Interventions and Subjectivities: Examining the Cultural Life and Struggles
1 Introduction
A quick glance at the news today points to how pervasive political and economic events are to human life. While that is true, people often neglect how important culture is in shaping those events, usually casting culture merely as an aesthetic and artform. Culture is at the heart of human development and of the rise of civilizations as questions of ontology and epistemology are formed through a particular realizing and understanding of culture. As cultural scholars, such as Edward W. Said, argue “culture is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another. Far from being a placid realm of Apollonian gentility, culture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another.”[1] Emphasizing that a plurality of cultures exists, various currents of cultures clash to fight over the method of life—how life is understood and organized—and this method is what principally guides societies to structure both political and economic life.
Three cultural thinkers have contributed to highlight how important culture is in the development of human society. The first, Clifford Geertz, was an American anthropologist whose The Interpretations of Cultures describes how humans, through cultural symbols and signs, form intersubjectivities, identity, and a view of worldmaking or Weltanschauung with such precision and lucidity. Second, Stuart Hall was a British-Jamaican sociologist and widely thought of as one of the founding figures of Cultural Studies. His Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History is a groundbreaking work that traces the genealogy of cultural studies—primarily in Britain—and points out the relationship of labor structures and culture, mostly through the Marxist concepts of the base and the superstructure. Lastly, Edward W. Said was a Palestinian American literary critic, a public intellectual, and popularly known as the founder of Postcolonial Studies. One of his magnum opuses, Culture and Imperialism, offers a wide scope yet detailed analysis of how culture influenced the European conquest and colonizing of the world (until present time) through aesthetics artforms and literature, particularly the novel. All three thinkers, with various interdisciplinary perspectives in their arsenal, provide fresh and compelling ideas on the centrality of culture in forming human societies.
This paper explores the ideas and methods of these three important cultural figures which culminates in a synthesis of my own reflections of culture. This work is specifically divided into two parts: the comparative analysis of these authors and my own reflections. Starting with the comparison, I first introduce central concepts of each of these thinkers while outlining the analytical method which they employ. Then, I comparatively analyze the themes of their works, exposing the key similarities and differences among them. With my reflections, I focus on the role of intersubjectivities and aesthetics in forming human sensibility and cultural struggles in a transnational battlefield. I ground my reflective analysis in ideas from the prior three authors and some ideas from Caribbean writer Derek Walcott and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School.
2 Three Key Figures in the Study of Culture
2.1 Geertz and The Interpretation of Cultures
For Geertz, culture is a semiotic system that humans use to make sense of the world. He “[takes] culture to be those webs [of significance that man himself has spun], and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”[2] Because of this groundwork definition, Geertz’s book focuses on how humans form societies based on how they create meaning and interpret the signs and symbols that they see around them. For him, cultures are not scaffolding that are already in place for humans to identify, thus refusing the study of culture to be an “experimental science.” Instead, Geertz views that humans form cultures by conceiving and constructing meaning collectively, and conversely, cultures help humans in developing the human mind and the development of civilizations. As Geertz writes, “without men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men.”[3]
As an anthropologist, Geertz spent a large chunk of his time in Indonesia, particularly Bali and Java, to understand the complex layers of culture: from the notion of Man and religion to ideology. Because of this method, he relies on multiple ethnographies and accounts of his time in those places. In addition to his ethnographies, he points to evidence found in natural history as we explore later.
To interpret culture, Geertz turns first to the history of formulating the idea of the “Man” (with a capital M) and proceeds to explore the religious and ideological dimensions of culture. These three concepts—Man, religion, and ideology—are critical to understanding Geertz’s framework of interpreting culture. Geertz argues that the concept of Man is a construction born out of the Enlightenment Era. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and René Descartes have created their own narrative and conditions of what Man is. To Rousseau, to reach a status of Man, one must move out of a natural state where a person gains intellection and leaves traits of savagery. Man, then, gains desire to accumulate more and enter civil society.[4] To Descartes, Man is the concentration of reason and where rationality is what defines the identity of Man. As his famous words write, “I think therefore I am.”[5] Though details of how Man is constructed varies, Geertz contends that there are traits that these thinkers agree on, usually rationality, and he attributes this to consensus gentium where “the notion that there are some things that all men will be found to agree upon as right, real, just, or attractive and that these things are, therefore, in fact right, real, just, or attractive.”[6]
The concept of Man surrounds the idea of rationality and logic, then comes out culture, but in fact, per Geertz, he contends that culture is an ingredient for human intellection, and his evidence can be found in archeological artefacts such as bones and primitive weapons. He outlines that in the Ice Age, humans were not only “receding brow ridges and shrinking jaws” but they gained a “thoroughly encephalated nervous system, [their] incest-taboo-based social structure, and [their] capacity to create and use symbols.”[7] The concurrent development of this physicality and social interactions indicated to Geertz that “man’s nervous system does not merely enable him to acquire culture, it positively demands that he do so if it is going to function at all.”[8] Therefore, culture is not just a supplement to intellect but a necessary ingredient to this capacity at all—which may have started by developing a system to understand the world through symbols and signs, notably religion.
