generation of scholars and critics-the children of decolonization in some instances, the beneficiaries (like sexual, religious, and racial minorities) of advances in human freedom at home-have seen in such great texts of Western literature a standing interest in what was considered a lesser world,populated with lesser people of color, portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoe’s”(xvi). By the end of nineteenth century works of writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide and Loti became central area of concern.

     Then he moves to his second example, Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). At first he gives the background. He also gave the feature of his writing. The major characters in this are Holroyd, Charles Gould etc. Said then praises Conrad, his works, features, reception. According to him Conrad is the precursor of the western views on the third world. He quotes similar examples like Naipaul, Greene, Robert stone, theoreticians, travelers, film makers and polemicists. But in the later part he counterparts Conrad for his imperialistic writing. From the reading about Conrad we will understand that Conrad was both anti imperialist and imperialist. Likewise said also supports and deports Conrad.

     Nostromo has an anti imperialist irony. Said says that many had done their work after learning Conrad’s ironies especially film maker’s. Said’s mentioning of both novel made a remark, a finding that “The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens in ways that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans, who now confront large non-white immigrant populations in their midst, and face an impressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard”(xx). He points out that result of Globalization put those population and voices to ignore or discount the overlapping experience of westerners and Orientals through various Methodologies. Said then speaks about Kipling as an example for those who not just read one side. In his novel Kim, Kipling depends on a long history of Anglo- Indian perspective and also forecast the Indian realities.

  The culture of imperialism was not visible, nor did it conceal its worldly affiliations and interests. Often culture is not paid much clarity. Imperialism, like globalization has tried to bring the world together. Said’s method is to focus on individual works to read them first as great products of creative and interpretative imagination and then to show them as part of relation between culture and empire. He discussed about many empires. He took British, French and American empires. The reason for this selection is that; one, the idea of overseas rule because these three had jumped beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands, contributing to its cultural development. Second is very personal as I think these three were the orbits in which he was born, grew and now living.

     Said hopes that history of the imperialist adventure rendered in cultural terms might serve illustrative and deterrent purposes. He was subjected to many political pressures for the closing of culture instead of other relevant matters. The binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise are gone. We began to sense that old authority cannot be replaced by new authority. The exchange process between Europeans and other’s, contributed to one idea that there is an ‘Us’ and a ‘Them’. Actually this was originated from the Greek thought of Barbarians.

      Towards the last part Said refers to the main ideas discussed in the book. This book tells us of what to read of recent history and how to read it. The American identity is a unitary and homogenous thing but at the same time a complex thing. This implies two perspectives, two historiographies, one linear and subsuming, other contrapuntal and nomadic. Said argues that the second perspective is fully sensitive to reality of historical experience. Then he speaks of United States and its cultural diversity.  Finally he admits that this book is an exile’s book because he lived in the Arab World. He was an ‘outsider’.

     Said through this introduction is  giving at the same time an introduction to his work Culture and Imperialism and an extension to the former work Orientalism He is demonstrating the relation between culture and empire. Empire constituted the imperialist’s which the world has ever seen. Throughout this introduction he has shown the two side of any problem or whatever discussed, he gave us a double understanding. He had either two reasons or supporting arguments. He had coined it clearly. Sometimes one may feel like comprising of positives but other time negatives. Introduction can be taken on the basis of different realms or notions. Each part considers each idea's. As like his method he has focused on all the important matters in writing the subject of enquiry. Said through the introduction proves that his aim is to set works of art of the imperialist and post colonial eras into their historical contexts. He took individual work as his practical’s and tries to prove the relation of Culture and Imperialism. I think it is essential to give such a descriptive introduction because it will help in the reading procedure. It will help in better understanding of the author’s perspectives and also the books.
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.

