CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM

a development of the arguments put forward in Orientalism (which was also limited
to the Middle East) to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the
modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories : they were not like us,
and for that reason deserved to be ruled

but also (as something Said left out of Orientalism) the response to Western
dominance - along with armed resistance there also went considerable efforts in
cultural resistance, the assertions of nationalist identities and, in the political realm,
the creation of associations and parties whose common goal was self-
determination and national independence - never was it the case that the imperial
encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western-
native; there was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming
majority of cases, the resistance finally won out.

CULTURE : two meanings

1) those practices (e.g. 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 - include both the popular stock of lore about
distant places in the world and specialized knowledge from disciplines such as
ethnography, historiography, sociology .. The power to narrate, or to block other
narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and
imperialism - see Anderson too : nations themselves are narrations.
Paraphrasing Said The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but
when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it,
who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future - these issues
were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative [that in my
case are paintings*].

2) each societys reservoir of the best that has been known and thought - in time,
culture comes to be associated, even aggressively, with the nation or the state;
this differentiates us from them, almost always with some degree of
xenophobia. Culture is in this sense a source of identity, and a rather combative
one. In this second sense culture is a sort of theatre where various political and
ideological causes engage one another - it makes apparent that, for instance,
american, French, or Indian students who are taught to read their national
classics before they read others are expected to appreciate and belong loyally,
often uncritically, to their nations and traditions while denigrating or fighting
against others. The trouble with this idea of culture is that it entails not only
venerating ones own culture but also thinking of it as somehow divorced from,
before transcending, the everyday world.Most professional humanists as a
result are unable to make the connection 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. One of the difficult truths
 Said discovered in working on his book is how very few of the British and
French artists whom he admired took issue with the nation of subject or
inferior races so prevalent among officials who practiced those ideas as a
matter of course in ruling India or Algeria. They were widely accepted notions,
and they helped fuel the imperial acquisition of territories thought the nineteenth
century. In thinking of Carlyle or Ruskin, Dickens and Thackeray, critics have
often relegated these writers ideas about colonial expansion, inferior races, or
niggers to a very different department from that of culture, culture being the
elevated area of activity in which they truly belong and in which they did their
really important work. Culture conceived in this way is antiseptically
quarantined from its worldly affiliations.

THE CHOICE

The novels and other books Said considers are analyzed first of all because of their
inherent value : he find them estimable and admirable works of art and learning -
great products of the creative or interpretative imagination. Second, the challenge is
to connect them not only with aesthetic pleasure and profit but also with the
imperial process of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part.

Said does not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class
or economic history, but authors are, he also believe, very much in the history of
their societies, shaping and shaped by the history and their social experience in
different measure.

By the end of the nineteenth century the empire is no longer merely a

shadowy presence but, in the works of writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide, and Loti,
a central area of concern.

Conrad as both imperialist and anti-imperialist, progressive when it came to

rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-confirming, self-deluding
corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary when it came to conceding
that Africa or South America could ever have had an independent history or
culture, which the imperialists violently disturbed but by which they were
ultimately defeated. Yet lest we think patronizingly Conrad as the creature of his
own time, we had better note that recent attitudes in Washington and among most
Western policymakers and intellectuals show little advance over his views. This is
in effect what Americans have felt about their souther neighbors : that
independence is to be wished for them so long as it is the kind of independence
we approve of.

the great cultural archive as the place where the intellectual and aesthetic
investments in overseas dominion are made.

if you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, india and
North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense
of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and
 explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an
active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of
exotic geographies and peoples. Above all, your sense of power scarcely
imagined that those natives who appeared either subservient or sullenly
uncooperative were ever going to be capable of finally making you give up India
or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge, or
otherwise disrupt the prevailing discourse. One of imperialisms achievements,
Said claims, was to bring the world closer together, and although in the process
the separation between Europeans and natives was an insidious and
fundamentally unjust one, must of us should now regard the historical experience
of empire as a common one.

the idea of overseas rule - jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant
lands - the idea has a lot to do with projections, whether in fiction or geography or
art - Britain and France jumped thousands of miles beyond their own borders to
other continents (in contrast with Russia which moved to swallow whatever land
of peoples stood next to its borders).

each great metropolitan center that aspired to global dominance has said,
and alas done, many of the same things - there is the horrifically predictable
disclaimer that we are exceptional, not imperial, not about to repeat the mistake
of earlier powers, a disclaimer that has been routinely followed by making the
mistake, as witness the Vietnam and Gulf wars.

challenging a fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of
cultural thought during the era of imperialism. Throughout the exchange between
Europeans and their others, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is
an us and a them, each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident. As
discussed in Orientalism, the division goes back to Greek thought about
barbarians but by the nineteenth century it had become the hallmark of imperialist
cultures. We are still the inheritors of that style by which one is defined by the
nation.

