Summary
The title of Chapter One of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and his name for what the different experiences of colonizer and colonized make up when looked at contrapuntally: “By looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility.” (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.45-46 / printed p.18-19).
Details
- The point of the book is the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals and the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives and histories; to ignore or discount these is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century (PDF p.19 / printed p.xx).
- Although the separation between Europeans and natives was insidious and fundamentally unjust, the historical experience of empire is a common one, to be described as pertaining to Indians and Britishers, Algerians and French, Westerners and Africans, Asians, Latin Americans and Australians despite the horrors, the bloodshed and the vengeful bitterness (PDF p.21 / printed p.xxii).
- The discrepant spheres of metropolitan and ex-colonized experience appear to overlap only partially, and the small area perceived as common provides for little more than a rhetoric of blame; a comparative literature of imperialism and a reconsidered post-imperial intellectual attitude might expand the overlapping community between the two societies (PDF p.45 / printed p.18).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Contrapuntalism, Imperialism, Edward Said