Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said - notes and about

Culture and Imperialism is a collection of essays by Edward Said published in 1993. Said attempts to trace the connection between imperialism and culture in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It followed his highly influential Orientalism, published in 1978.

“What to read and what to do with that reading, that is the full form of the question.” Thus with enviable concision Edward Said defines the central issues that no one teaching or studying literature today can escape. There is no consensus to fall back on, and indeed much of the interest of Said’s book—for readers outside as well as inside the academic world—lies in the potential of such disagreement to clarify fundamental values.

In one respect, Said’s answer to the question of what to read and what to do with that reading is deeply conservative. He singles out for attention works such as Jane Austen’s MANSFIELD PARK and Joseph Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS because, he says, “first of all I find them estimable and admirable works of art and learning, in which I and other readers take pleasure and from which we derive profit.” So far Said’s rationale is quite traditional. His next move, however, is not. In reading these canonical works of the modern Western tradition, Said argues, we must place them in their historical context. For Said, that context is imperialism: “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory.” In imperial powers such as Great Britain and France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and the United States today), Said contends, no less than in the territories they dominated, the reality of empire pervaded the entire culture. 

he title of Edward W. Said's grandly conceived and long-awaited new book, "Culture and Imperialism," deliberately echoes the titles of two great works of criticism -- Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" (1869) and Raymond Williams's "Culture and Society" (1958). Arnold saw culture ("the best which has been thought and said") as a safeguard against anarchy; the "and" in his title really means "or." That sense of opposing terms shapes Williams's work as well, a study of the way 19th-century social critics, Arnold included, came to view culture as a critique of "the bourgeois ideal of society."

The "and" in Mr. Said's own title seems more accurately chosen, since he argues that the terms it links are best seen not in opposition but in conjunction. Yet even so, I can imagine replacing it, not with "or," but with "of" or "as"; culture as imperialism, imperialism as a culture. For Mr. Said uses the word "culture" in both its Arnoldian meaning, to denote the realm of art and learning, and in the more inclusive sense employed by anthropologists. The two definitions fall into one. Or, rather, what the book shows is the involvement of culture in the first sense of the word -- the novels, poems, operas of high art -- with imperialism, itself a central fact of Western culture in the second sense.

"We assume," Mr. Said writes, "that the better part of history in colonial territories was a function of the imperial intervention." Yet in doing so, Mr. Said believes, we also assume "that colonial undertakings were marginal and perhaps even eccentric to the central activities of the great metropolitan cultures." And that assumption, he argues, is inextricable from our desire to excuse the cultural monuments through which we know the past for their participation in empire. (In consequence, a writer like Rudyard Kipling, who is inescapably linked with imperialism, has been pushed to the margins of the canon.) Charles Dickens provides an example for Mr. Said's argument, one that paradoxically enables him to demonstrate imperialism's centrality by detailing its peripheral status in the world of Dickens's novels.

Critics have traditionally considered the empire irrelevant to Dickens, for the simple reason that he set his books in England. Yet Mr. Said points out that his characters enact a steady commerce between the metropolis and its colonial margins, and that the empire's role on the outer borders of the novels' geography belies the degree to which it underwrites -- in both a financial and a literary sense -- Victorian society as a whole. It is the place in which fortunes are made and to which social misfits, like Mr. Micawber, are consigned. Yet everything connected with the colonies happens offstage, Mr. Said continues, as if the culture's participation in imperialism is not only to be excused, but excised.

One of the best chapters in "Culture and Imperialism" describes Jane Austen's assumption, in "Mansfield Park," of "the importance of an empire to the situation at home." But when her character Sir Thomas Bertram has to visit the Caribbean sugar plantation that supports his country house, Mr. Said says, Austen falls into "esthetic silence." We never get to see him walk across that other, slave-run estate.

That Mr. Said's accounts of Dickens and Austen -- or of figures like Verdi, Camus, Gide and Yeats -- no longer sound so startling is attributable in large measure to his own earlier work. He has argued elsewhere that what is most interesting about art is its "worldliness," the way it both reflects and helps constitute the political realities of its society; this emphasis calls into question any belief in an autonomous or "pure" realm of art and learning.

