EDWARD SAID’S POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
The Project of Postcolonial Theory
Scholars who examined the cultural and political condition of societies in the aftermath of colonialism have formulated postcolonial theory. They have charted the course of relations between colonizer and colonizer before and after the colonial period and have viewed the colonial and postcolonial periods as both discrete and continuous. Their key message is that an honest confrontation with the past leads to clarity and awareness of the present. Through this therapeutic process of uncovering and theorizing, heritages are recovered, new identities are created, and autonomy becomes possible.
Postcolonial theorists have addressed the paradoxical situation of the newly independent nations. After colonial control ends, new nations may succumb to the illusion that they are free from the past. They may believe that they have started afresh. But this illusion of freedom prevents them from recognizing that the hold of the past is firm and unyielding so long as it is not admitted and faced. Thus, the task of the postcolonial theorist is to examine again and question the colonial past in order to make theoretical sense out of it. Through the historical and psychological uncovering of the repressed past, the former colonial subjects are equipped with the self-understanding that enables them to freely act. They come to understand that only rigorous thinking about the past can help them..
One reason for denying the past is that an examination of prior events does not always flatter the colonized. The colonial story is not solely one of heroic resistance to colonization in the name of human dignity. Rather, the colonized felt ambivalence toward the colonizer; the colonizer was the object of both hate and yearning. Psychologically, the colonizer and colonized were locked in a contradictory embrace that simultaneously united and opposed them. This split between colonizer and colonized also existed within the consciousness of both colonizer and colonized. And this internal division is as important as the clearly visible struggles between rulers and ruled.
The colonized who attempt to fulfill their longing for the colonizer experience postcolonial schizophrenia. The dream of Europe continually recedes, while local people disown their own world and become homeless. But such harmful consequences are not merely the consequence of inner weakness. The weapons used by the colonial system must also be analyzed in order to make the process of colonization transparent. The colonizers used force to conquer territory and to enrich themselves. But they also carried out a policy of mental colonization, based on their claim to be the bearers of civilization to the backward peoples of the world. Thus, a hierarchical universe was built on the basis of a duality between colonizer and colonized in which they were conceived as opposites. The goal of the West was to not only conquer the lands of non-Western people, but also to occupy their minds so that they were negated as human beings.
Fortunately, the story of colonialism is more than just that of the complicity of local people with their masters. The history of the colonial period and its aftermath is also the record of the despised person’s recovery of humanity. Before national independence was achieved, a new person and new society were envisioned by opponents of colonialism as different as Frantz Fanon and Mohandas Gandhi.
Fanon and Gandhi
Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique, studied psychiatry in France, worked in an Algerian hospital, and then joined the liberation movement. His The Wretched of the Earth (2005), written just before his death of leukemia at 36 in 1961, was praised as the definitive work on the colonial struggle, and he was hailed as the most powerful and uncompromising voice of the Third World. Although known for his espousal of collective violence as the path to inner freedom, his work also diagnoses the relationship between master and slave, unmasks bourgeois nationalism, attacks the degradation of European humanism, and points toward a new human being and a new humanism.
One of Fanon’s great achievements was to chart some of the ways in which the structures and mentalities of the precolonial era continued to operate after independence. In his view, middle-class nationalists tended to serve as conduits between the rest of the nation and Western capitalism. They took over the institutions created by the colonizer and installed themselves as their elite successors. Their role was to cooperate with the foreign powers in neocolonial control over the local population. But Fanon did not outrightly condemn nationalism, since nationalism is also the vehicle of liberation from colonialism. Instead, he proposed an alternative nationalism that was anti-imperialist and internationalist, what he called a “transnational humanism.” This new humanism would replace Europe’s degraded humanism. After all, the glittering ideals of Europe have been accompanied by the murder of countless numbers of humans everywhere. Although universalist and cosmopolitan in outlook, Fanon opposed a thin and abstract cosmopolitanism in situations (e.g., Algeria) where an engaged response against forces threatening national consciousness is required. In such situations, it was appropriate to fully support national movements of liberation.
Gandhi is known for his efforts to secure Indian independence and for his advocacy of nonviolence. But he was also a fierce critic of modern civilization as epitomized by the British colonizers. In his view, what is called civilization in the West is merely an emphasis on bodily comfort. Neither religion nor morality generally plays a significant role in Western societies, except in distorted forms. Genuine civilization in Gandhi’s view existed in ancient India and its ideals continue to exist in India today. It implies conduct emphasizing the performance of duty and the observance of morality. And happiness does not arise from wealth or material possessions. It is mostly a mental state, requiring discipline and self-control, since the satisfaction of material desires leads to the expansion of such desires without end. India has nothing to learn from the West because it already possesses the needed insights into the nature of the human being and human happiness.
Gandhi felt great sadness that Indian people were attracted to the modern conveniences and lifestyle of the West. His critique of Western civilization served to undercut the colonial mission of bringing civilization to the native. From the perspective of the colonial victim, Western civilization was characterized by violence in service of the accumulation of wealth and power. And Gandhi offered nonviolence based on love as the antidote to this quest for wealth and power at the expense of others. For him, there is no distinction between the way that families live and the way that nations should live. Love among people is the natural state, and through willingness to suffer for the rights of others, it is possible to return to this natural state.
Both Fanon and Gandhi recognized the ways in which the West has failed to provide an ideal of human development. They see national liberation as a vehicle for leaving behind the mental universe of Europe in order to go beyond Western civilization. Thus, the civilization of Europe is not a progressive force that liberates the rest of suffering humanity; it is itself the cause of great suffering. In this vein, Fanon and Gandhi equate industrialization with economic exploitation, technological development with military conquest, and Western humanism with fatal infections of racism and violence. Their unsparing portraits of the colonizer and his civilization enabled non-Western people to overcome mental colonization. Seeing more deeply into the European world is the cure for the longing of the slave for the master.
Said and Postcolonial Theory
Edward Said was born in Palestine and spent his entire adult life outside the land of his birth. A professor of literature at Columbia University until his death in 2003 from leukemia, he achieved recognition for his humanistic analyses of writers and politics and his willingness to take the side of the underdog in opposition to power and authority. The appearance of Said’s Orientalism in 1978 is often considered to be the beginning of postcolonial theory. Non-Western writers such as Gandhi and Fanon had already harshly criticized colonialism and imperialism, but the distinctive feature of Said’s Orientalism was exposing the dependence of colonial power on colonial knowledge. Orientalism, as the study of the Orient, has always accompanied European imperialism and motivated such imperialism. To understand how the East was conquered, we must understand the ways in which the East was known.
At the level of knowledge, Said finds that the West has always represented other cultures in Western terms. The West has put forward universal knowledge that simply incorporated the reality of the non-West into its own scheme. Instead of understanding plural worlds on the basis of their own cultural specificity, the West has created a single history of humanity viewed solely from a European perspective. In Orientalism, Said’s task was to subvert and delegitimize such history that ignores the reality of colonialism and racism. In so doing, he pointed the way toward a new humanism.
Three Definitions of Orientalism
Orientalism is mainly three different but interrelated practices or pursuits: an academic discipline, a way of thinking based upon a clear distinction between Orient and Occident, and a corporate institution with links to colonialism and imperialism. The first two definitions refer to the production of the Orient as a text while the third definition illustrates Orientalism’s function as a means of asserting authority over and dominating the Orient by speaking, describing, teaching, ruling, and authorizing views of the Orient. The three definitions are interrelated, since the academic and imaginative dimensions of Orientalism make possible and justify Western domination of the East. Said’s focus in Orientalism is limited to three societies: Britain and France from the beginning of the 19th century to World War II and the U.S. after World War II.
Orientalism As Discourse
Discourse is a concept that Said absorbed from Foucault. The modern world is regulated by the need to demonstrate truth, a legacy of the Western Enlightenment. The demonstration of universal truth legitimizes the assumption of power over the object of knowledge. Modern Europe, in Said’s view, has created the Orient through knowledge, thereby allowing Westerners to manage it. Consequently, the focus of analysis shifts from the attempt to discover “true” representations to the conditions and functions of knowledge production itself.
Foucault viewed discourse as a strictly limited sphere of social knowledge within which we can know the world. A discourse is governed by rules that allow some statements to be made but not others. Power and knowledge are linked because the powerful have control over the content of knowledge and over how knowledge comes into being. Orientalism is a discourse that enabled European culture to manage and even produce the Orient. Those who wrote, thought about, and acted upon the Orient could only do so within the narrow range authorized by Orientalism..
Although influenced by the above notion of discourse, Said only partially agrees with Foucault’s treatment of the relation between representation and power. In Said’s view, Foucault has ignored the manner in which power is appropriated and maintained within a specific historical setting. Foucault’s focus is on all-pervasive bureaucratic networks of power that function within a technological system based on efficiency. This view of power enables Foucault to avoid the trap of viewing power as merely the use of force to achieve domination. But Foucault’s notion of power cannot account for what occurs in the relationships and tensions between members of different classes and different groups as they struggle to control the social process. In this struggle for hegemony, those in a disadvantageous position attempt to achieve social change and in doing so they move beyond the grasp of the dominant order. Therefore, human agency is important for Said in order to oppose hegemony and to avoid the political passivity that he perceives in Foucault.
In fact, Said believes that Foucault was really writing about the triumph of power, since Foucault did not provide a way of understanding how to resist the power of institutions that administer and discipline the populace. It is this possibility of resistance to power that most interests Said. Along these lines, Said’s work can be considered as an attempt to bring Foucault’s notion of discourse back to the historical world and to reality. He is dissatisfied with Foucault’s treatment of discourse as having a life of its own, because Foucault does not further our understanding of the negative effects of power such as conquest, domination, and surveillance techniques (Said, 2001b).
Said also compares Foucault’s work unfavorably with that of Fanon. Foucault gives the sense that everything is historically determined and that principles such as justice have no inherent meaning, since they are merely the product of the discourse that is employed. In contrast, Fanon believes in real historical change in which the oppressed free themselves from their oppressors and strive to achieve justice. Moreover, Fanon provides a historical, psychological, and cultural diagnosis of oppression as well as guidance in ways of overcoming such oppression.
It should be mentioned, though, that Said may have misinterpreted Foucault’s work. Did Foucault see power and resistance as dialectically related? If so, then each brings the other into being. Nevertheless, it is clear that both Said and Foucault did not focus on resistance to power, a significant weakness. In addition, Foucault had little knowledge of matters outside the West, and Said explored and thoroughly critiqued Western thought while largely ignoring the cultural production of those outside the West.
Humanism
Said supports Palestinian national aspirations and argues that Palestinians have been dispossessed of their land and that the Israeli state has occupied Palestinian territory as a colonial power. In his defense of Palestinian rights, Said appeals to universal standards of human rights. He likewise criticizes appeals to essences such as race, culture, nationality, or language because cultures and histories are hybrid and interdependent to such a degree that entities such as nationality are lies.
In his intellectual work, Said espouses humanism. He sees humanism as a practice that an intellectual continually engages in, not something that an intellectual can possess. In particular, it is what the intellectual does within specific historical circumstances like the Iraq war and the “war on terror.” In Said’s view, the core of humanism is the secular view that humans rather than God make history and the idea that the historical world can be understood rationally. He elaborates this notion of rational understanding by stating that since humans make history, they understand it by knowing what they make and, especially, by how they make it.
In the manner of Vico, Said believes that humanistic knowledge does exist, while recognizing that no issue, event, or work can ever be fully grasped or understood due to the indefinite nature of the human mind. Humanistic knowledge and practice will always contain a subjective aspect that must be dealt with. Humanists cannot produce objective or certain knowledge. Philosophy and study can bring knowledge but this knowledge will always be radically incomplete and, therefore, always subject to dispute and argument.
Said’s own work on literature and society utilizes argument and critical procedures, and he exposes the abuse of language, while maintaining no institutional allegiance. He is willing to explore and to be provisional in his conclusions. His standpoint is that critics on the margins who oppose orthodoxy are explorers capable of grasping the historical situation, whereas members of the dominant culture with strong institutional links to that culture often support the prevailing consensus and authority. In Said’s own case, his scholarly work has been influenced by his background, given that his adult life has been spent in exile. In addition, his non-academic concerns arising from his experience of imperialism and the problems of empire have also played a significant role in his writing and scholarship.
From Said’s humanistic perspective, the intellectual’s goal is to speak the truth in order to improve the conditions under which people live. Moral principles such as peace, reconciliation, and the alleviation of suffering provide the standard for judging the existing state of affairs. When writing and speaking, the intellectual’s goal is not to demonstrate that he or she is right. It is rather to bring about a change in the moral climate so that aggression is recognized for what it is, the unjust punishment of individuals or peoples is not allowed, and democratic freedoms are promoted for everyone, not just for a chosen group.
To the vexing question of the nature of truth and who is capable of reaching it, Said’s answer is first of all that truth arises from the correct determination of facts, difficult as that may be. And then our ideas must correspond to a moral norm. What Said finds clearly antithetical to this seeking of truth is the tendency for intellectuals to identify with their national group. In an era of integration of cultures and demographic mixing, the idea of national identity must be rethought. Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa, black Africans, East and West Indians have greatly transformed European countries. In Europe, the idea of a nation with a single language and culture makes no sense. The same can be said for nations like India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, many African countries, and Latin America. Thus, the idea of a national identity that is unified, coherent, and homogeneous is being rethought with great impact in many areas of society and politics.
Under such circumstances, Said proclaims that humanism which only praises and celebrates the achievements of the nation is false. What makes cultures interesting is not their essence or purity but the ways in which they are diverse and the dialogues that they have with other cultures and civilizations. The humanist welcomes the challenge of understanding other languages and cultures. And in relation to one’s own culture, the humanist questions and confronts its certainties and what its members have uncritically accepted as true.
Like Fanon, Said believes that nationalism has value in opposition to imperialism. The revolutionaries that opposed imperialism did so in the name of their own national culture. Their cultural resistance to imperialism was healthy and necessary. But cultural resistance is only a step toward the reintegration of peoples on the periphery with the entire human race. It is also not enough to proclaim one’s victimization at the hands of the imperialist West. Being a victim by itself does not enable the oppressed to develop and realize their humanity. Their experience of suffering must take them beyond nationalism to a universal standpoint that asserts the rights of all human beings to fair treatment, not just the members of one’s own group. Suffering at the hands of the Western oppressor should not be an excuse for additional acts of cruelty and inhumanity.
Colonization and domination cannot be viewed as the inevitable outcome of an oppressive Western culture. The dominant Western culture proclaimed humanitarian and universalist principles such as liberty and justice that inspired many colonized peoples that resisted oppression. The Haitian Toussaint L’ Overture, the leader of the successful revolution against French colonialism, studied Rousseau, Mirabeau, and other French revolutionary thinkers. The problem has not been the universal standards of the West; it has been the failure of Western governments and people to implement these standards and to apply them to all people rather than to just a small minority.
Universalism
Said’s humanist appreciation for universal principles does not mean that he is unaware of the ways in which such principles have been misused. He comments that nationalist thought in which the nation is conceived in essentialist terms has always produced loyalty and patriotism. Moreover, such faith in the nation has been accompanied by justifications for suddenly discarding general liberal principles. Clearly, it was in the humanist West that universal principles were both strongly proclaimed and routinely violated in the era of classical imperialism. And it is in the present-day United States that human rights are put forward as the indispensable standard for foreign policy decisions and yet are applied in a highly selective manner.
After World War II, great efforts were put forth to construct a new universalism. Significant results of such efforts were the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and many other resolutions that explicitly protect the rights of all individuals. The rights of individuals could not be violated by national governments invoking national security. Therefore, Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime was justly criticized by the West for its violation of human rights. At the same time the Saudi Arabian government expelled 800,000 Yemenis in retaliation for the Yemeni government’s vote against the UN resolution pushed through by the United States in favor of the invasion of Iraq. But nobody in the West protested against this violation of human rights. In reality, the Western community of nations led by the United States has strengthened older forms of nationalism, while a new universalism has not yet appeared.
For Said, the clearest example of the selective application of human rights doctrine has been the case of Palestine. Under the Israeli occupation of Palestine territories, unarmed Palestinians have been killed, houses demolished, people deported, political prisoners jailed, trees uprooted, land expropriated, whole villages made destitute, and hundreds of settlements have been built in the heart of Arab areas. In Israel, the approximately 20% of the population that are Palestinian citizens of Israel are a disempowered minority labeled as “non-Jews.” The law does not allow them to buy, rent, or lease land held in trust for Jews. They also have a very small representation in the Parliament, lack the right of return, and possess none of the entitlements reserved for Jews. Yet, the United States has provided huge financial, military, and ideological support for Israel and has opposed all UN resolutions calling for the end to discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. Said recognizes the suffering of Jewish people over history, but that does not excuse their treatment of Palestinians. And so, today, Palestine is “the touchstone case for human rights.”
Although Said is suspicious of claims to objective truth or certain knowledge, he recognizes the possibility of gaining humanistic knowledge and suggests the processes through which such knowledge emerges. By leaving one’s cultural home, it becomes easier to judge it, and the whole world, too. One acquires the spiritual detachment and generosity which is needed for true vision the more easily one is able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. It becomes possible to evaluate oneself and unfamiliar cultures with a combination of intimacy and distance. In other words, we work through our attachments rather than reject them. Such working through enables us to understand human experience in all its difference and in all the concrete forms that it takes. If we allow borders and boundaries to keep us imprisoned within the safe and the familiar, then we may become narrow-minded and react, unthinkingly, in prejudiced ways. In such cases, the freedom that knowledge gives will always lie beyond one’s grasp.
In other words, when a person sees the whole world as foreign, originality of vision is possible. Experience of more than one culture enables contrapuntal awareness, the awareness of simultaneous dimensions. This juxtaposing of old environments and our present environment facilitates the sympathy of appreciation and the overcoming of orthodoxy and conventional judgments; whereas by taking home and language for granted, we allow their underlying assumptions to become dogmatic and frozen. Thus, humanistic knowledge of the other that is based on human experience, that is personal and authentic, and that is sympathetic, is more likely to be achieved by the person or scholar who achieves detachment from the familiar environment of home.
Said’s high regard for humanistic knowledge is accompanied by his belief in the possibility of scholarship that is not corrupt and that is not blind to the human reality. In other words, he believes there can be intellectual work that is not in the vein of Orientalism. Such scholarship requires methodological self-consciousness and submitting one’s method and practice to critical scrutiny. The allegiance of the scholar must be to the reality and the material, not to ideological fictions or doctrinal preconceptions. The ethical and political consequences of intellectual production also alert scholars to the need for a clear value position from which to embark on the scholarly enterprise. For Said, this value position is based on human freedom and knowledge. And it involves illuminating concrete human experience so that such experience may be changed and human community may be promoted. What must be avoided are the abstractions and arbitrary systems of representation like Orientalism that have led to the degradation of knowledge.
Orientalism As Representation
The “Orient” and “Occident” are human products. The characterizations of Eastern peoples by Western writers were myths pretending to be fact. For example, it was generally accepted in the West that East Asians, Arabs, and Indians are followers of mystical religions and incapable of rational thought. Therefore, Orient and Occident do not just exist as inert forces of nature. Both have histories and traditions of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that give them reality and presence for the West. Orientalism has less to do with the Orient than it does with the West. It makes sense due to Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible and clear. The effects of such representations are due to institutions and communities of interpretation, to traditions and shared meanings. Instead of trying to judge whether the representation of the Orient is correct or faithful to some original, look for evidence of Orientalist discourse: the style of the text, its figures of speech, the setting, its narrative devices, and its historical and social circumstances. It is necessary to view the Orient as a text, not as factual knowledge.
A relational concept of identity informs Said’s critique of Orientalism. Modern European identity cannot be understood without reference to its colonial Other. Thus European knowledge of the East is not representational; rather, it serves as a vehicle to consolidate its own identity and to define itself as superior. Said shows that Western discourses have made a fundamental distinction between “Occident” and “Orient” in which the Middle East is conceived as opposite and inferior to the West in every respect. The West is masculine, democratic, rational, dynamic, progressive, and moral; whereas the Middle East is feminine, sensual, backward, childlike, depraved, and duplicitous. Such characterizations are the foundation of a fabricated Orient which the West can dominate and exploit. As a result, orientalist images are a sign of Western power and superiority over the East rather than a depiction of the Orient as a natural reality.
