Vol 7 – Issue 3 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-02T18:45:09+00:00

Conclusion

Edward Said’s biographer, Timothy Brennan, has rightly argued that Culture and Imperialism is Said’s attempt to rectify his exclusion of the colonized voice in Orientalism. Culture and Imperialism maps out the two poles of the imperial relation by charting both imperial culture and the work of anti-colonial writers and intellectuals who resist its impositions and dehumanizing effects. Said’s discussions of work by Chinua Achebe, Amílcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon (among others) rightly open imperialism to Third World challenge. This is an advance from the narrowness of Orientalism and situates empire in the empirical reality of political contention, not merely in the study of the idealist imperial projection.

But, in doing so, Said persists in viewing European national cultures as imperialist, ignoring his many critics. In fact, Culture and Imperialism doubles down on this claim and adamantly insists that, until it was changed by Third World decolonization and immigration, Western culture was indeed thoroughly imperialist. If Westerners were ontologically racist in Orientalism, they remained so in Culture and Imperialism. If all Western forms were imperialist, then the English novel acted as Said’s key evidentiary form. But my analysis of Said reveals the flaws of this position by demonstrating the weakness of his singular focus on empire when reading domestic literature empirically, as in the case of Jane Austen, and when reading it on a cultural basis, as in the case of George Eliot.

By the 2000s, Said’s postcolonial inflation of empire in domestic culture and his cultural-causal claim became extremely influential, if not dominant, in many Anglophone humanities disciplines. In English literature departments, students remain most familiar with Said and would have read very little (if anything) by other pillars of twentieth-century criticism, like F. R. Leavis, Georg Lukács, or Raymond Williams. Said’s work enables a political reading of literature and is invested in the worldliness of texts, which is valuable because it pushes students of literature to think beyond the words on the page. But his insistence on the singular causal role of culture mars the significance of his other critical achievements. My reading should make critics working in the vein of Said think twice about the cogency of his theory of empire. The inherent contradiction of his position in particular should either make contemporary postcolonial theorists abandon altogether the claim that culture causes empire or should spur them on to provide a stronger foundation for it.

Said’s emphasis on the explanatory and causal primacy of culture also comes at a huge interpretative cost: the exclusion of a wider web of mediations and determinations that shape empire. At a time when capital is now essential as a central category of social analysis, Said’s main theoretical deficiency is simply that his theory and reading practices totally ignore capitalism. If his theory continues to be uncritically replicated, the danger is that the single-minded insistence on culture as a causal mechanism and the inflation of empire in domestic affairs would hinder the analysis of actually existing capitalism and imperialism today.

Though Said unfairly tarred Raymond Williams as

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