Culture and Imperialism

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Would he have said the most-followed tweets belong to “privileged ethnic groups” and that the rest of the world that is trying to emulate them are all but going to get crushed, or worse, ignored? To the British and to the French in Algeria empire was embraced, each colony a necessary part of the nation enlarged, accepted with pride along with the seemingly unquestionable facts that the people of the colonies were both inferior and beneficiary to white Europeans. Missing is discussion about Russian/Soviet and East Asian imperialist literatures - perhaps there is more that Said wrote/spoke on these regional literatures, but undoubtedly similar contrapuntal reading opportunities here too with Eastern European, Balkan, Ukrainian, Korean, Philippine, Vietnamese, Cambodian (etc etc etc) voices. Reading this you would think that Said has no idea that the phenomenon of Imperialism has occurred all over the world in every culture throughout history.

And so if that environment happens to be imperialist, it’s worthwhile to look at their works through that lens. Jeder, der bis dato mit bestem Lesevergnügen Bücher wie das Dschungelbuch (Kipling) gelesen hat, wird so etwas in Zukunft nicht mehr ohne Vorbehalte tun können. It is interesting but lacks the impact it had on publication when the prevailing narrative was one in which all imperialism must necessarily be bad and exploitative.His definition of "culture" is more complex, but he strongly suggests that we ought not to forget imperialism when discussing it. I must thank him for continuously teaching us, those living in postcolonial worlds, about the continual violation around us. Edward Saïd is, predictably, scathing in his criticism of 'nativism' -as a reactive response to the deprivations of empire that seeks refuge in imagined pasts, and embraces the fundamental distinction between 'them and us'- and the shortcomings of anti-colonial nationalism: “What had once been the imaginative liberation of a people- Aimé Césaire’s ‘inventions of new souls’ - and the audacious metaphoric charting of spiritual territory usurped by colonial masters were quickly translated into and accommodated by a world system of barriers, maps, frontiers, police forces, customs and exchange controls. Tim Brennan nicely analyzes the role of philologists and of geography in Said’s Arab trilogy: Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), and Covering Islam (1981).

Each sentence in this book is crafted from a large vocabulary to convey exactly what the author intends. Said believes that diversity is valuable and complex and cannot be reduced to simple identity symbiology.But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).