There is a repertory of Orientalism in which later authors appropriated the views of earlier Orientalists in preference to recording what they saw with their own eyes. They borrowed ideologies, perspectives, and guiding theses from the work of previous scholars. Influential creative writers such as Nerval and Flaubert rewrote their predecessors such as Sacy and Lane in a fairly strict sense, thereby excluding the actualities of the modern Orient from their own accounts.
The example of European 19th century writers is revealing, since all believed that the Orient was a separate place, eccentric, backward, and silently indifferent, that was open to penetration by the masculine West and could be shaped by the West. Such writers included ideologically oriented ones like Renan and Marx, scholars such as Lane and Sacy, and imaginative ones like Flaubert and Nerval. They saw the Orient as removed from European scientific, commercial, and artistic progress, a place that required transformation by the West. Orientalist discourse reflects the ability of Western people as male and wealthy members of powerful nations to construct the Orient and to make the rest of the world into the Orient. The relative lack of resistance from the Orient meant that the West could speak for the Orient and define it in ways that justified its domination over the Orient.
Essentialism is another important concept that Said employs in his critique of Orientalism. Essentialism can be viewed as the attribution of the same characteristics to all members of a group of people, class of objects, or category. For Said, it implies that a group of people have an identity that is fixed, unitary, and unchanging. The group’s traits are considered inherent, and its qualities are viewed as outside the influence of historical forces, determined once and for all without being subject to change. Most perniciously, differences between the West and Asia are exaggerated so as to constitute these two areas as separate worlds. By setting boundaries between peoples, the common human realities such as joy and suffering are ignored in favor of allegedly ineradicable differences, turning Oriental peoples into a gross caricature with little connection to their actual experience.
Said’s Critics
Although Said’s work has been enthusiastically embraced by many scholars, especially those on the political left, many criticisms of Said’s notion of Orientalism have appeared. Some critics have charged that it is not clear whether Said wants to assert that there is a correct way of understanding the Orient. When he talks about misrepresentations of the Orient, he implies that it is possible to correctly represent the Orient. If so, all accounts of the Orient are not merely representations. The truth about the Orient is achievable. On the other hand, if Said wants to claim that all accounts of the Orient are myths and representations, then his own account is merely one representation of the Orient rather than a portrayal of the Orient as it really is.
For the most part, Said attacks orientalist portrayals of the Other on the basis of humanist notions such as authenticity, sympathy, and existential encounter. But there are also times when he appears to undermine the idea of accurate knowledge itself in the context of describing the alien. He argues that dividing human reality into clearly distinguished cultures, traditions, histories, and societies restricts and restrains the human encounter between such constituted groups and serves imperialism rather than humanity.
Said has also been criticized for neglecting the very real cultural differences that exist. This is the case whether he is taking a humanist stance or attacking the idea of representation as correspondence with reality. He criticizes orientalist generalizations about Arabs as lacking connection with individual and personal experience. His preference is for a cosmopolitan outlook that centers on the shared human realities. But this focus on what humans have in common fails to take account of the cultural meanings through which human experience is understood and expressed. Culture is the code by which human groups experience reality as well as a form of group expression. Do the African pastoralist and Irish poet actually share the same existential reality? In any case, culture cannot be reduced solely to the activities of hegemonic struggle and disciplinary control.
Said’s response is that there is a big difference between attacking humanism’s abuses and saying humanism is of no value or worth. In his opinion, humanism has been abused by some of its practitioners but this does not discredit humanism itself. For Said, humanism is democratic and open to all people; it is a process of discovery and of disclosure, and it involves examining one’s own assumptions. It is also critique of the existing order.
In summary, humanism is an oppositional stance that is secular, democratic, and open, aiming at human liberation. Humanism is the basis of Said’s principled opposition to the institutions and discourses of powerful nations and groups that oppress the disadvantaged. When those who attack humanism imply that there are no universal values such as justice and fairness, they cut away the ground for a critique of abuses of power and authority. Effective intervention in the public realm is based on the intellectual’s total commitment to justice and fairness while accepting the diversity among nations and individuals. This means rejecting all hierarchies.