To Geertz, religion is “a system of symbols which acts to establish…moods and motivations…by formulating conceptions of general order of existence and clothing [them] with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”[9] This understanding of religion allows people to explain the supernatural by using symbols such as transcendental signifiers. This signification allows a “general order of existence” by avoiding an ontological crisis for an individual. For example, instead of brooding over the question of origins of existence, one puts the faith in the symbol of “God” as the transcendental origin of all creation. While this seems fantastical and imaginary, these conceptions emanate an “aura of factuality” owing to the need of a person to make sense of the world around them. For instance, the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a symbol for redemption for sins is a motivation and standard that Christians uphold among themselves—for this belief enables them to track a trajectory and a purpose in life. This journey of atonement for sins, in short, gives life meaning to these devout people. While some people may treat religion as dogmatic. To some, it is a leap of faith—in helping build a subjective truth that helps one describe the supernatural and their own path in life. As Søren Kierkegaard writes, “an objective uncertainty [is held] fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness.”[10]
Another concept closely tied to Geertz notion of culture is ideology, which can be broadly defined as a “collection of political proposals” and a set of beliefs, heavily political, linked to the authorities of living people.[11] There exists two ways of understanding ideology per Geertz and that is either as an interest or strain. If understood as an interest, people use ideology to impress upon others a set of beliefs and pronounce to either subjugate or attract them to a particular goal, in other words, an interest.[12] Meanwhile, if an ideology is understood as a strain, emphasis is likely placed on the “social friction and anxiety” stemming from a clash of principles.[13] This strain, in opposition to interest, prescribes that people run away from this ideological anxiety and seek to alleviate the strain. From these two clashing theories of ideology, one thing remains clear—that a system of signs is in play to embody political interests and principles. As Geertz argues, the function of ideology is to “make autonomous politics possible by providing authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means it can be sensibly grasped.”[14]
Through an anthropological viewpoint, Geertz explores the notion of culture through narratives and ethnographic descriptions. While also pooling from other fields such as archeology, he argues for an understanding of culture as a constructed system of signs that must be continually interpreted for Man’s life to make sense. Geertz touches upon religion as means of signs to explain the unexplainable and mysterious aspects of life to man, while ideology serves as a system of signs to propel a political interest. Culture is undeniably a semiotic system; however, it should also be understood as a system of experiences and exchanges as our next thinker explores.
2.2 Hall and Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History
Cultural Studies has a long history of theoretical tradition from Karl Marx to E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall traces and critiques this genealogy in his book, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. For Hall, cultural studies “seeks the life one is obliged to live because of the conditions into which one has been born, the circumstances which have been made meaningful and hence experienceable, because certain frameworks of understanding have been brought bear those conditions.”[15] Hall places importance on culture understood as the interpretable and meaningful experiences stemming from the conditions of life. From this definition, one can extrapolate that Hall’s understanding of culture is: “experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.”[16] The broad goal of this work is to observe, unpack, and interpret what experience is, and for Hall, tracing an intellectual tradition that brought Cultural Studies to life is a necessary step.
In fulfilling this purpose, Hall’s methodology is genealogical: he accounts for the historical narratives and theories that were built upon each other. He congregates thinker such as Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, among others. Equally significant is his pooling of narratives both from the lives of these thinkers but also his life as a Black Jamaican living in the United Kingdom. These give his theoretical insights the lifeblood that roots his thought to practice. While Hall employs a plethora of concepts, four are at the core of his work in exploring experience: structuralism, ideology, hegemony, and resistance.
At the core of social and cultural work looms the shadow of Karl Marx. Because of this, Hall takes some time to talk about structuralism. For this, Hall delves first into the work of anthropologist and structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss before diving into Marx. Broadly defined, structuralism is a method of interpreting that focuses on identifying systems which reflect patterns in human life. To Levi-Strauss, there exists underlying themes and structures in any social setting, and to illustrate this, he utilizes myths and their infinite variations to point out that despite these multiple iterations, there exists a common theme along all of them across different times and spaces.[17] These common themes, he calls them mythemes.[18] To identify these mythemes in a particular social setting, Levi-Strauss prescribes looking at society and its different iterations across a particular space in various timeframes. Recognizing the difficulty in understanding such method, he uses a musical score as an example of this analysis.[19] On one hand, a person reads a score vertically to identify any harmonies and textures at a specific time. On the other, a person also reads this score horizontally to hear the melodies and progressions across time. The latter is called a diachronic analysis, while the former is a synchronic analysis. Therefore, to properly analyze a society through a structural lens is to read a society both diachronically and synchronically to identify the basic elements that comprise it. To Hall, no other person has left a critical mark on social structural analyses other than Marx.
