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Culture Imperialism (changes)

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Basics

• Comprehensive look at the relationship between cultural forms (literature) and imperialism
  • “as part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples” are “Europe’s special ways of representing the Caribbean islands, Ireland, and the Far East.”
  • basic connex: b/c they are not us, we are allowed to beat, control them etc (always accompanied by some kind of resistance)
  • privileges novels, but really wants to talk about all “arts of description, communication, and representation”
    • he points to “prototypical modern realist novel Robinson Crusoe…a European how creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island” xii
• So, fiction in context of empire: stories important both in way colonizers represent the Other to their fellow countrymen, but also important to resistance: the whole “contest” is “reflected” in narrative
  • “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
• Culture no. 1
  • Esp in context of say Matthew Arnold, the best that has been known and thought (Culture and Anarchy): culture “palliates, if it does not altogether neutralize, the ravages of a modern, aggressive, mercantile, and brutalizing urban existence”
    • always gets taken up in defining the nation, us versus them; culture as source of identity xiii
• Culture no. 2
  • “a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another” xiii not “placid” but a “battleground”
• Problem: how to get people to see connex between culture and imperialism
  • “between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist, and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other” xiv
  • nonetheless he says most of his favorite authors just accepted the ideas of inferior other races, even though critics like to sequester the unsavory elements of say Carlyle or Ruskin instead of seeing the connex between these Jekyll/Hyde manifestations of SAME author, where we can forget their politics and that’ll be fine
  • He’s not going to ignore or condemn the connex between the two, but see them as instructive and enlightening
• Ex: Great Expectations (1861)
  • People have read it as an urban novel
  • Magwitch’s time in Australia not “coincidental” but participating xv, making the book about the “larger and wider experience between England and its overseas territories”
    • Australia: convicts could be rehabilitated and have chance to earn money, but they can’t go back to England; but you also have soldiers, explorers, profiteers, etc
  • Also you have Pip earning a real living by going overseas to another colony, re-inventing himself via colonies
    • The trouble that begins in one colony, Australia, is solved in another (presumably India)
• Why? “less from a kind of retrospective vindictiveness than from a fortified need for links and connections. One of imperialism’s achievements was to bring the world closer together…” xxi
  • Not as mechanical determinism, but all “shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience” xxii b/c culture in large part
    “derives” from historical experience
• Culture at the heart of imperialist effort: “unrelenting Eurocentrism” 222 not only “supported and enabled” imperialism by giving it “ideological license,” but also culture colonized, subjugated “experiences, territories, peoples, histories…by banishing their identities”
  • “relentlessly codified and observed” the non-European world (this is where Orientalism comes in)
• Even the “advanced” people supported it, the supposedly “progressive” policies did
  • “Advanced writers and artists, the working class, and women—groups marginalized in the West—showed an imperialist fervor that increased in intensity and perfervid enthusiasm as the competition among various European and American powers increased in brutality and senseless, even profitless, control. Eurocentrism penetrated to the core of the workers’ movement, the women’s movement, the avant-garde arts movement, leaving no one of significance untouched.” 222

Specifics

• Mansfield Park, “part of a structure of an expanding imperialist venture” 95 as one of the first cultural productions to help create “Domestic imperialist culture” that Britain’s imperialism NEEDED to survive
  • “Austen affirms and repeats the geographical process of expansion involving trade, production, and consumption that predates, underlies, and guarantees the morality.” 93
  • Fanny being brought into Mansfield Park to correct its inmates’ moral irregularities (and Susan brought in to replace her when necessary has its analogue in geographical expansion
  • In addition to the fact that Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to solve his money problems, “usable colony” 93 for “local benefit”
    • While his trip to Antigua reflects the decreasing power of the absentee landowners
  • What’s the connex between the overseas plantation and the “imbroglio” of the family? We shouldn’t say that her work is silly b/c it doesn’t dwell upon slavery or not abolitionist, but instead we can read the book as part of the imperial history
    • Its relation to colonies complex, subtle: the individual power of Sir Thomas going to Antigua as mirrored in the social politics of Mansfield Park: both about individualism
      • Like Spivak, he has identified “individualism” at the heart of the hidden connex between these 19th c novels and imperialism

Yeats and Decolonization: Intro

• Yeats as “great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power” 220
  • Like many colonial artists, “cultural dependence and antagonism together” 220
• Ireland a part of English colonialism: seven hundred years before the “high age of imperialism,” beginning in 1870s
  • It also began resisting English rule early too, coming into its own during 18th c via nationalism
    • Problem w/nationalism: often led by people educated by the colonizer, so they often just get you a new exploitative system
    • Remember how colonization was an educative one: where you instructed the natives, modernization the civilizing project…so how do you get out of that mindset (even if politically free)? You learned science, but also to accept authority. And you certainly didn’t get to learn your own history, just that of the colonizer. 223
• Process of Nationalism
  • 1) “pronounced awareness of European and Western culture as imperialism” where you say they will no longer guide you; “anti-imperialist resistance” 225
    • very geographical: recover land via imagination
    • overturn imperial process of turning your land into copy of the colonizer’s homeland that will adapt to rule from abroad and to provide profit: looks different spatially as well as politically
      • for Ireland, one important moment 1827 Ordnance Survey, where British folks redrew the Irish map, anglicizing place names and creating boundaries to speed up land ownership
    • this is for these artists the end of “authentic” culture and politics: thus often “romantic mythmaking” 225, but what he really wants to emphasize here is the project to “reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land” 226
      • this will lead to new myths and heroes, a new history (one beyond history of colonization), new religion, native language,
    • see Neil Smith stuff below to understand why Said says that this step is the creation of a third nature: not just return to old land (which is impossible) but reconciled w/the realities of now, of the effects of imperialism)
  • 2) “openly liberationist…conventional nationalism was revealed to be both insufficient and crucial, but only as a first step” 224, post-nationalist viewpoint often made clear by insurrection

