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Chapter TwoChapter TwoThe The SubjectSubject in Overlapping Territories in Overlapping Territories

and Intertwined Historiesand Intertwined Histories

No race has a monopoly on beauty, or intelligence, or strength, and there will be a place for all at the rendezvous of victory (Aime Cesaire, Collected Poetry 72).

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations 248).

[T]he grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection (Edward Said, Imperialism xiii).

This chapter dwells principally on the resistant nature of

colonized subjectivity, which Edward Said leaves almost unanalyzed in

Orientalism. His definition of the discourse of Orientalism was taken by

many critics as a tendency to portray an overly unifying and

monolithic conception of Western cultural imperialism. For the same

reason, they argued that the colonial subject is portrayed as an

absolutely subjected subject in Orientalism. But it should be seen that

the immediate aim of Orientalism as Bart Moore-Gilbert rightly points

out was “to expose the degree to which Western systems of

knowledge and representation have been involved in the long history

of the West’s material and political subordination of the non-Western

world” (38). The focus of this chapter is therefore on Imperialism,37

which addresses the question of resistance more elaborately. As the

question of resistant subjectivity is connected to the question of

nationalism, the problematic interrelation between them is also

37 Imperialism when not in italics refers to the discourse of Imperialism.

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discussed in the last section of the chapter.

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The Complicity of Imperial Culture

In Imperialism, Said focuses on the complex relationship

between imperial ideology and the workings of culture and thereby

makes a remarkable shift of emphasis from an account of Orientalism

as the offensive representation of the East by the West (in

Orientalism) to an extensive account of Western domination and non-

Western resistance: “What I left out of Orientalism was that response

to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of

decolonization all across the Third World” (Imperialism xii). In a

symposium, Said again notes that Imperialism (through its “rethinking

[of] geography”) (Robbins et al 21), tries to exceed and overcome the

geographical and imaginative limits of Orientalism.

The structure of Imperialism is less systematic, when compared

to that of Orientalism. If Orientalism is noted for its use of Foucault,

Said’s growing unease with Foucault becomes more evident in

Imperialism. This apparently fundamental shift can be attributed to his

search for a space for political intervention.38 This being the case, Said

sets out to focus on cultural resistance and assertions of national

identities while analyzing cultural imperialism. Orientalism was in a

certain sense theorizing the dichotomy between the Orient and the

Occident. Its purpose was not to examine the emergence of resistant

subjectivities in the colonial period. Said himself explains this: “Never

38 Alon Confino observes: “the dual relationship between dominance and resistance appears to be one of the leitmotifs of Said’s professional and personal life” (185). See Chapter Five for a further discussion of this point.

95

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” (Imperialism xii).

At the very beginning of Imperialism, Said discusses the

multidimensional meanings of the term ‘culture’. Firstly, it means, in a

certain sense, all those practices often existing as aesthetic forms, one

of whose principal aims is pleasure. Secondly, in an Arnoldian sense of

the term, culture is something that includes each society’s reservoir of

the ‘best that has ever been known and thought.’ The word ‘culture’

refers to “all those practices like the arts of description,

communication, and representation” (xii), which Said believes, were

deeply implicated in maintaining and sustaining the imperial project.

These texts have “the power to narrate or to block other narratives

from forming and emerging.” Added to this, he argues, culture is “a

sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage

one another” (xiii).

But over the years culture came to be “associated often

aggressively, with the nation or the state; [and] this differentiate[d]

‘us’ from ‘them’, almost always with some degree of xenophobia”

(xiii). Here culture is often a combative source of identity as has been

revealed in recent ‘returns’ to culture and tradition. These returns,

revivalist in nature, “have produced varieties of religious and

nationalist fundamentalism” (xiv). For Said, binary constructions of ‘us’

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and ‘them’ elide the mutual embeddedness and worldliness of their

identities. But by striving to find out the worldliness of these binaries,

Said hopes to offer a corrective to the reactionary and segregationist

nationalisms that are engendered by the understanding of culture as

pure, discrete and unique.

Though Said has no definite theory of Imperialism, he

demonstrates how it uses culture as a potent agency for establishing

the empire. Imperial culture can be the most powerful agent of

imperial hegemony in the colonized world. The imperial political

context played a central role in the cultural production and circulation

of colonial and colonized subjectivities and representations.

Exclusively focusing on the modern Western empires of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, Said looks at cultural forms, such as the

novel, which he thinks are “immensely important in the formation of

imperial attitudes, references and experiences” (xii). He considers

novels and narratives as aesthetic objects connected to the expanding

societies of Britain and France. Very little attention has been paid

hitherto to the significance of narrative fiction in the history and the

world of empire. Said sees this as a serious drawback in existing

critical practices and maintains that: “stories are at the heart of what

explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they

also become the method colonized people use to assert their identity

and the existence of their own history” (xiii).

Thus, Said’s Imperialism illustrates a complex and reciprocal

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relation between written artifacts such as the European realistic novels

and imperial practices in geographically distant lands. Mainly

concentrating on the British Empire and the role and workings of

“classic” Victorian fiction in England and its imperial world, Said

explores the different ways in which culture and empire interrelate. At

a time when Marxist economic and political analysis was in vogue in

the 1970s, Said offered a different reading of culture and imperialism.

He demonstrated that the notion of culture is not only obvious in

literature, art and criticism but also within specific epistemic structures

such as archaeology and philology. After the end of the eighteenth

century, mainly the British and French imperialisms were growing into

systematic enterprises and the imperialists were able to subjugate

people even from a distance.

Said is fully aware of the complexity, dynamics, ambiguities and

contradictions inherent in the workings of culture and imperialism, and

of the crucial role culture has played in the history of imperialism.

“Neither culture nor imperialism is inert, and so the connections

between them as historical experiences are dynamic and complex”

(15). He brings out the encounter and clashes of cultures and how

often cultural differences are suppressed or displaced in the

mechanics of unequal power equations. For Said, the culture of

imperialism is a complex phenomenon in which social existence and

individual consciousness, the world and the text, determine each

other. In other words, he conceives of the histories, cultures and

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economies of formerly dominant and subordinate nations as

systematically and increasingly interdependent and overlapping.

In Orientalism and Imperialism, Said brings to our attention the

complex relationship between culture and the imperial enterprise, the

complicity of European production of knowledge with the imperial

project, the Eurocentrism of the humanities, and the construction of

colonial and postcolonial identities. For example, eschewing the

elaborate theoretical scaffolding that supported his arguments in

Orientalism and with an unconcealed interest in the theme of

imperialism, Said analyses the categories of ruler and ruled

particularly in the novels of modern British and French literature. For

example, viewpoints about empire were always strengthened by

English novels such as like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Forster’s A

Passage to India and so on. Novel is considered as an important

repertoire of liberal humanist values needed to civilize the Other. In

most cases, as viewed by Said, novels gave absolute endorsement to

the British overseas policy.

