culture

The Mythology of Imperialism
a book review by Eric Jackson

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

Joseph Conrad

It is man's social being that determines his thinking.

Mao Zedong

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

Allan Bloom

Although there are many rearguard actions and the precise form of the result is yet to be known, certain important things have been decided in the great cultural war within US academia about which books are in the canon of knowledge to which every well educated person should have been exposed. The notions of diversity and multiculturalism now hold the commanding heights, but by their very nature they have not been able to replace the lists of great books by dead white men that used to comprise the generally accepted canon.

Written at the height of the Vietnam War --- in the course of a protest against which Jonah Raskin was arrested and tortured by the New York City Police Department --- The Mythology of Imperialism is neither an argument against reading books that were part of that canon nor an assault on the very idea of a canon. It's a critical look at leading British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their takes on what became the central economic and political fact --- and thus an important literary topic --- of that time, the British Empire in particular and the imperial system in general.

So is it a dead, dry subject today?

Not if you consider that much of the political violence in today's world is intimately linked to what the British Empire left behind in places like the old Palestine Mandate (now entirely under Israeli occupation or seige), British India (which was partitioned along religious communal lines, giving rise to modern-day Pakistan) and Iraq.

Not if you consider that many of the Hollywood moguls who decide which cultural works get funded had educations that left them affected by the writers whose lives and works Raskin considers.

Not if you consider what was common to many colonial and post-colonial situations, for specific examples the ways that the Anglo-Indians and the Zonians saw the world around them.

The very first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rudyard Kipling, is the first target of Raskin's critique. Kipling was a hardcore colonialist whose works are laced with racism, overt and covert. He may have been the man who superficially brought a corner of the British Empire's tropical domains into sympathetic focus to generations of kids via works like The Jungle Book --- but his understanding of native cultures was crude and uninformed to anyone who grew up in one of them, and the fundamental idea upon which his celebrated works were built was the presumption of British superiority.

The gist of Raskin's complaint is that to the extent that readers learned of India and empire from Kipling, it was from someone who didn't know the subject very profoundly and didn't care to know --- as in the Anglo-Indian version of a Zonian who knew all about Panamanians from talking to his maid, the bartender at the club and people who labored under him at his job.

Joseph Conrad came from Russian-occupied Poland, where he was the son of a Polish nationalist. As such he grew up with a suspicion of imperial projects. He took to the sea, got to know parts of the colonized world first-hand, became an Englishman by choice and accepted the privileges of living well in the metropolis even as he expressed his qualms about imperialism.

Conrad's best-known work, Heart of Darkness, is about a voyage up the Congo River to a hell presided over by the monstrous European ivory trader Mr. Kurtz. It is much of the basis for the Vietnam and Cambodia movie Apocalypse Now. Here, too, we see the estrangement of those British writers of the period who knew something of the colonial world from those of their countrymen who went native --- Kipling tended to treat them as merely pathetic in comparison to Conrad's diabolical yet strangely attractive Mr. Kurtz. As in a distaste for imperialism is acceptable enough, but becoming one of the other is well beyond the pale.

Raskin also devotes chapters to D. H. Lawrence (whose masterpiece was Women in Love), E. M. Forster (best known for A Passage to India) and Joyce Cary (a somewhat younger writer whose works seem not to have stood the test of time in academia), and along the way compares, contrasts and critiques a number of other writers. Forster is portrayed as the committed imperialist whose world view and creative spark effectively came crashing down with World War I even if A Passage to India came six years after that conflict, while Lawrence was critical of Forster's imperialist viewpoint and Cary even more so. But even so, Raskin argues that Cary, while arguing for African freedom, was stuck in an imperial mindset that made him an advocate of neo-colonialism.

Raskin, the son of communist parents who grew up on Long Island, takes sides. He got his undergraduate degree at Columbia and his PhD at the University of Manchester, and has been a Fulbright professor in Belgium. But even if the late great Palestinian activist and Columbia University professor of English Edward Said cited The Mythology of Imperialism as one of the influences that went into his masterpiece Orientalism, elite university English departments were and are resistant to Raskin. Instead he has for many years been the head of the communication studies department of California's Sonoma State University, where he teaches the sons and daughters of the middle and working classes rather than the younger generations of the ruling elite. Although they, too, have been shaken by tremors of change, still the elite schools don't want too many professors who take sides against the system.

In this second edition, Raskin's afterword and Bruce Robbins's foreword look back to 1971, when the first edition was published by Random House, and at the changes that have come down since. For example, there is the recently created field of "post-colonial studies" to which this work and especially those of Edward Said are said to have contributed.

But Jonah Raskin looks primarily at cultural rather than political forms, and in that sense would not describe the world after formal decolonization as truly "post-colonial." Changes in government do matter, but ideas have lives of their own. Yes, the Canal Zone formally went out of business and Panama became officially whole back in 1979, but during the recent Carnival while most Panamanians sought ways to entertain themselves here, the children of the oligarchy flew off en masse to Disney World. The Mythology of Imperialism is about the literature instructed by a doomed empire, whose metropolis thought it could transfer its production to the colonies and survive as a financial and commercial center and naval power --- and don't you think that there might be parallels to the situation in which the United States finds itself today?