Cultural Imperialism by Edward Said

Alfred A. Knopf, 380 pages; (1993)

HOUR, 23 June, 1993

Cultural theory makes one think of words post-modernistically strung together making little or no sense. Unfortunately, Montreal is a world center for this sort of material. So, to read Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism is a welcome relief from the post-modernists who are umbilically connected to their Parisian masters.

Culture and imperialism confronts critics and ideological systems for not connecting literature with the woof and warp of British and French colonial expansion. Said shows how novels by Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, Albert Camus, André Gide, James Joyce, etc. are inextricably linked to the expansion of empire; for the empire inadvertently needed the novel and its cultural practice, in part, to make the periphery understandable to London and   Paris: "For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire...."

When a novel narrates overseas expansion, it helps to consolidate empire, even if the novel itself is anti-colonial in feeling. On this complex theme, Said has lots to say about E.M. Forster's Passage to India and about Camus, who is usually taught without an explanation of Algeria's war for independence (1954-62). Camus' work, we were told, was about the "human condition." But now we know that that wasn't all: Camus indirectly and directly played a cultural role in the strengthening of the French presence in Algeria. Said's treatment of La Peste is generous to Camus on many levels, but his reading changes the old appreciation once and for all.

Even if it transpires against imperial cultural culture, the process of novel-writing is somehow complicitous with it. Conrad's lived experience denied him access to the subjects of the Great British venture. He could write only about what he knew firsthand, although one can feel his deep resentment about what he knew and how he knew it. Too, Camus' Arab characters transpire behind the Europeans, decreasing their narrative value and making his practice much less forgivable than Conrad's for, in away, Camus was much closer to the fire of liberation than Conrad.

According to Said, Conrad would have been more of an anti-imperialist, but for the lack of alternatives to "The Great Game" Conrad was limited to a reluctant acceptance of London and its mission civilisatrice. Creative nationalist anti-colonial thinking of course came afterwards, during decolonization. Said extends the embryonic work of Frantz Fanon (Les damnes de la terre, 1961): the concept of nationalism is elegantly shredded. Some of Quebec's intellectuals should read Said's reflections on this current-day disease.

The nice thing about Said is that he is not dismissive of Austen, Kipling, Verdi, et al.: it would be mindlessly easy to dismiss these writers from the perspectives of today. He looks at culture not just as an isolated artifact but as something which was/is contrapuntal to the Great Plunder.

"The reason we can see that so clearly is that since Kim was written, India has become independent, just as since the publication of Gide's The Immoralist and Camus' The Stranger

Algeria has become independent of France. "To read these major works of the imperial period retrospectively arid heterophonically with other histories and traditions counterpointed against them, to read them in the light of decolonization, is neither to slight their great aesthetic force, nor to treat them reductively as imperialist propaganda."

This kind of analysis is a development over Said's Orientalism (1978) - a work which made the anti-Orientalist machine hum in the Occidental mind.

On Austen's Mansfield Park, Said writes: "...[she] belonged to a slave-owning society, but do we therefore jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery? Not at all, I would argue, if we take seriously our intellectual interpretative vocation to make connections...above all, to see complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that elucidates and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history."

Culture and Imperialism has an extremely erudite passage on Verdi's Aida as it was performed in Cairo during the last century. A literary critic and an expert on music and its political history? The spectrum of this book is impressive.

The concluding sections extend the literature of decolonization and addresses pitfalls of thinkers like Michel Foucault. There is a lovely sustained attack on the airiness of postmodernists. Said shows how, in the post-imperial age, cultural identities have many layers and cannot be nailed down into any super-determined single frame. "Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting points...." And what started this multidimensional process off? Was it not the imperial venture?