Culture and Imperialism

Said, Edward W. (1993). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Introduction (xi-xxviii)

Said contests that culture and imperialism are interconnected by controlling power to either narrate or block other narratives from emerging. Said points out that culture is often associated with the nation or the state and becomes a source of identity, and a rather combative one within the context of religious and nationalist fundamentalism in the formerly colonized world. In this sense, "Western imperialism and Third World Nationalism feed off each other" (p. xxiv) writes Said. In particular observing an emergence of vigorous non-Western feminist scholarship, Said refutes the binary oppositions between imperialism and nationalism; instead, he focuses on new alignments across borders, nations, types and essences that challenge the static notions of identity and culture bounded by a supposedly unbroken tradition. He argues:

Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic. (p. xxv)

For Said, multiculturalism in the United State is a process of integration, not separation, of women, minorities and recent immigrants who had been excluded from the main group and now claim for a place in it, thus by no means to be feared.

Body

Said defines as 'imperialism' "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory" whereas colonialism a consequence of imperialism that implant settlements on distant territory (p. 9). He argues that, while direct colonialism has largely ended, imperialism lingers in a general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic and social practices.

Said describes the paradox of culture in the late twentieth century: whereas all nationally defined cultures aspire after sovereignty and dominance, these cultures come across national boundaries and assume many foreign elements, alterities and differences within themselves. Thus, people's cultural experiences are oddly hybrid and even contradictory.

There was scholastic intervention in developing the concepts of nation and its culture. Said notes that the parallel alignment between the rise of nationalism between 1745 and 1945 and the emergence of the Eurocentric Enlightenment under the alleged universalism. He writes, "when most European thinkers celebrated humanity or culture they were principally celebrating ideas and values they ascribed to their own national culture, or to Europe as distinct from the Orient, Africa, and even the Americas," (p. 44)

Lyotard and other post-modernists, however, criticize the impact of the Enlightenment, arguing that the modernity that the Western Enlightenment had aimed to achieve in fact failed. Said defines as post-modernism "the loss of legitimizing power of the narratives of Western emancipation and the enlightenment" (p. 57). Said states that it is an irony that Western societies enter post-modernism whereas simultaneously modernism is rediscovered in the formerly colonized world. For Said, modernism and post-modernism coexist today. Within this context, Said stresses that cultural experience or every cultural form is essentially hybrid and culture and experience should not be separated. This theoretical framework is important to Said because cultural dimensions of an imperial ideology precede its actual territorial accumulation world-wide. Thus, his focus is on formulating the relationship between empire and culture.