Culture and Imperialism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1993

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction and Chapter 1

Chapter 2, Sections 1-4

Chapter 2, Sections 5-8

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Culture: From Authority to Hybridity

Said deconstructs the two terms in the title of his work, Culture and Imperialism. Culture, in Said’s view, “means two things in particular. First of all it means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms” (xii). This kind of culture is “aesthetic,” with the purpose of providing “pleasure” (xii). Second, Said indicates that “culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought” (xiii). Said is interested in particular forms of cultural production, specifically the novel, though he also looks at opera and theoretical criticism. While these definitions seem innocuous and devoid of political intent, Said quickly moves to destabilize what the reader might understand as culture, underscoring its participation in the project of imperialism:

Scarcely any attention has been paid to what I believe is the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience, and little notice has been taken of the fact that the extraordinary global reach of classical nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European imperialism still casts an extraordinary shadow over our times (5).

Said is not interested in examining cultural productions devoid of context; instead, his project is to reveal how culture supports a particular agenda with real-life consequences.

He exposes how imperialism undergirds the structures of class and manners that form even Regency-era England, prior to the ascendency of empire, through the figure of Jane Austen: Without sugar plantations in Antigua, the English estate in Mansfield Park would not be possible; the wealth and standards of supposed morality and decency rely upon the Other’s labor and status in far-flung colonies. It is not merely that Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth depends upon slavery and sugar; it is also that, in order to define what it means to be English, one must have something against which to define it. To paraphrase Said, without the barbarian, one cannot have the Englishman. In addition, in works like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the reader witnesses how the project of imperialism sets up the metropolitan center of England as the authority on history, geography, and culture itself. This has been replicated in the age of American dominance, as well.

Said wants instead to shift the reader’s perspective beyond the age of imperialism. This requires a re-imagining of culture itself: “Cultures are not impermeable; just as Western science borrowed from Arabs, they had borrowed from India and Greece” (217). This forces the imperial gaze to look elsewhere, reexamining works of literature to recognize how indebted they are to the colonized margins. As writers from formerly colonized places like Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka start to “write back,” they “brea[k] down barriers between cultures” and bring attention to the fact that culture is impure and hybrid. Said emphasizes this from the beginning of the book: “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxv). Said’s project is nothing less than the dismantling of the authoritative place that Western thought and the Western canon have occupied in cultural spaces for the last two hundred years or more. If this shift towards acknowledging culture as hybrid occurs, then “an emergent non-coercive culture” can be created (313). This culture would be inclusive rather than exclusive, polyphonic rather than authoritative, and interconnected rather than divisive. This culture would also not be limited to imaginative productions such as literature. It could become a broader geopolitical reality within which different societies could communicate and interact in more humane ways.

Imperialism: Ideological Imperative and Consolidated Authority

Imperialism, Edward Said argues, remains one of the most significant forces underlying the geopolitical and cultural maps of the world. His project, in Culture and Imperialism, is to show how imperialism influences culture and vice versa to justify its expansion, mission, and its authority. At its most basic, imperialism “means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on land owned by others” (7). Because this mission is necessarily contingent upon the consent of those in the dominant, imperial culture—not to mention the coercion of the natives in the distant land—imperialism relies upon an array of cultural productions and narratives that serve to bolster and sanction the project of empire—for example, the “civilizing mission.” Said reminds the reader that imperialism is dependent not merely on geographical control for its legitimacy; it is dependent on ideological imperatives—the idea of empire—and the consolidation of authority.

Said defines imperialism early in the book: “As I shall be using the term, ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory” (9). He quotes political theorist Michael Doyle who argues that “[e]mpire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence” (9). While Said touches upon all of these imperial endeavors, he focuses on the notion of “cultural dependence.” Throughout the book, Said mentions the ways in which colonial education—within the metropolitan centers and at the colonized margins—functions to support the idea that empire is both a civilizing force and a necessary corrective to the depredations of “native” culture. The whole idea is that the European centers must teach the foreign native how to live and how to think like a European. The imperial project is self-perpetuating.

