Culture and Imperialism Notes
1. The purpose of his book, he says, is to trace the relationship between culture,
aesthetic forms and historical experience.
2. Edward examines the roots of imperialism in the Western culture and traces the
relationship between culture and imperialism
3. He has focused on three imperial powers: British, French, and American.
4. In the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward said that his previous work
Orientalism was limited to Middle East, now he wants to describe a more general
pattern of relationship between West and other parts of the world.
5. Imperialism: The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came
to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going,
who won it back, and who now plans its future
6. Culture: 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.
7. Two types of attitudes towards culture:
a. Concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s
reservoir of the best that has been known and thought.
b. 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. Eg: You read Dante or Shakespeare in order
to keep up with the best that was thought and known, and also to see yourself,
your people, society, and tradition in their best lights. This differentiates ‘us’
from ‘them’, almost always with some degree of xenophobia
8. As someone who has spent his entire professional life teaching literature, yet who also
grew up in the pre-World War Two colonial world, I have found it a challenge not to
see culture in this way. “I have found it a challenge not to see culture in this way- that
is, antiseptically quarantined from worldly affiliations, but as an extraordinary field of
endeavor.”
9. In thinking of Carlyle or Ruskin, or even of Dickens and Thackeray, critics have
often, I believe, relegated these writers’ ideas about colonial expansion, inferior races,
or ‘niggers’ to a very different department from that of culture, culture being the
elevated area of activity in which they ‘truly’ belong and in which they did their
‘really’ important work. ( kalay kay culture ko culture na samajhna)
10. Edward Said sees the European writing on Africa, India, Ireland, and other lands as
part of European effort to rule distant lands. He says that Colonial and post-Colonial
fiction is central to his argument. These writings present the colonized lands as
‘mysterious lands’ inhabited by uncivilized barbarians, the disturbingly familiar ideas
about flogging or death or extended punishment being required when ‘they’
misbehaved or became rebellious, because ‘they’ mainly understood force or violence
best; ‘they’ were not like ‘us’, and for that reason deserved to be ruled. This is a
misrepresentation of the native people and their cultures and needs to be redressed.
a. Edward Said finds a connection between these narratives and the imperial
process, of which they are apart. These writing ignore the important aspect of
the reality- the native people and their culture.
11. There has always been resistance in countries on whom imperialism is being imposed
on.
12. My basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say
about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use
to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.
a. Conrad’s Nostromo. Dickens’ Great Expectations is a primarily a story about
Pip’s vain attempt to become a gentle man. 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 some time. 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.
These ugly criminals could not be allowed to return to England-the land of
decent people.
b. Conrad’s Nostromo, the second example picked up by Said, 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:
‘We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world
can’t help it- and neither we can, I guess.’
c. The above examples: This is the 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, says Edward
Said.
d. 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 both 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.
13. It is not that these westerners had no sympathy for the foreign cultures; their real
drawback was their inability to take seriously the alternatives to imperialism. The
world has changed since Conrad and Dickens due to imperialistic globalization.
14. Said says that the origin of current American policies can be seen in the past. All
powers aspiring for global domination have done. the same things. There is always
the appeal to power and national interest in running the affairs of ‘lesser peoples’, and
the same destructive zeal when the going goes rough. America made the same
mistake in Vietnam and Middle East.