Customer Reviews

Culture and Imperialism

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It is hard to evaluate this book.

Said has done a magnificent job of cateloguing the various ways that European authors, principally British and French, have acquiesced in, reinforced or justified imperialism.

The trouble is that this is almost universally true of most literature for most times and places for most of human history.

Historically, literature has been the product of a literate class, with both the education and leisure to write.

These have almost always occured at the hearts of power structures or nexus, such as kingdoms or empires, commanding both the resources, human and material, and the traditions and information out of which literature has usually, if not always, been composed (Said himself addresses the traditional origins of literature, quoting Elliot).

Homer wrote at the heart of a Hellenic colonial community; the Hebrew bible was composed of court records and redacted in the imperial Babylon that permitted the Jewish exiles to restore their state; the New Testament was composed or redacted, chiefly in Alexandria and Rome and, along with most Patristic literature assumes the right of Rome to rule and often censures the Jews for their rebelliousness; the Quran is the pamphlet for Jihad, the conquest of unbelievers by believers or Arab Islamic imperialism, itself modelled on the Israelite conquest of Canaan.

Said undermines his otherwise excellent thesis by making s qualitative distinction between modern European Christian and postChristian empires, and those that preceded them, by they Arab or Turkish Islamic, classical pagan or Christian.

I think this a little problematical.

Surely the difference between modern and ancient imperialism is one of degree, not kind?

Surely the urge to acquire land and resources, human and material, by force is, in at least some sense, common to all?

Historically, the literature produced in all these structures, has reflected their imperial situation.

Human nature has rarely refused the benefits that empire accrues, and this is as true for the ancient Athenian tragedians and comics as for Austen or Dickens.

The Arabian nights assumes imperial power structures (Scheherezade is a queen, for heaven's sake!).

The mercantile adventures of Sinbad the sailor assume a right to sail and trade in a wider Islamic empire: surely Dombey and Son, whom Said singles out for this assumption, are not alone in this.

Similarly, Aristotle's Politics assume and justify an inherent Hellenic right to rule the world and, as the traditional tutor of Alexander the great, Aristotle could be said to have played his part in establishing the 'legitimacy' of the Hellenistic empire (including, ultimately, the province of Syria Palaestina, the origin of Said's native 'Palestine').

Indeed, some of Aristotle's arguments later appear in Islamic literature.

Said leaves himself open to the charge of applying a universal principle in a highly selective and partisan manner.

To pursue his own agenda, Pro Palestinian Arab and culturally Islamic, he has criticised modern European literature but left the culture of, say, imperial Islam unscathed.

His work is undoubtedly worth reading as a catelogue of the many evils of modern European empires committed against subject non Europeans.

It is also, as far as I am any judge, a comprehensive survey of postimperial and postcolonial indigenous literary and historiographical responses to empire and its ravages.

Said's partisanship is understandable.

Yet, one cannot help but feel, as a work of universal merit, it is flawed and one sided.

Said (Columbia Univ.) is internationally recognized as a scholar with exceptional insight on wide-ranging cultural phenomena. Here he brings the same skills exhibited in his widely heralded work Orientalism (CH, Apr'79) to bear on the age of imperialism. Said makes extensive use of literary masterpieces, intermingling them with a solid understanding of political developments, to present an interesting and original view of the pervasive legacy of imperalism. He sees the impact of imperialism as a "consolidated vision" of the sort Kipling had in mind when he spoke of the "white man's burden." Set against this Eurocentric view were the thoughts and writings of indigenous peoples who struggled valiantly, even as decolonization was in progress, to retain and reassert their own distinct cultural identity. Said's scope is wide; his arguments deep. Yet this book is one that no serious student of modern empire can afford to ignore. Those who seek greater understanding of today's interaction between the West and the Third World cannot overlook its message of the true oneness of the human community.