ANJANA PP- ASSIGNMENT II

ANJANA PP- ASSIGNMENT II

            A REVIEW ON SAID’S INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM

           Culture and Imperialism is actually a lecture by Edward Said. It is an important book as far as the post colonial reading are concerned. The book radiates his concepts on two terms ‘culture’ and ‘imperialism.’ The very introduction of the book written by Said himself, gives us a elaborated kind of explanation that leads us to the rest of the text. He starts with the creation of the text. The thoughts that came after the production of Orientalism led him into a series of lecture conducted in the Universities of United States, Canada, and England. The main argument of the lecture, that constitutes the core of the text. He found the fact that there are several studies had happened on the ideas of Orientalism, this has made a major shift in academic thought that was limited to Middle East. He needs to expand his ideas so that he describing “a general pattern of relationship between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories. He had also used non- Middle Eastern materials for writing the text. That includes European writing on Africa, India, and Parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean etc. for said these discourses seems as a part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and people.

                  When analyzing these texts ha says that one keep on confronting the grant narratives on the “mysterious East”, as well as the stereotypes of the third world nation. We can see the stereotypes of Africans, Indians, Irish, Jamaican, or even Chinese. This is what he already mentioned in his previous book Orientalism too. The Western representation of the third world nation’s civilization as something barbaric and primitive. And also the need for taking punishments when ‘they’ misbehaved or become rebellious. The West people have the notion that “they”( people from third world nation) mainly understood only force or violence. Said says that the writers propagating the idea that “they” are not like “us”, and for that reason deserved to be ruled. Said says that the emergence of some sort of resistance among the non- European world was an important change. He reclaim the fact that these kinds of resistance was the response to the western domination and that mass movement all around the world resulted in the decolonization itself. While talking about the kinds of resistance Said never stick upon the armed resistance but also according to him, a kind of cultural resistance also there all around the world. “There was always” he says “some form of active resistance, and in the over whelming majority of cases, the resistance finally went out.” He describes two different factors in the resistance. The first one is the general worldwide pattern of imperial culture and second is the historical experience of resistance against empire.     

                 Culture is very important in his both books- Orientalism, and Culture and Imperialism. Before he enters into the term he clarifies the term in his own way- the way that word seems to him. He had given two meanings for the term ‘culture.’ In which the first one is nothing but the whole “practices, like the art of description, communication, and representation, and have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realm and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principle aim is pleasure.” While giving this it is important that he gives importance to the modern Western empires of both nineteenth and twentieth century. His major area of study culture is on the cultural forms. He focused on novels here. He believed that these cultural forms are very important in creating imperial attitudes, references and describing the experiences. The reason behind selecting novels as its study material is that novels are very much connected to the expanding societies of Britain and France. Even in the introduction too Said is trying to give instances for what he is going to discuss. Here he had given an example of the novel Robinson Crusoe. This novel is considered to be a best example for prototypical modern realistic novel. Even in this realistic novel too we can see that the protagonist, who is a European and he trapped in a lonely island and the story travels with how he made a fiefdom in that distant non European land. According to said there are many studies had held on the narrative fictions but in fact a little study that held on its position in the history and world of empire. Narrative is important in this book also. The description of these narratives is very crucial for his argument too. Said believes that “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelist 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.”

                In an overall analysis, most of the narratives are based on the land imperialism. The issues related to this land were reflected, contested, and even for a time decides narrative. There should be a power to narrative and also there is a power to block other narratives from emerging etc are very much important in culture and imperialism, and that narrative itself make the main connection between them.

                   Said’s second way of looking at culture includes a refining and elevating elements. According to him it is each society’s reservoir of the bests. This is what differentiate people- differentiate “us” from “them.” This is in the sense that people from the west are not like people from the East. In this case culture become a tool for identification. Recently a going back to culture and tradition had happened, this might be a part of decolonization. In the formally colonized world, these “returns” have produced varieties of religious and nationalist fundamentalist. In this second sense of culture according said “is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another.” He also mentions some problems regarding this dimension of culture. The problem with this is that as a result of this the humanists are unable to make a connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of some bad practices of colonizers such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression and imperial subjection on the one side and in the other side the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices etc.  He shares some difficulties which had confronted him while working on this book. It is a widely accepted notion that some races are inferior and subjected. That idea can see even in the writings of some writers those whom Said admires.