Yeats and Decolonization: What’s actually about Yeats

• First, Yeats does the “reclaim our land and history and myths” stuff with his Gaelicism and Celtic themes
  • Seamus Deane: Yeats’ early Ireland was “amenable to his imagination” but “he ended by finding an Ireland recalcitrant to it” qtd 227; Easter 1916 and other concurrent events = end of the endless cycle (cf Cuchulain’s endless cycles) and creation of new national identity
    • unfortunately, this idea “reinforces in Yeats himself, the colonialist British attitude of a specific Irish national character” qtd 227 leading him in the end (this will be stage 3) to mysticism and fascism; but still there is possibility in this mysticism for keeping Irish culture alive by “keeping awake its consciousness of metaphysical questions” 228 b/c that is counter to the modernity given by capitalist British culture
      • Said: I don’t agree with this heroism; we need to see his reactionary politics, incoherence, and nostalgia for what they are: “nativist phenomenon” like Negritude that has its dangers and limits
      • Said on nativism: “to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the…divisions imposed by imperialism itself” 228 and is “metaphysics of essences” rather than historical…so dangerous, divisive, limiting and chauvinistic… yet Said notes they are inevitable, you have to go through nativism 229
• Then Yeats takes the unbearable tension between his ties with the Anglo-Irish elite (Protestant Ascendency) and his “Irish loyalties” to a ”’higher,’ that is, non-political level” with stuff like “Ego Dominus Tuus” and A Vision. “eccentric” and “aestheticized”
  • B/c couldn’t reconcile them on the political level
  • He mixed “Irish nationalism and the English cultural heritage” 227
• Stage three, nativism
• He recapitulates this movement: “nationality, nationalism, nativism” “more and more constraining” 229 leading to “pathology of power” qtd 230
  • Alternative to nativism? Yes. “imperialism courses on, as it were, belatedly in different forms…and the relationship of domination continues, but the opportunities for liberation are open” 230
• Yeats’ last poetry (1920s) shows him to be “partially” in this “second moment” before nationalist independence happens, during the opportunity for liberation just named above (that is instead of “nationality, nationalism, nativism” course, you don’t do nationalism, but rather liberation. That will prevent nativism.)
  • his gaiety, anger, and anarchism
  • what is this liberation? quotes Fanon: “a transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness” qtd 230, acceptance of history, realization of reality beyond national identity or colonialism (seen in Cahier d’un retour, Cesaire)
• So where is Yeats? BOTH in decolonization/resistance AND in nativism 232
  • Early on, nationalist poet
  • Then, he has “liberationist and utopian revolutionism” 235
    • where chaos is seen as product of imperialist action
  • Finally, “reactionary politics” that might even “cancel out” the second stage
• As a Poet of Decolonization
  • “struggles to announce the contours of an imagined or ideal community, crystallized by its sense not only of itself but also of its enemy” 232
  • evokes “instability of time” and by doing so “gains universal significance” 233 (“more than strictly local Irish meaning” 233)
  • poetry as “pact between the people and the poet” 234
  • “exhortation and expansiveness” 234
• Yeats’ most interesting work around the meaning and place of violence in the path towards liberation: is it justified? is it necessary? is it enough?
  • Finally sees that you need more than violence, but also “political and organizational process” 235
  • Yeatsian themes: “the problem of assuring the marriage of knowledge to power, of understanding violence;” “genealogy and recapitulation;” 236-7
• What is his best achievement? “reverse the reductive and slanderous encapsulation of Irish actualities…which had been the fate of the Irish at the hands of English writers for eight centuries” 237, “restoring a suppressed history” by using his personal experience as a perspective on history, an “archetype,” so important b/c colonialism (as Fanon said) “emptied” the native’s mind and robbed him of a history
  • B/c of the historical situation Yeats was in, his archetypes and allegories are not empty, but rather “insight and experience” 2389
  • he didn’t get to full liberation, but still “major international achievement in cultural decolonization nonetheless” 238
    • he doesn’t come right out and say it, he implies that b/c Yeats’ “fascism” is seen as a kind of nativism, he therefore places this unsavory Yeats into the decolonization process as a whole.

See Also

• Neil Smith, Uneven Development, where capitalism creates new space
  • “commercial geography…justified imperialism that the result of ‘natural’ fertility or infertility, available sea-lanes, permanently differentiated zones, territories, climates, and peoples.” qtd 225
    • the creation of a “scientifically ‘natural’ world,” a “second nature” qtd 225
  • end result: “universality of capitalism…the differentiation of national space according to the territorial division of labor” qtd 225