Yet though imperialism implacably advanced during the 19th and 20th
centuries, resistance to it also advanced. Methodologically then he tries to show
the two forces together.

APPEALS TO THE PAST AND INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PRESENT

the central idea : how we formulate or represent the past shapes our understanding
and views of the present ( T. S. Eliot) - appeals to the past are among the
commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present, why? not only because of
disagreements about what happened in the past, but also because of uncertainty
about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues,
albeit in different forms, perhaps.

IMPERIALISM
Eliots ideas of the complexity of the relationship between past and present are
particularly suggestive in the debate over the meaning of imperialism, a word and
an idea today so controversial, so fraught with all sort of questions, doubts,
polemics, and ideological premises as nearly to resist use altogether. To some
extent the debate involves definitions and attempts at delimitations of the very
notion itself : was imperialism principally economic, how far did it extend, what were
its causes, was it systematic, when (or whether) did it end? The roll call of names
who have contributed to the discussion in Europe and America is impressive
(Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxememburg, Hobson, Lenin, Schumpeter, Arendt, Magdoff,
Kennedy, Appema Williams, Kolko, Chomsky, Zinn, Lefeber). These authorities
debated largely political and economic questions. Yet scarcely any attention has
been paid to the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience, and
little notice taken of the fact that the extraordinary global reach of clausal 19th and
early-20th century European imperialism still casts a considerable shadow over our
own times.

to speak, as OBrien does, of the propaganda for an expanding empire [which]

created illusions of security and false expectations that high returns would accrue to
those who invested beyond its boundaries is in effect to speak of an atmosphere
created by both empire and novels, by racial theory and geographical speculation,
by the concept of national identity and urban (or rural) routine.

everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we
must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have
more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous residents. At
some basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land
that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others. the
earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not
exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely
free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting
because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about
forms, about images and imaginings. There were scholars, administrators,
travellers, traders, parliamentarians, merchants, novelists, theorists, speculators,
adventurers, visionaries, poets, and every variety of outcast and misfit in the
outlying possessions of these two imperial powers [France and Britain], each of
whom contributed to the formation of a colonial actuality existing at the heart of
metropolitan life.

As I shall be using the term, imperialism means the practice, the theory, and the
attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; colonialism,
which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of
settlements on distant territory. As Michael Doyle puts it: Empire is a relationship,
formal or informal. in which one state controls the effective politica sovereignty of
another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by
economic, social, and cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or
policy of establishing and maintaining an empire. In our time, direct colonialism has
largely ended; imperialism, as we shall see, lingers where it has always been, in a
kind of cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and
social practices. Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation
and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive
ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and peoples
require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with
domination: the vocabulary of classic 19th century imperial culture is plentiful with
words and concepts like inferior or subject races, subordinate peoples,
dependency, expansion, and authority.

WHAT DROVE THE EXPANSION OF THE GREAT WESTERN EMPIRES?

A question that concerns Said: given the initial, perhaps obscurely derived and
motivated move toward empire from Europe to the rest of the world, how did the
idea and the practice of it gain the consistency and density of continuous
enterprise, which it did by the later part of the 19th century?

Profit and hope of further profit were obviously tremendously important, as the
attractions of spices, sugar, slaves, rubber, cotton, opium, tin, gold, and silver over
centuries amply testify. So also was inertia, the investment in already going
enterprises, tradition, and the market or institutional forces that kept the enterprises
going. But there is more than that to imperialism and colonialism. There was a
commitment to them over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation
and recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent men and women to
accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be
subjugated, and, on the other, replenish metropolitan energies so that these decent
people could think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation
to rule subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples. We must not forget that
there was little domestic resistance to these empires, although they were very
frequently established and maintained under adverse and even disadvantageous
conditions. Not only were immense hardships endured by the colonizers, but there
was always the tremendously risky physical disparity between a small number of
Europeans at a very great distance from home and the much larger number of
natives on their home territory.

For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire, and all
kind of preparations are made for it within a culture; then in turns imperialism
acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and
ruled alike within the culture.

