culture and imperialism

© Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23:1&2 (2003)
Reflections on Edward Said: A Caribbean Perspective
MELANIE NEWTON
In Culture and Imperialism–the work which, of all of
Edward Said’s writings, resonated most with me, and, I
think, with many scholars of and from the Caribbean–
Said did for the British novel what Trinidadian scholar
and prime minister Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery
did a generation before for slave emancipation. Said
took what were previously dismissed as merely peripheral,
passing references to the empire “out there,” comments
carelessly “thrown away” and forgotten, and
showed how central they in fact were to the stories being
told. Said represented more than just the empire
“writing back.” His was a voice writing through and beyond
the master narratives of empire, refusing the binary
oppositions between empire and metropole,
“them” and “us,” “familiar” and “unfamiliar” which
have been so important to colonial expansion and which
still informs so much of our academic inquiry.
Beneath the carefully considered prose, the humorous
language and the kindness of Said’s writings—a kindness
frequently not replicated and usually unacknowledged
in the writings of his detractors—is a sense of
urgency, which also animates the writings of so many
writers and artists from the Caribbean, who are or were
public intellectuals like Said. In common with Said,
many of these intellectuals have found that the history
of the Caribbean does not permit them the illusion that
the beauty of art can ever be disconnected from its
wider historical context. Through their works these intellectuals
have both helped and forced their audiences
to face the fact that artistic forms, like the novel, are
inextricably bound up with colonialism, and will always
recall histories and legacies of exploitation, persistent
inequalities and enslavement. It is no accident that the
novel—perhaps the most imperially imbricated of all
forms of artistic expression—became one of the principal
sites for the articulation of a language of decolonization
in the twentieth century Caribbean.
Said’s writings are peppered with references to Caribbean
thinkers and public intellectuals who were writing
in exile of various kinds. His writings on Aimé Césaire,
Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney reflect
the empathy of a fellow traveler who shared a consciousness
of himself as in but not of this messy array of
institutions which make up the “West.” Like Fanon,
James, or Rodney, Said did more than simply provide a
voice for the dispossessed–already a noble thing–or
serve as the intellectual face of anti-colonial nationalism.
He was able to occupy a difficult space of ambivalence,
a position “out of place”, which could not be satisfied
with easy recourses to identitarian politics. This gift of
living creatively with the ambivalence of the perpetual
insider/outsider speaks powerfully to the experience of
many Caribbean intellectuals who have come to terms,
in the words of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming,
with the “pleasures of exile.” It is a rare ability,
but one which is essential to any vision of a just and
genuinely postcolonial world.
Said brought to his analysis a determination to recognise
the imperialist assumptions, the “throw-away” references
to empire which so shaped the world view of,
for example, Jane Austen and William Thackeray, while
still retaining the ability to admire their beauty. Even as
Said laid bare the imperialist assumptions that informed
the English literary canon, taking it apart and rebuilding
it with empire and slavery at its heart, he also laid claim
to the British novel as his. Like C.L.R. James, who
probably knew every word of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair by
heart, Said could confront and accept his own uncomfortable
sense of simultaneous familiarity and unbelonging
in this imperial vision, and still claim such texts,
in all their ambivalence, as part of himself. I was
touched by his ability to see, for example, the genius of
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and yet also critique
the fact that Conrad could afford-–despite his trenchant
critique of European imperialism in Africa-–to paint a
picture of Africa which closed off the possibility of
alternative visions either of Africans or of the encounter
between Africans and Europeans.
This ability to see beauty in all its tarnished forms, to
understand that we should not run from that beauty
even as we expose and condemn the assumptions on
which it was based, was perhaps one of Said’s most important
legacies. He understood that beauty is not to be
found in the absence or suppression of historical pain
but in the act of creation, recognition, naming and refusing
to “throw away”. Perhaps what moves me most
about Said’s writings, his life and his passing was this
generosity of spirit, this capacity to marvel, whether
through literature, music, or academic scholarship, at the
beauty of the mess that we have made of the world.