Culture & Imperialism

Read for Network Imperialism but also of just, you know, general interest.

Bibliographic Deets

 * Said, Edward 1993. Culture & Imperialism. Vintage, London.

Introduction

 * Said's definition of Culture:
 * " those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure" which includes "specialized knowledge available in such learned disciplines as ethnography, historiography, philology, sociology, and literary history" (xii)


 * "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them." (xiii)

Overlapping Territories

 * "Electronic communications, the global extent of trade... have joined together even the most distant corners of the world." (4)


 * "It is difficult ... to show the involvement of cultures with expanding empires, to make observations about art that preserve its unique endowments and at the same time map its affiliations, but, I submit, we must attempt this, and set the art in the global, earthly context." (5)


 * "'Imperialism' means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory" (8)


 * "Imperialism, as we shall see, lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices" (8)


 * "For the entreprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire ... and all kinds of preparations are made for it within culture" (10).


 * "Think of what Yeats does for the Irish past, with its Cuchulains and its great houses, which give the nationalist struggle something to revive and admire" (17).

Resistance and Opposition

 * Another wonderful section on Yeats starts on 265

Freedom from Domination in the Future

 * " Whereas a century ago European cultural was associated with a white man's presence, indeed with his directly domineering (and hence resistible) physical presence, we now have in addition an international media presence that insinuates itself, frequently at a level below conscious awareness, over a fantastically wide range" (352).


 * "Historically the American, and perhaps generally the Western media have been sensory extensions of the main cultural context." (357)


 * "As for the intellectuals whose charge includes values and principles- literary, philosophical, historical specialists- the American university, with its munificence, Utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged them. Jargons of an almost unimaginable rebarbativeness dominate their styles. Cults like post-modernism, discourse analysis, New Historicism, deconstruction, neo-pragmatism, transport them in the country of the blue; an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history and individual responsibility fritters away attention to public matters, and to public discourse." (366-367)


 * Part of At Cambridge