One crucial concept in Marxist structuralism is that any society could be understood through the base-superstructure model. The base includes all notions relating to the labor relations and production means. The dynamic between how capital is produced, exchanged, and accumulated is embedded into this base. On the other hand, the superstructure is an ideological sphere which includes everything else aside from labor and usually pertains to religion, culture, arts, family, politics, among other matters. The base is usually understood to shape the superstructure, while the superstructure aims to maintain the relations within the base. In other word, materialist labor relations and production means pave way to how social and cultural interactions are formed in each setting, and the norms produced within these social and cultural contexts serve to preserve labor relations through an ideological conditioning.[20] Hall contends, however, that because of the high level of abstraction in Marx’s works, particularly The Capital, Marx’s ideas tend to be misunderstood.[21] Moreover, because of class reductionism, Marxist analysis tend to leave out other “determinations…such as race, ethnicity, and gender” that are usually relegated to the superstructure.[22] Nevertheless, Hall argues that this leaving out “does not absolve us of the responsibility of recognizing them.”[23] Instead, “we need to…incorporate the determinations that [Marx] left out.”[24] To explore the importance of these determinations within the superstructure, Hall takes time to introduce and explicate on ideology, particularly through the lens of Althusser.
To Althusser, ideologies are “systems of representation—composed of concepts, ideas, myths, or images—in which men and women…live ‘their imaginary relations to the real conditions of existence.’”[25] It is quite clear that ideology as a cultural domain is a system of signs, symbols, and of ways we depict “the world to ourselves and one another.”[26] These representations constitute “ideological knowledge [which are] the result of specific practices.”[27] However, Hall takes caution in defining what this “practice” is. As the social is always inside the semiotic system, every social practice is confined within ideology. This does not mean that practice is strictly a discourse; nor it is strictly mapped to material things. Hall describes how a worker uses labor power to transform raw materials into a commodity, and this process is “the definition of a practice—the practice of labor.”[28] Workers cannot learn this practice of labor if labor itself is outside the range of representation and meaning. This practice of labor would also cease to be a “practice” if no transformation happens. Therefore, practice is not simply a material act, nor it is simply a discourse. Practices embody and express an ideology through both meaning and materiality concurrently. Therefore, Althusser maps ideology to the state apparatus. The material state ceases to be an apparatus if it does not represent meaning. At the same time, if ideology only has meaning, then there is no apparatus to materialize the thought. Thus, ideology requires a material subject to exist, while at the same time, a subject can only exist if an ideology flows through them. As Althusser argues, “all ideology functions through the category of the subject, and it is only in and for ideology that subjects exist.”[29] Having said this, Althusser emphasizes that a plurality of ideologies exist that are in constant flux and conflict with each other. Often these ideologies share the same reservoir of concepts while articulating and disarticulating the differences and similarities among them.[30] As Hall explains, the “ideological struggle actually consists of attempting to win some new set of meanings for an existing term or category, of disarticulating it from its place in a signifying structure.”[31] While Althusser articulates the terrain of ideological pluralities through abstraction and semiotics, Antonio Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony more aptly describes the constant currents and clashes of plural cultural forces in society though a clear reference to concrete historical conjunctures.
Broadly defined, hegemony is a domination of a historical bloc over people and society through a consensual (typically cultural) authoritative force. Succinctly, in echoing Gramsci, Hall views hegemony as “leadership which is in control, and that is what hegemony means: mastery.”[32] Since to obtain a hegemony is a “process of the coordination of the interests of a dominant group with the general interests of other groups and the life of the State as a whole,” Gramsci argues that a historical bloc requires mastery over the ebbs and flows of the plurality of cultural forces within a social setting.[33] To achieve this robust hegemony is to achieve what is called an integral hegemony. It is integral as it can hold together and integrate a plurality of forces and interest through a consensual authoritative power. When an integral hegemony is in place, the dominant ideology is “common sense,” and does not requires people to have a conscious mastery of its inner workings as this ideology is “taken-for-granted.”[34] However, when a hegemony is losing its mastery over these varying forces, it is said to be decadent as it fails to keep together in control these opposing currents which is called a counterhegemonic force. However, as Hall argues, if an opposition wishes to gain enough momentum to topple the hegemony, they “must contend for mastery, the ground which new conceptions of the world must contest and even transform, if they are to shape the conceptions of the world of the masses and in that way become historically effective.”[35] From here, Hall continues to identify how resistance can form to challenge dominant ideologies and hegemonies.
For Hall, resistance is a continual struggle of the opposition to articulate their interest and over-determinate dominant cultures and ideologies.[36] This resistance can mean as little as sustaining survival to contaminating the norm through emergent cultural forms. The first strategy that Hall introduces is negotiation. He argues that while negotiations imply that an opposition lack the power to topple the hegemony, they possess enough strength and persistence to survive to even negotiate in the first place.[37] This kind of opposition treads ground that they have complete familiarity and organization that they can afford to resist and survive the hegemony. They always identify sites and possibilities of small victories to contend with the dominant forces. As Hall argues, “the moment of negotiation is also a moment of struggle and resistance.”[38] Even if the dominant force cannot be overthrown, at least there are always small concessions and gains to be claimed.