Recent intellectual and academic discourse has tended to separate and divide
between the pursuit of national imperial aims and the general national culture. Most
scholars are specialists. And understanding that connection does not reduce or
diminish the novels value as works of art; on the contrary, because of their
worldliness, because of their complex affiliations with their real setting, they are
more interesting and more valuable as works of art. Moreover seeing their
connections by no means involves hurling critical epithets at European or,
generally, Western art and culture by way of wholesale condemnation. Not at all.
we must take stock of the nostalgia for empire, as well as the anger and resentment
it provokes in those who were ruled, and we must try to look carefully and integrally
at the culture that nurtured the sentiment, rationale, and above all the imagination
of empire.

The Foundation of Empire, William Blake says in his annotations to Reynoldss

Discourses, is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is
No more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

IMAGES OF THE PAST

the questions dealt in the book are not nostalgically academic or theoretical
ones, for as a brief excursion or two will ascertain, they have important social and
political consequences. Both London and Paris have large immigrant populations
from the former colonies, which themselves have a large residue of British and
French culture in their daily life.

when the social pressures of administering numerous overseas territories

and large new domestic constituencies mounted, the ruling elites of Europe felt
the clear need to project their power backward in time, giving it a history and
legitimacy that only tradition and longevity could impart. Similar constructions
have been made on the opposite side, that is, by insurgent natives about their
pre-colonial past, as in the case of Algeria during the War of Independence (1954
- 1962), when decolonization encouraged Algerians and Muslims to create
images of what they supposed themselves to have been prior to French
colonization.

in 1910, the French advocate of colonialism Jules Harmand said: It is

necessary, then, to accept as a principle and point of departure the fact that there
is a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and that we belong to the superior race
and civilization, still recognizing that, while superiority confers rights, it imposes
strict obligations in return. The basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples
is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic, and
military superiority, but our moral superiority. Our dignity rests on that quality, and
it underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity. Material power is nothing but a
means to that end.

was it not true that we had given them progress and modernization?
Hadnt we provided them with order and a kind of stability that they havent been
able since to provide for themselves? Wasnt it an atrocious misplaced trust it
believe in their capacity for independence, for it had led to Bokassas and Amins
?Shouldnt we have held on to the colonies, kept the subject or inferior races in
check, remained true to our civilizational responsibilities ?

we live in a world not only of commodities but also of representation, and

representations - their production, circulation, history, and interpretation - are the
very element of culture. In much recent theory the problem of representations is
deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is
primarily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolated cultural sphere,
believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical
speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political sphere,
where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur. A radical
falsification has become established in this separation. Culture is exonerated of
any entanglements with power, representations are considered only as apolitical
images to be parsed and construed as so many grammars of exchange, and the
divorce of the present from the past is assumed to be complete. And yet, far from
this separation of spheres being a neutral or accidental choice, its real meanings
is an act of complicity.

a structure of attitude and reference : allusions to the facts of empire in the

novels.

the empire functions for much of the European 19th century as a codified, if
only marginally visible, presence in fiction,very much like the servants in grand
households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever
more than named, or rarely studied.

disgraced young sons are set off to the colonies, shabby older relatives go
there to try to recoup lost fortunes, enterprising young travellers go there to sow
wild oats and to collect exotica.

eccentric of unacceptable human beings, with fortune-enhancing or

fantasized activities like emigration, money-making, and sexual adventure

we must read the great canonical texts with an effort to draw out, extend,
given emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically
represented in such works (like a message out of a bottle). Western writers,
whether Dickens and Austen, Flaubert or Camus, wrote with an exclusively
Western audience in mind, even when they wrote of characters, places, or
situations that referred to, made us of, overseas territories held by Europeans.
But just because Austen referred to Antigua in Mansfield Park or to realms visited
by the British navy in Persuasion without any thought of possible responses by
the caribbean or Indian natives resident there is no reason for us to do the same.
We now know that these non-european peoples did not accept with indifference
the authority projected over them, or the general silence on which their presence
in variously atte hated forms is predicated. In practical terms, contrapuntal
reading means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an
author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to
the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England. References to
Australia in David Copperfield or India in Jane Eyre are made because they can
be, because British power (and not just the novelists fancy) made passing
references to these massive appropriations possible; but the further lessons are
no less true: that these colonies were subsequently liberated from direct and
indirect rule, a process that began and unfolded while the British were still there.
The point is that contrapuntal reading must take into account of both processes,
that of imperialism and that of resistance to it.