This work is one of Edward Said's best , in fact, Culture and Imperialism is better than Orientalism. The overarching theme is the interconnection between culture and society be it in the past or the present. His aim is not to disparage the West but to show how one's identity is more or less determined by one's relationship with the Other ( the third world). His obeservations on this relationship, the other and the west is quite enlightening. Contrary to what have been written, this is not an apologia for Islamicism ( Islamic Fundamentalists), he is indeed critical of fundamentalists of any stripe. Said is a secularist so it would be nonsensical for him to support a fundamentalist government. While he is critical of the West(rightfully so), he does acknowledge the undemocratic nature of Middle Eastern governments. His love for liberty and justice convinces the reader that he is sincere in his condemnation of Islamicism. This book is needed to be read carefully but once you're done reading you'll be glad to have done so.
[....]

Edward W.Said's Culture and Imperialism explores seemingly difficult areas of postcolonial discourse with consummate ease, carefully and clearly definining terms and writing an utterly convincing piece. As with all of his texts, Culture and Imperialism's main strength is in the conviction of the writer as he puts forward his claims. An invaluable tool for those approaching Postcolonialism, Culture and Imperialism is quite possibly the most illuminating piece of writing I have considered. A fine text, and one of immeasurable usefulness.

In Culture And Imperialism American professor and lecturer Edward W. Said addresses the obscure and hitherto overlooked subject of the culture of the empire. More specifically, Said connects the previously dotted lines of culture, literature and the intelligentsia with colonization and subsequently racism.
The concept is both valid and largely original: imperialism has traditionally been associated with politics and economics and not so much with culture. The direct connection is elucidated given Said's definition of Imperialism (p.9) as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory." The book discusses the hubris inherent in Western attitude towards its own supposed superiority, a discussion in which the works of mainstream writers like Conrad, Austen and Kipling figure prominently. The author argues vehemently that a cultural work of fiction can be imperialistic - intentional or not.
The book is indeed thought-provoking and free of nostalgia and hostility. Having said that much of the prose is shrouded in unnecessary convoluted writing. The notions put forth are not easily digested and not necessarily because of the novelty of the topic, but also the heavy-handed and complex text.
As such, Caveat Lector!

Who cares about the persecution of Christians? Historically, Christianity has persecuted and killed more people than any other religion on earth (crusades, spanish conquests, protestants vs. catholics, etc.) I think Western Christians have a serious problem with self-examination, and it needs to be addressed. Just look at the reviews of this book, Said is trying to make a valuable connection between literature and our beliefs; he is not condoning terrorism, give me a break.

Edward W. Said teaches comparative literature at Columbia University. A few years ago, he made news when a published photograph of Professor Said hurling a stone at Israeli soldiers -- a symbolic act of Palestinian solidarity and protest, he later claimed -- caused embarrassment to his employer. Said is a man of learning and strong views. Unfortunately, the learning is largely absent from this attenuated book written in a convoluted style, even as the views come through all too clearly: the author despises imperialism.

"We need a different and innovative paradigm for humanistic research," he writes (312). Perhaps so. Yet Said's suggested paradigm has little to do with research and even less to do with the humanities. Nor is it particularly new or different. Like a Victorian interpreter of Zeitgeists, he reduces literature (which, together with art and music, he calls "culture") to a pale reflection of (or, more tantalizingly, "counterpoint" to) the perceived political wisdom of its time. Thus, if the British pursued imperial designs on the Caribbean in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen's fiction must either reflect or react to that spirit or, at worst, purposely ignore it, and it is the duty of the critic, Said maintains over and over, to determine which. Such a paradigm, I believe, trivializes the study of literature and adds nothing to the study of imperialism. One might as well research the history of baseball by its reflection in baseball cards, or the psychology of force by its reflection in action comic books.

For all its length, Culture and Imperialism is an unconvincing synthesis and a too cursory analysis of Austen, Conrad, Dickens, Verdi, Rushdie, and Said's other primary sources.