Said seems to argue that “the Western writer or work of art

cannot escape the determinations of the dominant ideology and is

always marked by its production within the context of a system of

(neo-)colonial relations” (Moore-Gilbert 68). Even Jane Austen’s early

novel Mansfield Park is imbued with a complex web of colonial

geography and identity according to Said. He was interested in

highlighting the generic nature of the novel that takes imperialism as

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natural and inevitable within the context of British culture. Verdi’s

Opera Aida also advances imperialism and consolidates domination

through the generation of a common consent both in the metropolitan

centers and marginalized Third world communities. And further,

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim serves as an imperial rationale of domination

over an ‘inferior’ land and people. Kipling conceives Britain as a

country that always stands for justice and rules over the wild and

uncivilized India so as to modernize it. Though the British novel “is not

an overt meta-narrative of Empire, the issue of empire and imperial

dominance is inflected continually, subtly, and almost ubiquitously in

these texts” (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 5). Said exposes the fabricated

moral of novels like these, quite successfully in Imperialism.

Through the historical contextualization of these texts, and by

reading them contrapuntally, Said tries to find out their social meaning

in an imperialist age. He succeeds in uncovering the political purposes

of Orientalist representational strategies in novels by demonstrating

how imperialism always required culture to assist its political work. For

him, literature itself makes constant references to itself as

participating in Europe’s overseas expansion. It is to demonstrate this

that Said takes up the analysis of the novel, “a cultural artifact of

bourgeois society” (Imperialism 84), and unravels the structures of

imperialism and thereby revealing the imperial complicities of these

works. Said’s concern with the question of subject formation in

‘overlapping territories and intertwined histories,’ and his explorations

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of the colonial complicities of canonical narratives in Imperialism

makes it almost a sequel to Orientalism. Said makes his plan very

clear:

My method is to focus as much as possible on individual

works, to read them first as great products of the creative

or interpretative imagination, and then to show them as

part of the relationship between culture and empire. I do

not believe that authors are mechanically determined by

ideology, class or economic history, but authors are, I also

believe, very much in the history of their societies, shaping

and shaped by that history and their social experience in

different measure (xxiv).

Said’s work asserts the indispensable role of culture as the vital

enabling counterpoint to institutional practices. The bureaucratic

exercise of power together with the deployment military force always

helped the aims of territorial expansion. Said demonstrates through

his work how this process is sustained by the ideological invasion of

the cultural space.

Imperialism always sees to it that, there was literally no

disagreement about the ontological distinction between the West and

the rest of the world. Since the geographical and cultural boundaries

between these two were strongly perceived, the boundaries between

them were also deemed to be absolute. With the emergence of the

discipline of ethnography, the codification of difference between the

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civilized and the natives was easily established. The evolutionary

schemes of ethnography defined the subject races as inferior and

primitive, and the dominant races as superior and civilized. According

to Said, it is the power of imperialism that helps to make the great

convergence between the geographical scope of the empires and their

totalizing cultural discourses. This convergence helps “to learn about

other people, to codify and disseminate knowledge, to characterize, to

transport, install, and display instances of other cultures…, and above

all to rule them” (Imperialism 130). Thus, reflections on culture and

identity in the modern world need to interrogate the knowledge-power

nexus and the role of Eurocentrism in the construction of knowledge

about colonial subjects and identities.

Said praises Gauri Viswanathan’s work, Masks of Conquest:

Literary Studies and British Rule in India, in this context, for

uncovering the ideology of the British educational system. The

imperialists permeated and transmitted ideas about unequal races and

cultures in the Indian classrooms, which in Charles Trevelyan’s words

was “to awaken the colonial subjects to a memory of their innate

character” (qtd. in Imperialism 131). Said relates this notion of

ideology with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. He argues that

the “ideological vision [is] implemented and sustained not only by

direct domination and physical force but much more effectively over a

long time by persuasive means, the quotidian processes of hegemony”

(131). Thus, as discussed earlier, Said’s divergence from Foucault

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mainly stems from his great concern for the individual subject and its

capacity to resist the dominant forms of power and ideology. He gets

the impetus for this politics of resistance obviously from Gramsci’s

focus on the ideology and on the dynamics of resistance and counter-

hegemony. Said’s kinship with the Gramscian paradigm is also

reflected in his conceptualizations on the role of intellectuals and in his

privileging of ‘geographical thinking’.39 Before going further into the

Saidian notions of subjectivity, it would be worthwhile to touch upon

Homi Bhabha’s rather complex idea of the colonized subject so as to

juxtapose it with Said’s.

Bhabha’s Theorization of the Subject

As has been briefly pointed out in the “Introduction,” Homi

Bhabha attempts to theorize the subjectivity of the colonized through

a complex approach mainly influenced by Freud, Lacan and Fanon. In

his The Location of Culture, Bhabha makes a remarkable and inspired

departure from Said. He argues that the “discourse of colonialism” is

frequently populated with “terrifying stereotypes of savagery,

cannibalism, lust and anarchy” (72). Therefore the colonized subjects

are split between contrary positions: knowable, mute and

harmless/wild, harmful and mysterious. Consequently, Bhabha

continues, the colonized subject, in colonialist representations, is

always in motion, sliding ambivalently between the polarity of

39 Both these aspects will be discussed in Chapter Four and Chapter Five respectively. Said observes: “the emphasis on geography in Culture and Imperialism and in Orientalism is extremely important. A kind of paradigm shift is occurring… (Robbins et al. 21).

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similarity and difference. Because of this slippery nature of the

colonized subject, strategies of frequent repetition are exercised by

the colonizers to describe them in static terms. However, as McLeod

observes, “this fixing of the colonized’s subject position always fails to

secure the colonized subject into place” (53). For Bhabha, this anxious

repetition involves “the same old stories of the Negro’s animality, the

coolie’s inscrutability or the stupidity of the Irish” (Location 77).