This is, perhaps, to overstate the matter, but Said wants to make the point
that far from Heart of darkness and its image of Africa being only literature, the
work is extraordinarily caught up in, is indeed an organic part of, the scramble for
Africa that was contemporary with Conrads composition. True, Conrads
audience was small, and, true also, he was very critical of Belgian colonialism.
Butto most Europeans, reading a rarefied text like Heart of darkness was often as
close as they came to Africa, and in that limited sense it was part of the European
effort to hold on to, think about, plan for Africa.

as Said repeats frequently, the nineteenth-century contest over empire is still

continuing today.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow contrast Roman colonizers with their modern

counterparts, illuminating the special mix of power, ideological energy, and
practical attitude characterizing European imperialism.The ancient Romans, he
says, were "no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze and nothing
more." Such people conquered and did little else. By contrast, "what saves us is
efficiency-the devotion to efficiency," unlike the Romans, who relied on brute
force, which is scarcely more than "an accident arising from the weakness of
others." Today, however, the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the
taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter than
ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is
the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a. sentimental pretence but an idea;
and an unselfish belief in the idea-something you can set up, and bow down
before, and offer a sacrifice to.

Said is not trying to say that the novel - or the culture in the broad sense -
caused imperialism, but that the novel as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society,
and imperialism are unthinkable without each other. Imperialism and the novel
fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible ti read one without in
some way dealing with the other. Nor is this all. The novel sian incorporative,
quasi-encyclopedic cultural form. Packed into it are both a highly regulated plot
mechanism and an entire system of social reference.

But, one might ask, why give so much emphasis to novels, and to England?
And how can we bridge the distance separating this solitary aesthetic form from
large topics and undertakings like culture or imperialism?For one thing, by the
time of World War One the British empire had become unquestionably dominant,
the result of a process that had started in the late. sixteenth century; so powerful
was the process and so definitive its result that it was the central fact of British
history.It is not entirely coincidental that Britain also produced and sustained a
novelistic institution with no real European competitor or equivalent. Only as North
Africa assumes a sort of metropolitan presence in French culture after 1870 do we
see a comparable aesthetic and cultural formation begin to flow: this is the period
when Loti, the early Gide, Daudet, Maupassant, Mille, Psichari, Malraux, the
exoticists like Segalen, and of course Camus project a global concordance
between the domestic and imperial situations By the 1840s the English novel had
achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to
speak, in English society. Because the novel gained so important a place in "the
condition of England" question, for example, we can see it also as participating in
England's overseas empire. In projecting what Raymond Williams calls a
"knowable community" of Englishmen and women, Jane Austen, George Eliot,
and Mrs. Gaskell shaped the idea of England in such a way as to give it identity,
presence, ways of reusable articulation. And part of such an idea was the
relationship between "home" and abroad.

There seems to be agreement among scholars that until about 187o British
policy was not to expand the empire but "to uphold and maintain it and to protect it
from disintegration. Central to this task was India, which acquired a status of
astonishing durability in "departmental" thought. After 1870 protecting India and
defending against other competing powers, e.g., Russia, necessitated British
imperial expansion in Africa, and the Middle and Far East. Thereafter, in one area
of the globe after another, "Britain was indeed preoccupied with holding what she
already had," as Platt puts it, "and whatever she gained was demanded because
it helped her to preserve the rest. In short, British power was durable and
continually reinforced. In the related and often adjacent cultural sphere, that
power was elaborated and articulated in the novel, whose central continuous
presence is not comparably to be found elsewhere. But we must be as fastidious
as possible. A novel is neither a frigate nor a bank draft. A novel exists first as a
novelist's effort and second as an object read by an audience. In time novels
accumulate and become what Harry Levin has usefully called an institution of
literature, but they do not ever lose either their status as events or their specific
density as part of a continuous enterprise recognized and accepted as such by
readers and other writers. But for all their social presence, novels are not
reducible to a sociological current and cannot be done justice to aesthetically,
culturally, and politically as subsidiary forms of class, ideology, or interest.
Equally, however, novels are not simply the product of lonely genius, to be
regarded only as manifestations of unconditioned creativity. Novel generally, and
narrative in particular, have been shown to have a sort of regulatory social
presence in West European societies (see Jameson; and Miller).

