Culture and Imperialism

“What I have tried to do is a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience, and I have kept in mind the idea that the earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.”

This quote implies that all peoples everywhere are implicated in the imperial project. Said suggests that in order to move beyond the facts of imperialism, cultural, political, and literary scholars must acknowledge the idea that there must be such a thing as a global community wherein people from different places can contribute with equally weighted voices. This also gestures to the fact that this struggle is not just a military one but also one “about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (7).

“At a time when the older filaments and organizations that bound pre-modern societies internally were beginning to fray, and when the social pressures of administering numerous overseas territories and large new domestic constituencies mounted, the ruling elites of Europe felt the clear need to project their power backward in time, giving it a history and legitimacy that only tradition and longevity could impart.”

This is another way in imperialism justifies itself. Said uses the example of the celebration of Queen Victoria’s official enshrinement as “Empress of India”: Her Viceroy participated in numerous “traditional” Indian festivals and activities, as if Queen Victoria and her British subjects had been as much a part of these traditions as the Indians themselves. By the logic of this effective propaganda, her rule must be legitimate because the British are integrated into India’s long cultural history.

“Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination.”

Although Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, takes into account the futility, brutality, and cruelty of the imperial mission, Conrad does not give any narrative space to the African point of view or provide any real understanding of African culture. The indigenous natives are “unintelligible” and diseased, and their only hope lies with a more enlightened imperial ruler than Kurtz and his ilk. This imperial trope—that the natives can only be saved with European imperial intervention—recurs throughout 19th and 20th century literature.

“More particularly, the extraordinary formal and ideological dependence of the great French and English realistic novels on the facts of empire has also never been studied from a general theoretical standpoint. These elisions and denials are all reproduced, I believe, in the strident journalistic debates about decolonization, in which imperialism is repeatedly on record as saying, in effect, You are what you are because of us; when we left, you reverted to your deplorable state; know that or you will know nothing, for certainly there is little to be known about imperialism that might help either you or us in the present.”

Said observes the lack of acknowledgment regarding the deforming effects of imperialism, both within cultural productions and within the project of nationalism. This allows for both the canon and the geopolitical map to remain stagnant, with a continuous privileging of metropolitan voices and silencing of indigenous ones. If, however, contemporary scholars begin to uncover how imperialism is at the root of cultural disenfranchisement and failed nationalisms, then there might be a pathway toward a more equitable and liberated future. The above narrative only reframes the ideological position of the “civilizing mission.”

“To speak of comparative literature therefore was to speak of the interaction of world literatures with one another, but the field was epistemologically organized as a sort of hierarchy, with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures at its center and top.”

Said argues that the academic field of comparative literature was never truly a comparative endeavor. Rather, it was a reinforcement of the imperial ideologies that suggest Europeans lay claim to cultural refinement while Others should hope only to mimic European culture. This hierarchy creates a canon that leaves out the experiences, history, and culture of billions of people across the globe.

“Culture is exonerated of any entanglements with power, representations are considered only as apolitical images to be parsed and construed as so many grammars of exchange, and the divorce of the present with the past is assumed to be complete.”

Said points to what he sees as the complicity of academics and critics in furthering the notion that imperialism—and the very real injustices it engenders—is separate from productions of cultural value like the novel. Many argue that culture should not be studied as a political enterprise, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. This allows imperialist ideologies to flourish without resistance.

“In all of these instances the facts of empire are associated with sustained possession, with far-flung and sometimes unknown spaces, with eccentric or unacceptable human beings, with fortune-enhancing or fantasized activities like emigration, money-making, and sexual adventure.”

These examples illustrate some of the many tropes about empire. The privileged Europeans of the metropolitan centers travel to the marginalized frontiers in order to make their fortunes (as in Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”), to participate in activities that would be taboo at home (as in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky), to inscribe their own identity onto vast and unknowable lands (as in Camus’s The Stranger), and so on. In literature of this era, the colonized margins, and their infantilized, exoticized, or animalized inhabitants, exist for the benefit and pleasure of the European traveler or colonizer.

“The old organic rural communities were dissolved and new ones forged under the impulse of parliamentary activity, industrialization, and demographic dislocation, but there also occurred a new process of relocating England (and in France, France) within a much larger circle of the world map.”

This describes the backdrop against which Jane Austen was writing at the close of the 18th century. The traditional English country estate was experiencing a transformation via the internal forces that will eventually lead to the rise of a middle class and also because the facts of empire have begun to write themselves onto the English landscape. Mansfield Park is dependent on England’s centrality to the worldwide project of imperialism, wherein wealth is amassed and moral character is defined through and against the sugar plantations of the colonized margins.