In addition, Said writes, “Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control” (225). These acts of exploration, mapping, and naming are the exclusive province of the European colonizer, who possesses authority over the native subject. The term “authority” is used in two senses of the word: Europeans wield political power over the native, and they also narrate their history, sanctioning their cultural stories. The English Marlow narrates the indigenous African experience in Heart of Darkness; the Irish Kim narrates the mystical Indian experience in Kim; the Italian Verdi narrates the ancient, eroticized culture of Egypt in Aida. The indigenous voices are silenced until the movements for independence and decolonization.

Once post-colonialism is too large to be contained, these formerly marginalized voices talk back to the metropolitan center. Readers can then explore stories about the same historical events from very different perspectives. Said mentions several examples of post-colonial writers, including Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. When brought into the canon and into the academic conversation, these new narratives can engender what Said calls “an emergent non-coercive culture” (334). Resistance to empire has always been a fundamental part of the imperial project. Contrary to dominant European narratives, natives never willingly or wholly handed over their land and their self-determination. Said argues that examining both the facts of imperialism and the inherent resistance to it leads to a kind of liberation. As he writes, “All these hybrid energies [...] provide a community or culture made up of numerous anti-systemic hints and practices for collective human experience (and neither doctrines nor complete theories) that is not based on coercion or domination” (335). Embracing this view of culture will lead to a truly anti-imperial future.

Discrepant Experiences: From the Indian Mutiny to the American Century

Said’s notion of “discrepant experiences” relies on the understanding that the same historical event or cultural object can be seen from very different perspectives, particularly when imperialism is in the background. Said describes his method: “In juxtaposing experiences with each other, [...] it is my interpretive political aim (in the broadest sense) to make concurrent those views and experiences that are ideologically and culturally closed to each other” (33). Put another way, experiences of the exact same event are widely divergent, depending on which side of the imperial map the subject or character falls on. Said uses numerous examples throughout the book to illustrate how discrepant experiences, when analyzed together, give the reader and the scholar the clearest picture of how imperialism functions and how to move beyond the imperial project.

For example, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 reveals the fissures in understanding that existed between the English colonizers and the mostly native military that the British had assembled to police its empire. The root causes of the Mutiny are debated—it is said that a rumor circulated that the grease used on the soldiers’ weapons was, variously, pig fat (which would be sacrilegious to Muslims) or cow fat (which would be sacrilegious to Hindus). Regardless of the immediate cause, Said writes, “It was lost on none of the mutineers that numerically they vastly outnumbered their superior officers” (146). The Mutiny resulted in the loss of several British lives, including women and children, and the retaliation to the event was as brutal as could be expected in the age of high empire. Said points out that, in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, the writer has an Indian speak against the Mutiny, without noting the possibility that his indigenous compatriots might regard him as a traitor. In this way, Kipling eliminates “any chance of conflict appearing altogether” (148). This collapses the discrepant experiences into one imperial narrative—though any modern reader would be aware that, a short 46 years after the publication of Kim, India would be independent of the British empire. The resistance was already brewing in 1901.

For another example, Said turns to the American century and the lead-up to the Gulf War of 1991. Said illustrates how the American public easily supported the war, given the mass of “films and television shows portraying Arabs as sleazy ‘camel jockeys,’ terrorists, and offensively wealthy ‘sheikhs’” (36). Notably, this is written before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, after which these ugly trends only intensified. He continues by noting, “When the media mobilized behind President [George H.W.] Bush’s instructions to preserve the American way of life and to roll Iraq back, little was said or shown about the political, social, cultural activities of the Arab world” (37). The discrepant experience of the average Iraqi was conspicuously left out of the conversation about the moral rightness or wrongness regarding the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, as well as the subsequent American intervention to expel the Iraqi military from Kuwait.

Finally, one can see this notion working within literary forms themselves: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reinterprets Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with his book, The River Between. Thiong’o shunts the white interloper, in this case a misguided missionary, to the margins while bringing the previously unintelligible voices of the indigenous Africans to the forefront. He deliberately echoes the earlier novel’s pattern while “convey[ing] the unresolved tensions that will continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes no effort to contain” (211). Thus, Thiong’o juxtaposes the discrepant experiences of Marlow’s journey to the heart of the African jungle with protagonist Waiyaki fleeing the ravages of the imperial mission on the same river. Doing so reveals new truths, differing perspectives, and a broader narrative of the same historical and ongoing event that is imperialism.