                   He says that culture conceived in this way can become a protective enclosure. The criteria said has taken to analyze the literary texts are; all of them are admirable in the same time estimable works of art. The second reason is that it is very difficult to connect them with the imperial process in which they are directly or indirectly a part of. It is a practice that ignoring their participation in what was an unquestioned reality in their societies. According to Said this ignoring factor is what we want to understand from them. He had given a great narrative analysis of Dicken’s Great Expectations. But I this kind of a large explanation about a text is unnecessary in an introduction.

                   By the end of nineteenth century the empire was not in its disappeared form. It was moreover evident everywhere. But this was not the case of the subjects of the writers such as Conrad, Cliping, Gide, and Loti. His second example he given is a Western nation which is dominated but at the same time an interested area for the outsiders. He speaks of the work of Joseph Conrad. He is talking about the Latin American republic. most of the governmental amendments that took in the society is almost described in the novels, especially in Conrad’s texts. Said says that “yet it is a rhetoric whose most damning characteristics is that it has been used before, not just once but with deafeningly repetitive frequency in the modern period, by British, the French, the Bulgarians, the Japanese, the Russian, and now the Americans.”

               It is a well known fact that Conrad is a precursor of the western views of third world countries. Said has very deliberately contemn Conrad for his very objective kind of view on third world nation from the point of view of a mere west. Said accuse Conrad that his is very much blind to other histories about the non western nations. This was the same accusation put forth by African writer Chinua Achebe against Conrad’s The Heart of the Darkness. According to Achebe, the representation of Africans in Conrad’s text is very insufficient. This fact can be include with the very nature of Conrad as mentioned by said in this part. Conrad’s view about the third world is very much reflected in the characters he creates too. Said also shows his concern about the growing intellectual group who never suspect Conrad in the way Said described us. According to them Conrad’s works sometimes “making the world safe for democracy.” Said has given some a list of writers and their attitude or the perspective towards native people and the westerners. In which we can see a gradual deconstruction of the perception of non western people. It was actually a deconstruction of the western representation of non- western world.

              Said says that Conrad wrote by criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time, in that way we are capable of judgments on all these. Said claims that, the condition has changed a lot. The age of Conrad and Dickines has changed. The European people now very used with the non- European people. The immigration itself is the reason behind this change. The Europeans have to face the others everyday basis, and it is an interesting observation from Said that, the Europeans are forced to read the narratives from the non Western nations. The globalization process that makes this difference that both colonized and colonizers are co- exists in a same place. The overlapping of the cultures also happens through this.

                     “the great cultural archive” Said argue “is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made.” Said has stressing on the fact that imperialist agenda was not hidden, and their culture was not invisible. There is a sufficient clarity in the culture’s major lines. Said is seems to talk from the part of imperialists. He did an attempt to appreciate imperialist’s achievements- that they could bring the world together. Even though he is accepting the fact that, the distinction between the West and the non- west is an unjust one. He says that most of us should now regard the historical experience of empire as a common one.

               It is good to give a particular method of the book. He approach the individual works from the perspective of a work of art and deals with the aesthetic part of the texts, in the same time it focuses on the relation of these texts with the culture and imperialism. In the introduction itself he claims his argument of the book that he says “I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history…authors are very much in the history of his societies, shaping and shaped by history and their social experience in different measures. He also took bail for the convenient omission of some other imperialisms such as the Russian, the Austro Hungarian, the Ottoman, The Portuguese and Spanish etc. he say that these imperialisms are not at all less danger than that of the West, but the Western imperialism has a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality. There are another reasons behind the selection of these countries selection. The vastness of their expansion of their territory into distant lands, and it is important that they had a privileged status also. His personal reason also there in the selection of these countries as a study material. He had also given explanation to this reason.