What we have is a slowly built up picture with England- socially, politically,

morally charted and differentiated in immensely fine detail- at the center and a
series of overseas territories connected to it at the peripheries. The continuity of
British imperial policy throughout the nineteenth century -in fact a narrative- is
actively accompanied by this novelistic process, whose main purpose is not to
raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy attention, but to keep
the empire more or less in place. Hardly ever is the novelist interested in doing a
great deal more than mentioning or referring to India, for example, in Vanity Fair
and Jane Eyre, or Australia in Great Expectations. The idea is that (following the
general principles of free trade) outlying territories are available for use, at will, at
the novelist's discretion, usually for relatively simple purposes such as
immigration, fortune, or exile.
 The actual interpretative consequence of this slow and steady structure of
attitude and reference articulated by the novel are diverse. Said specifies four of
them :
1. there is an unusual organic continuity between the earlier narratives that are
normally not considered to have much to do with empire and the later ones
explicitly about it. Kipling and Conrad are prepared for by Austen and
Thackeray, Defoe, Scott, and Dickens; they are also interestingly connected
with their contemporaries like Hardy and James, regularly supposed to be only
coincidentally associated with the overseas exhibits presented by their rather
more peculiar novelist counterparts.
2. novels have not legislative or direct political authority, but they participate in, are
part of, contribute to an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies,
reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions and attitudes
about England and the world.
3. all the major English novelists of the mid-19th century, accepted a globalized
world-view and indeed could not (in most cases did not) ignore the bast
overseas reach of British power. The domestic order (e.g. Dumbey and Son)
was tied to, located in even illuminated by a specifically English order abroad.
Jane Austen sees the legitimacy of Sir Thomas Bertrams overseas properties
as a natural extension of the calm, the order, the beauties of Mansfield Park,
one central estate validating the economically supportive role of the peripheral
other.
4. the refusal to collapse the various contributions of individual authors into a
general scheme.

it is too simple and reductive to argue that everything in European or

American culture prepares for or consolidates the grand idea of empire. It is also,
however historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies - whether in narrative,
political theory, or pictorial technique - that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise
assured the West's readiness to assume and enjoy the experience of empire. If
there was cultural resistance to the notion of imperial mission, there was not
much support for that resistance in the main departments of cultural thought.
Liberal though he was, John Stuart Mill - as a telling case in still say, "The sacred
duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each
other, are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are
certain evil, or at best a questionable good.

Part of our difficulty today in accepting any connection at all is that we tend to
reduce this complicated matter to an apparently simple causal one, which in turn
produces a rhetoric of blame and defensiveness. I am not saying that the major
factor in early European culture was that it caused late-nineteenth- century
imperialism, and I am not implying that all the problems of the formerly colonial
world should be blamed on Europe. I am saying, however, that European culture
often, not always, characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate
its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with
distant imperial rule. Cultural forms like the novel or the opera do not cause
people to go out and imperialize. Carlyle did not drive Rhodes directly, and he
 certainly cannot be "blamed" for the problems in today's southern Africa but it is
genuinely troubling to see how little Britain's great humanistic ideas, institutions,
and monuments, which we still celebrate as having the power a-historically to
command our approval, how little they stand in the way of the accelerating
imperial process. We are entitled to ask how this body of humanistic ideas
coexisted so comfortably with imperialism, and why - until the resistance to
imperialism in the imperial domain, among Africans, Asians, Latin Americans,
developed - there was little significant opposition or deterrence to empire at home.

I would venture to say that if one began to look for something like an imperial
map of the world in english literature, it would turn up with amazing insistence and
frequency well before the mid-19th century. Even a quick inventory reveals poets,
philosophers, historians, dramatists, statesmen, novelists, travel writers,
chroniclers, soldiers, and fabulists who prized, cared for, and traced these
interests with continuing concern.

until after the mid-19th century France shows a somewhat fitful, perhaps
even sporadic but certainly limited and specialized literary or cultural concern with
those realms that traders, scholars, missionaries, or soldiers went and where in
the East or the Americas they encountered their British counterparts. before
taking Algeria in 1830, France had no India. About French literary culture it would
be easy to draw the wrong conclusions, and so a series of contrasts with England
are worth listing. England's widespread, unspecialized, and easily accessible
awareness of overseas interests has no direct French equivalent. The French
equivalents of Austen's country gentry or Dickens's business people who make
casual references to the Caribbean or India are not easily to be found. Still, in two
or three rather specialized ways France's overseas interests appear in cultural
discourse. One, interestingly enough, is the huge, almost iconic figure of
Napoleon, who embodies the romantic French spirit abroad, less a conqueror
(which in fact he was, in Egypt) than a brooding, melodramatic presence.

