Culture and Imperialism
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
3.
How is political conflict directly represented in novels?
Edward
W. Said. Chapters on Conrad and Austen in Culture
and Imperialism.
Supporting References:
- Chomsky on Said!!! “The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism” Noam Chomsky. December 3, 2009.
- Blog notes: http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/said01.htm
- Troubled rebutal: http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_Warraq/Jane_Austen_and_Slavery/
- "Collapsing Frontiers: Conrad’s Modernist Prophecy for the British Empire" http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/english/undergrad/samples/conrad.htm
- Buchanan, Ian. "Orientalism." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 27 Aug. 2013
“Orientalism.
Traditionally, any form of scholarship or indeed fascination with the
Orient, meaning the countries generally referred to today as the
Middle East (but also encompassing the whole of North Africa, Turkey,
Pakistan, and the northern tip of India). Edward
*Said's book Orientalism: Western
Conceptions of the Orient (1978) transformed the term from a
relatively neutral, though obviously biased, name for a venerable
field of study dating back several hundred years, into an indictment
of bigotry and racism. Said's work emptied Orientalism of its
previously positive associations and connotations and put in their
place a long list of charges. Indeed, there are few critical
reversals of the meaning of terms as complete as Said's demolition of
Orientalism. His basic charge is that the Orient as conceived by the
Orientalists (primarily, but not exclusively, English, French, and
German) is a fiction of their own imagining bearing no resemblance to
the actual Orient, which as Said points out is a vastly complicated
region. He notes, too, that many of the most famous Orientalist
scholars never even visited the Orient, relying instead on
second-hand accounts of it, as though the actuality of the Orient did
not really interest them. This fictional Orient conjured up by
Orientalists is, Said shows (using the work of Michel
*Foucault as his inspiration), a discursive
production, a fantastic place that is the product of hundreds of
years of mystification, exoticization, and outright deception made
possible by the discrepant power relations between West and East. The
problem, he argues, is that the West's ongoing fantasy of the Orient
has real effects: insofar as the West understands the Orient as
backward, unenlightened, irrational, sexually deviant, unhealthy,
uninviting, and so on, it forms its politics accordingly (one has
only to recall Donald Rumsfeld's callous disregard for the looting of
Iraq's national museum following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to see
the consequences of this). In the 30 years since its publication,
Orientalism, has become a cornerstone of Postcolonial
Studies.”
- Buchanan, Ian. "Said, Edward." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Said and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Said,
Edward (1935–2003) US-based Palestinianliterary critic
and theorist and one of the founding figures of Postcolonial
Studies. An accomplished pianist, Said also
wrote extensively on music. Outside of the academy, Said was a
member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) from 1977 until
1991 (for which the FBI opened a file on him and kept him under
surveillance).
“Said was born in Jerusalem, then
part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His family were solidly
middle class, and at that time actually lived in Cairo. His father
was a businessman with American citizenship and his mother a
Nazarene Christian. Although primarily based in Cairo, the family
maintained a home in Talbiyah in West Jerusalem until 1947, and Said
lived ‘between worlds’. Talbiyah was incorporated into the State
of Israel following the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.
“In 1951 said was sent to boarding
school in the US. Thereafter he completed a BA and MA at Princeton,
followed by a PhD on Joseph Conrad at Harvard, which was published
in 1966 as Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography.
A year before he completed his PhD, he was appointed to a position
in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where
he remained for the rest of his life. His main theoretical
inspirations were Theodor
*Adorno (particularly with respect to music),
Antonio
*Gramsci, and Michel
*Foucault.
“Said's second book, Beginnings:
Intention and Method (1975) established him as part of the new
wave of literary critics (e.g. Paul de Man, J.
Hillis *Miller, and Gayatri
*Spivak) who advanced beyond, without
necessarily leaving behind, the established critical practice of
‘close reading’, and became known as practitioners of theory.
This was in many respects a transitional work for Said, for it was
not until his third book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the
Orient (1978) that he really found his true metier and with it
worldwide fame as one of the originators of postcolonial theory.
Orientalism
as Said conceives it is almost the complete opposite of the
traditional meaning of the term.
“Orientalism in the strictest sense
simply means any study of or fascination with the Orient, which
roughly speaking encompasses North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Northern Tip of India. Said's
argument is that Orientalism's study of the Orient conceives it as a
monolithic, undifferentiated region; but, more problematically, its
conception of the Orient is utterly phantasmal. As he points out,
many of the most famous Orientalist scholars never travelled to the
Orient and those that did arrived and departed with their all their
preconceptions and prejudices intact. He cites several purple
passages from Gustave Flaubert's Egyptian memoirs in support of his
thesis. Unsurprisingly, this thesis has its critics (notably Ernest
*Gellner, Bernard Lewis, and Aijaz Ahmad), and
it even divides opinion among those who basically support it.
Nonetheless as a way of thinking about the relation between culture
and power it has been enormously influential. Culture and
Imperialism (1993) furnishes the sequel to Orientalism,
extending its claims to literatures the other work did not consider.
“In the years following the
publication of Orientalism, Said immersed himself in
Palestinian politics and wrote a series of articles and books
describing the situation of the Palestinian people and decrying the
politics that had put them in that situation: The Question of
Palestine (1979), Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts
Determine how We See the Rest of the World (1981), and an
edited collection entitled Blaming the Victims: Spurious
Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988). Said favoured
a two-state solution and he resigned from the PNC in 1991 when it
became clear in the lead up to the Oslo accords that this was not
the agenda. After 1991, he wrote several more books on Palestine,
including The Politics of Dispossession (1994), Peace
and its Discontents (1996), and From Oslo to Iraq and the
Road Map (2003).
“In 1993, Said used the occasion of
the prestigious Reith Lectures on BBC Radio to reflect on his
situation as literary critic, cultural commentator, and political
activist in a series of talks he titled Representations of the
Exile (1994). He develops this theme further in his marvellous
memoir Out of Place (1999), written between treatments for
the leukaemia that would claim his life at the early age of 67.
Perhaps aware of his limited time, Said granted several book-length
interviews in this period, which offer terrific insights into his
life and work. He also devoted time to his other great passion,
music. He wrote a column for The Nation (a selection of
these pieces has been published as Music at the Limits
(2007), and gave the Wellek Library lectures on this topic as well,
published as Musical Elaborations (1991). More concretely,
he collaborated with Daniel Barenboim to create the West-Eastern
Divan Workshop. His last, unfinished book, fittingly enough, was On
Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2006).
‘Late style’ is Said's term for the aesthetic that develops when
an artist knows they have made it career-wise, that their reputation
is secure and they can relax enough to permit themselves to
experiment.”
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