No serious literary scholar would now argue that literature is somehow independent of history or (in the anthropological sense) culture. Indeed, it is difficult to know what such an argument might mean. Thus there is hardly anything revolutionary about Said's basic premise. What Said seeks to do is to excavate the assumptions which his chosen texts work with and which they either reproduce or attempt to question. Thus he, situates Conrad's work within the context of imperialism - a familiar enough move. More interesting is his analysis of Mansfield Park and its silent assumption of a certain imperial space. In analysing these texts, Said refutes those uncomprehending old style critics who protest that the texts are not "about" imperialism or whatever, since we are dealing here with the ASSUMPTIONS on which the texts are based. That a text can not be "about" its own assumptions or conditions of possibility is (as Said shows)little more than a truism. It is from these simple truisms that Said begins. His actual analyses, though,
often lack rigour and real knowledge. His essay on Yeats is largely silent about the particularities of Yeats' Ascendancy background. The concept of the "anti-colonial" writer effaces the particularities of Yeats' class status and his problematic relation to Nationalism. There are many other criticisms I could make. Nonetheless, this is an interesting book....

Culture and Imperialism deals with western literature primarily. That and an Italian opera. Austen, Conrad, Yeats, Camus are each given considerable attention as especially pertinent examples of how culture has either collaborated with or attempted to counteract the influence of colonialism. Austen is the least obvious choice and perhaps the least satisfying part of the book. To many the debate about colonialism was initiated(at least in literature)with the publication of Heart of Darkness. That work has been ably analyzed by many Conrad scholars, Said does not really challenge existing scholarship but he expresses his dissappointment that Conrad did not seem capable of imagining a political alternative to colonialism. I think it is important to point out that there were Englishman at the time of the writing of Heart of Darkness that were politically outspoken against colonialism (Roger Casement)as well as opponents to colonialism as far back as 1787(Edmund Burke). My point being that Conrad was a novelist and he is describing the physical realities of colonialism that he saw firsthand and he obviously saw it as a horrendous and inhumane affair. Others were more suited than he to make the case against colonialism in the courts. Conrad made his case in a book.
Said examines Yeats in the context of Irelands national struggle for independence. Yeats explored Irelands past and integrated its particularly Irish mythology into his poems. By doing so he reconnected Ireland to its own past and a sense of its own identity. This is perhaps one of the more satisfying sections of the book illustrating plainly that one of the ways an empire maintains control over a colony is by divorcing it form its own past and history.
Camus was a figure at odds with his times. Most of his contemporaries disagreed with him about Algeria. He imagined an Algeria that would be ruled jointly by both the French and the Algerians which is not too surprising given the fact that Camus was himself a Frenchmen who spent his childhood in Algeria. I think Camus is a fascinating and perhaps conflicted figure and perhaps a better author(where conflict does not always have to be resolved) than political thinker. He wanted compromise and consolodation for both the nation and himself. Said however doesn't approach Camus in this way, in fact, he doesn't seem sympathetic at all with the autobiographic element in Camus' work which he finds to have anti-Arab elements in it. I don't agree with that. He grew up poor and fatherless and he loved the North African landscape to which he remained attached his whole life. His sympathies were with the poor Bedouins and he did not trust either the communist left nor the nationalist movements of the right. Any interpretation of Camus' work which focuses exculsively on the political is going to be a narrow one and discount all those unresolved elements that make his work so confounding and so fascinating.
The figures discussed here are all interesting but Saids approach which focuses exculsively on extracting the political import of each author is not in my opinion the best possible approach for these authors. Literary work is never reducible to a few political principles & polotics in literary works is never without ambiguity and irony. Which means extracting a discernable political postion from a complex work is not really possible nor really to be desired. Art asks questions which is what Said is good at too. I think Said wants art to be more specifically political than it often is so his natural tendency is to make as much as he can out of whatever evidence he finds and build arguments by overloading what is sometimes pretty scant evidence with disproportionate significance. As a result you get lopsided views of these authors. So if you want a balanced assessment of any of these authors Said is not your man and this is not your book.

This is an excellent book covering the power of literature to form and maintain ideological control over cultures, history, and people. In fact, the wide range of opinions about this book expressed here among the amazon customer reviews points to just how real this kind of control can be. Your position in the world will affect your reading of this book. But really that's Said's point. And it is true of whatever you see and read. Being entirely objective probably is asking too much of anyone, but opening yourself to the opinions and experiences of others is not asking too much. There's more than just a little that is valid and true in this book even if it is not immediately true for you. How Western literature, words, and ideas have affected other non-western lives is real. Here's the proof. Everyone needs to be aware of these relationships and this book does make a sound argument for that awareness.