Through this discourse, colonialism endeavors to construe the

colonized as both similar to and the other of the colonizers; in effect, it

is to be noted that, it does neither. Its aim to fix knowledge about the

Other is always deferred according to Bhabha. “The best it can do is

set in motion the anxious repetition of the colonized subject’s

stereotypical attributes that attempt to fix it in a stable position. But

the very fact that stereotypes must be endlessly repeated reveals that

this fixity is never achieved” (McLeod 54). In his essay “Of Mimicry and

Man”, Bhabha examines how the ambivalence of the colonized subject

becomes a threat to the authority of the colonizers through the effects

of mimicry. He sees mimicry as “one of the most elusive, and effective

strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (Location 85). He

considers mimic men as agents capable of menacing the colonial

authority. As he puts it, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be

English” (87). By speaking English, the colonized subjects challenge

representations, which attempt to fix and define them as static

entities. And by this, they make an attempt to disclose the

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ambivalence of the discourse of colonialism. When the colonizers

listen to their own language from the mouths of colonized they are

affected by the worrying threat of resemblance (McLeod 55). This

helps to dismantle the Orientalist structure of knowledge, wherein

such oppositional distinctions are made. Bhabha’s positive, active and

insurgent model of mimicry together with his assertion of the

colonized subjectivity is an extension and a different version of Said’s

model of subjectivity. Bhabha highlights the agency of the subaltern

and argues that the colonizer’s desire for the colonized, and the

images of him as an object that can be studied and controlled, is

parallel to the desire of the colonized—through which the colonizer is

defined as a master of knowledge and culture. In this way, ambivalent

and conflicting attitudes towards the Other are shaped by both sides.

This model depicts the constitution of subjectivity as the result of a

mutual dialectical process of interaction between two equal entities

facing each other on a horizontal plane. Bhabha’s model however has

been attacked by many critics40 mainly for its generalization of the

colonial situation ignoring the historical, political and social

dimensions.

In this context, it has to be said that the Saidian protocols

provide a more inclusive perception of the colonial realities that take

into account the long-lasting and dynamic hierarchy between the

colonizer and the colonized. He outlines an alternative dialectical

40 See for example, Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism 178-183.

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model that emphasizes historical and political contexts and is

reinforced by the use of Gramsci’s thought. The Saidian model insists

on presenting the dynamic of the colonizer and the colonized as

intertwined, sometimes as shaping a single entity, which is revealed

more in his Imperialism than in Orientalism. He understands the

dynamic of change as a result of the struggles of the ‘overlapping

territories’, which creates hybrid social realities. Hence his dialectical

model focuses not merely on the constitution of the subjectivity

through the Other that faces it. It also exposes the ways in which the

hegemonic oppressive order includes the conditions of its own defeat,

since the resistance of the colonized subject to this structure is

performed within and against this order. A deeper understanding of

these processes is possible through the notion of the “counterpoint” in

Western classical music (or in its adjectival form, “contrapuntal”),

which Said employs in his writings to study the course of history and

the creation of culture. Such a contrapuntal perspective must take

account of both the processes of imperialism and that of resistance to

it. But prior to the discussion of the notion of contrapuntality, an

examination of the role of ideology in his protocols is vital, as the

contrapuntal methodology is closely linked to the critique of ideology.

The Role of Ideology

Apart from the influence of Gramscian notions on hegemony,

there is also the implicit presence of Althusser’s theory of ideology in

Said’s conceptualization of subjectivity, though Said himself seldom

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acknowledges and few critics have discerned it. Particularly in his

method of reading literary works ‘against the grain’ (contrapuntal

method), Said tries to discover their ideological implications in the

sense Althusser discuss the concept.41 As it is well known, Althusser

includes literature also among the ideological apparatuses, which

interpellate the individuals as subjects. And, in the context of

Althusser’s concept of ideology, it is possible to argue that the novel or

the ‘bourgeois artifact’ as Said would call it, re-presents the myths and

imaginary versions of real social relations that constitute ideology.

This becomes more evident in the context of Said’s analysis of Jane

Austen’s Mansfield Park or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He

exposes the underlying ideology of imperialism through his

contrapuntal reading, emphasizing the political character of such

literary pursuits. For Althusser,

ideology is both a real and imaginary relation to the world

—real in that it is the way that people really live their

relationship to the social relations which govern their

existence, but imaginary in that it discourages a full

understanding of these conditions of existence and the

ways in which people are socially constituted within them

(Belsey 53).

Said seems to be conscious of the working of ideology when he argues

41 Said’s basic assumption on the colonized subjectivity seems to be dependent on Althusser’s theory of ideology and subjectivity, to a certain extent. He combines Gramscian notions of hegemony with Althusser’s ideology and Foucauldian discourse.

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that perspectives of empire were always fortified and disseminated by

English fiction: a repertoire of liberal humanist values needed to

civilize the Other.

In a way, literary forms like novels interpellate the reader and

offer him a space from where the text is more ‘obviously’ intelligible.

Said’s reading of Mansfield Park is an example of his ideology critique.

He contextualizes the novel within the areas of private domination and

slavery, highlighting its generic nature which takes imperialism as

natural and inevitable within the context of British culture. As Belsey

says further, “ideology obscures the real conditions of existence by

presenting partial truths. It is a set of omissions, gaps rather than lies,

smoothing over contradictions…masquerading as coherence” (53).

Said looks into the content of Mansfield Park from the

perspective of the colonized subject and deciphers its underlying

invisible subtexts which produce the illusion of ‘imperialist coherence.’

Through his contrapuntal methodology, he examines how the ideology

of imperialism works through a set of omissions that appears to

provide answers to questions which in practice it evades. This

contrapuntal methodology is, in a certain sense, an ideology of

resistance. He explores the relations between Austen’s Mansfield Park

and Britain’s colonisation of the Caribbean Island of Antigua. According

to him, the Antiguan material is not marginal but central to the whole

meaning of the text. He finds the correlation between the locations of

Mansfield Park and Antigua as very significant in the identification of

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these ideological underpinnings. The contented life style of Sir Thomas

Bertram’s Mansfield Park is dependent on his economic interests and

agricultural enterprise in Antigua. In his absence from Mansfield Park,

the younger characters become unruly, but his return re-establishes

an order and decorum in this English country house. In short, Said

suggests that Sir Thomas’s ability to set his house in order on his

return is reflective of his role as a colonial landlord: “[Austen] sees

clearly that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an

imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it. What

assures the domestic tranquility and attractive harmony of one is the

productivity and regulated discipline of the other” (Imperialism 104).

Said was in effect, reading the ‘political unconscious’ of the novel, to

use a term from Frederic Jameson, and thereby reminding that literary

texts have complex engagements with historical, social and political

conditions.