                  He talking in a very informal way, and he presents his hopes in constructing a history of imperial adventures rendered in cultural terms. He also assured the fact that in analyzing the imperialist’s history the nature of colonized is not escaped from the criticism. The history doesn’t mean that a flattering story. It should comprise the fortunes and misfortunes of nationalism. The story of separatism and nativism should also come under consideration. Towards the end of the introduction, he is talking about the emerging writings from the part of women. According to his it seem something in a very deconstructive in nature.

             He makes a valid observation that “instead we begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignment made across borders, types, nation, and essence are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignment 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 ideological concerns are not in a free form, it is very much connected to the interests and agendas of various groups. So we are not capable of determining something about these things. The idea Said has put forth for reading history is somewhat very interesting and the same time very important. There should be a reading from two opposing parts of a same incident. That makes us more enlighten than that of hearing a one sided history. All cultures are entangled in one another no one culture is free from another culture. It is not pure, and single, but it is very much hybrid, heterogeneous as well as extraordinarily differentiated.

                 Said’s concern going into the educational field, the recent issues like non- Americanism and the threat to Arabism. He talking about how this factors affects the educational field and how the educational institutes taught to venerate and celebrate the uniqueness of their tradition. Said seriously looking on this and also suggests an alternative to this issue, a patient alternative. According to him the Universities have the responsibility to took up this issue and investigate on it and analyze the issue with full seriousness. A kind of exploration of history should be there. This is a very good observation from the part of Said is that “narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation.”

                  The claim of Said that this book is a “an exile’s book,” is seems to be a kind of bailing that he took before he really entering into the text. Eighteen pages long introduction is seems sometimes deviate from reading. The matters that includes in the rest of the text is seems to be already revealed by the introduction itself.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

        

                                 

JISHA D- ASSIGNMENT II

         INTRODUCTION- CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM BY EDWARD SAID

                                                                                                  -A READING

           In introduction of the text Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said discusses about the relationship between culture and empire. Initially he got this stimulus from his series of lectures that he had given at the universities in the United States, Canada and England in 1985- 1986. In his previous text Orientalism (1978), he has treated only the Middle East. In Culture and Imperialism he tries to develop those arguments in the previous book about the relationship between modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories.

          In this book Said focuses on the individual works, to read them first as great products highly creative authors and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire. He does not believe that the authors are not mechanically shaped by ideology, class or economic history. But he believes in the importance the high influence of history and culture over writers. Culture and aesthetic forms that every text contains actually derived from its historical experiences and that is the main subject in this book.

        European writing on Africa, India, Australia and the Caribbean can be seen as a part of the European’s urges to rule other part of the world. Through these kinds of writing they consciously create a unique images to Europe, as in Said words “the mysterious East”. And they generate various stereotypical images about the colonized world. They tried to emphasis the civilization as something primitive or include the barbaric people. Said opines that they understood force or violence is the best and they deserved to be ruled because they are not similar to the others from the subjugated nations.

        Said admits that he has begun this book from the background Orientalism and it reads the socio- political background of the colonized world. Unlike Orientalism text Culture and Imperialism concentrates mainly in some of the important fictional works from the European world which were published at the time of colonization. He discusses the treatment and the representation of the Third World countries in those texts. With the emergence of armed resistance in colonized worlds, there were also many struggles through cultural resistance.

       Many Associations and parties formed with common goals that are, self determination and national independence. In many time such active resistances had won its goals. Said put forwards two main issues in this book that are the world wide pattern of imperial culture and the historical resistance against the experience of empire. Through this book wants to do something more than Orientalism has presented. 

        In both books he gives his own definitions for Culture. According to Said, Culture means two things in particular. Culture means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation that have relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realm and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principle aim is pleasure.

       Said’s main concern in this book is the modern Western Empires of 19^th and 20^th century. And he has selected the cultural form, novel to read the cultural history of West because he believes novel form is very vital in the formation of imperial attitudes, references and experiences. He selects the novel Robinson Crusoe as the prototypical modern realist novel and which narrates a person’s story from Europe and how he has earned freedom in a non- European land.

