Culture and Imperialism

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I found Said's interpretations so compelling that after completing this book I read the Kipling and Conrad works, prepared to get an extra amount of pleasure from doing so. The very notion today seems like a crumbling relic, imperialism being a code word for a long dead political project, a yellowing photograph of Rhodes and Stanley sitting strident as Atlas over Africa, comes to mind whenever the term is brought up.

The last part is the most interesting one re: modern day imperialism (read: early 1990s) and American ascendancy to global hegemony. Said surveys several canonical works to argue that they support imperialism by the way they ignore or amplify certain narratives including works of Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Giuseppe Verdi and Albert Camus. Moreover, how does mainstream culture with all of its media, arts, literature and supposed-morality take over the world? To be aware of this fact, it is necessary, according to Said, to look at how colonialists and imperialists employed "culture" to control distant land and peoples.There are four essays that consider Said’s career and criticism, in addition to Sprinker’s brief and informative introduction. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden. That was even written before the post-9/11 hell broke loose, but the gist, especially the North-South divide, unfair trade practices, IMF free market crap, aid and debt traps remain so very, very relevant.

Chapter 3, which was one of the best things I have read in a long time, covers a vast expanse: from Yeats to CLR James, from Fanon to Ranajit Guha, from Chinua Achebe to Aimé Césaire.Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism is a good example of this. Said emerges in this, as in his other work, as one of the most erudite, sophisticated, and (perhaps most importantly) profoundly humane thinkers of the past century. Each sentence in this book is crafted from a large vocabulary to convey exactly what the author intends. Where the book gets more morally complicated though is in dealing with the different phases of the colonizer’s reaction to imperialism and particularly the revolutionary violence and subsequent oftentimes very oppressive regimes it engenders. and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture; then, in turn, imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture.