The Legacy of Edward W. Said

4. Culture and Imperialism: The Specter of Empire

4. Culture and Imperialism The Specter of Empire It is therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. —Hugo of St. Victor (qtd. in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism) Il n’est point vrai que l’oeuvre de l’homme est finie que nous n’avons rien à faire au monde que nous parasitons le monde qu’il suffit que nous nous mettions au pas du monde mais l’oeuvre de l’homme vient seulment de commencer et il reste à l’homme a conquérir toute interdiction immobilisée aux coins de sa ferveur et aucune race ne possède le monopole de la beauté, de l’intelligence, de la force et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête —Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition. It was published in England, and is among the first books to’ve been not only banned but also ceremoniously burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. . . . Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had time to consolidate and prosper? . . . It seemed to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back—maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, 112 the legacy of edward w. said the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Strangely, Edward Said’s magisterial book Culture and Imperialism has not received even remotely the kind of attention that Orientalism has had ever since its publication in 1978. This is in part, no doubt, because Orientalism was a groundbreaking book that, in its powerful de-struction of the Occident’s polyvalent truth discourse about the Orient, rendered it no longer possible for Westerners—scholars, intellectuals, public officials, and ordinary people—to perceive the Orient according to the representational imperatives of the binarist logic that, as I have shown, is intrinsic to the very idea of the Occident. Since its publication, Orientalism has instigated a revolution in literary and cultural studies and the production of an archive called postcolonialism, whose texts, whether sympathetic to or critical of their origin, bear (paradoxical ) witness to its virtually scriptural status. Coming in the aftermath of the critical revolution, Culture and Imperialism has implicitly been seen as at best simply a development and refinement of its predecessor’s argument, one that, responding to the criticism of the scholars and critics Said had enabled, made up in some degree for his “failure” in Orientalism to attend to the voices of the very world he was retrieving from the Orientalist gaze. I suggest, however, not against this too obvious interpretation of the reception of Culture and Imperialism but in marked addition to it, that the primary reason many of the book’s commentators viewed it as secondary to Orientalism concerns Said’s apparent indifference to narrative: Culture and Imperialism displays a more or less episodic, often digressive, and even erratic structure, in marked contrast to the undeviatingly sustained story Said tells about the history of the Occident’s relationship to the Orient in Orientalism. This is not so much a consciously articulated judgment as a symptomatic one in that, as far as I can tell, there has been no sustained analysis of the book in its entirety; rather, we have a multitude of commentaries—often...