Content area
Full text
Culture and Imperialism.
Edward Said. New York: Knopf, 1993. 380 pages.
In many ways Culture and Imperialism can be read as a continuation and expansion of Said's previous writings such as Orientalism (1978) and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). As in his earlier works, the starting point in Culture is a critique of culture perceived as "antiseptically quarantined from its worldly affiliation," a view which, Said contends, leads to a disjunction of the cultural realm from its connections to power. Nothing illustrates better, according to Said, the wordliness of culture than the works, in particular the novels, that originated in the modern Western empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Said goes on to show that the worldly affiliation of metropolitan cultural productions can be foregrounded through an analysis of their "structures of attitude and reference" and through the practice of "contrapuntal" reading, which consists in looking at the cultural archive "with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (51). The first half of the book illustrates the link between European literature and imperial ideology through a contrapuntal discussion of several Victorian and French novels as well as Verdi's Aida.
One fundamental problem in Said's analysis is his inconsistency in formulating the relation of the cultural and the political. On the one hand, Said seems to argue that European culture of the last two centuries is basically an imperial culture, hence his view that no area of experience was spared the unrelenting application of imperial ideology. Yet he also wonders how Western humanist ideas "which we still celebrate as having the power ahistorically to command our approval" could "[co-exist] so comfortably with imperialism" (81). By thus positing a separate existence of the two realms, Said is led later on in his reading of Malraux's La Voie royale to the remark that "as the work of an extraordinary European talent, it testifies so conclusively to the inability of the Western humanistic conscience to confront the political challenge of the imperial domains" (208). What Said does not acknowledge is precisely that Western humanism and imperialism are the two sides of the same coin as they...