Culture and Imperialism. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1993 by Leo Muray

Edward W. Said. Chatto & Windus. 444pp. 0 7011 3808 4.

With the PLO-Israel attempted understanding in progress and retreat the attempt of a leading Arab writer -- in English -- to analyse the cultural relations between the former imperial powers and their former possessions is timely. Especially since the author, a Palestinian professor in New York, Edward Said, served as an adviser to Yasser Arafat for years but has distanced himself recently. For years he has been writing and lecturing for the Arab cause in many countries, whilst becoming an authority on comparative literature.

His main thesis, forcefully set out, is that anti-imperialism is well sustained intellectually and any suggestion that the end of empire was harmful is unacceptable. Imperial rule is, in essence, harmful to the masses despite some facts and developments which we all know. He writes in the stressed language of the American East Coast University elite. His range is world wide but he concentrates on Britain, France and the US. Ireland is included in the list of countries that suffered colonial rule. He indulges in lengthy examinations of some of the works of writers like Dickens and Conrad to show that imperialist attitudes of superiority are evident. It is often amusing to read. He even wades into Verdi's opera ~Aida' to show that the Egyptians were treated badly in it. Egypt's past, even before it became an Arab country, must be defended.

He attempts to deal with the embarrassingly essential problem of the anti-imperialist writers that they have to address imperialism in the language and terms of the ruling powers, English and French in the first place. He quotes C. James, a Caribbean writer as saying ~we people whose literary and aesthetic past is rooted in Western European civilization'. It should be mentioned that writers in the former French colonies in Africa confess now that it is a problem for them that the need to write in French rather than their native language, often tribal, is essential for their new national identity.

He sees the British as the more prominent in seeing the world in their novels as subordinated and dominated by the British presence. Kipling, of course, is the most guilty and Said devotes a whole section to Jane Austen's ~Empire'. He has dug up Thomas Carlyle's mention of ~The Nigger Question'.

As a Palestinian Arab, he focusses eloquently on Arab-Islamic relations with the West. Throughout the book he showers the reader with names of authors ranging from the well-known to names hardly anybody can be expected to have heard of, let alone read, and this especially when dealing with the Arab issue. He is a secular Arab, but says that there is ~western imperial impingement on Islam'. There has been a strenuous development of Arab-Islamic identity after American missionaries, according to the first Arab nationalist writer Antonius, last century, revived the Arab language leading to a break through. There is now ~cultural autonomy in anxious partnership with the West'. On the Israel situation he supports Antonius in the charge that the West ~betrayed' the Arabs after World War I. The existence of Israel is an emotional challenge and the authors he mentions are listed as hostile to the Arab's ~collective aspiration to break out of the historical determinism developed in colonial perspectives' and those of ~the cultural coalition now being built between anti-imperialist resistance in the peripheries and oppositional culture of Europe and the United States'. There we are. His whole argument is a detailed examination of the thesis first adumbrated in English by George Steiner, that a hidden part of colonial weaponry is to be found in language and in the prestige of the literature of the victorious nations who have subdued eastern peoples.