Mr. Said, now University Professor at Columbia, has long had a particular worldliness of his own, a double fame -- in the news media as a spokesman for Palestinian causes and a fierce critic of American policy in the Persian Gulf, and in the academy as the author of "Orientalism" (1978). There he described the ways the "Orientalist discourse" -- through which European scholarship came to define the Middle East as Europe's stereotypically exotic Other -- both legitimized and served French and British colonialism.

For Mr. Said the inescapability of that discourse kept -- and keeps -- the West from engaging with the actuality of the lands it sought to dominate, and his pioneering attempt to chart what one might call the textual manifestations of colonialism has had an enormous impact. He was among the first critics to show how one might mount the kind of sophisticated analysis of the close relations between literature and politics, knowledge and power, that now prevails in literary studies. No one examining the relations between the metropolitan West and the decolonizing world can ignore his work. If very little of what "Culture and Imperialism" has to say seems absolutely fresh, that is because other critics, working within the lines that "Orientalism" suggested, have already begun to explore the issues this new book raises (some examples: Gauri Viswanathan's "Masks of Conquest," Christopher L. Miller's "Blank Darkness" and Kwame Anthony Appiah's "In My Father's House").

But the model of "Orientalism" did have problems. In mapping the ways in which Orientalist discourse works, it fell, inadvertently but perhaps inevitably, into the very type of binary thinking it sought to attack, suggesting that there is indeed some "real" Orient whose radical difference remains unrepresentable in or by the Occidental mind. Appropriately, some of Mr. Said's most interesting chapters in "Culture and Imperialism" stand as an implicit response to the limitations of his previous work. For after describing the culture of imperialism, he turns, in the book's second half, to the "culture of resistance," to the anticolonial vision of writers like the Trinidadian C. L. R. James. Those chapters amount to an attack on "nativism," the systematic turning away from the West and its products that is often a response to colonial oppression.

The cultural "authenticity" that nativism demands -- the call for Afrocentric education is a good example -- is at best reactive; a phase through which most liberation movements must go, but one that Mr. Said echoes Frantz Fanon in seeing as a pitfall on the way to a more far-reaching liberation. For "to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious and political divisions" that colonialism imposes on its subject peoples. Nativism, he says, believes that we each have one absolute and essential identity, as blacks or whites or Serbs or Croats. Its other name is nationalism, and in the name of the people it can as easily build an empire as oppose one.

Mr. Said's account of the dialectical relation between imperialism and resistance is the most persuasive one I know. And I admire as well the equipoise of his call for a similarly "contrapuntal" approach to the canon of Western literature; asking, for example, that we play off a full awareness of the history that shapes the world of "Mansfield Park" against our "enjoyment or appreciation" of Austen's "irony and taste," while losing sight of neither. Yet even for readers like myself, whose sympathies are already engaged by his project, reading "Culture and Imperialism" can at times seem frustrating.

Its great scope means that it must settle for being suggestive rather than exhaustive about any one issue, any one text. And despite the overall strength of its polemical frame, its separate chapters remain too heavily marked by their origins as lectures. The lecturer wants to send his audience away thinking, so he throws out a great many ideas. But on the page they too often read as digressions, as a repetition of the ideas Mr. Said has developed in other lectures -- other chapters -- or simply as a string of names, as if that in itself constituted an argument: thus, "To speak today of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and many others like them is to speak of a fairly novel emergent culture unthinkable without the earlier work of partisans like C. L. R. James, George Antonius, Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jose Marti."

Yet that telegraphic style does not finally mar either the usefulness of "Culture and Imperialism" or its importance. If it is not a conceptual breakthrough on the same order as "Orientalism," it nevertheless stands as an urgently written and urgently needed synthesis of the work in a field that, more than any other critic, Edward W. Said has himself defined.

Why did Edward Said write the book Culture and Imperialism?

One never can know completely why anyone does anything. Freudian and other forms of psychological theory suggest that many of our motives are unknown even to ourselves, much less transparent to other people. From what we know of Said and his biography, we can attribute several potential motives to him, but we cannot actually know for certain what was going on inside his head during the entire process of his writing the book.

First, Said was a professor. As a professor at an elite research university, his salary and opportunities for promotion and merit pay depended to a large degree on his publishing books. Thus one obvious motive for writing a book was simply professional.

As to why he wrote about this specific topic, he describes himself as interested in the ambiguities of his own cultural position as an American citizen with an anglophone first name, an Arabic last name, and Palestinian ancestry. He states that his own experience of this sort of cultural ambiguity and blending was the source of his interest in postcolonial studies. In this work, he tries to show how the colonial experience affected not just the colonized, but also the major literary works of the colonizers.