“All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or in some way control them. Yet not all cultures make representations of foreign cultures and in fact master or control them. This is the distinction, I believe, of modern Western cultures.”

Said acknowledges that the process of defining the Other—those outside the viewer’s or reader’s own cultural experience—happens across cultures all over the globe. To define something or someone, one must also know what it is not. This is captured in the axiom that barbarians must exist for the Greeks also to exist. However, there was something unique about the Western imperial project in that it physically codified these opposing identities into structures of power and domination that still define relationships between cultures around the world.

“The cultural machinery—of spectacles like Aida, of the genuinely interesting books written by travelers, novelists, and scholars, of fascinating photographs and exotic paintings—has had an aesthetic as well as informative effect on European audiences. Things stay remarkably unchanged when such distancing and aestheticizing cultural practices are employed, for they split and then anesthetize the metropolitan consciousness.”

Said suggests that exoticizing spectacles and tales from the colonized margins provide Europeans with information—inflected by the imperial gaze—while rendering that information in apolitical ways. The beautiful or exotic images serve as the only representations the metropolitan viewers have of the Other; thus, the facts of subjugation or domination are elided. Only the aesthetically acceptable vision of imperialism is passed along.

“One is that, whether we like it or not, its author [Kipling’s Kim] is writing not just from the dominating viewpoint of a white man in a colonial possession, but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature. Kipling assumes a basically uncontested empire.”

metropolitan centers that it functions unchallenged and uncriticized. Imperialism becomes its own self-serving and self-perpetuating ecosystem. This is not a political system carried out by individuals; it is a systemic form of power and dominance that encompassed every facet of both the colonizer and the colonized native’s existence. Said’s project is to reveal the role that imperialism played in cultural production and to challenge the notion that it was ever uncontested. Knowing that Kipling published Kim a mere 44 years after the Indian Mutiny and 46 years before Indian independence, it is ironic that Kipling and his contemporaries believed resistance to the British empire was nonexistent or invisible.

“After all India itself is responsible both for the local vitality enjoyed by Kim and the threat to Britain’s empire.”

This is one of the paradoxes of imperialism: The geographical space and the native inhabitants that make the empire possible are at the crux of the threat to its survival. In the case of Kim, the “pleasures of imperialism” in which Kim partakes include the exploration of the vast geographic space of India and the participation in the Great Game of espionage—wherein two imperial powers, England and Russia, vie for dominance. The fact that he does this with impunity indicates how deeply the ideologies of empire pervade Kipling’s fiction; the threat is silenced and moved off the page.

“At the apex of high imperialism early in [the 20th] century, then, we have a conjunctural fusion between, on the one hand, the historicizing codes of discursive writing in Europe, positing a world universally available to transnational impersonal scrutiny, and, on the other hand, a massively colonized world. [...] For the colonizer the incorporative apparatus requires unremitting effort to maintain. For the victim, imperialism offers these alternatives: serve or be destroyed.”

This is part of the “consolidated vision” of which Said speaks, wherein ideologies and systems, including culture, become part of an all-pervasive empire. History, literature, politics, economies, and governance are all components of the project of empire. It is difficult to maintain, so diffuse is its “apparatus.” This also reveals how discrepant experiences work in the time of colonialism: It is the same empire for each, engendering vastly different experiences.

“The irony is that wherever in his novels or descriptive pieces Camus tells a story, the French presence in Algeria is rendered either as outside narrative, an essence subject to neither time nor interpretation […], or as the only history worth being narrated as history.”

Without the French, Said suggests, Algeria has no legitimate history according to the imperial perspective from which Camus writes. Camus’s rendering of that presence also legitimizes the French imperial intervention within Algeria’s borders: It has always and will always be there as an atemporal phenomenon, and it requires no explanation nor interpretation. This is reminiscent of the example above regarding Queen Victoria’s transformation into Empress of India: The British presence is depicted as inseparable from Indian history and, by extension, inseparable from its future destiny.

“I would like to suggest that many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society and culture, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium.”

Modernism has usually been interpreted as a reaction to the devastation of World War I, as disabled and “shell-shocked” veterans returned home and tried to reintegrate into society. One might even suggest that the notion that war was a “world” event is a misnomer, given that it was a war fought almost exclusively by Europeans on European soil. Most critics point to the formal techniques of modernist art and writing as a response to the cultural upheavals of the war. However, Said argues that at least some of the innovations and preoccupations of the modernists were the result instead of influences and brewing resistance in the foreign colonies.

“[T]he empire never gives anything away out of goodwill. It cannot give the Indians their freedom, but must be forced to yield it as a result of a protracted political, cultural, and sometimes military struggle that becomes more, not less adversarial as time goes on. Similarly, the British, who in holding on to empire are part of the same dynamic; their attitudes can only be defended until they are defeated.”