The Revisionist View of Empire
In recent years, there have been attempts to portray American imperial power as enlightened or unselfish and to claim that such benign imperialism also existed in the British and French empires of the past. V. S. Naipaul followed Conrad by saying that although serious abuses took place in the African colonies, nevertheless some colonizers were idealists. And what came after colonialism was far worse. The Iranian Revolution and the attempt by Khomeini to have Muslims kill Salman Rushdie encouraged such revisionist thinking during the 1980s and 1990s. There were also attacks against postcolonial societies accused of failing to acknowledge local abuses such as slave-like conditions for workers, female genital mutilation, despotism, and racism.
The overall attitude of empire’s supporters has been that the colonial past and its effects are over. The problems that postcolonial societies face are those of their own creation. Empire’s apologists have claimed that people of color have not sufficiently benefited from enlightened Western rule. The result of anti-colonial movements has been hatred of the West. Local ideologies that reject democracy and tolerance such as “Islamofascism” are completely home-grown and have not been affected by the West’s relation to the former colonies. As more and more non-white immigrants have come to Europe and North America, this revisionism has become more strident. The events of September 11, 2001 gave it seemingly unstoppable momentum.
Said, however, points out that imperialism is not finished. All present-day problems in postcolonial societies should not be blamed on the colonized peoples themselves. The wounds of the colonized are not simply self-inflicted. Colonialism in many and diverse ways still affects the lives of people today, several decades after independence. This effect can be seen in language, bureaucracy, and attitude. In fact, Said believes that Orientalism has outlived colonialism and continues to flourish through its institutionalized status within the United States. In other words, the American empire has replaced that of the British and French in the former colonial world. The United States has a complex set of interests in the parts of the world once colonized by the British and French. And the area specialist with expertise in relation to different regions of the former colonial world puts this knowledge in the service of the controlling government and business interests.
As an example of American Orientalism, Said points to the stereotypical images of the Arab that have appeared in both American popular culture and the social science literature. In more general terms, the Arab has been viewed as the disrupter of the West and of Israel; in television and films as lecherous or bloodthirsty and dishonest. After 1973, the Arab world was portrayed as a threat to the West because of its control of large supplies of oil.
In terms of cultural relations, Middle Eastern studies in the United States have accommodated and popularized European Orientalism. This European tradition has led to a recognizable attitude toward the Middle East among American scholars, institutions, and discourses, even though this predominant attitude is overlaid by social science techniques that give it an aura of sophistication and refinement. In other words, such knowledge is political, despite the attempt to pass it off as pure knowledge.
We find ideas like Islamic culture is incapable of creativity and innovation, Islam is a closed system that does not look beyond itself unless forced to, and Islam can only be improved through the use of Western methods. Such ideas and attitudes prosper in the Middle East studies establishment in which a range of interests and networks of experts link the corporate world, the foundations, the military, the foreign service, and the intelligence community together with the academic world. There are interlocking organizations that legitimize and maintain the authority of a set of ideas about Islam, the Orient, and the Arabs that rarely change.
Culture and the Colonies
Said started out in Orientalism with a blanket condemnation of Western imperialism, but in his later work Culture and Imperialism, he paints a more nuanced picture of the complex relations between colonizer and colonized. Whereas many non-white scholars and writers have heavily criticized the Western literary heritage for its exclusionary nature, Said sees this heritage in both positive and negative ways. Instead of viewing Conrad and Kipling simply as racist whites, he treats their work in relation to colonialism in a more sophisticated manner.
We can compare Said’s treatment of Conrad with that of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist. Achebe asserts that in Western psychology there is a need to set up Africa as a reference point for the West’s own sense of identity. Africa is “a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” For him, this psychological need is best exemplified in Conrad’s well-known work, Heart of Darkness, in which Africa appears as another world. This other world is completely opposed in every respect to the civilized West. And when Europeans linger in this other world, their prized intelligence and refinement are destroyed by the bestial and primitive people and environment of Africa.
