Summary
Edward Said’s name in Culture and Imperialism for the conscious effort by scholars, critics and intellectuals of the peripheral world to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, mix with it, transform it, and make it acknowledge marginalized, suppressed or forgotten histories (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.243 / printed p.216).
Details
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The effort is instanced in an earlier generation of resistance writing and in Salman Rushdie’s work: writing back to the metropolitan cultures, disrupting the European narratives of the Orient and Africa, is the second of the three great topics of decolonizing cultural resistance (PDF p.243 / printed p.216).
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Chapter Three, IV, “The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition”, treats the work of intellectuals from the colonial or peripheral regions who wrote in an imperial language, felt themselves organically related to the mass resistance to empire, and set themselves the revisionist, critical task of dealing frontally with the metropolitan culture, using the techniques, discourses and weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the European (PDF p.270 / printed p.243).
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The voyage in is an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work, and a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures: no longer does the logos dwell exclusively in London and Paris, and the weapons of criticism have become part of the historical legacy of empire (PDF p.271-272 / printed p.244-245).
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Its four exemplary texts are C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening, works of scholarship and advocacy from within national movements, against Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and S. H. Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977), post-colonial and specialist works (PDF p.272 / printed p.245).
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The contrast between the earlier and later pairs is worked out in full in part 7: James and Antonius offer alternative narratives meant to enlarge the awareness of Western readers and speak for movements already launched toward self-determination, whereas Ranajit Guha and Syed Hussein Alatas, after several decades of independence, perceive the relationship between cultures as radically antithetical, replace narrative with irony and a hermeneutics of suspicion, and address Western scholars and compatriots alike (PDF p.278, p.282-283 / printed p.251, p.255-256).
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The four scholars write out of and within a political situation whose pressures are constant; scholarship and politics are more openly connected in their books because they think of themselves as emissaries to Western culture representing a political freedom as yet unfulfilled, blocked, postponed (PDF p.285 / printed p.258).
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Their voyage in was fundamental to the cultural coalition built between anti-imperialist resistance in the peripheries and oppositional culture of Europe and the United States, instanced in the transformation of the Middle East Studies Association in the 1980s (PDF p.288 / printed p.261).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Contrapuntalism, C. L. R. James, George Antonius, Imperialism