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Culture and Imperialism (Vintage)
Books: Travel: Algeria: Item 3
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Culture and Imperialism (Vintage)by Edward W. Said
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32 of 59 people found the following review helpful: Austen, Conrad, Yeats, Camus....the political story, January 14, 2002 Reviewer:Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - Culture and Imperialism deals with western literature primarily. That and an Italian opera. Austen, Conrad, Yeats, Camus are each given considerable attention as especially pertinent examples of how culture has either collaborated with or attempted to counteract the influence of colonialism. Austen is the least obvious choice and perhaps the least satisfying part of the book. To many the debate about colonialism was initiated(at least in literature)with the publication of Heart of Darkness. That work has been ably analyzed by many Conrad scholars, Said does not really challenge existing scholarship but he expresses his dissappointment that Conrad did not seem capable of imagining a political alternative to colonialism. I think it is important to point out that there were Englishman at the time of the writing of Heart of Darkness that were politically outspoken against colonialism (Roger Casement)as well as opponents to colonialism as far back as 1787(Edmund Burke). My point being that Conrad was a novelist and he is describing the physical realities of colonialism that he saw firsthand and he obviously saw it as a horrendous and inhumane affair. Others were more suited than he to make the case against colonialism in the courts. Conrad made his case in a book. Said examines Yeats in the context of Irelands national struggle for independence. Yeats explored Irelands past and integrated its particularly Irish mythology into his poems. By doing so he reconnected Ireland to its own past and a sense of its own identity. This is perhaps one of the more satisfying sections of the book illustrating plainly that one of the ways an empire maintains control over a colony is by divorcing it form its own past and history. Camus was a figure at odds with his times. Most of his contemporaries disagreed with him about Algeria. He imagined an Algeria that would be ruled jointly by both the French and the Algerians which is not too surprising given the fact that Camus was himself a Frenchmen who spent his childhood in Algeria. I think Camus is a fascinating and perhaps conflicted figure and perhaps a better author(where conflict does not always have to be resolved) than political thinker. He wanted compromise and consolodation for both the nation and himself. Said however doesn't approach Camus in this way, in fact, he doesn't seem sympathetic at all with the autobiographic element in Camus' work which he finds to have anti-Arab elements in it. I don't agree with that. He grew up poor and fatherless and he loved the North African landscape to which he remained attached his whole life. His sympathies were with the poor Bedouins and he did not trust either the communist left nor the nationalist movements of the right. Any interpretation of Camus' work which focuses exculsively on the political is going to be a narrow one and discount all those unresolved elements that make his work so confounding and so fascinating. The figures discussed here are all interesting but Saids approach which focuses exculsively on extracting the political import of each author is not in my opinion the best possible approach for these authors. Literary work is never reducible to a few political principles & polotics in literary works is never without ambiguity and irony. Which means extracting a discernable political postion from a complex work is not really possible nor really to be desired. Art asks questions which is what Said is good at too. I think Said wants art to be more specifically political than it often is so his natural tendency is to make as much as he can out of whatever evidence he finds and build arguments by overloading what is sometimes pretty scant evidence with disproportionate significance. As a result you get lopsided views of these authors. So if you want a balanced assessment of any of these authors Said is not your man and this is not your book.
Product Review
Edward Said makes one of the strongest cases ever for the aphorism, "the pen is mightier than the sword." This is a brilliant work of literary criticism that essentially becomes political science. Culture and Imperialism demonstrates that Western imperialism's most effective tools for dominating other cultures have been literary in nature as much as political and economic. He traces the themes of 19th- and 20th-century Western fiction and contemporary mass media as weapons of conquest and also brilliantly analyzes the rise of oppositional indigenous voices in the literatures of the "colonies." Said would argue that it's no mere coincidence that it was a Victorian Englishman, Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, who coined the phrase "the pen is mightier . . ." Very highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand how cultures are dominated by words, as well as how cultures can be liberated by resuscitating old voices or creating new voices for new times.
From Publishers Weekly
The author of Orientalism examines the interrelationship of Occidental literature and imperialism from the 17th century to the Gulf war.
Copyright 1994 Reed business Information, Inc.
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