Said suggests that the notion of resistance, both ideological and actual, must be incorporated into the idea of empire. The ruling authority must be challenged in order to affirm its identity—just as there must be barbarians for there to be Greeks—until it is challenged to the point at which it relinquishes its identity. As in the above example about India, resistance is both the source of imperial power and the central threat to that power.

“That is the partial tragedy of resistance, that it must to a certain degree work to recover forms already established or at least influenced or infiltrated by the culture of empire.”

As with the paradox of empire, the paradox of resistance is that it must work within the established framework of imperialism. This leaves it two choices: to appeal to nativism, an essentializing ideology of identity and an imagined pre-imperial culture that is “pure”; or to create a nationalism that effectively repeats the same structure of power that was inherent to imperialism. Said later argues that there is a third alternative—that of liberation—by which an anti-imperial culture celebrates migratory, hybridized histories and identities that traverse borders, ignore national boundaries, and accept an impure, interdependent vision of culture.

“But we have evidence of its ravages: to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself.”

Nativism reproduces the hierarchy of power and authority that is the hallmark of empire. It pits Self against Other, creating divisions within societies. This has been witnessed throughout the formerly colonized world, wherein essentialized identities split what could be alliances. Examples include the Hindu nationalism that has given rise to the BJP political party, which works to exclude and disparage Muslims.

“The voyage in, then, constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work. And that it exists at all is a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures. No longer does the logos dwell exclusively, as it were, in London and Paris.”

The “voyage in,” as Said coins it, is the process by which post-colonial writers begin to talk back to the empire, emphasizing their discrepant experiences of the imperial project. The work of these post-colonial writers dismantles prevailing ideas about empire, culture, and the role of the formerly colonized places and peoples. The metropolitan centers of London and Paris are no longer the only sources of reasoned analysis and argument; their privileged positions are being deposed by marginal voices. Instead of an imperial monologue, Western culture becomes a mixed dialogue.

“The basic premise of this analysis is that although the imperial divide in fact separates metropolis from peripheries, and although each cultural discourse unfolds according to different agendas, rhetorics, and images, they are in fact connected, if not always in perfect correspondence.”

Said emphasizes the idea of interdependence in his analysis of culture. Instead of a hierarchy of ideas and of authority, he envisions an interplay between and among “metropolis and peripheries.” This interconnectedness does not reproduce a monolithic vision of culture as projected by imperialism; rather, it produces a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives that all have in common the foundation of imperialism. This leads the way to an emerging discourse about imperialism itself that differs from the dominant narratives in the 19th century and most of the 20th century.

“The world cannot long afford so heady a mixture of patriotism, relative solipsism, social authority, unchecked aggressiveness, and defensiveness toward others. Today the United States is triumphalist internationally, and seems in a febrile way eager to prove that it is number one, perhaps to offset [domestic concerns].”

Among the domestic concerns Said mentions are poverty, healthcare, and education. While much has changed in the United States in the nearly 30 years since the book was published, his observation that unchecked patriotism reveals an anxiety about the strength of the domestic polity still rings true. As America’s position in the world is challenged by an emerging China, an ongoing hostility with the Arab world, and geopolitical conflicts that stretch resources, nativist rhetoric grows more strident, and insistence on America’s greatness more raucous.

“It is not only tired, harassed, and disposed refugees who cross borders and try to become acculturated in new environments; it is also the whole gigantic system of mass media that is ubiquitous, slipping by most barriers and settling in nearly everywhere.”

The proliferation of an American-centered international media which disseminates everything from American worldviews to “I Love Lucy” has worked to bring a neo-imperialist vision to the entire world—these days, in an instant. This consolidates authority yet again. Said describes how discussions regarding various groups from formerly colonized places—Sunni and Shi’ite, Hindus and Sikhs, Tamils and Sinhalese, Iraqis and Kurds—collapse into terms like “fundamentalist” or “terrorist.” The individual identities and discrete histories of different cultures become subsumed by one overarching and authoritative narrative. Note that Said is writing before the advent of social media.

“Thus the focus in the destabilizing and investigative attitudes of those whose work actively opposes states and borders is on how a work of art, for instance, begins as a work, begins from a political, social, cultural situation, begins to do certain things and not others.”

In contrast to the essentializing and homogenizing narratives discussed above, the post-colonial or anti-imperial scholar or writer acknowledges the specific circumstances in which their work is produced, disseminated, and interpreted. This resists the authoritative accounts of identity and culture, and its ultimate result is that it destabilizes the imperial discourse in favor of local, specific, and intersectional stories.