Summary
Victorian writer whose writing on Blacks in the West Indies Edward Said takes as the frank statement of the basic theme of imperialism, in a lingua franca for metropolitan Britain that Austen a few decades before and Mill a decade after share in less extreme form (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.128-129 / printed p.101-102).
Details
- Said sets the elaboration of Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s aesthetic theories beside the authority their ideas bestowed on the subjugation of distant peoples, as a serious split in critical consciousness (PDF p.39 / printed p.12).
- Carlyle did not drive Rhodes directly and cannot be blamed for the problems in today’s southern Africa, but Said asks how Britain’s humanistic ideas co-existed so comfortably with imperialism; in Past and Present and in his Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (title checked against the original; the copy garbles it) his energetic animadversions on revitalising Britain do nothing to animate “Quashee”, the emblematic Black whose “ugliness, idleness, rebellion” are doomed forever to subhuman status (PDF p.109, p.128 / printed p.82, p.101).
- In the passage Said quotes, Carlyle holds that the gods wish spices and valuable products to be grown in their West Indies, and that “Quashee, if he will not help in bringing-out the spices will get himself made a slave again” (PDF p.128 / printed p.101).
- The status of the Black is decreed by “eternal Act of Parliament”, so there is no real opportunity for self-help or upward mobility, although Carlyle says he opposes slavery; his Quashee is like Sir Thomas Bertram’s Antiguan possessions, designed to produce wealth intended for English use (PDF p.129 / printed p.102).
- Carlyle speaks a language of total generality anchored in unshakable certainties about the essence of races, peoples and cultures, locating England at the focal point of a world presided over by its power (PDF p.129 / printed p.102).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, John Ruskin, Jane Austen, Imperialism