The second strategy relies on expanding how marginalized forces can expand the enactment of agency and mobility through intensifying what Hall call “spaces for intervention.”[39] These spaces allow for opposing and marginalized subjectivities to survive and thrive. He argues that when these spaces are identified, criticized, and intensified; they offer a room for marginalized subjectivities to become stronger, deeper, and better articulated than before so that it can be a force that can dislocate and disarticulate these resistances from places they are subjugated and held hostage in.[40] Because of these spaces for intervention, Hall argues that “the domain of culture and ideology is where those new positions are opened and where the new articulations have to be made. And in that domain, people can change and struggle.”[41] This domain is one that fosters the emergence of new cultural forms that serves as a manifestation and clear articulation of marginalized subjectivities.
To Hall, the third strategy, namely these emergent cultural forms, usually find its realization in the aesthetic dimension of culture.[42] When a marginalized group resists a dominant power, they often produce a material articulation of that resistance that comes in an emergent cultural form. For example, Black slaves in the United States have turned to work hymns and rhythmic chorus to match the beat of the pounding hammers and to synchronize their energies with that of their fellow workers. Not only this, but this form of aesthetic also somehow alleviates the suffering coming from these strenuous situations as these cultural forms serve as an outlet to articulate and materialize the potential emotions welling inside. Such an aesthetic is one of many that helped in shaping the subjectivity of the Black slave and consciousness as an oppressed human being that would have led eventually to leading Black figures such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois. Hall argues that “without that articulation, the movement would have even less shape and direction than it currently has, and we would presumably be in more trouble than we already are.”[43] Therefore, aesthetic cultural forms, even if only emerging, are signs that there exists a strong subjectivity that lies in opposition to the hegemonic force. While these subjectivities may be small, there is potential and space for them to grow and find articulation in these emergent cultural forms.
While Hall talks of sites of where subjectivities and cultural struggles may arise, this discourse is limited within the vast theoretical repertoire that eventually founded cultural studies. Hall may already hint at points relating to the hegemonic power of imperial forces; however, his exploration lacks depth, whereas our next thinker has a lucid insight on matters of cultural imperialism and power.
2.3 Edward Said and Culture and Imperialism
Culture both reflects and reinforces imperialism. Edward Said argues in one of his magnum opuses, Culture and Imperialism, that the aesthetic developments during the Age of Imperialism helped in shaping the social and spatial narrative of colonized nations and those in its periphery. These narratives reinforce and helps in legitimizing imperialism by propagating the belief among white colonizers that they are superior, and that the rest is inferior not only in aesthetics but in every field constructed for the benefit of the colonial and imperial project.[44]
In exploring this thesis, Said’s methodology is threefold. First, he employs what he calls “contrapuntal reading.”[45] This type of analytical reading encourages to identify and evaluate various interdependent forces that act in a phenomenon. By this way of analysis, one gets a sense on the microscopic view of forces at play while understanding the macroscopic consequences of how all these forces interact. Said receives inspiration from the counterpoint of Western Classical music, where “various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work.”[46] Second, Said analyzes a slew of aesthetic and artistic works from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida to illustrate how culture and imperialism interact and influence each other. As Said believes, “authors are…very much in the history of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure.”[47] Third, Said traces the historical accounts of the colonial and imperial project of Europe, particularly Britain and France, to concretize and ground his work in historical actuality. The combination of these three methods results in an elegant analysis laid out using beautiful and tight prose whose detail and precision is unique and unmatched. Through these methodologies, Said advances his thesis by explicating his ideas on four crucial themes: culture, imperialism, resistance, and exile.
For Said, he defines culture in two ways. First, culture is “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure.”[48] Said places an important role to the aesthetic dimension of culture as a material expression of subjectivity. It is also important to note that his understanding of culture has pleasure as a principal aim. Aside from being a system to interpret and make sense of the world, culture can be a means to find solace and enjoyment. said One of the long-standing cultural warzones over the past centuries is that of the imperial project of Europe and other white colonial powers, that could arguable still exist until now.
Said broadly defines imperialism as the “practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating, metropolitan center ruling a distant territory.”[49] At its root, imperialism is the conquest and plunder of resources from colonized nations by the white colonizers. Said also observes that the imperial project is an expansion of nationality, where various colonial powers compete in grabbing land and power.[50] Because of this, the notion of “nationality” is always continually being made to overdetermine other competing powers.