All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to

master or in some way control them. Yet not all cultures make representations of
foreign cultures and in fact master or control them. This is the distinction, I
believe, of modern Western cultures. It requires the study of Western knowledge
or representations of the non-European world to be a study of both those
representations and the political power they express. Late 19th century artists like
Kipling and Conrad, or for that natter mid-century figures like Gerome and
Flaubert, do not merely reproduce the outlying territories: they work them out, or
animate them, using narrative technique and historical and exploratory attitudes
and positive ideas of the sort provided by thinkers like Max Muller, Renan,
Charles Temple, Darwin, Benjamin Kidd, Emerich de Vattel. All of these
developed and accentuated the essentialist positions in European culture
proclaiming that Europeans should rule, non-Europeans be ruled. And Europeans
did rule.

THE FRENCH IMPERIAL EXPERIENCE

 Not all empires were the same. Frances empire, though no less interested
than Britains in profit, plantations, and slaves, was energized by prestige. The
ideological theory of colonial assimilation begun under the Revolution collapsed,
as theories of racial types - Gustave Le Bons primitive, inferior, intermediate, and
superior races; or Ernest Seillres philosophy of pure force; or Albert Sarrauts
and Paul Leroy-Beaulieus systematics of colonial practice; or Jules Harmands
principle of domination - guided French imperial strategies. Natives and their
lands were not to be treated as entities that could be made French, but as
possessions the immutable characteristics of which required separation and
subservience, even though this did not rule out the mission civilizatrice. The
influence of Fouillee, Clozel, and Giran turned such ideas into a language and, in
the imperial realms themselves, a practice that closely resembled a science, a
science of ruling inferiors whose resources, lands, and destinies France was in
charge of. Betts rightly notes that nonetheless the theory of imperialism did not
occur by invitation but by force, and in the long run, all noble doctrine considered,
was only successful so long as this ultima ratio was apparent.

To compare discussion of empire be and for the French with the actualities of
imperial conquest is to be struck by many disparities and ironies. Pragmatic
considerations were always allowed for people like Lyautey, Gallieni, Faidherbe,
Bugeaud - generals, proconsuls, administrators - to act with force and draconian
dispatch. For the lobbies and what today we call publicists - ranging from
novelists and jingoists to mandarin philosophers - the French empire was
uniquely connected to the French national identity, its brilliance, civilizational
energy, special geographical, social, and historical development.

making Algeria French - fir the land was taken from the natives and their
buildings were occupied ; then French settlers gained control of the cork oak
forests and mineral deposits. Then, as David Prochaska notes for Annaba
(formerly named Bone), they displaced the Algerians and peopled [places like]
Bone with Europeans. For several decades after 1830 booty capital ran the
economy, the native population decreased, and settler groups increased. A dual
economy came into being: "The European economy can be likened by and large
to a firm-centered capitalist economy, while the Algerian economy can be com-
pared to a bazaar-oriented, pre-capitalist economy."So while "France reproduced
itself in Algeria,"Algerians were relegated to marginality and poverty.

Camus is particularly important in the ugly colonial turbulence of France's

twentieth-century decolonizing travail. He is a very late imperial figure who not
only survived the heyday of empire, but survives today as a ''universalist" writer
with roots in a now forgotten colonialism.Why was Algeria a setting for narratives
whose main reference (e.g. Lstranger and La Peste) has always been construed
as France ? The choice is not innocent, and much in the tales (e.g., Meursaults
trial) is either a surreptitious or unconscious justification of French rule or an
ideological attempt to prettify it.

the struggle between Bugeaud and the Emir Abdel Kader - the razzia, or
punitive raid on Algerians villages, their homes, harvests, women and children -
 at the core of French military policy - the Arabs, said Bugeaud, must be
prevented fro sowing, from harvesting, and from pasturing their flocks. It was an
opportunity for a guerre outrance beyond all morality and need. General
Changarnier, for instance, describes a pleasant distraction vouchsafed his troops
in raiding peaceful villages; this type of activity is taught by the scripture, he says,
in which Joshua and other great leaders conducted de bien terribles razzias and
were blessed by God. Ruin, total destruction, uncompromising brutality are
condoned not only because legitimized by God but because, in words echoed
and reechoed from Bugeaud to Salan,."les Arabes ne comprennent que la force
brutale."As it happens, one of the quiet themes running through French fiction
from Balzac to Psichari and Loti is precisely this abuse of Algeria and the
scandals deriving from shady financial schemes operated by unscrupulous
individuals for whom the openness of the place permitted nearly every
conceivable thing to be done if profit could be promised or expected.
Unforgettable portraits of this state of affairs can be found in Daudet's Tartarin de
Tarascon and Maupassant's Bel-Ami.

