Culture And Imperialism

A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.

Following his profoundly influential study, Orientalism, Edward Said now examines western culture. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism is a broad, fierce and wonderfully readable account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

Demonstrates that Western imperialism's most effective tools for dominating other cultures have been literary in nature as much as political and economic. Traces the themes of 19th- and 20th-century Western fiction and contemporary mass media as weapons of conquest and also brilliantly analyzes the rise of oppositional indigenous voices in the literatures of the "colonies".

This book offers a diverse range of essays on the state of current research, knowledge, and global political action and debate on cultural imperialism.

Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this more true than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. When they were being entertained or educated the British basked in their imperial glory and developed a powerful notion of their own superiority. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late Victorian and Edwardian times--in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education, and the iconography of popular art. Several chapters look beyond the first world war when the most popular media, cinema and broadcasting, continued to convey an essentially late nineteenth-century world view, while government agencies like the Empire Marketing Board sought to convince the public of the economic value of empire. Youth organizations, which had propagated imperialist and militarist attitudes before the war, struggled to adapt to the new internationalist climate.

Cultures of United States Imperialism represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies. Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the United States. Drawing on a broad range of interpretive practices, these essays range across American history, from European representations of the New World to the mass media spectacle of the Persian Gulf War. The volume breaks down the boundary between the study of foreign relations and American culture to examine imperialism as an internal process of cultural appropriation and as an external struggle over international power. The contributors explore how the politics of continental and international expansion, conquest, and resistance have shaped the history of American culture just as much as the cultures of those it has dominated. By uncovering the dialectical relationship between American cultures and international relations, this collection demonstrates the necessity of analyzing imperialism as a political or economic process inseparable from the social relations and cultural representations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class at home. Contributors. Lynda Boose, Mary Yoko Brannen, Bill Brown, William Cain, Eric Cheyfitz, Vicente Diaz, Frederick Errington, Kevin Gaines, Deborah Gewertz, Donna Haraway, Susan Jeffords, Myra Jehlen, Amy Kaplan, Eric Lott, Walter Benn Michaels, Donald E. Pease, Vicente Rafael, Michael Rogin, José David Saldívar, Richard Slotkin, Doris Sommer, Gauri Viswanathan, Priscilla Wald, Kenneth Warren, Christopher P. Wilson

In "Cultural Imperialism," John Tomlinson deals with issues ranging from the ideological effects of imported cultural products, to the process of cultural homogenization, to the nature of cultural autonomy. He examines a number of related discourses: thedebate about "media imperialism" the discourse of national cultural identity; the critique of multinational capitalism and the critique of cultural modernity. His analysis reveals major problems in the way in which the idea of cultural, as distinct from economic or political, imperialism is formulated.