Discussion Topic
Edward Said's purpose and main point in writing Culture and Imperialism
Summary:
Edward Said's purpose in writing Culture and Imperialism is to explore the complex relationship between culture and imperialism. He argues that Western cultural narratives have historically supported and justified imperialist practices, and he aims to reveal how literature and other cultural forms have both reflected and shaped imperial power dynamics.
What was Edward Said's purpose for writing Culture and Imperialism?
One never can know completely why anyone does anything. Freudian and other forms of psychological theory suggest that many of our motives are unknown even to ourselves, much less transparent to other people. From what we know of Said and his biography, we can attribute several potential motives to him, but we cannot actually know for certain what was going on inside his head during the entire process of his writing the book.
First, Said was a professor. As a professor at an elite research university, his salary and opportunities for promotion and merit pay depended to a large degree on his publishing books. Thus one obvious motive for writing a book was simply professional.
As to why he wrote about this specific topic, he describes himself as interested in the ambiguities of his own cultural position as an American citizen with an anglophone first name, an Arabic last name,...
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and Palestinian ancestry. He states that his own experience of this sort of cultural ambiguity and blending was the source of his interest in postcolonial studies. In this work, he tries to show how the colonial experience affected not just the colonized, but also the major literary works of the colonizers.
What is the main point of Edward Said's introduction to Culture and Imperialism?
This novel represents an advance in Said's thinking from his initial work Orientalism, which is a text prized by postcolonialists. I will highlight some of the main ideas, but obviously reading through it yourself is what is most important.
Said identifies a series of assumptions that are made by the West about the Orient. Said himself is Palestinian, and he identifies a series of assumptions that the West makes about Arabs: they are irrational, anti-Western, menacing and dishonest. He explores how these assumptions are constructed in opposition to what the West thinks about themselves, and therefore defines this projected image of "Arabs" in the mind of Westerners as the other - we define the other by what we are not. The danger is that these assumptions come to be treated as truth and therefore impact our relations and our ideologies.
Said therefore calls for a new treatment of "the Orient" - allowing for self-representation of authors belonging to the Orient rather than depending on second hand representation. He also objects to half the globe being labelled "the Orient" - you can hardly make generalisations that will apply equally to Eqyptians as you can to the Chinese, for example. Tell any British person that they are just part of the United States of America, and you will probably receive a black eye!
Above all, Said helps us explore the processes of constructing binary opposites and uncovering the values that cause these opposites to come into being. By doing so, he calls for an erasure between these boundaries and lines that we construct and a more moderate way of thinking. If you want some examples of these binary opposites and how they are applied to the West and to "the Orient", think about these oppositions and how they are used: civilised / uncivilised, democracy / despotism, developed / undeveloped, liberated / repressed, educated / ignorant. You might want to look back at American foreign policy and judge how many decisions have been made from the standpoint of "us" having the answers and making decisions on the part of "them" who are ignorant and therefore do not know what is best for them.