In Achebe’s view, Conrad is obviously and unmistakably racist in his descriptions of African people and in his interpretation of Africa’s place in human history. Conrad portrays Africans not as individuals with thoughts and sensibilities but as parts of a mass. His emphasis is on their movements and sounds: yells, whirling limbs, clapping hands, stamping feet, swaying bodies, and rolling eyes. He also mentions their frenzies, their “short grunting phrases,” and “violent babble of uncouth sounds.” Despite African primordial barbarity, Conrad does detect a remote kinship between Africans and Europeans. Africans are prehistoric people who give Europeans a glimpse of the beginnings of humanity. Therefore, Europeans experience a very slight hint of response to the noise and clamor of the savages, as if recalling something in their own distant past. Achebe’s conclusion is that Conrad dehumanizes Africa and Africans. As a result, Heart of Darkness cannot be considered a great work of art.
Said’s analysis of Conrad’s Nostromo in Culture and Imperialism shows the coexistence of both anti-imperialist and imperialist tendencies in the mind of Conrad, since he recognizes the imperialism of the silver mine’s British and American owners, but, as Western man, he can only assume that Western people make history and that the non-West must do their bidding, a dilemma from which there is no escape. He could not take anti-imperialist movements seriously, nor could he understand that non-Western people have their own lives and control their own destinies, despite attempts by the Western imperialists to take away such freedom.
Likewise, Said mentions that Marlow in Heart of Darkness sees the violence and potential evil of imperialism, while believing that the noble ideal of improving the native can partially justify imperialism. For Marlow, the idea behind imperialism of bringing civilization to savages served as the vehicle of the colonizer’s unselfish sacrifice. But Said, instead of rejecting Conrad’s art for its racism, praises Conrad’s genius and achievement while recognizing his limitations. Achebe, too, recognized that Conrad had explored the seamy side of imperialism without making much of this fact. In contrast, Said finds Conrad ahead of his time in the ability to self-consciously witness imperialism, maintain an ironic distance from it, and question the official view of empire. By showing the discrepancy between what is supposed to be taking place and the reality of colonialism in Africa, Conrad prevents the reader from viewing the colonial world as routine, ordinary, and natural. Empire is a radically unstable idea that is being performed with uncertain results. It is precarious, since it is always in process of being made and remade. Clearly, its continued existence is by no means assured. Although Conrad could not imagine the coming into being of liberation movements to challenge empire, his portrait of empire as dominance is a noteworthy achievement.
Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories
Although the colonial divide surely existed and a native could never become a white person, it is not so easy to isolate their experiences. There is a need to keep in mind two ideas opposed to each other in many ways: the fact of imperial divide and the idea of common experience. People shared experiences across the boundary separating colonizer from colonized, even if such shared experiences had a different tone and texture to them. For example, the colonizer and the colonized crossed paths in education, the public domain, and in the realm of war. Although France tried to make Algeria French, and independent Algeria attempted to erase all connection with the French past, there cannot be two distinct histories of France and Algeria. The history of neither France nor Algeria can be written without considering the other. In the same vein, we cannot say that Africans alone can write African history, Muslims alone can write the history of Islam, or women alone can write women’s history. Therefore, nativism is not a proper response to Western hegemony and Afrocentrism is distorted in the same way that Eurocentrism is.
“Civilizing Subjects”
Said uses Catherine Hall’s interrelated history of Great Britain and Jamaica to illustrate his preferred manner of interpreting colonial and postcolonial history. Hall makes the point that those who went from Jamaica to Great Britain during the early postwar era took up residence, had offspring, and expected full rights and complete acceptance in Great Britain. Identity and belonging issues assumed paramount importance for Jamaicans in Britain and the destinies of Jamaica and Britain were intertwined just as they were during colonial times. But there were great differences — England was no longer the imperial power and diverse peoples made up Great Britain. To understand the present it was necessary to refer to the past; yet, dramatic changes had also taken place.
In Jamaica while slavery existed, there were missionaries and abolitionists who provided much support for black Jamaican freedom. But even such supporters had their doubts about whether black Jamaicans were part of the same human family as whites. For them, the black Jamaican was a meek victim of white oppression, grateful for salvation by whites, and willing to imitate whites. For liberal British, Jamaica was an example of a backward society, earlier in time, and unable to survive without British aid.
From Hall’s writing, we learn that colonization, slavery, and most of all freedom took place in contradictory fashion within institutional structures of church, school, business firm, government bureaucracy, and family. Although English as well as local people underwent hardship, the maintenance of empire not only required the consent of the English colonists, it was based on a hierarchy with English on top and black Jamaicans on the bottom.