The Contrapuntal Vision

The concept of contrapuntality was essentially Said’s response

to critics of Orientalism who felt that Said seemed to focus exclusively

on European culture and ignored the resistance and agency of the

colonized. In a certain peculiar sense, Said’s assumptions of being the

professional voice of an American academic was a “way of submerging

[his] difficult and unassimilable past” as he argues in Reflections

(562). It is in order to overcome this past that he develops a

methodology to “think and write contrapuntally, using the disparate

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halves of [his] experience, as an Arab and as an American, to work

with and also against each other” (562). Through a contrapuntal

reading, Said engaged in a “reading back” to uncover the “submerged

but crucial presence of empire in canonical texts” (Ashcroft and

Ahluwalia 93). This method of reading also demonstrates “the

complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated,

or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing

intrusions of human history” (Imperialism 115). The oppositional

commitment implicit in the contrapuntality analysis provides Said a

counter-hegemonic edge the “principal aim [of which] is not to

separate but to connect,” as he believes that cultural forms are hybrid,

overlapping and mixed (15).42

According to Said, the stories told by dominant powers become

naturalized and acquire the status of ‘common sense’ in univocal

readings. But contrapuntal reading helps to ‘read back’ from the

perspective of the colonized subject with a simultaneous awareness of

both histories—the metropolitan and the subjected/concealed

histories. To put it differently, Said’s notion of contrapuntality provides

a method that enables the study of simultaneous and mutually

constitutive (of East and West, North and South) histories against the

linear and developmentalist historical narratives. In effect, it attempts

to discover what a univocal reading might conceal about the political

42 According to Radhakrishnan, “it is a certain aestheticizing of the political that enables one to reconcile real ideological oppositions contrapuntally: for after all, despite their counterenergies, both the point and the counterpoint are and need to be part of the same musical text” (20).

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worldliness of the canonical text.

Said turns this practice of ‘reading against the grain’ into a

critical methodology. Through this reading, he means to reveal the

wholeness of the text or the mutually embedded and overlapping

histories of the elite and the subaltern and of the metropolitan and

colonized societies. Counter-hegemonic strategies should underpin a

contrapuntal methodology so as to pull culture and literature out of

their narrow concerns into a space of historical intermixture, according

to Said. While analyzing English novels, he discovers that they

“participate in, contribute to, and help to reinforce perceptions and

attitudes about England and the world” (89). Almost all English

novelists of the mid-nineteenth century accepted a globalised view of

the vast overseas reach of British power. Said calls this a “structure of

attitude and reference” (91), which builds up gradually in the novels,

obviously adapting Raymond Willliams’s phrase “structures of feeling.”

In order to examine “structures of attitude and reference,” Said

suggests, one has to read novels contrapuntally.

Contrapuntal methodology encapsulates an ideology of

resistance within it. The Eurocentric perspective about the pre-colonial

era as a pre-civilizational limbo can be thoroughly resisted by this

method. “Contrapuntal perspective” would also seek “to think through

and interpret together experiences that are discrepant,” (36) but this

notion of ‘discrepant experiences’, for Said, is “not intended to

circumvent the problem of ideology” (37). For example, Kipling’s Kim

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occupies a very special place in the development of the

English novel and in late Victorian society, but its picture

of India exists in a deeply antithetical relationship with the

development of the movement for Indian independence.

Either the novel or the political movement represented or

interpreted without the other misses the crucial

discrepancy between the two given to them by the actual

experience of the empire (36).

In juxtaposing discrepant experiences with each other, Said

reveals his interpretative political aim to “make concurrent those

views and experiences that are ideologically and culturally closed to

each other” (37). For example, he finds it important to see “a

connection between coronation rituals in England and the Indian

durbars of the late nineteenth century” (36). The exposure and

dramatization of discrepant experiences highlights the cultural

importance of ideology, says Said.

Only the contrapuntal perspective is fully sensitive to the reality

of historical experience. “Partly because of empire,” he argues, “all

cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are

hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and

unmonolithic” (xxix). Consequently, Said points: “by looking at the

different experiences contrapuntally, …I shall try to formulate an

alternative both to politics of blame and to the even more destructive

politics of confrontation and hostility” (19). The critic Aamir Mufti

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considers this concept and metaphor of contrapuntality as one of the

most significant contributions of Said. The range and depth of its

meaning is yet unexplored according to him. He maintains that

“contrapuntality is an argument about the nature of culture in the

modern era” (“Global Comparativism” 477). In other words, this

methodology implicates a possibility of a thorough change in our way

of reading literature and culture. Said’s own understanding of culture

derives in a sense from his dedication to the contrapuntal method.

Said relates the concept of contrapuntality to the vision of

culture as hybrid and conceives hybridity as one of the chief

characteristics of culture(s) and individual works of art. In another

context, Said says “[c]ultural experience or indeed every cultural form

is radically, quintessentially hybrid” (Imperialism 68). Observing this

shift in emphasis Valery Kennedy says: “Hybridity at this point seems

to mean the worldliness of texts, that is, their involvement in the social

and political complexities of their historical moment that Said first

proposed in The World, the Text, and the Critic” (107). For Said, the re-

appropriation of notions like hybridity, migrancy and heterogeneity will

no doubt counter any sort of essentialism or fundamentalism. When

Bhabha problematizes the term hybridity,43 Said uses it basically to

represent the worldliness of colonizing and colonized cultures, the

“overlapping territories and intertwined histories.”44 And this

43 “Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition” (Bhabha, Location 114). 44 This is the title of Chapter one of Said’s Imperialism.

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worldliness in a certain way is connected to Said’s notions of

secularism. For example, Stathis Gourgouris vividly relates Said’s task

of secular criticism with his proper “understanding [of] the

contrapuntal nature of complicity between events and things,

concepts and beliefs,” as encapsulated in Imperialism. According to

Gourgouris, Said creates a

unique methodology by proceeding from a Gramscian

sense of spatial complexity (a sense of asymmetrical,

multilateral, geographical relation) to a musicological

sense of co-incidentally entwined figures that testify to a

polyphonic simultaneity understood as internal to the

object of inquiry. In other words, a contrapuntal reading

does not seek a presumed order of things that might arise

from various external forces bearing upon the object, nor

does it settle for an interpretive framework that privileges

singular identities emerging from an otherwise assumed

and unexamined totality (“Transformation” 63).

This observation on the concept of contrapuntality becomes

clearer, when it is understood in terms of Said’s deep love of Western

music. As he deliberates,

in the counterpoint of western classical music, various

themes play off one another, with only a provisional

privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the

resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an

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organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from

a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work

(Imperialism 59-60).

