Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Culture and Imperialism

Since that day it has undergone countless changes of meaning in everyday usage, largely under the influence of Marxist-Leninist dogma. Not only has "imperialist" supplanted "imperial" as the adjective normally derived from "empire" but it has proceeded through a series of mutations, each more outlandish than its predecessor, until now it is no more than a husk of a word into which anyone may cram whatever tortured meaning he cares to. So it is with Edward W. Said, who in his new book subsumes under the heading "imperialism" virtually every contact Europe has had with the outside world since the eighteenth century. Not being an historian, he obviously feels himself absolved from any obligation to respect the imperatives of historical scholarship, and free to prosecute the Western world at will for the crimes he says it has committed against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Culture and Imperialism continues and broadens the attack Said launched a dozen or so years ago in Orientalism, which argued that the very study of the Middle East by Western scholars was an imperialist act, for it furthered the aims of imperial powers and contributed to Western perceptions of the Arabs as inferior and of Islamic culture as secondrate. Now he argues, more ambitiously, that not only did the West lay Africa and most of Asia under the imperialist yoke, but it also forced its culture, especially its literary culture, upon the African and Asian peoples, at the same time deriding or denigrating their indigenous cultures. However, as opposition to imperial rule grew, eventually finding expression in nationalist struggles for independence, a literature of resistance and liberation developed among the native intelligentsia and their sympathizers in the West, which ultimately neutralized the pernicious influence of imperialist literature and paved the way for the downfall of European dominion in Asia and Africa.
At least this is what I understand Said's thesis to be. His writing is so diffuse, obscure, and overwrought that it is difficult to make out what it is he is trying to say - even though he repeats himself ad infinitum throughout the book. Take, for instance, this passage, on British histories of India.
Whereas these official versions of history try to do this for identitarian authority (to use Adornian terms) - the caliphate, the state, the orthodox clerisy, the Establishment - the disenchantments, the disputatious and systematically skeptical investigations in the innovative work I have cited submit these composite, hybrid identities to a negative dialectic which dissolves them into variously constructed components. What matters a great deal more than the stable identity kept current in official discourse is the contestatory force of an interpretative method whose material is the disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above all overlapping streams of historical experience.
There are interminable acres of prose like this - muddled, inflated, impenetrable - which testify to nothing more than the author's awesome capacity for self-indulgence.
According to Said, the English novel was "immensely important" in the formation of imperial attitudes. "The novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other." A dubious proposition at best; but let it go. He chooses four novelists whose work for him embodies and promotes the ideas current in their day about the British Empire - Conrad, Kipling, Jane Austen, and Dickens. Conrad and Kipling one can understand, especially as they knew the East at first hand. But Austen and Dickens? It seems that by casually referring to Antigua in Mansfield Park Austen revealed that she had the empire in the back of her mind most of the time, that she was nevertheless indifferent to the condition of the subject peoples ("in Mansfield Park [she] sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half dozen passing references to Antigua"), and that she dodged facing up to her true responsibility to denounce imperialism and all its works.

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