Culture and Imperialism

Edward said:
Edward Said, a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, literary critic and political activist. Said‘s legacy,
religion, to the places he moved and reasons of migrations had great impact on his writings. A Palestinian
protestant Christian Born in Arab‘s heart Jerusalem, got early education in Cairo, graduated from America.
He referred to himself as a
“Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture”

Introduction of Culture and Imperialism:

The idea of that book was inspired by Edward’s first book ‘Orientalism’ which was limited to Middle East.
Culture and Imperialism was a series of lectures delivered in the universities of the United States, Canada
and England in 1985 and 1986. In the present book he wanted to describe a more general pattern of
relationship between the modern West and its overseas territories.

Definition of Imperial Culture:

Culture and imperialism presents two factors; first one is a general worldwide pattern of imperial culture
and seconds a historical experience of resistance against Empire in both active and passive way. He
examines the roots of imperialism in the Western culture and traces the relationship between culture and
imperialism. According to Edward there are two types of attitudes towards culture. One that considers
culture as a concept that includes refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of best that has
been known and thought. The other is the aggressive, protectionist attitude viewing culture as a source
of identity that differentiates between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and power with which we can combat the
influences of the foreign cultures. Such an attitude is opposed to liberal philosophies, as multiculturalism
and hybridism, and has often leaded to religious and- nationalist fundamentalism. Culture conceived in this
way becomes a protective enclosure that divorces us from the everyday world.

Culture:

“Culture means two things in particular. First of all it means all those practices like the arts of description, communication and
representation and that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms
one of whose principle aim is pleasure “(Culture and Imperialism P.5)

Imperialism:

Imperialism is a policy of extending a country’s power beyond its border for the purpose of exploiting other lands and other peoples by
establishing economic, social or political control over them “

Start with the general pattern of imperial culture. Imperialism is a name of planned process; first step to
show the ‘Other’ or non-European as exotic, strange and barbaric, for this purpose use art to show the
desired picture of orient. They chose art as their medium because art can be assumed as nonpolitical but
Edward will show in this book that Imperialism has always fascinated the literary writers and political
thinkers as a subject, their art was not depicting the real situation of East but the European mentality
towards orient. European Art for orient was poetics and politics of imperialism.
They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.
—Karl Marx, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The second step is to civilize those barbaric through so called mission civilization. If they deny becoming
civilize use power because they mainly understand violence and language of power best. They are not like
‘Us’ and for that reason, deserved to be ruled. They used culture, and in culture especially fine arts which is
assumed as less politic and can be treated as imaginative or creative thing. European used Art to impose,
rationalize and extend imperialism. Said quotes different authors to strengthen his idea of imperialism.

Imperialistic Dimensions of European Fiction:

If it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's
involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or
American displaying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he
comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second. We believe that author
inevitably influenced by the social, political environment in which in lives. It is out of question that the
European intellectuals were unaware of the chauvinistic behavior of imperialism, or their minds were
purified from racial superiority which is the distinguish feature of imperialism.

Edward said was a professor of English literature by profession. Novel was his area of specialized study and
he believed that novel is a picture of life; a novelist is often concerned with the socio-political backgrounds
and developments. He frequently referenced to the Victorian and modern novel, especially where the novel
touches history. European writers’ especially Victorian novelists manifestly and unconcealedly became a part
of imperial process, rather than condemning or ignoring it. Speaking of the importance of fiction in the
formation of his argument against imperialism he says,
“Narrative is crucial to my argument here my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explores and novelists say about
strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their identity and existence of their own
history.”

Charles Dickens novel Great Expectation is primarily a novel about the self –delusion, about Pip’s vain
attempt to become a gentleman with neither the hard work nor the aristocratic source of income required
for such a role. Early in life Pip helps a condemned convict, Abel Magwitch, who after being transported to
Australia, pays back Pip with huge sums of money through his lawyer. Magwitch reappears illegally in
London after sometime. Pip does not welcome him and rejects him as an unpleasant criminal. Magwitch is
unacceptable being from Australia, a penal colony designed for rehabilitation of English criminals.

Briton established Australia as penal colony in the late eighteenth century so that England could transport an
irredeemable and unwanted excess population of felons. Dickens‘s reference is not merely a coincidence but
a clear participation in wider imperial process between British and its overseas territories.
Dickens knotted several strands in English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed but they
could hardly, in real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal sense but what they suffered wrapped them into
permanent outsider. (Robert Hughes, The Epic of Australia’s founding)

Taking, Joseph Conrad‘s Fictional Work as his second example, Conrad’s anti-imperialistic view is seen in his
famous Novel Heart Of Darkness in which he shows utmost antagonism against imperialism. He describes
the exploitation of the basic rights of Africans by the Englishmen without having any compunction.In this
novel Conrad openly expose the foreign claims of “Exterminating all the Brutes” by the white men for
civilizing the savage and uncivilized people of Congo .Kurtz goes to Africa with a mission of civilization but
turns into a beast, a devil of earth and exploits his every inch of potential to grab everything worthwhile
found in that land.