What is the viewpoint of Edward Said as expressed in Oreintalism and what links the text of Orentialism with lieterature, including novels, film, or plays?

The viewpoint Edward Said expresses in Orientalism is founded upon his three-point definition of his concept of "Orientalism":

• an academic field within multiple disciplines.
• a conception of reality based on the binary form of "Occidental" opposing "Oriental" [Occident, West; Orient, East].
• Imperialistic philosophy and mechanization's of the Occident to dominate and control the Orient.

Said's particular interest as expressed in Orientalism is the Muslim Middle East, due in part to Said's own ethnic background. Thus the particulars of Orientalism--as an academic field and as a binary form--as it relates to the Muslim Middle East forms another part of Said'sviewpoint.

The arguments that Said makes that express his viewpoint can be summarized in about four points expressing his polemic (i.e., refuting and attacking accepted doctrine) that denounces the concept and realization of Orientalism, which he so strongly opposes. Danielle Sered of Emory University summarizes Said's viewpoint nicely:

[Said's] rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. ... It is an erasure of the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ (Sered, "Orientalism")

Four arguments Said makes expressing his viewpoint involve

(1) accumulating and analyzing present-day evidence of the cultures and psychologies of the Oriental East rather than emphasizing past historical Oriental eras;

(2) dispelling the doctrine that Orientals are sociologically unworthy of scholarly recognition and denouncing reliance on social science's uninvestigated generalities of cultures and human anthropological characteristics;

(3) rejecting international policy relations that represent the Occidental West as superior and rational while representing the Oriental East as deviant and inferior;

(4) eradication of binary facilitated domination by the powerful, rational, superior Occident over the impotent, irrelevant, deviant and inferior Orient.

This total picture provides a good summary of Said's viewpoint as expressed in Orientalism. What links the text of Orientalism to literature is the picture of enfeebled, dominated, inferior Orientals and Oriental culture as expressed in works like Lawrence of Arabia (a novel and a film) and the film Gandhi (1982) and Kipling's poem "Buddha at Kamakura":

A tourist-show, a legend told,
A rusting bulk of bronze and gold,
So much, and scarce so much, ye hold
The meaning of Kamakura?           

What is the relation between orientalism and imperialism?

To understand the relationship between Orientalism and Imperialism, one has to understand the relationship between the "East" and the "West" as well as the imbalance of power between the two worlds. In his phenomenal work Orientalism (1978), Edward Said talks about “orientalism” as an ideology, discourse and body of knowledge created by westerners that misinterprets and then homogenises the eastern world and its culture, and justifies Western superiority and domination over the East. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said furthers his argument on orientalism by explaining how imperialism has created imaginary boundaries, power dynamics and perpetuated conflict and opposition between different parts of the world, between the Whites and the Blacks and between the colonised and the colonisers. 

The relationship between orientalism and imperialism is simple. Said believes that orientalism supports colonisation and the imperial ideology. Oriental discourse makes generalisations about the cultural patterns in the non-Western world based on what was familiar to the Westerners and what wasn’t. The Eastern identity is represented as a set of decadent values, backwardness, barbarism, laziness, irrationalism, superstitions, lack of logic, etc., which, inevitably, the West thwarted and claimed was inferior to their own cultural identity. Since they felt it stood in staunch opposition to them, East became the “other” for the West. This knowledge of the Eastern reality was, however, incomplete and wrong. It not only created prejudices, but was also used to justify colonial subjugation of the East by the West.

Imperialism, which is the force behind colonisation, leads to power imbalance, and which along with hostility towards the unfamiliar Eastern reality, gives orientalists the privilege to place the orient below the occident. Put differently, it is imperialism that gives the authority and power to orientalists to estimate, homogenise, devalue and narrate the oriental reality to the western world. Orientalism, in this way, is nothing but a construct of imperialism.

Edward Said Orientalism Summary

This work by Edward Said has been crucial to postcolonial studies and criticism. I will give you a brief summary of the main ideas and how it contributes to postcolonialism, but obviously, there is no substitute for reading the book yourself!