While imperialism’s purpose is economic, an imperialist cannot simply steal resources without interfering with the political and cultural systems of this distant territory. One way that legitimizes this plunder is that imperial powers gain a monopoly of representation. In reference to Eric Wolf, Said argues that the colonized people are stripped of their historical and cultural significance even if the empire depends on their labor and efforts.[51] By doing so, the colonized is relegated to an inferior status—that below of a human—which legitimates their oppression and exploitation. Not only does the imperial project strip the colonized of their historical actualities, but these peoples become orientalized, where the West constructs a starkly absurd and different image of the colonized solely based on Eurocentric views.[52] By controlling the images and narratives of the colonized, the imperialists can shape the ideological terrain of their territories and keep hostage any counterhegemonic forces. This colonial effort is a part of creating what Said refers to as a “consolidated vision.”[53] The West continually affirms its own view of the colonial narrative that a “near unanimity of view was sustained.”[54] Said notes that this was done within various media and discourses such as journals and ethnographies. However, there is one cultural and aesthetic artefact that is vital to the imperial project. As Said argues, “the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other.”[55]
The novel, as Said notes, is “the aesthetic form and [a] major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.”[56] This aesthetic form achieves a vital space in engaging with the questions of the human condition, and in the English colonial project, the novel was integral to exploring the question relation to “the condition of England.”[57] Because of the novel can encapsulate Romanticist ideals of identity and conditions, the bourgeois—specifically les bourgeois conquérants—is always tied to this aesthetic form.[58] The bourgeois narrative of expansion, accumulation, and conquest inspires these novels, yet at the same time, the novels also inspire and shape the colonial and imperial project that the bourgeoisie spearheads. This is because the novel is not simply an artistic production of a lonely genius nor “manifestations of unconditioned creativity.”[59] The novel is a product of a lonely genius who is built upon other “lonely” geniuses and a cacophony of conditions that surround the life of the author. The novelist continues a genealogy of works and narratives while noticing the current condition that they are in. Such is the “departmental view” of Britain where a consolidated vision is achieved through continuous affirmations.[60] Therefore, to resist against this cultural imperial project, colonized peoples must reclaim and reshape their own narratives and develop their emergent cultural forms to foster a counterhegemonic subjectivity.
To Said, resistance must aim to “reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land” from the colonizers in two fronts: physical (primary) and ideological.[61] First, primary resistance involves that colonized peoples must “[fight] against outside intrusion” and reclaim the physical land.[62] Second, resistance becomes ideological where newly independent peoples must reclaim a shattered identity and restore or save a sense of community against any pressures from the colonial system.[63]
As one may expect, ideological resistance gradually gains strength and momentum through various waves. First, an ideological resistance comes from within the imperium that usually springs from intellectuals among imperialists. While they depict untypical affection for the territories, they do not stretch to fight for a territory’s independence yet only appears to support a domestic resolution and reform which can be seen in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.[64] Second, post-imperial writers enact their agency to create visions of a postcolonial world while, at the same time, “[bearing] their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices…in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory reclaimed as part of a general movement of resistance, from the colonist.”[65] An example of such effort is Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North where he reclaims the spatial narratives from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where “Conrad’s river [becomes] the Nile,…and Conrad’s first-person British narrative style and European protagonists are in a sense reversed.”[66] Third, the colonized intervenes and reinscribes European narratives to reveal the latent colonialisms of these works. For example, Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête reinscribes William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to affectionately contend “for the right to represent the Caribbean.” Césaire highlights the character of Caliban to “[signal] a profoundly important ideological debate at the heart of the cultural effort to decolonize, an effort at the restoration of community and repossession of culture that goes on long after the political establishment of independent nation-states.”[67]
While one can argue that cultural resistance is an endless process of contending with dominant powers, certain individuals get thrusted into multiple transnational settings which impels them to question their notion of culture and subjectivity. Originally belonging in their nation of birth, they are clothed and raised in their parents’ homeland, and along the way, forces impel them to move away from their country, entering a journey that forces them to question their sense of identity and belongingness. They become exiles. To Said, they are not sad or deprived people, yet they are faced with situations when places they can call home can no longer simply be their homes. These homes might have been destroyed, like Said’s experience when certain parts of his Arab attachments might have been physically obliterated or have simply ceased to exist.[68] However, these same circumstances allowed him as an exile to stand at both sides of the imperial issue at question. This position enabled Said to understand both sides far easily, and it made it “possible for [him] to feel as if [he] belonged to more than one history and more than one group.”[69] The process of being an exile is by no means an easy one. One begins by finding love in their homeland, and then they progress to finding this same love in other places. However, to be an exile is to always detach oneself from this sweet feeling for everywhere. This does not mean that an exile must not have love at all. As Said argues, “exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss.”[70] He continues to write that “no one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind.”[71]
Said’s elegant analysis of culture’s relationship with imperialism elevates the role of the aesthetic in the development of societies. To some, this aesthetics might only seem to be ornaments, yet through a slew of aesthetic works, Said proves that otherwise. Imperialism as a project cannot be envisioned without its cultural and aesthetic dimensions and Said demonstrates all that with elegance and superb detail in Culture and Imperialism.
