Week 12: Aesthetics and Culture
This week we defined culture in the colonist/colonized relationship and the .
This week we read another essay by Said. This time, Said is discussing how culture affect politics. He begins by arguing that culture does not exist disconnected from politics, and studying one must be informed by the other. Because the colonial project has affected culture globally, there is no “pure” place to study the effects of colonialism from. Said argues that the only way to understand it is to compare different group’s (colonizer/colonized) retelling of their experience. This creates a vantage in between cultures, a stable place to examine both. “People between worlds have a richer perspective on dominant narratives” (class discussion). Said accuses the West of ignoring its imperial history in the cultural narratives it tells about itself, and shows that imperialism is at the core of the global experience of the West as told by the rest of the world.
Jameson, writing 7 years prior, seems to have needed this memo for his analysis on “third world” literature. In this essay, he argues that all “third world” literature can be read as a “national allegory” for the experience of the colonized. While there are many threads to criticize his writing on, as Ahmad does well, the most striking to me is Jameson’s blindness to the imperialism seeped into Western (“first world”) culture. He argues that in the “first world”, politics and culture are separate, whereas the “third world” does not have that freedom and any writing encodes the entire imperial history. To me this argument merely reveals Jameson’s position within Western academia and his blindness to its dominant narratives. Particularly, he makes the distinction that in “first world” texts, any political allegory is merely written unconsciously and must be deciphered by critics, while all “third world” literature is consciously and overtly an allegory to the (post)colonial experience. I’m just confused how he can so quickly dismiss any political existence encoded in Western literature, while aligning himself with the colonized.
Ahmad adds to this criticism by showing how the argument is too broad to draw accurate conclusions without engaging in positivist reductionism. Primarily, Ahmad focuses on the “third world” as a base to the argument. How can Jameson make an argument about national allegory in all “third world” literature, when each nation’s history of colonialism is drastically different? He then shows how Jameson places himself in all three worlds (1st: his USA origin, 2nd: his Marxist ideology, 3rd: his spirit/alliance), but takes away that power from all “third world” writers.
Themes:
- Politics and culture are interdependent: one informs the other.
- Imperialism has seeped into all global (political/personal) experiences, and so can only be studied through comparing different group’s experiences of it.
Questions
- How are these arguments connected to aesthetics? My understanding of aesthetics is in terms of art and desire, but these arguments center on cultural narratives and
- In Jameson’s essay, what is the “libidinal dimension”? Is this the psychological source of personal desires, separate from politics/public desire?
Readings
- Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories - Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism)
- Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism - Fredric Jameson
- Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” - Aijaz Ahmad