Introduction to Culture and Imperialism – Edward W. Said

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM (1993)

Author:Edward W. Said (1935 ~ 2003)

Age:Contemporary

Quotations:

I want to begin with an indisputable fact, namely that during the nineteenth century unprecedented power, compared to which the power of Rome, Spain, Baghdad or Constantinople in their day were far less formidable, was concentrated in Britain and France and later in other Western countries, the United States especially.
By 1914, the annual rate by which the Western empires acquired territory had risen to an astonishing 247,000 square miles per year. And Europe held a grand total of roughly eighty five percent of the earth.
The economies were hungry for overseas markets
The United States experience was from the beginning founded upon the idea of an imperium.
there were distant lands to be designated “vital to American Interests”, to be intervened in and fought over
the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct.
As I shall be using the term–and I’m not really too interested in terminological adjustments–“imperialism” means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre that rules a distant territory. “Colonialism”, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.
That (imperialism) includes ideas that certain people and certain territories require and beseech domination
The vocabulary of classic nineteenth century imperial cultures in places like England and France is plentiful with words and concepts like “inferior” or “subject races”.
In the expansion of the great Western empires, profit, and the hope of further profit, was obviously tremendously important.
(an) almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior or less advanced people
A legacy of connections still binds countries like Algeria and India to France and Britain, respectively.
In Yugoslavia the United Nations is powerless, largely because of the will of the so-called permanent members of the Security Council, principal among them the United States.
The powerful are likely to get more powerful and rich, the weak less powerful and poorer. And Africa, of course, is living testimony of this fact.
The U.S., uniquely blessed with surpassing riches and an exceptional history, stands above the international system, not within it.
In Pakistan and Egypt, for example, contentious fundamentalists are led not by peasant or working class intellectuals, but by Western educated engineers, doctors and lawyers.
This new overall pattern of domination … a replication, reproduction of the old imperial order … is basically unstable
The people whose current status is the consequence either of decolonization … or major demographic and political shifts… constitutes a real alternative to the authority of the state.
A new critical consciousness, a kind of counter discourse to empire is needed. This can be achieved only by revised attitude to education.
we are mixed in with each other in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrated realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of our time.
It is one of the unhappiest characteristics of our age, to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons and exiles than ever before in history
Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a world scale.
not constantly to reiterate how our culture or country is number one, or not number one, for that matter. For the intellectual there’s quite enough of value to do without that.

Quotations inside the lecture:

V. G. Kiernan: / All modern empires imitate each other – they were hard at work settling, surveying, studying and of course ruling the territories under their jurisdiction.
Michael Doyle: / Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society … Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.
Kipling: / represented in his novel Kim, principally, but also in some of the short stories, and he has Indian characters say this, without the English, India would disappear.
Joseph Conard: / in Heart of Darkness says that the difference between us in the modern period, the modern imperialists, and the Romans is that the Romans were there just for the loot. They were just stealing. But we go there with an idea.
Franz Fanon: / Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their dues when they withdrew their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the foreign colonists have behaved in the underdeveloped world like nothing more than criminals.
Noam Chomsky: / But it’s an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty and self-determination, and the barbaric brutality of those who, for some reason, perhaps defective genes, fail to appreciate the depth of this historical commitment, so well revealed by America’s Asian wars, for instance.
Kennan: / believed his country (US) to be the guardian of Western civilization.
Richard Barnet: / The goal of US foreign policy is to bring about a world increasingly subject to the rule of the law. But it is the United States which organizes the peace and defines the law
Noam Chomsky: / The media plays an extraordinary role in “manufacturing consent” as Chomsky puts it, in making the average American feel that it is up to us to right the wrongs of the world, and the devil with contradictions and inconsistencies.
Eliot: / Easy commerce of the old and new, the common word exact and without vulgarity, the form of word precise but not pedantic, the complete consort dancing together.
reality cannot be deprived of “other echoes that inhabit the garden”
Anonymous: / Edward Said – champion of the disposed and displaced

Summary:

“Rise of the West” in 19th century and policies to maintain it. US experience founded on idea of “the right to command” and its connection with culture. Definition of Imperialism. (Reasons:) Not a simple act of accumulation but the cultural idea that “they” require “our” domination. Unlike Russia, England and France occupied distant territories. Illusion of improvement of inferior nations. After end of colonization, condemnation in colonized people and nostalgia in dominating culture – and imperialism does not ends at once. UN became Inadequate. Western ideological justification for domination in cultural terms. American brand of imperialism. Counter discourse to imperialism – revised attitude to education. Imperialism costs more than accumulation. Imperialism consolidated cultures. Intellectuals should struggle

Relevant Quotations:

Edward Said: /
  • Culture is “the learned, accumulated experience of communities, and it consists of socially transmitted patterns of behaviour”.

  • Take a young man from Gaza living in the most horrendous conditions – most of it imposed by Israel – who straps dynamite around himself and then throws himself into a crowd of Israelites. I’ve never condoned or agreed with it, but at least it is understandable as the desperate wish of a human being who feels himself being crowded out of life, and all of his surroundings; who sees his fellow citizens, other Palestinians, his parents, sisters and brothers, suffering, being injured or being killed. He wants to do something, to strike back.

  • It is very hard, for example, to justify the thirty four year occupation of the West Bank and Ghaza. It’s very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400, 000 settlers.

William Blake: /
  • The foundation of an empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more.

Camille Paglia – Washington Post: /
  • Said is a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete and political activist, an inspiring role model for a younger generation of critics seeking their cultural identity.

  • (His prose) is sober, stately, lucid and melancholy.

  • Literary criticism, which is struggling to bridge the gap between art and politics, has everything to learn from listening to Edward Said’s dialogue with himself.

Noam Chomsky: /
  • Edward W. Said helps us to understand who we are and what we must do if we aspire to be moral agents not servant of power.

Toni Morrison: /
  • Readers accustomed to the precision and elegance of Edward Said’s analytical prowess will not be disappointed by Culture and Imperialism.

John Pilger – New Statesman: /
  • Illuminating the imperial doctrine found in much Western culture – from Conard’s Heart of Darkness to the present day.

London Review: /
  • a brilliant, courageous and necessary book

NY Times: /
  • an urgently written and urgently needed synthesis of the work in the field.

The Nation: /
  • If Orientalism was Said’s Midnight’s Children, then Culture and Imperialism is his Satanic Verses, an epic of migration and metamorphosis

Nadine Gordimer: /
  • Edward Said is among the truly important intellectuals of our century.

Malise Ruthven: /
  • A man who has helped to illuminate our crisis-ridden world with its contradictions and complexities.

Interview – NY Times: /
  • There’s lots of talk these days about public intellectuals. Much of it is hot air. Edward Said is the real thing.

Culture and Imperialism:

  • Definitions
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  • Imperialism – Accumulation, ideology, attitude

  • English and French Imperialism – its impact
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  • Literature of dominating nations

  • Affect of imperialism and colonization
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  • Counter discourse of Imperialism

  • Rise of United States
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  • Culture of United States

  • Revised attitude to education needed

Style:

  • Grasping, Plain, Factual, Rational and scientific
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  • Balanced and Practical – Classical

  • Literary, Scholarly and Historical
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  • Tone is persuading but authoritative

  • Didactic
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  • Comparison & Argumentation

  • Precision and conciseness, aphoristic
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  • Sensuous and Humanitarian

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Compiled by: Zia Ullah Khan