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56 pages 1 hour read

Edward Said

Culture and Imperialism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1993

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Key Figures

Edward Said

Said, who died in 2003, is considered one of the founders of the academic field of post-colonial studies. His seminal work, 1978’s Orientalism, explores the ways in which the West’s dominant vision of the East produced cultural stereotypes that either romanticized or barbarized the Eastern native. While geographically obvious, Said points out that the “Orient” was no more real a place than the “Occident”; these were imagined communities that sanctioned the imperial control and colonial endeavor of the Western world over indigenous peoples in the Middle East, in particular. With Culture and Imperialism, Said expands his view to include the ways in which imperialism is inextricably linked with cultural productions, and he claims that imperialism itself is the central geo-political force that has mapped out—quite literally—the contours of the modern world. Culture, far from being an innocent repository of refined contributions to the nation-state, is implicated in the imperial project that subjugates Others and misrepresents their histories and societies.

Said is deemed one of the most influential critics and scholars of the 20th century. As a Palestinian-born and American-educated intellectual, Said brings to his scholarship a unique perspective: “Ever since I can remember,” he writes in the Introduction, “I have felt that I belonged to both worlds, without being completely of either one or the other” (xxvi). This insider-outsider’s perspective gives Said a distinctive insight into both the imperializing missions of the West and the resistant narratives of the rest of the world. As he repeatedly emphasizes, there never existed an empire without resistance, even if the facts of said resistance were often brushed aside in official versions of history. Said’s scholarship is overtly political, and he asks other intellectuals to challenge the status quo in the service of an interconnected and less conflict-riddled global community.

While Said utilizes numerous texts and evaluates several authors, both literary and critical, the following three figures are followed throughout the book. These provide Said with a critical framework for examining ideologies at the height of empire (Kipling), uncertainty in the face of the inevitable dismantling of empire (Conrad), and critical ideas about how a truly post-imperial era might be created (Fanon).

Rudyard Kipling

Nobel-prize winning English author Rudyard Kipling penned some of the late 19th and early 20th century’s most well-known fictional works, including The Jungle Book and “The Man Who Would Be King,” both made into classic movies. Kipling’s novel, Kim, while not as celebrated within American popular culture, is perhaps his most complex and most accomplished work. It is an enduring portrait of the British imperial presence in India, the so-called jewel in the crown. As Said notes, “Kipling not only wrote about India, he was of it” (133). Kipling was born there in the latter part of the 19th century at the height of the British imperial power. His work, particularly Kim, arises out of a complete confidence in the sustaining power and cultural superiority of England and its “civilizing mission.”

Kipling’s protagonist Kim provides Said with the perfect example of “The Pleasures of Imperialism”—the title of the section in which Said parses Kim at length. He is a liminal figure even within the context of Britain’s imperialism. Kim is an Irish subject of the broader empire who becomes a British agent for the espionage service that exists to secure British interests in foreign lands. Kim can “pass” as an Indian native, or he can reveal himself to be a white Sahib; this makes him the ideal negotiator to “knit [disparate societies] together into community” (140). Of course, Kim’s goals are inseparable from that of the British empire—Kipling himself is so much a product of it that he cannot see resistance even when it confronts him in the form of the Indian Mutiny. Kim’s unfettered ability to travel throughout the Indian subcontinent serves to reinforce the ideological notion that he—and, by extension, the empire—belongs there. As Said rhetorically asks, “Isn’t it possible in India to do everything? be anything? go anywhere with impunity?” (159). Kim represents the cultural sanctioning of the imperial project at its apex.

Joseph Conrad

In contrast to the imperial insider, Kipling, Joseph Conrad is a consummate outsider. Born in Russian-occupied Poland, Conrad writes in his second language, English. Said sees in Conrad something of the same exile character that he himself possesses: the ability, as an outsider, to interpret history and events from a different perspective than that of the more embedded insider. Thus, Conrad produces works like Heart of Darkness and Nostromo that examine the imperial project in more deeply troubling and critical ways. Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, wonders about the legitimacy and even the very point of empire. As Said suggests, “Conrad allows the reader to see that imperialism is a system” (xix) and that “Conrad was both anti-imperialist and imperialist, progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of overseas domination” (xviii). At the same time, “Marlow’s narrative takes the African experience as further acknowledgement of Europe’s world significance” (165). Without the Englishman Marlow to narrate the story that occurs in Africa, “there is no history worth telling, no fiction worth entertaining, no authority worth consulting” (165).

Thus, Conrad’s work represents a very different historical moment than Kipling’s: It ushers in the era of modernism, whose hallmarks are “extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony” (188). Conrad can see the flaws inherent in the imperial system, yet he cannot quite see what might exist beyond or outside that system. His African natives are silent or unintelligible; they have nothing yet to say to the metropolitan centers. Said also employs Conrad’s vision to presage the new American world order, the empire that cloaks itself in ideologies of freedom and patriotism: “Conrad saw Kurtz as a European in the African jungle and Gould [from Nostromo] as an enlightened Westerner in the South American mountains, capable of both civilizing and obliterating the natives; the same power, on a world scale, is true of the United States today” (323). Conrad’s work is critical of that power and how it is wielded, yet he cannot imagine a political or cultural authority emerging from anywhere else besides the West.

Frantz Fanon

Said also engages at length with the work of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose groundbreaking works Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are considered pivotal texts in the field of post-colonial studies. In contrast to Kipling and Conrad, Fanon was a colonial subject, a Black man born in the French West Indies. For Said, his work represents an alternative to the ideologies of imperialism that still dominate discussions of the West and the rest of the world even today. In particular, Fanon assists Said in making the case for liberation as an active response to the essentializing narratives of either imperialism or nationalism: “If I have so often cited Fanon, it is because more dramatically and decisively than anyone, I believe, he expresses the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation” (268). This “liberation” frees both the former colonial subjects and, ironically, the former colonial masters from essentializing notions of identity. It also envisions a new culture wherein interconnectedness is emphasized over authority and a hierarchy of importance. Liberation decentralizes the West but resists the urge to elevate other, indigenous identities to take its place.

Fanon’s work imagines the possibilities of a truly post-imperial culture that lies beyond the nationalism that arose after decolonization: “Fanon was the first major theorist of anti-imperialism to realize that orthodox nationalism followed along the same track hewn out by imperialism, which while it appeared to be conceding authority to the nationalist bourgeoisie was really extending its hegemony” (273). Fanon saw that nationalism, with its elevation of new voices of authority, still promoted a centralized authority, even if said authority was indigenous. For Said, true liberation from the codifying and authoritative narratives of imperialism can be gained only by disrupting power structures, whether emanating from the metropolitan centers or radiating back from the colonial margins.

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