Culture and Imperialism

Said defines the project of resistance as counter to the project of imperialism: “To achieve recognition is to rechart and then occupy the place in imperial cultural forms reserved for subordination, to occupy it self-consciously, fighting for it on the same territory once ruled by a consciousness that assumed the subordination of a designated inferior Other” (210). He continues by noting that this essentially means that the burden of the past—that inferiority and humiliation—is carried always by writers and scholars of the post-colonial era. He uses William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and in particular the character of Caliban, to illustrate the choices that post-colonial writers have. According to Said, these are particularly fraught choices in light of the fact that “[f]or natives to want to lay claim to that terrain is, for many Westerners, an intolerable effrontery, for them actually to repossess it is unthinkable” (212).

In the case of Caliban, he is the native inhabitant of the island to which the exiled magician Prospero now lays claim. Prospero controls both Ariel, a spirit who was freed by Prospero, and Caliban, usually portrayed as a deformed and unwilling servant to Prospero’s whims. Said presents the post-colonial writer’s choice as between that of Ariel—who “does what he is told willingly” and is “untroubled by his collaboration with Prospero” (214)—and Caliban. In the latter character, Said sees a way in which the formerly colonized “sheds his current servitude and physical disfigurements in the process of discovering his essential, pre-colonial self” (214). However, this pathway leads to nationalism—which Said fears is inherently destructive—and other forms of fundamentalism. Instead, “[i]t is best when Caliban sees his own history as an aspect of the history of all subjugated men and women, and comprehends the complex truth of his own social and historical situation” (214). Out of this emerges the themes of cultural resistance: insisting on the right to one’s own historical reality and cultural production; understanding that resistance itself is actually a way in which to “brea[k] down the barriers between cultures” (216); and moving away from nationalism toward the view that the global community is integrated and that “[c]ultures are not impermeable” (217).

Said sees in certain works, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, that this process has begun, as the voices from the margins speak back to the center. Rushdie’s book utilizes the cultural and actual history of both the West and the East in its complex and multilayered narrative. He also points to the women’s movements throughout the world as another example of how marginalized groups can mobilize and change the cultural discourse.

Said discusses the background of English colonial control of Ireland, which is not always recognized in the rhetoric surrounding the British empire since it involved two groups of “white” people. Nevertheless, as Said argues, the Irish cannot ever be British, and “[t]he idea of English racial superiority became ingrained” (222). This is due to many factors, one of which being that colonial education carried with it the purpose of promoting the superiority of the dominant, imperial culture. As nationalist ideas come into play, an awareness of this indoctrination comes to the fore, and the native begins to recognize “Western culture as imperialism” (225). Furthermore, Said illustrates how imperialism alters the actual geographical landscape of the colonized territory: First, the colonizer consciously changes the territory, aiming “to transform territories into images of what they had left behind” (225). Second, as capitalism comes into play, the colonized territory must be made profitable, and so the people themselves become commodities. Third, “colonial space must be transformed sufficiently so as no longer to appear foreign to the imperial eye” (226). This, Said argues, was successfully carried out in Ireland more so than in any other British colonial possession.

According to Said, all of these imperial actions explain the writing of Irish poet W.B. Yeats—even his later, mystical poems. As Yeats becomes more disillusioned with the state of affairs in Ireland, he returns to a mystical nativism that essentializes identity; he grapples with the notion that any modernity can be “civilized” (228) and “struggles” to define a pre-imperial community (232). Said argues that Yeats’s poetry has been used, perhaps erroneously, to warn “of nationalist excesses” (235). The idea expressed in “The Second Coming” that “things fall apart” implies that without centralized imperial control, nationalism devolves into a “frenzy” (235). However, Said takes a different tack, seeing colonialism itself—as in Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart—as the moment at which disorder actually breaks out. Said also argues that Yeats recognizes that nationalist violence cannot be the final answer in the struggle for decolonization. He contends, “Yeats’s prophetic perception [...] is, to my knowledge, the first important announcement in the context of decolonization of the need to balance violent force with an exigent political and organizational process” (235). Yeats’s work, though marred by his later allegiances to fascism, still provides the post-colonial scholar with an idea of how “cultural decolonization” can begin (238).