       Though the recent criticism has mainly concentrated on the narrative fiction, it no more focuses on its position in history and the world empire. Said’s emphasis on the narration of the fictional work. Sometimes the fiction itself became the colonized people’s methods to establish their identity and the existence of their own history.

        Said mentions an opinion by an anonymous critic that nations themselves are narrations. Said finds the power of narration and the prevention of other narratives from forming and emerging are very important to culture and imperialism. At a one point of time the works from colonial world with the elements of subjugation and power stimulated the Europeans and also the Americans. They had struggled for the new narratives with equality and human community.

        Said’s second definition of Culture is, a concept that includes a defining and elevating element, each societies reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. In other words, Culture differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’. In that sense Culture is the source of identity. Now the present era is ‘returning’ to their own culture and tradition. Said finds that this kind of returns produces varieties of religious and nationalist fundamentalism. In such cases, according to Said culture is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another.

       In most areas Culture is something worshiped by the natives but in the opposite side it cannot stay with the human life. In Said’s opinion this is the most important problem that Culture now faces. Most of the thinkers in the Humanist discipline could not find any logic in the practices of slavery, racial oppression and also the writing of literary works which carries these kinds of cruelties from the imperial hand. Among such works Said finds works of Dickens, Thackeray, Ruskin, and Carlyle are the exceptional because which treats the colonialism in a different way.

        As a person who has to spend the life in many countries and also has got opportunity to teach literature for years, Said assumes that it is a very challenging experience because his experience as human being and the human experiences in literary works are contradictory in nature. One the one hand every literary work gives pleasure while reading it and helps to earn money. But we cannot connect them with the society because each of them directly or indirectly carries the imperial hands. Said argues that this unquestioned reality in the narration of a text itself is something which enhances the reading and understanding of them.

        Firstly Said put forwards Charles Dickens’s novels like Great Expectations, David Copper Field, etc… In the late 19^th century Australia was established as a penal colony. He suggests that Dickens’s attempt to portray the land of Australia is not a mere representation, but a participation in the lives of that society. Carter’s book The Botany Bay explores relatively similar experiences of Dickens’s book which goes through a narration of travel and discovery. He envisions a social space in it and that is what Dickens has already planned for Pip in David Copper Field and which created a free system for the laborers in the 1840 s colonized worlds.

      Dickens’s texts foreshadow Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel through the Orient. By the end of 19^th century the Empire was become an unwelcome presence in most of the countries and this issue was the main concern in the works of Conrad, Kipling, Gide and Loti. Said selects Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo (1904) and in his opinion it would be incomplete to read Conrad’s work as a mere prediction of the future of Latin America with its liberation forces. Conrad is said to be the precursor of the western view of the Third World. Conrad paradoxically views imperialism as something which doomed by its own pretensions and impossible ambitions.

      Said suggests that what Conrad sees is a world totally dominated by the West. He could not see the Third World and its lives and cultures with integrity. And he never allowed himself to trust the anti- imperialist independence movements. So for Conrad as a man having Western view over non- Western areas actually blinds him to notice other culture, histories and aspirations. So in Said’s opinion, at the same time Conrad was an imperialist and also a non- imperialist.

       In Said’s view today’s world does not exist as a spectacle over the texts to find whether it is ingenious or boring. But in all such attitudes involves the elements of power and interest. While Conrad criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time, Said states that we can also characterize our own present attitudes to all issues and also the energy to comprehend and engage with other societies, traditions and histories.

     Now the world has changed and the alarming of Conrad’s and Dickens’s books to the Europeans and Americans has ended. And they now faces newly empowered voices asking about their narration. Said points out that such populations and voices will miss what is essential about the world in the past centuries.

       Said winds up the Introduction with a statement that this is an Exile’s book. He admits that he have felt that he had belonged to many worlds, many histories and many groups. And these circumstances are the motifs to make this book possible. Finally he argues that because of empire all cultures are involved in one another. All are hybrid, heterogeneous and un monolithic. To substantiate this point he takes the example of Arab world with the dangers of un- Americanism and also the threats to Arab ism.

References

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New : Vintage Books, 1994.