Summary
Edward Said’s phrase in Culture and Imperialism for the systematic quality of imperial culture in Britain, France and the United States — the set of attitudes and references through which a metropolitan culture sustains its intercourse with distant territories (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.15, p.22 / printed p.xvi, p.xxiii).
Details
- The idea of overseas rule — jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands — has a privileged status in the British, French and American cultures, bound up with projections in fiction, geography and art, and acquiring a continuous presence through actual expansion, administration, investment and commitment; there is something systematic about imperial culture therefore that is not as evident in any other empire, and this is what Said says he has in mind when he uses the phrase “a structure of attitude and reference” (PDF p.22 / printed p.xxiii).
- In Chapter One, V the phrase names a cultural topography: the way structures of location and geographical reference appear in the cultural languages of literature, history or ethnography, sometimes allusively and sometimes carefully plotted, across several individual works not otherwise connected to one another or to an official ideology of “empire” — with Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” also in mind. In British culture a consistency of concern in Spenser, Shakespeare, Defoe and Austen fixes empowered space in metropolitan England or Europe and connects it to distant or peripheral worlds (Ireland, Venice, Africa, Jamaica) conceived as desirable but subordinate, with attitudes about rule, control, profit, enhancement and suitability growing from the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century (PDF p.79-80 / printed p.52-53).
- In Chapter Two, I, nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French culture there are allusions to the facts of empire, nowhere with more regularity than in the British novel, and taken together these allusions constitute a structure of attitude and reference (PDF p.89 / printed p.62).
- An instance: after Pip acknowledges his debt to Magwitch in Great Expectations, his new career as a hardworking trader in the East with Herbert Pocket is another structure of attitude and reference, suggesting Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient (PDF p.15 / printed p.xvi).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Imperialism, Raymond Williams, Edward Said