Said admires Conrad’s prescience as he forecasts the unstoppable unrest and a general thinking of the
imperialists. Much of the rhetoric of ‘The New World Order’ with its self-assumed responsibility of civilizing
the world seems to be originated from this thinking. Nostromo is set in a Central American Republic,
independent, but dominated by outside interests because of its immense silver mines. In this novel Holroyd,
the American financer tells Charles Gould, the British owner of a mine says.

“We shall be giving the world for everything –industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics and religion. We shall have the leisure to
take in hand the outlying island and continent of the earth. 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 “

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 could never
understand that India, Africa and South Africa had lives and cultures of their own, not totally controlled by
the imperialists. Conrad allows the readers to see that imperialism is a system and it should work in a
proper fashion. There are certain obvious limitations of Conrad’s vision. Conrad was imperialist and anti-
imperialist, progressive in rendering the corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary in ignoring
the fact that Africa and South America had independent history and culture, which the imperialist violently
disturbed but by which they were ultimately defeated.

Commenting on the words of Conrad, Said says ‘much of the rhetoric of the new world order promulgated
by the American government since the end of the cold war- with its redolent self –congratulation , its
unconcealed triumphalism , its gave proclamations of responsibility – might have been scripted by Conrad ‘s
Holroyd’ ;

“We are number one, we are bound to lead, and we stand for freedom and order or so on”

All such works, says Edward Said, seem to argue that source of world’s significant action and life was the
West, and rest of the world was mind-deadened, having no life, history or integrity of its own. It is not that
these westerners had no sympathy for the foreign cultures; their real drawback was their inability to
take seriously the alternative:

Natives’ Cultural Resistance:

It was the case nearly everywhere the coming of white man brought forth some sort of resistance, which has
many forms like armed resistance in form of organizing militant groups for national independence, in
political resistance Creation of parties whose common goal was identical independence. Cultural resistance
for self-determination and for negation of colonial powers attitude towards the literature of colonized
people and third world nations which is based on philistinism .Macaulay’s absurd and racist remark ,
“I have never found one among them (orientalists) who could deny that single shelf of good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia”
World famous Rubaiyat of Omer Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald his low opinion about Persian
poetry
“It is an instrument to me to take what liberties I like with these passions that as I think are not poets enough to frighten one from such
excursions who really do want a little art to shape them”

The world has changed after Dickens and Conrad, The colonizers and the colonized do not exist in separate
worlds. So, one-sided versions cannot hold for long. One has to listen to what people are saying on other
side of the fence. Said, is a positive development. One should always suspect the impressions of an exclusive
consciousness. Most of the Western writers, for example, could never imagine that those ‘natives’ who
appeared either subservient, or uncooperative were one day going to be capable of revolt. It is true that
native voices were there but decolonization, post-colonialism gave attention to those voices. Overlapping
western experience is revisited by natives and good sign is also by westerns. Deconstruction of moral,
intellectual and imaginative western representation of non-western is clearly seen in works of Chinua
Achebe, Wole soynika, Ngugi Thiongo, Frantz Fanon and many others.

Said’ Vision of Intellectual And Cultural Hybridity:

Pioneers of world comparative-literature believe that” Literature is one as art and humanity are one. The
idealistic vision of comparative literature is the fine blend of universality and regionalities. It gives the idea of
mutual comparison because its material that changes not art.

“Comparative Literature focuses on commonalities which overrides yet does not obliterate regionalities “

Said‘s point is that criticism on imperialism does exempt the aggrieved colonized people from criticism. The
fortunes and misfortunes of nationalism, of what can be called separatism and nativism, do not always make
a flattering story. Narrow and dogmatic approach to culture can be as dangerous to culture as imperialism.
Secondly, culture is not the property of the East or the West.

Said’s views on intellectual harmony are that for the first time the history of imperialism and its culture can
now be studied as neither monolithic nor reductively compartmentalize, separate, distinct. There has been a
disturbing eruption of separatist and chauvinistic discourse, whether in India, Lebanon, Eurocentric, Islam-
centric, Afrocentric counties. Even those who are on the side of those fighting for freedom from imperialists
need to avoid narrow-mindedness.

It is a general wish to make ourselves heard but we tend very often to forget that the world is a crowded
place and that if everyone were to insist on the radical purity of one’s own voice, all we would have would
be awful din of unending strife and a bloody political mess, the true horror of beginning to be perceptible
here and there in the re-emergence of racist politics in Europe, the cacophony of debates over political
correctness and identity politics in United States ,intolerance of religious prejudices and illusionary promises.
Method is not just read one’s own side but also to grasp the others view. Focus on individual work first as
great product of the creative or interpretive imagination and then see them as part of relationship between
culture and imperialism.

Said defines the reasons of discussing only British, French and American Empires is not that he believes the
Austro- Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman and Spanish and Portuguese were less imperialists but the
reason is this trio B.F.A. have a special cultural centrality .England is an imperial class and France is in indirect
competition with it. America begins as an Empire during nineteenth century but it was in the second half of
20th century, that it directly followed its two great predecessors. Second reason is that these counties are the
three in whose orbits he was born and grew up and now live, this has enabled me to try to mediate between
them.
“The last point I want to make is that this is an exile’s book. Ever since I remember, I have felt that I belonged to both the Worlds,
without being completely of either one or the other”