2.4 Comparative Analysis
Culture is at the root of what it means to be human and what it takes to live in a society. Considering that, it is expected that varying ideas on culture exist as we witness Geertz, Hall, and Said. There is no doubt that they have similarities in their analysis of culture; however, nuances must be discerned to prevent misinterpretation. This entails looking at them through the lens of practice and abstraction. In doing so, I first compare the methods of each thinker to highlight important points on how methods may lead to different insights. Afterwards, I examine how these three thinkers differ or resemble in their analysis of three concepts: culture, hegemony, and resistance.
In terms of methodology, all three thinkers refer to theoretical traditions and abstractions, yet they may differ in how they concretize these abstract analyses. For Geertz, he borrows from a long tradition of sociological and anthropological thought as we see earlier. His use of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud proves indispensable and integral to his arguments on culture both as a religious and ideological systems of signs. In the same manner, Hall traces a genealogical line in the formation of cultural studies which necessitates that he pools works from Marx, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Gramsci, among others as seen earlier. Said is not different, as he borrows ideas from multiple thinkers such as Gramsci, Fanon, Césaire, among others. When concretizing his ideas, Said utilizes aesthetic forms such as novels and operas in tandem with historical accounts to advance his thesis and theoretical claims on the relationships of culture and imperialism. Geertz utilizes extensively his own ethnographies and experiences in Indonesia to push his claims and explicate the theories that he uses about culture as an interpretable system of signs. On the other hand, Hall focuses on tracing the theoretical history of Cultural Studies, and while he brings up historical accounts, cultural examples (some from his own life), and other biographical accounts of theorists including himself, these are quite limited in comparison to Said and Geertz. Knowing these differences in method allows readers to realize that Geertz’s and Said’s corresponding works are focused on analyzing historical actualities. This is not to say that Hall is not concerned with concrete practices—his project in this book is to trace the significance and history of a field, and therefore focuses on these theories, mostly using concrete conjectures to help explain abstractions. Therefore, when talking about culture, Geertz and Said make claims based on observations in historical or aesthetic actualities while Hall mostly borrows from a long tradition of theory to do so.
Culture is such a contested term even among our three thinkers, despite this they all agree on culture as being a semiotic system of meaning and interpretations. Geertz is the most obvious among them who views culture as a system of signs. His book is dedicated to understanding how culture can be interpreted through signs and symbols in the religious and ideological dimensions. While his analyses are riddled with ethnographic descriptions, Geertz never fails to explicate how various traditions, meanings, and symbols affect mindsets and clashes in various cultural struggles. A notable example of this is Geertz’s account of a Javanese boy’s burial, where opposing cultural forces—Islamic, Christian, and agnostic views—clash as to how to conduct the boy’s burial. Questions of rituals, tokens, and materials were debated among these views which hints at the struggle between cultures in determining which articulations stands strongest.[72]
Culture in Hall’s view is much broader yet more humanistic as he defines culture as “experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.”[73] While Geertz places emphasis on symbols and signs as Hall does as well, Hall focuses on how labor relations and struggles help shape the experiences that culture so relies on. Because of this, he depends on Marxist thought, notably the base-superstructure model as discussed earlier, in addition to other thought relating to labor relations and state analyses which includes Athusserian notions of ideology and Gramscian conceptions of hegemony and conjunctural analysis. Culture is not simply a structure, though, to Hall. It is a continued effort by individuals to engage in an unending process of socializing with other individuals.[74] In other words, culture is an endless formation of intersubjectivities. Hall is stern in emphasizing that culture is not static, but that it is in constant movement and flux, operating with other cultures both mutually and antagonistically to either articulate their interests or to disarticulate opposing thought. While Hall starts in thinking about culture as constant movement and struggle, Said concretizes and puts into historical context this constant movement.
To Said, culture is a system of representations and communication primarily in aesthetic form whose principal aim is pleasure.[75] Aside from this, he also defines culture as source of identity where elements from various cultures always contend with each other leaving only the strongest units of those clashing cultures. Unlike Geertz who places emphasis on religion and ideology, Said places utmost importance on the aesthetic dimension. Said extends this definition to the imperial project, noting that imperialism deeply meddled with the systems of representation in their territories holding the advantage over the colonized. However, Said also notes that this clash also happens between imperial powers, notably France and Britain. He observes that the notion of culture and identity between these powers are measured through how strong their national expansion is. As discussed earlier, this unending process of expanding nationality serves a constant cultural struggle to obtain land and power. Britain was far more consolidated in their imperial vision as they have a stronger sense of iterative and continual affirmations of their colonial narratives as constituted in the departmental view.[76] Because of this they have a tighter grip and more integral kind of a hegemony at the peak of their imperial conquest.