Said identifies a series of assumptions that are made by the West about the Orient. Said himself is Palestinian, and he identifies a series of assumptions that the West makes about Arabs: they are irrational, anti-Western, menacing and dishonest. He explores how these assumptions are constructed in opposition to what the West thinks about themselves, and therefore defines this projected image of "Arabs" in the mind of Westerners as the other - we define the other by what we are not. The danger is that these assumptions come to be treated as truth and therefore impact our relations and our ideologies.

Said therefore calls for a new treatment of "the Orient" - allowing for self-representation of authors belonging to the Orient rather than depending on second hand representation. He also objects to half the globe being labelled "the Orient" - you can hardly make generalisations that will apply equally to Eqyptians as you can to the Chinese, for example. Tell any British person that they are just part of the United States of America, and you will probably receive a black eye!

Above all, Said helps us explore the processes of constructing binary opposites and uncovering the values that cause these opposites to come into being. By doing so, he calls for an erasure between these boundaries and lines that we construct and a more moderate way of thinking. If you want some examples of these binary opposites and how they are applied to the West and to "the Orient", think about these oppositions and how they are used: civilised / uncivilised, democracy / despotism, developed / undeveloped, liberated / repressed, educated / ignorant. You might want to look back at American foreign policy and judge how many decisions have been made from the standpoint of "us" having the answers and making decisions on the part of "them" who are ignorant and therefore do not know what is best for them.

Erward Said explains how the West views the Oriental and Oriental culture and literature as irrational, depraved, and often they are mispresented.

He argues that the West’s view of Oriental cultural affirmed by Western institutions and they are expressing their point of view from their aspect which degrades the Non western people, cultures.Said shows his resistence to the hegimony of Western ideas.

• 1 - Edward Said  has focused on what he called «The literary Orientalism » in his analysis and monitoring of his data and ideas, and what can be considered as a subset of the heritage of Orientalism, which can not be confined to literature only, He in many places exceeded the literary outputs to the historical ones. 
  
  2 - The author's language was literary and romantic influenced by the texts of the books that he  tried  to criticize and investigate. A language  that might not be commensurate with the rational scientific method in criticizing and analyzing of the efforts and productions of Orientalism from a non-literary perspective that is  interested in the study of  how to form the ideas and images about Arabs and Muslims. 
  
  3 - An author was trapped in an impressive admiration  of some Orientalists (Irving) and American Orientalism in general, considering it as a different model, or better shape, at least, than his European counterpart, although he confessed many times the existence the European compact on the American orientalism.
  
  4 -  The author is characterized by his high analytical ability and his critique was objective to a large extent, although the reader will note  his emotionality, in some topics, in the defense of Arabs and Muslims. 
  
  5 - The book is suffering, in some of its chapters , from repetition and elaborating that the author would be able to overcome if he had another division to the book's chapters  than the historical one.
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  The book remains an important knowledgeable effort that has a great deal of objectivity and criticism. The author tried in this book to explain the mechanisms of the image of Arabs and Muslims in the Western mind and the American in particular.

dward W. Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine and attended schools there and in Cairo. He was a Christian Arab. He received his B.A. from Princeton and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is University Professor at Columbia. He is the author of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, After the Last Sky, and Culture and Imperialism.

He delivered his speech Culture and Imperialism at York University, Toronto, February 10, 1993. He was an influential writer, speaker and teacher. 1950’s he went to the USA and studied at Princeton and Howard. His writings have been translated into 26 languages. Orientalism is his most influential book which presents the Western view of the Islamic World. It is limited to the Middle East only but it covers the whole landscape occupied by 19^th and 20^th century. He had been a teacher of Literature (Comparative) and made critical and literary analysis of most writers literary allusions are frequently found in his political works. He died on 25^thSeptember, 2003.

Said’s views on Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism is a lecture by ES. It briefly surveys the formation of Western Culture to show that the process itself was a result of imperialism. In defining the two terms he says that

Culture: 

The learned, accumulated experience of  communities and it consists of socially    transmitted patterns of behavior.  According to  the anthropologist Cliff Greety, Culture is: An ordered system of meanings and symbols in terms of which social interaction take place.

Imperialism:  (According to OED may be  defined as): aggressive expansion of peoples at          the expense of the neighbors. This has been  going on for years.

Imperialism implies some sort of collective premeditation which means a policy formed at home by the imperialistic force before launching an offensive against another nation.

The Historian Solomon Modell, “Imperialism is a policy extending a country’s power beyond its own borders for the purpose of exploiting other lands and other peoples by establishing economic, social and political control over them.”