The destruction wrought upon Algeria by the French was systematic on the
.one hand, and constitutive of a new French polity on the other. Tocqueville, who
sternly criticized American policy toward Blacks and native Indians, believed that
the advance of European civilization necessitated inflicting cruelties on the
Muslim indigenes: in his view, total conquest became equivalent to French
greatness. He considered Islam synonymous with "polygamy, the isolation of
women, the absence of all political life, a tyrannical and omnipresent government
which forces men to conceal themselves and to seek all their satisfactions in
family life." But, as Melvin Richter comments, Tocqueville said nothing "in 1846
when it was revealed that hundreds ofArabs had been smoked to death in the
course of the razzias he had approved for their humane quality." "Unfortunate
necessities," Tocqueville thought, but nowhere near as important as the "good
government" owed the "half-civilized" Muslims by French government.

MODERNISM

No vision, any more than any social system, has total hegemony over its
domain. Said is clear that his account speaks of largely unopposed and
undeterred will to overseas dominion, not of a completely unopposed one. We
ought to be impressed with how, by the end of the 19th century, colonial lobbies
in Europe could whether by cabal or by popular support press the nation into
more scrambling for land and more natives being compelled into imperial service.
with little at home to stop or inhibit the process. Yet there are always resistances,
however ineffective. Imperialism not only is a relationship of domination but also
is committed to a specific ideology of expansion. And expansion could occur with
such stunning results only because there was power - power military, economic,
political, and cultural - enough for the task in Europe and America. Once the basic
fact of European and Western control over the non-Western world was taken as
fact, as inevitable, much complex and antinomian cultural discussion began to
occur with noticeably greater frequency.
 Conrad, Foster, Malraux, T.E. Lawrence take narrative from the triumphalist
experience of imperialism into the extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity,
self-referentiality, and corrosive irony that are the hallmarks of modernist culture,
a culture that also embraces the major work of Joyce, T.S. Eliot. Proust, Mann,
and Yeats. Many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture,
which often are thought to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western
society and culture, include a response to the external pressures on culture from
the imperium. In Manns Death in Venice - the plague that infects Europe its
Asiatic in origin; the combination of dread and promise, of degeneration and
desire is Manns way of suggesting, Said believes, that Europe, its art, mind,
monuments, is no longer invulnerable, no longer able to ignore its ties to its
overseas domains. Only now instead of being out there, they are here, as
troubling as the primitive rhythms of the Sacre du printempts or the African icons
in Picassos art.

When European culture finally began to take due account of imperial

delusions and discoveries it did so not oppositional but ironically, and with a
desperate attempt at a new inclusiveness. Members of the dominant European
cultures now began to look abroad with the skepticism and confusion of people
surprised, perhaps even shocked by what they saw. Cultural texts imported the
foreign into Europe in ways that very clearly bear the mark of the imperial
enterprise, of explorers and ethnographers, geologists and geographers,
merchants and soldiers. At first they stimulated the interest ofEuropean
audiences; by the beginning of the twentieth century, they were used to convey
an ironic sense of how vulnerable Europe was, and how - in Conrad's great phrase
- this also has been.one of the dark places on the earth." To deal with this, a new
form became necessary, one that had three distinctive features : 1) a circularity of
structure, inclusive and open at the same time (e.g. Ulysses, A la recherche, The
Waste Land ..) 2) a strange juxtaposition of comic and tragic, high and low,
commonplace and exotic, familiar and alien ; 3) as you can no longer assume that
Britain or France will rule forever, you have to reconceive reality as something
that can be held together by you the artist, in history rather than in geography.
Spatiality becomes the characteristics of an aesthetic rather than of political
domination.

