B 201- Critical Histories of the Broadcast Media

Edward W. Said’s
RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION

A Report By
Ralph Jake T. Wabingga
MAMS Broadcast
UP-CMC
I. THERE ARE TWO SIDES
• We belong to the period both of colonialism
and or resistance to it; yet we also belong to a
period of surpassing theoretical elaboration,
of the universalizing techniques of
deconstruction, structuralism and Luckacsian
and Althusserian Marxism.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 194
• The net effect of cultural exchange between partners
conscious inequality is that people suffer.

• In modern times, thinking about cultural exchange

involves thinking about domination and forcible
appropriation: someone loses, someone gains.

• 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 a new national community, to take
the final plunge.
Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism . New
York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 200
• Said cited Thompson who admits the
paramount importance of culture in
consolidating imperial feeling: the writing of
history is tied to the extension of
empire…[Thompson] attempts to
understand imperialism as a cultural
affliction for colonizer as well as colonized.
But he is bound to the notion that there is
“a truth” to events involving both sides that
transcends them.
Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 206
II. THEMES OF RESISTANCE CULTURE
• Davidson said that after the period of
“primary resistance”, … 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.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 209
“Over there is like here, neither better nor
worse. .. The fact that they came to our land I
know not why, does that mean that we should
poison our present and our future? Sooner or
later they will leave our country, just as many
people throughout history left many
countries…Once again we shall be as we
were—ordinary people –and if we are lies we
shall be lies of our own making”. -Conrad

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 212
• Laming said that “While identity is crucial, just to assert a
different identity is never enough. It is an important
ideological debate at the heart of the cultural effort to
decolonize, an effort of restoration of community and
repossession of culture that goes on long after the political
establishment of independent nation-states.

• Most often, the concept of race itself gives the prison its
raison d’être and it turns up nearly everywhere in the
culture of resistance.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism . New York: Alfred A.
Knopf. pp 213 and pp. 215
• But the history of all cultures is the history of
cultural borrowings. Cultures are not
impermeable…Culture is never just a matter of
ownership, of borrowing or lending with absolute
debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations,
common experiences, and interdependencies of all
kinds among different cultures. This is a universal
norm.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 217
• In sum, decolonization is a very complex
battle…One cannot put timetables or fixed
dates on this. In the process it permanently
changes the internal situation of the Western
powers, which divided into opponents and
supporters of the imperial policy.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 219-220
III. YEATS AND DECOLONIZATOION
• The point here is that no matter how one wishes to
demarcate high imperialism… imperialism itself
had already been a continuous process for several
centuries of overseas conquest, rapacity, and
scientific exploration.

• The resistance to imperialism was conducted in the

broad context of nationalism.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 219-220, 223
• Said commented that imperialism is an act
of geographical violence through which
virtually every space in the world is
explored, chartered, and finally brought
under control.

• One of the first task of the culture of

resistance was to reclaim, rename and
reinhabit the land.
Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 225 and pp. 228
• Nationality, nationalism, nativism: the
progression is, Said believed, more and more
constraining.

• Colonialism is not satisfied merely with

holding a people in its grip and emptying the
native’s brain of all for and content.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 229 and pp. 237
IV. THE VOYAGE IN AND THE
EMERGENCE OF OPPOSITION
• No matter how apparently complete the dominance of an
ideology or social system, there are always going to be
parts of the social experience that it does not cover and
control. From these parts very frequently comes
opposition, both self-conscious and dialectical.

• For Said, there was no overall condemnation of imperialism

until after native uprisings were too far gone to be ignored
or defeated.
Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 240-41
• Alatas said that the false consciousness
distorts reality. As such there was also no
ideological struggle.

• According to James, “Great men make

history but only such history as it is possible
for them to make”.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 249 and pp. 256
• It often happens in the history of nations that
a conflict of opposing forces which seems
destined inevitably to end in the triumph of
the stronger party is given an unspecified
twist by the emergence of new forces which
owe their emergence to that very triumph.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 257
V. COLLABORATION, INDEPENDENCE
AND LIBERATION
• The national identity struggling to free itself from
imperialist domination found itself lodged in, and
apparently fulfilled by, the state. Basil Davidson’s
important distinction between mass mobilization
and mass participation highlights the distinction
between nationalist elite and the rural and urban
masses who were briefly an organic part of the
nationalist project.
Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 264
• Nationalism was only one of the aspects of
resistance, and not the most and enduring
one.

• All nationalist cultures depend heavily on

the concept of national identity, and
nationalist politics is a politics of identity…

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 266-267
• “World change can come about only when the
native, decides that colonization must end—in
other words, there must be an
epistemological revolution. Only then can
there be movement. At this point enters
violence, “a cleansing force”, which pits
colonizers against colonized directly”- Fanon

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 271
• Liberation is conscious of self, “not closing of a door to
communication but never-ending process of “discovery and
encouragement” leading to true national self-liberation and to
universalism.

• …we must strive to liberate all mankind from imperialism; we

must all write our histories and culture respectively in a new
way; we share the same history, even though for some of us
that history has enslaved.

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism . New York: Alfred
A. Knopf. pp 274
• One might perhaps say that it is the history of politics
of imperialism, of slavery, conquest, and domination
freed by poetry, for a vision bearing on, if not
delivering, true liberation…It is a part of what in
human history can move us from the history of
domination toward the actuality of liberation…It does
not abandon the social principles of community,
critical vigilance, and theoretical orientation.//

Said, Edward W. (1993). Resistance and Opposition, in Culture and Imperialism .

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp 281
END