Summary
Rudyard Kipling, whose White Man — as he appears in several poems, in novels like Kim, and in too many catchphrases to be an ironic fiction — Said presents in Orientalism as an idea, a persona and a style of being that served many Britishers abroad, and whose singing of holding dominion over palm and pine provided the imaginative perspective of the Oriental experts (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.234, 236 / printed p.225, 227).
Details
- In Chapter One, I, Kipling’s chain-of-command passage is quoted without a title for the order of sovereignty from East to West in its clearest form, from mule and driver up through the Viceroy, servant of the Empress (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.54 / printed p.45).
- Kipling celebrated the road taken by White Men in the colonies, quoted: “Now, this is the road that the White Men tread / When they go to clean a land”; cleaning a land is best done by White Men in delicate concert with each other, and behind the White Man’s mask of amiable leadership there is always the express willingness to use force, to kill and be killed (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.235 / printed p.226).
- Being a White Man, for Kipling and for those whose perceptions and rhetoric he influenced, was a self-confirming business: it involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the nonwhite worlds, specific judgments, evaluations and gestures, and was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.236 / printed p.227).
- Such ideas and their authors emerge out of complex historical and cultural circumstances, two of which Kipling’s White Man shares with Orientalism: the culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations dividing reality into collectives under the rigidly binomial opposition of ours and theirs, and the field each commanded, with its peculiar modes of behavior, learning and possession (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.236-237 / printed p.227-228).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, T. E. Lawrence, Lord Cromer