Talking about hegemony is critical in the concept of culture among these three thinkers. While Geertz does not go in-depth with the concept of hegemony, his formulations of ideology closely relate to Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony. For Geertz, ideology is a collection of political proposals whose function is to “make autonomous politics possible by providing authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means it can be sensibly grasped.”[77] Geertz notes that ideology provides authoritative concepts which connotes that a successful ideology must seek convincing and suasive authority that is based on respect and consent. However, Geertz does not explicate how such an ideology can be achieved nor how a particular culture can achieve it. In this sense, Hall provides a clear theoretical path as to how hegemonies are procured. By way of Gramsci, Hall views hegemony as “leadership which is in control, and that is what hegemony means: mastery.”[78] This requires that a historical bloc—not simply an individual—must be cognizant and cunning in keeping together the plurality of cultural currents in each social setting. When other cultures and forces recognize this historical bloc as authoritative and deserving of respect, then consent is in order—thus forming an integral hegemony. While Hall offers a clear insight into the process of how hegemonies form, it is Said that concretizes this process during the imperial period.
Said argues that the imperialists managed to acquire hegemony by controlling the narrative and geographical space of their territories. By orientalizing the colonized, these subjugated peoples were made to believe that they are inferior and that the white colonizer must be feared and respected.[79] While this seems coercive, the colonized have internalized this narrative, thus making conquest and plunder much easier to the colonizers. This same distorted image of the Orient is proliferated across European intelligentsia that a consolidated vision was built for both colonized and colonizers thus sustaining a “near unanimity of [Eurocentric] view.”[80] Therefore, to dismantle such a hegemony requires a strong resistance.
In any situation where there are dominating forces, there are always an opposing cultural force working against it however small or big they may be. Geertz explores how struggles between cultures operate at the level of the signs as we explored earlier with the example of the Javanese boy’s burial. He also gives an example of how Bali has their own set of beliefs and religion that counterposes the dominant Islamic view. Because of this, the Bali religion is forced to formalize and internally rationalize their religious norms to contend with the prevailing Islamic norms.[81] This resistance is less to topple the dominant forces but to allow for one’s survival. This is like Hall’s strategies of resistance. Since he views resistance as a continual interplay with domination, opposing forces must always learn to create interventive spaces to foster a counteracting subjectivity. [82] Without this subjectivity, a subjugated culture cannot survive let alone negotiate terms with the cultural hegemony. In other words, without a cohesive ideological thought, any material body ceases to be a subject or an apparatus. As Hall writes, echoing Althusser, “all ideology functions through the category of the subject, and it is only in and for ideology that subjects exist.”[83] Therefore, Hall contends that emerging cultural forms are necessary to foster these subjectivities. These forms usually take an aesthetic form such as reggae, church responses, or work hymns as discussed earlier. Hall does touch on the aesthetic aspect of a cultural resistance but Said places the aesthetic at the center of his discourse on resistance.
Because Said views culture strongly related to the aesthetic, both domination and resistance must involve the aesthetic for both to be effective and robust. We discussed earlier how controlling and manipulating representations are integral to the imperial and colonial project. In the same manner, having mastery over representations of one’s own culture is necessary to reclaim the narratives and the land of colonized peoples. Resistance can happen when the aesthetic can express the opposition’s ideology. Until then, colonized peoples must work to build national consciousness and ways to articulate such an ideology and figure out how to disarticulate the prevailing and oppressing colonial consolidated vision. In the postcolonial context, Said notices that the resistance still is ideological, in a sense that even if the colonizers may be driven away from the physical land, the colonized has to reconstitute their shattered identities and protect it from the influence of the colonial system. Said emphasizes that even though the white oppressors have been driven out, oppressors of my culture have merely replaced the white colonizers. Thus, resistance is continual and almost never ending as the battle to contest cultural symbols and systems is a long and heavily fought series of wars.
Culture is both a process and a system. This is what we can gather from the comparisons between these three monumental thinkers. Geertz lays down the critical foundations for culture to be understood as a system of signs. Hall traces how culture can be related to a structure of labor while at the same time emphasizing that culture is a lived experience where a plurality of cultural currents always contend with each other. Said sees culture as a system of representation, mostly aesthetic, yet it is also a process of forming an identity and subjectivity—one that is necessary to both form and sustain an integral hegemony and to disturb and counteract a subjugating and oppressive colonial system. While this comparative analysis merely shows the tip of the iceberg, it offers us multiple pathways in understanding that culture is ever pervasive. Among these multiple paths, culture takes an important transformation (or possibly deformation) in a globalized and capital society. We saw earlier how the aesthetic is necessary is materializing and expressing the ideology of culture. In the following section, I explicate my own views as to how the aesthetic aspect of culture may slowly succumb to a neutralizing and homogenizing force which a capital culture industry has engendered. I also show how in a globalized setting, Said’s notion of an exile is becoming more necessary to overcome this potential danger to aesthetics and culture.