Said points out that “no matter how apparently complete the dominance of an ideology or social system, there are always going to be parts of the social experience that it does not cover and control” (240). Such it is with imperialism: Although the “emergence of opposition” is seen more clearly as colonies openly agitate for independence and the process of decolonization begins, its presence was always there. However, from the metropolitan perspective, “there was no overall condemnation of imperialism until [...] after native uprisings were too far gone to be ignored or defeated” (241). Still, the influence that the colonized margins had and still have upon the metropolitan centers is obvious: From the incorporation of non-European elements in the works of Picasso and Matisse to the emerging literature from post-colonial voices such as Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, the colonized margins have been at work to transform the cultural conversation taking place within the metropolitan centers. Said calls these efforts, particularly by writers and critics of the post-colonial moment, “voyages in” (244). According to Said, this process “constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work” (244).

Thus, Said contrasts the works of four scholars to show how the understanding of the post-colonial experience has evolved. The first two—C.L.R James’s The Black Jacobins and George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening—represent an early period in this voyage in, wherein the special position occupied by Western culture goes mostly unchallenged. James and Antonius provide a space in which non-Europeans can contribute their experience to how the project of imperialism and its dismantling affect the Other, while still working within the Western tradition. They explicitly challenge the notion that only the West has authority, and they present “alternative versions of [that authority], dramatically, argumentatively, and intimately” (248). Yet they are disappointed by nationalist movements and by the promise of post-colonization and potential harmony between the West and the rest of the world. Their very authority and authenticity arise out of their Western education and cultural influence.

In contrast, the other two works—Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal and S.H. Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native—belong to a later period of scholarship recognizing that the clash between the imperial center and the formerly colonized margins is ongoing and perhaps insurmountable. These works critique history rather than affirm it, as Guha strives to “dismantle imperial historiography” (254) and Alatas reveals the “myth of the lazy native [to be] synonymous with domination” (255). For these later scholars, independence—at least geographically speaking—has been achieved, so their work focuses on “the imperfections of the decolonizations, the freedoms and self-identity gained hitherto” (256). They speak as much to their compatriots on the margins as to the dwellers within the metropolis.

Still, for all their differences, Said notes that they all take the voyage in, and that “to Western professional scholars they seem to be written from the outside looking in” (258). Their work contributes to the larger discourse regarding imperialism, colonialism, post-imperialism, and decolonization, and how cultural forces participate in these processes in new and hybridizing ways. As Said observes, Texts are not finished objects”; rather, they are “notations and cultural practices” (259). Once marginal voices joined the cultural conversation, they “effectively took away the monopoly of discourse held by Eurocentric intellectuals and politicians” (261).

Said charts the progress of the post-imperial moment through the depredations of nationalism into the potentially hopeful future of liberation: Independence, and its attendant ideology of nationalism, is merely one step toward an anti-imperial future. In moving beyond nationalism, there must be “a pronounced awareness of culture as imperialism,” which marks “the end of Europe’s cultural claim to guide and/or instruct the non-European” (264). This movement must also look beyond the nationalist and essentialist ideas that have led to despotic regimes in formerly colonized places. There are paths to an anti-imperialist future that are more productive.

For this, Said turns to Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born philosopher, and his ground-breaking work, The Wretched of the Earth. In Said’s view, Fanon’s analysis “forcibly deforms imperialist culture and its nationalist antagonist in the process of looking beyond both toward liberation” (269). By liberation, he means an ideological liberation from the controlling narrative of imperialism, which Fanon saw repeating itself in nationalist politics: “Liberations is consciousness of self, ‘not the closing of a door to communication’ but a never-ending process of ‘discovery and encouragement’ leading to true national self-liberation and to universalism” (274). This kind of liberation recognizes the multiple connections that bind the former imperial centers with the formerly colonized margins, without privileging one perspective over the other. New scholarship, following Fanon’s lead, can bring about this liberation by acknowledging the continuing connection between European and non-European cultures, bound together by the facts of imperialism. By imagining a “utopian vision which reconceives emancipatory (as opposed to confining) theory and performance” (279), and by looking toward different sources that are “nomadic, migratory, and anti-narrative” (279), a new kind of authority may emerge.