Therefore the term ‘contrapuntal’ refers to the weaving together of

different musical notes, which indicates a movement across and

within. No doubt, there is a strong presence of musical thinking in

Edward Said’s work that informs the humanist ethical framework of his

writings. This is evident in his later works such as Humanism and On

Late Style.45 Said associates with the idea of the contrapuntal a variety

of functions such as ‘contrapuntal thinking’, ‘contrapuntal reading’,

‘contrapuntal awareness’, and ‘contrapuntal exile.’ All these terms and

associated music analogies have been widely introduced into

theoretical discourse since he proposed it as a methodological

foundation for Imperialism. In a certain sense, these musical

terminologies are woven through the deep humanism of Said’s later

intellectual and cultural projects.

The fact that Said (an accomplished piano player himself),

founded in association with Daniel Barenboim the ‘West-eastern Divan

Orchestra’ acquires significance in this context. As conceptions of

musical structure play a very crucial role in his criticism and critical

practice, it would be worth investigating some of the historical

dimensions of his faith in polyphony and contrapuntality. As

Gourgouris observes in his article ” “[t]he musicological expression

45 Abbreviated hereafter as Late Style. The full title of this work is On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain

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that Said lends to [his contrapuntal] methodology harkens back to his

deep-seated veneration for Adorno, whose remarkable intellectual

edifice, Said argues, must be read primarily as the multifaceted work

of a musical sensibility” (“Transformation” 64).

However, it is to be remembered that, Said never assumes

through his notion of contrapuntality, a space of postmodern plurality

where multiple voices jostle and no voice is privileged. In fact, there is

no valorization of plurality in his argument. Instead, he attempts to see

the text, institutions and practices as “worldly” and tries to historicize

them for interrogating their sociality and materiality. Ultimately the

goal is to bring forth the hierarchies and the power-knowledge nexus

embedded in them to recuperate a non-coercive and non-dominating

knowledge. As an idea at the heart of Said’s ethics, in a certain sense,

the notion of contrapuntality emerges out of the tension and

complexity of Said’s own subjectivity. He is continually trying to write

the text of his own self and identity, which involves a perpetual

dialogue between the varied and sometimes contradictory dimensions

of his own “worldliness.”

Plural Identities

“No one today is purely one thing,” says Said (Imperialism 407).

For him, concepts of unitary, essentialised or monolithic identities

were the root cause of much suffering and oppression. Notions of

plurality might easily come to a person like him who was several

‘things’ at the same time. He was an Arab, a Christian, a Palestinian,

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an American, a teacher, a writer, a political analyst, a political activist,

a music critic and a performing pianist. Given this, he is not only

talking about this surface level of plurality, but was also reflecting on

the nature of human existence. Patrick Williams captures the dilemma

of Said as follows:

For him—rather than the ideological constructs offered by

discourses or institutions like Orientalism emphasizing

cultural difference and hierarchy, or the reactive and

reductive politics of identity which results in embattled,

often bitter, separatism—humanity is formed in and by the

complexities of ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined

Histories’, as one of the section titles of Culture and

Imperialism has it. Again, the purpose is not to indulge in

an easy celebration of hybridity or syncretism (precisely

the kind of contemporary theorizing Said was most

uncomfortable with), but to point to the necessary and

difficult task of both accounting for and analyzing the

forms of such overlapping and intertwining, as well as

assessing their impact. This process, both historically

informed and contemporarily relevant, embodies the best

of Said (170).

Said demonstrates the political role of culture in legitimizing,

enabling, preparing and consolidating attitudes of reference to

geography and to other peoples that persist throughout imperialism.

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According to him, this can be defeated by the resistance of people

elsewhere. It is through asserting their long histories of language,

culture and traditions that they can confront the imperialist forces. In

an interview Said speaks of how this oppositional identity is

constituted and merged with the nationalist identity as happened in

the Indian freedom movement. This “sense of native identity [that]

was free of the British (in case of the Indians), and this identity,

eventually, acquired a tremendous prominence in the politics of

imperialism, as oppositional identity, and of course it flowered into

what we call nationalism” (Panourgia et al. 143). In this discussion he

praises Tagore for being a nationalist and critic of nationalism at the

same time. Nationalism need not necessarily be always a desire for a

state or a nation:

But it expresses itself in various ideas of community,

imagined communities in Benedict Anderson’s words. I

think, in all of this, what is most important for me is the

dynamic sense in which identities are always

constructions, that cultural contests always include

politics, and that there is a large element of change and

criticism involved in this process (144).

Benita Parry argues that Said’s work “commutes between a

position conserving specific structures of communal subjectivity

invented by dominated peoples, and that which conceptualizes the

subject as split, unfixed and disseminated” (30). But Said conceives

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this split subjectivity as opposed to the essentialist claims of holistic

cultural traditions and transcendent native self. He argues that

multiple identities of individuals help them to think beyond their local

identities. Hence, his emphasis on the necessity of transcending the

simplistic formulations of racial or national essence while recognizing

their role in the early stages of subject formation.

In Said’s memoir Place, it is possible to come across a host of

statements that refer to his multiple and hybrid identities. He talks

about “[his] starved and repressed hidden self,” “that underground

part of [his] identity,” “the other self [he] was always aware of but was

unable easily or immediately to reach” (284). Similar statements and

phrases can be found in various parts of the book: “the emergence of

a second self buried for a very long time” (217); “the overall sensation

I had was of my troublesome identity as an American inside whom

lurked another Arab identity from which I derived no strength, only

embarrassment and discomfort” (90). Hence it can be said that the

experience of multiple identities and hybrid subject formation in a way

helped Said to take a strong stance against the essentialist claims of

cultural tradition and pseudo patriotic selves. His theorization of the

concept of exilic subjectivity and deliberations on the role of

intellectuals are also intrinsically founded on this notion of multiple

identities and hybrid subjectivity.

Nationalism and the Resistant Subject

One of the significant forms of resistance to imperial dominance

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has been the idea of a ‘nation’. This idea of a shared community or an

‘imagined community’ as Benedict Anderson (15) would call it,

enabled the colonized subject to invent a self-image through which

they tried to liberate themselves from colonial hegemony. Said

discovers that the foremost step towards the creation of a culture of

resistance is the recovery of that “geographical territory which is at

the heart of decolonization,” and the next is the “charting of cultural

territory” (Imperialism 252). Resistance then becomes a process “in

the rediscovery and repatriation of what had been suppressed in the

natives’ past by the process of imperialism” (253). The colonized

subject ‘writes back’ to the empire and thereby reconstructs the

relationship between the self and the other, as a strategy of

resistance. Hence in the Shakespearean text The Tempest, a post-

imperial identity is ascribed to Caliban. Caliban sees that his “own

history [is] an aspect of the history of all subjugated men and women,

and comprehends the complex truth of his own social and historical

situation” (258). The barriers between different cultures break down in

this writing back. A powerful transformative movement of resistance is

what Said calls the voyage in, which makes it possible, to “enter into

the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, [to] transform it,

to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten

histories” (260). Bruce Robbins calls this “the movement of Third

World writers, intellectuals, and texts into the metropolis [for] their

successful integration there” (“Secularism” 30).

