Summary of Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperialism

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The poet is a talent that works within a tradition that cannot be simply inherited. The poet’s task is to obtain a tradition that involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which is a perception of the pastness of the past and its presence.
#2 The past shapes our present understanding and views of the present. How we represent the past determines how we view the present. The American and Iraqi versions of the past clashed during the Gulf War in 1990–91.
#3 The modern imperial experience has had a profound impact on the lives of individuals around the world. The British and French empires between them controlled vast territories, which were later liberated from their control.
#4 The world is one, and we are all connected to it in some way. We must consider the impact of empires on art, and how it can be difficult to separate the two.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Imperialism
• Impérialisme (jeu vidéo)

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669399308
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperialism
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The poet is a talent that works within a tradition that cannot be simply inherited. The poet’s task is to obtain a tradition that involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which is a perception of the pastness of the past and its presence.

#2

The past shapes our present understanding and views of the present. How we represent the past determines how we view the present. The American and Iraqi versions of the past clashed during the Gulf War in 1990–91.

#3

The modern imperial experience has had a profound impact on the lives of individuals around the world. The British and French empires between them controlled vast territories, which were later liberated from their control.

#4

The world is one, and we are all connected to it in some way. We must consider the impact of empires on art, and how it can be difficult to separate the two.

#5

The rise of the West, and Western power, allowed the imperial metropolitan centers to acquire and accumulate territory and subjects on a truly astonishing scale.

#6

The American experience was from the beginning founded upon the idea of an imperium, a dominion, state or sovereignty that would expand in population and territory, and increase in strength and power.

#7

The primacy of the British and French empires by no means obscures the modern expansion of Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and, in a different way, Russia and the United States.

#8

The expansion of the great Western empires was fueled by profit and hope of further profit, but there was also a commitment to them over and above profit. This allowed decent people to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated.

#9

The imperial past is not completely contained within the era of high nineteenth-century imperialism, but it has entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people. We must take stock of the nostalgia for empire, as well as the anger and resentment it provokes in those who were ruled.

#10

There is a serious split in today’s critical consciousness, which allows us to spend a lot of time elaborating the aesthetic theories of Carlyle and Ruskin while ignoring the authority that their ideas simultaneously bestowed on the subjugation of inferior peoples and colonial territories.

#11

The novel Dombey and Son is a prime example of how Dickens expresses the egoism of the British mercantile ethos. The book is a description of Dombey’s overweening self-importance, and his coercive attitude to his barely born child.

#12

The connections between literature and culture and imperialism are complex and dynamic. I am not trying to separate them, but to connect them. I am interested in this for the main philosophical and methodological reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, and impure.

#13

There is a growing awareness that all cultures have an aspiration to sovereignty, sway, and dominance. In this, French and British, Indian and Japanese cultures agree. However, they also concur that these are not unitary or monolithic cultures but rather hybrid experiences that incorporate many contradictory elements.

#14

The Invention of Tradition is a book that explores the origins of traditions, and how they are created and perpetuated by the ruling classes. It demonstrates how the European ruling classes needed to project their power backward in time, and so they created traditions.

#15

The legacy of imperialism is extremely complex, and it is difficult to handle. Many people in England feel some remorse or regret about their nation’s Indian experience, but there are also many people who miss the good old days.

#16

The post-colonial world is too small and interconnected to allow for the passively happening of conflicts between Western and non-Western cultures.

#17

The world we live in today is a result of the imperialism of the past, and it is up to us to make sure it does not repeat itself.

#18

The history of imperialism is a history of the globalization of conflict, and it is still present in the present day in the form of arguments and counter-arguments about the past.

#19

The debate about the residue of imperialism is a good example of how the West still views the world through a colonial lens. It is rare to see Western intellectuals praise the accomplishments of non-Western nations, despite many non-Western nations being much worse off than Western nations.

#20

The emotions stirred up by Rushdie’s case showed how much the West felt that enough was enough. There was a sense that the West had given too much to the ex-colonial world, and that they didn’t appreciate it.

#21

The imperial attitude is beautifully captured in the narrative form of Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness, written between 1898 and 1899. While the narrator Marlow acknowledges the tragic predicament of all speech, he still manages to convey the enormous power of Kurtz’s African experience through his own overmastering narrative.

#22

Heart of Darkness is a dramatization of Marlow telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. However, the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism.

#23

Conrad was not a great imperialist like Cecil Rhodes or Frederick Lugard, but he still understood how the system worked. Because he was not a fully incorporated and acculturated Englishman, he maintained an ironic distance in each of his works.

#24

The second argument is that the old imperial enterprise should be allowed to play out conventionally, and that the West should retain its colonies not only as markets but as locales on the ideological map over which they continue to rule morally and intellectually.

#25

The first line out of Conrad’s novel is the discourse of resurgent empire, which persists today in the extremely complex and quietly interesting exchange between former colonial partners. But these exchanges are overshadowed by the loud antagonisms of the pro- and anti-imperialist camps.

#26

The second line out of Conrad’s narrative form is a profoundly secular perspective that is beholden neither to notions about historical destiny and the essentialism that destiny always seems to entail, nor to historical indifference and resignation.

#27

The controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses brought to light a common ground between the Western media and the Third World that had been obscured by the controversy itself.

#28

Conrad’s narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of European imperialism. They think about it a lot, they worry about it, and they are actually quite anxious about whether they can make it seem like a routine thing. But it never is.

#29

The darkness that Conrad saw in Africa was actually a non-European world resisting imperialism. However, Conrad could not see this, as he was a product of his time. He could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.

#30

There is a crossing over between classical nineteenth-century imperialism and what it gave rise to in resistant native cultures. Many of the most interesting post-colonial writers bear their past within them as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, and as potentially revised visions of the past.

#31

There is a subjective core to human experience that is not exhausted by totalizing theories. If we acknowledge the histories and entanglements of special but nonetheless overlapping and interconnected experiences, there is no particular intellectual reason to grant each and all of them an ideal and essentially separate status.

#32

The notion of discrepant experiences is not meant to bypass the problem of ideology. On the contrary, no experience can be characterized as immediate, and no critic or interpreter can be entirely believed if they claim to have achieved an Archimedean perspective that is subject neither to history nor to a social setting.

#33

The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 was the beginning of a period of great battles, serious results were produced in a frightening manner, and the course of things was troubled. The common meaning of life was corrupted and destruction overtook it.

#34

The French and British colonization of the Middle East and Africa was not a one-time event, but a constantly repeated, institutionalized presence in French life. The response to the silent and incorporated disparity between French and subjugated cultures took on a variety of forms.

#35

The dispute over the value of knowledge about imperialism is not just a matter of academic perspectives, but a compellingly important and interesting configuration in the world of power and nations. The past decade has seen a resurgence of tribal and religious sentiments all over the world, which has been accompanied by a manipulation of opinion and discourse.

#36

The media constantly portrays the Arab world as being filled with terrorists and camel jockeys, while never showing the political, social, and cultural actualities of the Arab world that make these caricatures possible.

#37

The argument that without the West, slavery and bigamy would return is an indication of a highly inflated sense of Western exclusivity in cultural accomplishment, and a terribly limited view of the rest of the world.

#38

The National Endowment for the Humanities removed its financial support for the broadcast of the documentaries, although the series aired on PBS anyway. The New York Times ran consecutive attac