THE IMMORALIST

A major locale for the action of LImmoraliste is French Algeria, a place of

deserts, languorous oases, amoral native boys and girls. Michels Nietzchean
mentor, Mnalque, is straightforwardly described as a colonial official. Speaking
of French North Africa Michel reflects: This land of pleasure satisfies without
calming desire; indeed, every satisfaction merely exalts it. A land liberated from
works of an. I despise those who can acknowledge beauty only when it's already
transcribed, interpreted. One thing admirable about the Arabs: they live their art,
they sing and scatter it from day to day; they don't cling to it, they don't enbalm it
in works.Which is the cause and the of the absence of great artists....Just as I was
returning to the hotel, I remembered a group of Arabs I had noticed lying in the
 open air on the mats of a little cafe. I went and slept among them. I returned
covered with vermin.

RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION

Just as culture may predispose and actively prepare one society for the
overseas domination of another, it may also prepare that society to relinquish or
modify the idea of overseas domination. These changes cannot occur without the
willingness of men and women to resist the pressures of colonial rule, to take up
arms, to project ideas of liberation, and to imagine (as Benedict anderson has it) a
new national community, to take the final plunge. Nor can they occur unless either
economic or political exhaustion with empire sets in at home, unless the idea of
empire and the cost of colonial rule are challenged publicly, unless the
representations of imperialism begin to lose their justification and legitimacy, and,
finally, unless the rebellious "natives" impress upon the metropolitan culture the
independence and integrity of their own culture, free from colonial encroachment.

MALRAUX

Malrauxs La Vie Royale :Perken and Claude (the narrator) on the one hand,
and the French authorities on the other contest for domination and loot in French
Indochina: Perken wants the Cambodian bas-reliefs, the bureaucrats look on his
quest with suspicion and dislike. When the adventurers find Grabot, a Kurtz
figure, who has been captured, blinded, and tortured, they try to get him back
from the natives who have him, but his spirit has been broken. After Perken is
wounded and his diseased leg is seen to be destroy:.. ing him, the indomitable
egoist (like Kurtz in his final agony) pronounces his defiant message to the
grieving Claude (like Marlow). The jungle and tribes of Indochina are represented
in La Voie royale with a combination of fear and inviting allure. Grabot is held by
Mois tribespeople; Perken has ruled the Stieng people for a long period and, like
a devoted anthropologist, tries in vain to protect them from encroaching
modernization (in the form of a colonial railroad). Yet despite the menace and
disquiet of the novel's imperial setting, little suggests the political menace, or that
the cosmic doom engulfing Claude, Perken, and Grabot is anything more
historically concrete than a generalized malevolence against which one must
exert one's will. Said attaches so much importance to La Voie royale because, as
the work of an extraordinary European talent, it testifies so conclusively to the
inability of the Western humanistic conscience to confront the political challenge
of the imperial domains.

If one compares Malraux with the celebrated French expert on Indochinese

culture Paul Mus, whose book Viet-Nam: Sociologic d'une guerre appeared
twenty years later, on the eve of Dien Bien Phu, and who saw, as Edward
Thompson did, the profound political crisis that separated France from Indochina,
the difference is striking. In a remarkable chapter entitled "Sur Ia route Viet-
namienne" (perhaps echoing La Voie rvyale), Mus speaks plainly of the French
 institutional system and its secular violation of Vietnamese sacred values; the
Chinese, he says, understood Vietnam better than France, with its railroads,
schools, and "administration laique." Without religious mandate, with little
knowledge ofVietnamese traditional morality, and even less attention to local
nativism and sensibility, the French were merely inattentive conquerors. Mus sees
Europeans and Asiatics bound together and he opposes continuing the colonial
system. He proposes independence for Vietnam, despite the Soviet and Chinese
menace, yet wants a' French-Vietnamese pact that would give France certain
privileges in Vietnamese reconstruction.

THEMES OF RESISTANCE CULTURE

after the period of primary resistance (literally fighting against outside

intrusion) there comes the period of secondary, that is, ideological resistance,
when efforts are made to reconstitute a shattered community, to save or restore
the sense and fact of community against all the pressures of the colonial system
(Basil Davidson). There is indeed the need to find the ideological basis for a wider
unity than any known before. This basis is found, Said believes, in the rediscovery
and repatriation of what had been suppressed in the natives' past by the
processes of imperialism. Thus one can understand Fanon's insistence on
rereading Hegel's master- slave dialectic in light of the colonial situation, a
situation in which Fanon remarks on how the master in imperialism "differs
basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here
the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the
slave is not recognition but work."

The imperial writers of the Third World bear their past within them - as scars
of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised
visions of the past tending toward a post-colonial future, as urgently
reinterpretable and redeployable experiences, in which the formerly silent native
speaks and acts on territory reclaimed as pan of a general movement of
resistance, from the colonist.