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Postcolonial critics such as Bill Ashcroft and Griffiths have

discarded the assumption that rejection is the best resistance against

colonialism. Such a rejection, according to them would only entrap the

political consciousness of the colonized subject and thereby the

mobilization of actual resistance becomes impossible.46 Said also

seems to agree with this. There are three important steps in the

process of cultural resistance and struggles for decolonization

according to Said. The first is the insistence on a comprehensive,

coherent and integral perception of the community’s history. It is like

restoring “the imprisoned nation to itself” (Imperialism 259). He

emphasizes the significance of national language and of the local slave

narratives, spiritual autobiographies and prison memoirs in

formulating a counterpoint to the Western panoptic perspective,

official discourses and monumental histories. Secondly, the idea of

resistance should be based on an alternative reconception of human

history capable enough to break the barriers between cultures. In this

context, Said considers Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a

“brilliant work based on the liberating imagination of independence”

(260). Thirdly, for Said, the notion of resistance should move away

from any sort of separatist nationalism and towards an “integrative

view of human community and human liberation” (261). While

recognizing the prevalence of cultural hybridity and multiple identities

as conducive towards the movement of resistance, Said cautions

against the fostering of monolithic identities that might help develop a 46 Ashcroft et al. The Empire Writes Back.

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sort of nativism as in the case of negritude. As a case in point, he

points towards both Fanon’s and Soyinka’s rejection of the

racialisation of African culture. The possibilities of liberation are

diminished, when the problematic of cultural oppression is racialized.

Hence Said critiques all sorts of essentialist politics in the name of

nationalism: “To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of

essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam, or Catholicism is to abandon

history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings

against each other” (276). Considering such nativist essentializations

as an abandonment of history, Said educates us by saying that

“moving beyond nativism does not mean abandoning nationality, but

it does mean thinking of local identity as not exhaustive…” (276).

Benita Parry’s observation on Saidian nationalism is notable in this

context:

As a critique which declares its historical location and

political interest, Said’s method condenses a tension

between recognizing the subject as decentred and culture

as hybrid, and acknowledging the political exigencies in

the process of liberation, of constructing and affirming

collective identity, with its implications of organicism and

consensus—a tension which is not displayed by Homi

Bhabha’s notion of a solidarity fashioned in the

intersubjectivity of dispersed subjects. This ambivalence is

registered in Said’s designating nationalism as both

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necessary and the enemy, as positive and problematic …

the simultaneous affirmation of and cancellation of an

insurgent native subjectivity and a resurgent cultural

nationalism (30).

As the colonialist representations always tried to distort the

native identity, counter-hegemonic oppositions should be located in

acts and articulations of native defiance. But the question of

nationalism towards decolonization remains a deeply problematic,

ideological and socio political enterprise for Said. He was against all

theories, which abandon history and the historical world for the

metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness and Catholicism: “To

become aware of one’s self as belonging to a subject people is the

founding insight of anti-imperialist nationalism. From that insight came

literatures, innumerable political parties, [and so on]” (Imperialism

258). As we have seen in the previous chapter, Said fashions his own

self while trying to critique the discourse of Orientalism and always

keeps in mind his identity along with the dilemma of Palestine:

Thus in talking about the Orient…I tried to uncover the

longstanding, very varied geographical obsession with a

distant, often inaccessible world that helped Europe to

define itself by being its opposite. Similarly, I believed that

Palestine, a territory effaced in the process of building

another society, could be restored as an act of political

resistance to injustice and oblivion (Reflections 566).

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The anti-nationalist leanings of the postcolonialist and

postmodernist thinking are well known. They tend to reject all the

“great collective social identities of class, of race, or nation, of gender,

and of the West” (S. Hall 44). Or in other words, these collective

hegemonic identity narratives suppress marginality, heterogeneity and

difference. Homi Bhabha also portrays the nation as an ambivalent

narrative strategy contrasting it with the emergent global trans-

national culture and heterogeneity of the modern city (Narration 319-

320). For critics such as Hall and Bhabha, the notion of nation and

nation-state are problematic because of their suppression of

differences and hybridity. To put it differently, this postmodernist and

postcolonial hostility to the nation-state, in a certain sense is founded

upon a problematic of identity. Hinting at these stances, some critics

call Said also an anti-nationalist thinker citing his cosmopolitan

celebration of exile. For example, Aijaas Ahmad, in his In Theory finds

fault with Said’s strident rejections of “nationalism, national

boundaries, nations as such” (201). He finds many more paradoxes in

Said and argues further “that a stateless Palestinian, longing always to

have a state of his own, should describe the state--all states; the state

as such--as a ‘coercive identity’ signifies a paradox too painful to bear

comment” (215).

But a closer examination of Said’s work reveals that he is only

against extreme forms of nationalism. 47 His was not an antinationalist

47 “Edward W. Said has advocated the crossing of boundaries while at the same time abjuring the existence of those very boundaries… [His] regard for nationalist movements, as having progressive and liberatory potential, stands alongside his

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stance per se. After weighing and discriminating between the merits

and demerits of nation-states and nationalism, Said warns against all

forms of exclusivist and untutored national consciousness and was

equally hostile towards different forms of xenophobia, chauvinism,

tribalism, nativism and authoritarian nationalism. Nonetheless, he

does not “want to be misunderstood as advocating a simple anti-

nationalist position” (Imperialism 263). One can very easily find that

for Said, national identity when allied to, or conducive of, a

liberationist project is always good. But when connected to

imperialism or to authoritarian post-colonial states, nationalism tends

to promote bellicose “narratives of patriotic sovereignty” and inhuman

“policies of arrogant interventionism” (Humanism 50). In other words,

Said never fails to realize that nationalism can be a potential ally of

freedom and liberty when it takes an anti-imperialist and anti-

authoritarian form. Anti-imperialist nationalism enables the recoveries

of subjectivities and reassertions of belonging that are suppressed

under foreign rule. Furthermore, he believes that most of the

progressive nationalisms are founded on universal principles of justice

and truth. This itself marks a radical departure from the relativist

approaches of postmodernist and post-colonialist critics. Said takes

postcolonial critics48 to task for their inattention to the radical,

recognition of the bleaker, more regressive, aspects of nationalism” (Bhambra 1). 48 Said is critical of both postmodernists and postcolonialists. However, critics per se have not looked at his aversion and disagreements to certain streams of postmodernism and postcolonialism carefully. Said sees a great Eurocentric bias in postmodernism. See for example his “After Word” to Orientalism 351, for a further discussion.