Introduction to the Book

Culture and Imperialism is an important document. ES explains his own concepts of Culture and Imperialism. ES explains Imperialism as “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory.” Imperialism originated with the industrial revolution in 19^th century. The British and the French held sway over a large part of the globe. 

For the industrial revolution, cheap raw material and labor was needed so for the development of the backward countries, loud claims imperialism were made out to be need of the nations. The slave nations were taught to regard it as a blessing. 1^st world war ended the European Imperialism to some extent, but the 2^nd world war brought about it. The two hot wars initiated a major cold war between USSR and the USA. Thus, Imperialism took a new shape. The USAreduced USSR and came to be the sole super power. It the USA-based Imperialism that ES targets in his works.

The book also has its literary merits like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and many others.

Important Textual areas of his Speech

The 19^th century is rise of the west for its for its dominating posture.

It grabbed lands so largely and abundantly as never before.

The industrial revolution caused imperialism.

Colonialism, almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territories. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.

Direct colonialism of the British in India, the French in Algeria and Morocco has largely ended but Imperialism exists. Russia acquired bordering lands and the British and the French jumped thousands of miles for occupation.

The Soviet Union’s and America’s super power status which was enjoyed a little less than half a century derives from very different histories than those of Britain and France in the 19^thcentury. In the expansion of western empires, profit and the hope of further profit was important – spices, sugar, slaves, cotton etc. gold.   There was very little domestic resistance to foreign dominations in Britain & France because the superior thought it a metaphysical obligation to rule the inferior. According to them, their imperialism was different from that of the Romans who were for the loot but they went there with an idea of civilizing and improving their life.

We see in the empire nothing but a mitigated disaster for the native people. It was their native,cultural design and need that matured imperialism and they regret it now. Imperialism has caused dislocations, homelessness for the Muslims, Africans and the West Indians. They have created the troubles for Britain and France and also caused the emergence of Soviet and later today America.

According to Arno Mayer’s telling phrase, “of the old regime” The Willy Brandt Report, entitled North-South: A program for the survival published in 1980. It says that the needs of the poorest nations must be addressed. Hunger must be abolished and other problems solved. The main purpose is power-sharing in decision making within the monetary and financial institutions.

It is different to disagree with it. But how will the changes occur? The post-war classification of all nations into 3 worlds, Ist, Second and the third.

The solution is the revised attitude to education, to urge students on insistence of their identity, culture and democracy, thus nationalism is the solution.

The relationship between culture and empire is one that enables disquieting forms of domination. Imperialism considered the mixture of cultures and identities on a large scale, but its worst and the most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that there only white, black, western or oriental.

Imperialistic allusions from literature

He believes that novel has been important in formation of imperialistic attitudes, references, and experiences. He calls Robinson Crusoe “the prototype of modern realistic novel”.  He draws his arguments particularly from the novel because he believes that “Narrative is crucial to my argument here, my basic point being that story 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 there an identity and the existence of their own history.” Said further argues that narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized the people to rise against the yoke of imperialism. The stories of Sir Walter Scott charged the Scottish nation against the British rule. Said cites Mathew Arnold who says that culture is each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. Literature is, no doubt, the mirror that faithfully captures and reflects the picture of culture.

He says that his entire life was devoted to teaching culture. He developed the habit of looking for the imperialistic implications in the stories. He says that in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens “What Dickens envisions for Pip, being Magwitch’s London gentlemen is roughly equivalent to what was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia.” Said believes that nearly all Dickens’ businessmen, wayward relatives and frightening outsides have a fairly normal and secure connection with Empire.

Said highly admired Joseph Conrad – a star novelist of the late Victorian period for his superb criticism of Imperialism, especially in the Heart of Darkness which is still highly relevant to the situation across the world.

Said’s message is that Imperialism is not about a moment in history, it is about a continuing interdependent discourse between subject peoples and the dominant empire. Said’s view of the empire and colonialism is best expressed through Fanny and Sir Thomas from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park which is the story of Fanny’s being taken into Sir Thomas’s life at Mansfield Park where she eventually adjusts into the role of mistress of “estate”. Fanny was poor. Her parents are not capable managers of wealth.  These skills she acquires when she goes to Mansfield Park to live at 10.  Said’s comment on Jane Austen’s writings highlight the extent to which he sees in her the reflection of empire.