Presences and Absences in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism

Author(s): Harriet D. Lyons

Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes Africaines,
Vol. 28, No. 1 (1994), pp. 101-105
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African
Studies
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Presences and Absences in

Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism

Harriet D. Lyons

Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) might be described as an

extended scrutiny of the literary representation of colonial history. In the
first part of the book, Said argues that the colonial project depended for its
success as much upon art as upon gunboats. In the latter part of the book, he

examines some of the ways in which resistance has been recorded in

counterpoint to colonial and neo-colonial motifs.
Some of the more prominently featured names in both sections come as
no surprise. Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Camus, Fanon, C6saire, and Tagore
would astonish us if they were absent, though Said's encounter with all of
them is more complicated than one might expect. With regard to Conrad and
Kipling, for example, Said locates in their work submerged texts of resistance, pointing out irreversible turns toward the end of empire, though neither author is yet willing to acknowledge the possible rightness of that path.
In Camus, despite that author's disillusion with the French cause in Algeria,
Said senses an unwillingness to confront Arabs as people, rather than foils. In
Fanon, Said finds a plea not only for Third World nationalism but for a global
egalitarianism and magnanimity, which he sees as a necessary completion to
the nationalist endeavour. All this signals a work of unusual intricacy, and
the reader is not disappointed in that regard. For my part, the inclusions,
exclusions, and emphases of the book constitute its real novelty, though I am
not equally happy with all of Said's decisions.
Said announces his strategy for the first segment of the book by including
a detailed treatment of Jane Austen, certainly not a writer whose presence is
de rigeur in a work on the literature of imperialism. In the second part, he
includes an extended assessment of William Butler Yeats as a writer of resis-

tance. Again, while one cannot argue with the appropriateness of including
the Irish struggle in the annals of anti-imperialism, an author who does so is
making a deliberate choice, the reasons for which need to be explored.
In fact, Said's choices form part of his argument. He wishes to demonstrate that colonialism was not an addendum to the culture of the imperial
powers, nor a special topic in their literatures. Rather, he asserts, the acceptability of colonialsm in the metropole depended upon its becoming part of
IOI

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IO2 CJAS / RCEA 28:I 1994

the taken-for-granted universe of the ordinary citizen, naturalized so that it
could become invisible while in full view. Literature was both an agent of
that naturalization and its product.
This, one suspects, is not an argument which will cause much controversy among readers of the Canadian Journal of African Studies. Certainly,

the Canadian Association of African Studies includes some of the many

scholars in "African, Indian, Caribbean, and Latin American studies" whom
Said credits with participating, at least in recent years, in a "metropolitan

story of cultural opposition to Western domination" (26I). Nonetheless,

even if one does not need to be convinced of the necessity for a certain way of

reading, Said's insistence upon such readings may stimulate attention to

imperial assumptions where one had not noticed them before; indeed, where
Said himself does not appear to notice them.
Under the influence of the first third or so of Culture and Imperialism, I

invited considerable opposition from a women's studies class by pointing

out that in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf does not think it necessary
to examine the imperial implications of the fact that her famous ?5oo a year,
which she sees as prerequisite to a literary career, is attributed to a bequest
from an aunt who died in a riding accident in Bombay. Upon arriving home, I

searched Said's index for support for my perspicacity in noticing such an

egregious manifestation of metropolitan blindness. Indeed, A Room of One's
Own was there, but the text merely congratulated its author for a "tentative
authorization of feminine experience" (334).
In fact, although Said makes numerous claims to favour feminist literature and criticism, there is a perfunctoriness to his discussions of women

and resistance to colonialism which troubles me. At the most superficial

level, this is manifested by surprising absences. The Igbo Women's War of

1929 is nowhere mentioned, though it was prominently reported and

brought the dysphoria of colonized women to the attention of the British
public. A representative of the National Council of Women of Great Britain
in fact corresponded with Lord Lugard in 1930, asking whether the presence
of a woman in the Colonial Office might have prevented the uprising (Lugard
doubted it!) (Lugard papers, Rhodes House, Oxford).
The Women's War did not achieve the notoriety of the Indian Rebellion of
1857, or the revolution against the French in Algeria, events to which Said
attaches considerable importance. The anxiety which accompanied the suppression of a revolt organized by women was, nonetheless, symptomatic of a
watershed in colonial history which Said discusses at some length: the irretrievable loss of innocence within colonial culture which Said detects, for
example, in contemporary works by E.M. Forster. Nor has the Women's War
failed to figure in literature. Achebe, an author of whom Said is fond, is one of

many Nigerian writers who has mentioned it.

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103 Lyons: Said's Culture and Imperialism

This absence is particularly disappointing, as Said's text prepares the
reader very well to understand why District Commissioners and District
Officers were made so uneasy by rioting Igbo women. Said notes, in one of
many penetrating analyses, that after the phenomenal successes of the
domestic bourgeoisie in the Victorian era, most literature about life within
colonial countries stressed stagnation, frustration, and disappointment, if
not outright emasculation. By contrast, Kipling and Conrad owed much of
their appeal to their evocation of a world where there were still challenges to
face, where a (white) man could still be a man. If a few social feminists in
Britain recognized a limited degree of kinship to the women of Igboland, no

doubt these implications were not lost on the men who had fled such
do-gooders, only to encounter angry Nigerian women with raised skirts.
Colonial service in Africa would never be the same.