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liberationist dimensions of nationalist thought and practice

(Imperialism 264), but quite appropriately finds some possibilities of

affiliation with the thought of Fanon. His involvement in Palestinian

politics carries his true spirit of nationalism:

It struck me as implicit in the Palestinian struggle . . . that

we from the very beginning as a movement said that we

were not interested in another separatist nationalism.

That’s when I joined the movement. We were not

interested in just another nationalism, resisting theirs in

order to have ours, that we were going to be the mirror

image of them. That just as they had Zionism we would

have Zionism too, except it would be Palestinian. But

rather that we were talking about an alternative in which

the discriminations made on the basis of race and religion

and national origin would be transcended by something

that we called liberation.

That’s reflected in the name of the Palestine Liberation

Organization . . . One of the saddest things, I believe, in

the history of twentieth-century liberation movements is

the betrayal of liberation by short-range goals such as

independence and the establishment of a state (The Pen

and the Sword 165-166).

This problem of nationalism seems to have emerged as one of

the most challenging and ethical issues for Said. His own thinking on

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the theme seems to have undergone a noticeable evolution. For

example, Orientalism does not talk much about the subject. But in

Palestine Said unequivocally endorses a Palestinian statehood. He

would say that a critique of nationalism is implied therein too. Again in

Imperialism Said emerges as a very strong critic of certain forms of

nationalism. It can be remembered in this context that in the last

phase of his life and career he was championing a bi-national state in

Palestine based on the concept of citizenship and equality, for he

strongly believed in a nationalism of coexistence. In an interview Said

comments on this discernible evolution in his notions on nationalism:

[A]t a certain stage of historical development in the

colonized world, nationalism is a necessary defense

against extermination, elimination and ethnocide, those

things Palestinians and others such as Native Americans

and African-Americans have suffered. So at that level, I am

unequivocally a supporter of nationalism…there is also a

self awareness of nationalism which includes a critique of

its limitations. In other words, it can develop into

triumphalism, and...into a kind of anti-democratic structure

(Ibish 14).

These forms of nationalism have been well exemplified in

Nasserism, Ba’athism etc. where democracy, civil and human rights

are abrogated in the name of national struggle. Said understands

these dangers of belligerent nationalism and so admires the critics of

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nationalism within nationalism such as Fanon, Tagore, Cabral and so

on. Though issues of representation and identity are central to Said,

he is also highly critical of essentialist, nationalist, and fundamentalist

identities. In an interview with Stephen Howe he says:

There are many different kinds of nationalisms.

Triumphant nationalism seems to me to be a hateful thing.

Nationalism which produces an ethnocentric culture, as

most of them do, I’m opposed to. Defensive nationalism,

movements of the weak and the oppressed, I very much

support. One has to distinguish between types of

nationalism, and between phases. At the heart of many

nationalist movements in the phase of decolonization,

there was a critique of nationalism, as in Frantz Fanon, for

example. It said, on the one hand we need nationalism;

but we must realize it is never sufficient (“Interview with

Edward Said” 59).

This true cosmopolitanism is evidently present throughout the

protocols of Said. He argues that the politics of knowledge that is

mainly based on the affirmation of identity is linked to unreconstructed

nationalism. Several postcolonial states have been guided by this sort

of separatism, which consequently neglects “the integration of that

earned and achieved consciousness of self within “the rendezvous of

victory”” (Reflections 380).

Fanon and the Act of Will

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Said acknowledges the importance of Fanon’s notion of

liberation as “a transformation of social consciousness beyond national

consciousness” (Imperialism 277-78). He invokes Fanon’s analysis of

how colonialism “distorts, disfigures and destroys” the past of the

colonized people and separates the colonized individual “from his or

her own instinctual life”, thus disrupting the formation of national

identity from one generation to another (286). Analyzing Fanon’s The

Wretched of the Earth Said opines that it should be read as “a

surreptitious counter-narrative” to the power of the colonial regime

(283). It is a “hybrid work—part essay, part imaginative story, part

philosophical analysis, part psychological case history, part nationalist

allegory, part visionary transcendence of history” (326). Said considers

this as the central text in resistance literature and presents Fanon as

the representative of the philosophy of resistance and liberation.

Fanon’s “immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist

independence to the theoretical domain of liberation” is what captures

Said’s interest (324). Fanon examines, remarks Said, the ways in

which the national bourgeoisie uses nationalism to maintain its power.

This replicates the very conditions that the colonized subjects try to

combat. Said too realizes with Fanon that national consciousness may

sometimes easily degenerate to nativist rigidity and thereby result in

the replacement of the white bureaucrats with colored equivalents. He

discovers that the entire corpus of Fanon’s writings is an attempt to

overcome theoretical obduracy by an act of political will, and hence his

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theory of violence. “For Fanon violence … is the synthesis that

overcomes the reification of white man as subject, black man as

object” (326). Said conjectures that, in saying this, Fanon must have

been influenced by the Marxist critic Lukacs’s49 History and Class

Consciousness while formulating his thesis of violence. Violence is a

kind of “cleansing force”, for him, which allows an “‘epistemological

revolution.” Said argues that Fanon’s violence corresponds very

closely to “Lukacs’s thesis about overcoming fragmentation by an act

of will” (326, 327). The assertion of the natives that ‘colonialism must

end’ necessitates the requirement of such violence. “Fanon is not only

reshaping colonial experience in terms suggested by Lukacs but also

characterizing the emergent cultural and political antagonist to

imperialism” (327). Said cites from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

to substantiate this argument:

The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-

violence of the native balance each other and respond to

each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity…

The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty

impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine

all possible methods for destroying the settler. On the

logical plane, the Manicheanism of the settler produces a

Manicheanism of the natives, to the theory of the ‘absolute

evil of the native’ the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the

49 A further discussion on Lukacs is available in Chapter Five.

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settler’ replies (qtd. in Imperialism 327).

As Ashcroft and Ahluwalia observe, this observation “has two

implications for Said’s hypothesis of Lukacs’s influence on Fanon: First,

there is the reification of the subject and the object. Second, violence

is an act of mental will that overcomes this reification” (112). They

observe that this Lukacsian influence can be identified in Said himself.

But for Said, “the act of will that overcomes this reification is the

‘writing back’ to cultural imperialism.” This allows them to argue

further: “the essence of liberation and emancipation is a

consciousness and recognition of a universal self, which is unification

of the self and the other.” This conclusion is possible “because Said

views Fanon not merely as a theoretician of resistance and de-

colonisation but also one of liberation” (113). In other words, Fanon

helps Said to formulate his ideas of emancipation and human agency.

