4 - The religious effects of culture: imperialism

Summary

World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end.

(G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, p. 92)

Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.

(Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 102)

Culture and Imperialism does not begin where Orientalism ends so much as extends and complicates an account that Said now describes explicitly as imperialism. The story of imperialism and its culture exceeds the geographical and imaginative limits of Orientalism: from an account of Orientalism as the invidious representation and domination of the East by the West to an extensive account of Western domination and non-Western resistance. Said interprets the culture of imperialism as a complex phenomenon in which social existence and individual consciousness, the world and the text, mutually determine each other. He describes a complex and reciprocal relationship between written artifacts such as the European realistic novel and imperial practices in geographically distant lands. In short, he construes imperialism as a cultural phenomenon that occurs within multileveled relations of power and knowledge that are irreducible to language and that are captured poorly by terms such as “text” and “discourse.”