Said does praise some women writers of resistance, though they tend to be
included in summary lists, like Toni Morrison (334), Nadine Gordimer, and
Bessie Head (239), rather than subjected to detailed analysis. Some names are
conspicuously missing, most disturbingly, for me, Doris Lessing and Alice
Walker. One male writer whose presence is particularly missed in this context is Ousmane Sembene who, among male authors, is especially sensistive
to women's role in nationalist struggles and their circumstances in postcolonial Africa.

At one point, women's writing as a whole gets buried in a list, albeit that
list is an honour roll of the oppressed:
The reader and writer of literature - which itself loses its perdurable forms and

accepts the testimonials, revisions, notations of the post-colonial experience,

including underground life, slave narratives, women's literature, and prison no longer need to be tied to an image of the poet or scholar in isolation, secure,

stable, national in identity, class, gender or profession ... (317).

"Women's literature" deserves a more complex reading in a book of this sort,

and Said has, to be fair, already given some clues to that complexity before he
reaches this point. He tells us that the early women's movement, like the

working class movement, for the most part favoured empire (53). On the
other hand, he tells us that, throughout the colonial world, demands for
change in the status of women accompanied the first stirrings of insurgency

and were among the forces which propelled successful nationalist movements to look beyond independence toward "new and imaginative reconceptions of society" (218).
Said's analysis of Austen's Mansfield Park, of course, provides ample evi-

dence that women, as writers and as the subjects of women's writing,

enjoyed no exemption from implication in the culture of imperialism.
Voices within feminist literary criticism, indeed, have been making this

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Io4 CJAS / RCEA 28:I 1994

point for some time. Leading writers have been taken to task by other femin-

ist critics, for example, for failing to point out that Jane Eyre's triumph
comes at the expense not merely of a mad woman in the attic, but a woman
whose madness was not unconnected to her exploitation as the mulatto wife
of a Jamaican planter. Feminist discourse, in fact, was one of the first traditions where the embeddedness of colonial assumptions was noted and agonized over. A closer reading of this criticism might have provided Said with
some supporting arguments.
Feminism is problematic to opponents of colonialism in part because of

the use made by apologists for imperialism of alleged mistreatment of

women by the colonized. This tendency, of course, is especially salient when
the subject of discourse is the Arab world, an area of special concern for Said.
The author of Orientalism describes the image of Islam used to prepare the
American public for the Gulf War with accuracy and pungency:
The most disheartening thing about the media - aside from their sheepishly fol-

lowing the government policy model, mobilizing for war right from the start -

was their trafficking in "expert" Middle East lore, supposedly well-informed

about Arabs. All roads lead to the bazaar; Arabs only understand force; brutality

and violence are part of Arab civilization; Islam is an intolerant, segregationist,

"medieval," fanatic, cruel, anti-woman religion (295).

Not surprisingly, confronted by this sort of propaganda, Said is especially

grateful for works on women in Islam, like those of Lila Abu-Lughod, Leila
Ahmed, and Fedwa Mali-Douglas, which are "feminist, but not exclusivist"

and which are "sensitive to but not maudlin about women's experience"
(xxiv). If nothing else, here, as in many other parts of the book, readers who
know more about Africa or India than about the Arab world are in Said's

debt, and undoubtedly deserve some measure of the guilt he rouses about
their relative ignorance. In return, one might ask him not to privilege this
sort of writing quite so prominently over some of the angrier complaints of

women against patriarchal domination in pre-colonial and post-colonial

socieities. He is certainly more accommodating to other nationalisms, even
ones which have gone tragically wrong.
In fact, Said's ability to remain sympathetic to good intentions born out of
oppression, while condemning the tyrannical outcomes which have often
succeeded those intentions, is one of the particular strengths of his writing.
There is a clear-headedness in his work which is often lacking in writing on
Third World struggles. It seems greedy to ask for even more generosity, but
apart from the case of women, there is one other area where I would beg for
it. As much as any Third World dictatorship, or the Irish Republican Army,
Zionism was born out of suffering and oppression. Surely, Said could find
some place to acknowledge this fact, and those Jewish writers who have

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105 Lyons: Said's Culture and Imperialism

hoped, and contnue to hope, for a final outcome other than domination. To
do so would provide another piece for the display Said so capably assembles
in Culture and Imperialism.
Culture and Imperialism is a marvellously written book. Were the subject matter not so full of pain, one would not want it to end. Said's erudition
has provided me, at least, with several years' worth of suggestions of sources
worthy of consultation, while his clarity and incisiveness have relieved me
of the obligation of reading all of them. This is definitely a book which must
be read, reckoned with, discussed, and taught. One hopes it will accomplish
its objectives in changing not just the way many people think of colonialism
and its aftermath but also the way they think about culture and literature.

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