Emancipation and the Subject of Action

Said argues that “human experience is finely textured, dense,

and accessible enough not to need extra historical or extra worldly

agencies to illuminate or explain it” (Imperialism 377). He talks about

“a way of regarding our world as amenable to investigation and

interrogation without magic keys, special jargons and instruments”

(377). Thus Said emphasizes the necessity of having a different and

innovative paradigm of ‘new humanism,’ disregarding the many

streams of poststructuralist anti-humanism. He highlights the ways in

which orthodox and institutional versions of history freeze the

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provisional and highly contestable versions of history into official

identities. For example, the official versions of British history in the last

quarter of the nineteenth century creates an image and identity of a

Britain which “has ruled and must always rule” India. He argues:

What matters a great deal more than the stable identity

kept current in official discourse is the contestatory force

of an interpretative method whose material is the

disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above

all overlapping streams of historical experience (378).

Furthermore, he argues that “‘identity’ does not necessarily

imply ontologically given and eternally determined stability, or

uniqueness, or irreducible character, or privileged status as something

total and complete in and of itself” (382). As has been pointed out

earlier, here also Said uses the term “identity” almost synonymously

with “subjectivity.” Thus, in his analysis, identity is not simply a

monolithic concept but a multidimensional one. It is also to be noted

that, his notion of hybrid subjectivity always presupposes a politics of

humanism. Saidian idea of hybrid subjectivity does not have anything

to do with poststructuralist hybridity as he always founded his notions

on the worldliness of the world. Only when identity becomes a stable

and determined concept, Said believes, does it comprise elements of

pseudo-nationalism and extremism.

Relentlessly focusing on ‘critical consciousness,’ Said not only

urges individuals to insist on their own identity, history, tradition and

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uniqueness but also to situate these in the geography of other

identities, peoples and cultures. In spite of the differences between

these cultures and identities, one has to realize that, they have been

always overlapping and intertwining with one another. The most

intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment is to correlate the

systems of knowledge and education with these integrative realities.

And the intellectual mission of liberation “has now shifted from the

settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its

unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies” as explained by Said (403).

Said’s concern about the formulations of identity however has to

be juxtaposed with his deep anguish over the politics of identity. He

voices this strongly in his “The Clash of Definitions”50 as a response to

Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilizations.” 51

Huntington’s problematic discourse argues that the West and the Rest

(particularly the Arab region) are in inevitable collision. Said critiques

him by arguing that instead of focusing on the clash of civilizations, we

have to concern ourselves with collaboration between cultures: “The

sad part is that “the clash of civilizations” is useful as a way of

exaggerating and making intractable various political or economic

problems” (Reflections 571). In his more recent essay “Orientalism

Once More,” Said observes that though every domain is linked to

every other one, “the territory reductive polarizations like Islam vs. the

50 See Reflections of Exile.51 See Samuel Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster) 1996.

133

West seem to conquer” (874).52 Accordingly he stresses the

importance of representing the issues of injustice and suffering “within

a context that is amply situated in history, culture and socio-economic

reality” (874). And as Bart Moore-Gilbert observes, “Said’s work asks

whether ‘true’ knowledge—or even non-coercive and non-reductive

representation of the other—is indeed possible” (73). Though culture

and its resistance to imperialism is vital to the Saidian protocols he

continually reminds us that “there is always a need to keep

community before coercion, criticism before mere solidarity, and

vigilance ahead of assent” (Imperialism 63). Keeping these vital points

in mind, Said demonstrates how to intervene in the formation of

cultures without allowing the subjects to become subservient and

subject to ideological state apparatuses. As Ashcroft and Ahluwalia

observe, his “strategy of resistance is the ability to make the ‘voyage

in,’ to write back to imperialism” (113). The subjected subjects, he

believes, will be able to do this task in their progression towards

subjects of action. “This is possible because of the potential for

humans to negate their experiences, to imagine another world, a

better world in which the colonizers and the colonized work towards

liberation” (113). This is why Said upholds in the grand narratives of

emancipation and liberation, despite Lyotard’s and Fukuyama’s53

52 See Said, “Orientalism Once More.” Development and Change 35.5 (2004): 869-79.

53Lyotard defines that postmodernism is characterized by its “incredulity toward metanarratives’ (xxiv). And, Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis argues that history, envisaged by Hegel and Marx as a process moving towards perfection, ends its evolution with the advent of liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992). Said rejects these two theses in his various writings.

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tautological assertions:

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from

forming and emerging, is very important to culture and

imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections

between them. Most important, the grand narratives of

emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the

colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection

(Imperialism xiii).

This decisive shift in Imperialism in relation to the question of

resistance to dominance can be largely attributed to Said’s

disengagement with Foucault. He “considerably complicates--ramifies

and nuances—the notion of oppositional commitment” in this work

(Arac 57). His adoption of Gramscian hegemony, Williamsian

‘geographical thinking,’ and Adornian contrapuntal perspective

enables him to address this question of resistance more effectively.

In the period between abolition of slavery and World War II, the

formation of resistant subjectivities was quite ineffective. In this

context, Said realizes that the tradition of metropolitan resistance is

possible only through the colonized subjects’ recognition of a struggle

for liberation. Consequently, he traces the struggles for liberation and

independence, and addresses the histories of decolonization in the

contemporary era in Imperialism with a broad-ranging analysis of the

question of nationalism. However, his analysis of nationalism, as we

have seen, is not imbued with the politics of identity, but permeated

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with his notions on the hybrid nature of cultures and territories.

Arguing against all forms of monolithic fundamental subject formation,

Said posits therefore the need to nourish a hybrid subject formation of

the colonized.

The most important aspect of Imperialism is probably this

skeptical recognition of Said that “nationalism can all too easily

replicate the essentializing and dichotomizing vision of culture of the

former imperial powers” (Moore-Gilbert 65). Said adopts a mode of

cultural criticism which reflects and espouses “the hybridity

engendered by the ever more intertwined histories of the modern

world, and which eschews conceptions of identity which are based in

fixed ontological categories, whither of race, ethnicity or national

identity” (65). In continuation of this nationalist problematic, Said

theorizes his notions of the exilic subjectivity, recognizing the

oppositional quality inherent within it.

To conclude, it is important to realize that if Orientalism is

theorizing the formulation of the subjectivities of the colonizer as well

as of the colonized, Imperialism goes a step further in politicizing the

resistant subject as constituted by the ideology of intertwined histories

and hybrid cultures.