Culture and Imperialism

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ahmad argues, among other things, that said reproduces the very discourse that he seeks to elucidate and overcome; the western corpus of literature retains its primacy, the non-western is flattened into a discourse of 'colonial' and 'postcolonial' that obscures dynamics internal to a country's literature in favour of eternally tethering it to its relationship with the west; the reliance on a logic of humanism even as said tries to situate himself outside of humanism results in an ultimately liberal imaginary; the incoherence of a theory that at once tries to trace an east/west literary divide back to the literature of antiquity and insists on its emerging as part of a tool of colonialism rather than interrogating the incorporation of classical texts into the colonial imaginary.

One of the key messages here is that “power” is not really measured by the tanks and weapons but more importantly by literature and science. In obnoxiously simplified terms, he’s a ‘middle of the road’ guy, all about acknowledging both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in a work of art. In this series of essays, he "consider[s] it the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study.Said covers a broad area but only from a narrow perspective - that of the West being bad and non-Western cultures being its victims and morally superior.

Still, the book is interesting as a social document on the thinking of imperialism and culture of the time.I could not help thinking about what Edward Said would make of social media today: Would he perhaps have thought that an app like twitter only reinforces the regulation of public discussion and mainstream culture? I remember being completely blown away by Said's 'Orientalism' years ago, and this book, like that one, is less concerned with resolving every possible issue it brings up than with inaugurating and providing profound moral and aesthetic incentives for a massive intellectual mission. He also explores the ways in which imperialism has been represented in cultural productions, such as novels and films, and argues that these representations have often been used to justify and perpetuate imperialism. Said main doctrine is that through culture, the assumption of the divine right of imperial powers to rule is supported, that the institutional, political and economic operations of imperialism are nothing without the power of the culture that maintains them. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among the scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

In a wonderful metaphor, he sees the existence of anti-colonial revolt, the dissent of the Third World, and the "discrepant experiences" of the 'natives'- who would not have recognized themselves in Western accounts of the 'inferior races'- as introducing polyphony into the music of Western self-conception and identity. Culture and Imperialism concludes with an examination of the American empire that while abandoning the idea of placing colonies of settlers abroad retains the central idea that expansion of influence and capitalism across the globe is both good and just regardless of how it may be seen by those subject to domination. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. As the connection between culture and empire, literature has "the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging", which might contradict the colonization of a people.Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. The Foucauldian manner in which he excavates these materials is well suited, I’m only saddened that I’m not familiar with all the works he mentions (which I’m sure diluted my understanding of his thesis). Both Fanon and Foucault have Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Canguihelm, and Sartre in their heritage, yet only Fanon presses that formidable arsenal into anti-authoritarian service.