3 Aesthetics and the Global Culture Industry
While I emphasized earlier that aesthetics holds an important position in expressing and materializing an ideology of a culture, it is still publicly thought as an ornament to the entire cultural assemblage. A quick survey of how “aesthetic” is used in quotidian culture shows us that this word often connotates style, fashion, and beauty. While that is true, Said clarifies that the aesthetic dimension of culture “[derives] from historical experience” and expresses the general thought and feeling of that time.[84] How else can we understand a society’s culture other than looking at their performative rituals, their artforms, writings, and other forms of aesthetic expression? Any secondary sources or intellectual works such as the earlier three books still rely on primary sources—rituals, novels, burials, music, operas, performative assemblies—which usually lies in the aesthetic dimension of culture. Therefore, aesthetics is not simply an adornment to culture, it is culture’s realization. If culture is a representational system, aesthetics is its materialization. One cannot exist without the other.
Because aesthetics expresses culture, it also appeals deeply to human sensibilities and emotion. If we understand that culture helps humans make sense of the world and offers meaning and purpose to life, it only follows that the aesthetics of a particular culture a person ascribes to must move and rock them to their core. As Said argues, a principal aim of culture and its aesthetics is to provide pleasure to its members.[85] This pleasure can be widely interpreted as emotional fulfillment and the satisfaction of the soul. While those words may seem ethereal, any person who has listened to their favorite music or watched their beloved movie and TV series would exclaim how they enjoyed these artforms, because they are full of relatable content of meaning. They are relatable, because these aesthetic artforms materializes their cultural values and experiences.
While I seem to argue that aesthetics simply reflects a person’s experience, it is far from that. These artforms are not reflections of a person’s experience, they are a part of the person’s experience. The acts of creating and consuming the aesthetic already constitute how a culture operates. When one records pop music in a studio and uses a variety of techniques of the time, they are in fact enacting the ideological practices of the time. Moreover, a common person today may relate far more to newer artists such as Rihanna as opposed to Renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay. This is not to say that no one likes Dufay more than Rihanna. As Hall argues, there exists a plurality of cultural currents, and the current of Dufay fans may not be as dominant as Rihanna fans. The larger question at hand: why do newer popular forms of aesthetics prevail today? In other words, how does the current cultural ideology operate and in what framework?
Theodor Adorno points to the idea of a culture industry where the aesthetics’ purpose in this global capitalist system is to entertain and ease the workers’ suffering to squeeze as much labor from them. Capitalist aesthetic seldom evokes nor provokes. As he says, “the culture industry remains the entertainment business” and “[its] tendencies are reinforced by the survival of the market in the industry.”[86] The culture industry creates art that limits human imagination. These artforms are grounded on simple perceptions of daily life that they are easy to digest.[87] They are full of naiveties. However, Adorno does not deny that art as amusement never existed before. He argues that all the naiveties of this type of art are not questioned, and they now dominate today’s art scene.[88] The reason for this is that art as entertainment serves to prolong work, and it is the mechanism that people use to escape the “mechanized labor process” so they can cope with it more.[89] To echo Marx, religion might be the opium of the people, but a new more effective opiate comes into play—commodified culture and aesthetics.
To reproduce the capital ideology, culture must follow the logic of capitalism which grounds itself in accumulating capital and gorging on as much surplus value as possible. For this to be possible, an unquantifiable feeling and pleasure derived from culture must be “drowned…in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”[90] Culture becomes commodified and assigned a particular numerical exchange value. Like any commodity in a capitalist society, individuals must be led to purchase and obsessively consume to provide the capitalist with profit. This process has two important implications. First, an endless chain of consumption relies on an endless chain of production. For production to be extremely efficient and fast, the proletariat is exploited and squeezed of their labor value with inhumane hours, yet they are not compensated with the actual value of their labor. The capitalist pockets this surplus instead when consumers pay for the commodity. However, the proletariat are most times the consumers as well. This gets at the second point: the products must serve to ease the suffering from work and prolong the efficacy of proletarian labor. If this is not the case, then there serves no compulsion for workers to buy these commodities, and then the endless chain of consumption ceases. People often shop to satisfy their pleasures, but these pleasures do not nourish the soul, but it eases suffering to build resistance from revolting towards exploitation. Aesthetics falls into the same pitfall. Human sensibilities turn dull, and aesthetics become extremely naïve and unquestioned. Because of this, Adorno argues that the culture industry neutralizes culture, but I think that it perfectly embodies a specific culture—the global capitalist culture.
The tendency of capitalism is to continually expand to satisfy its endless pursuit of accumulation. To do this, as Said observes, the capitalist expands into other lands to annex them and siphon their resources as a part of the imperial project.[91] In doing so, the imperialists strip the colonized peoples of their history and consequently their culture. In a slow yet sure process of ingraining a colonial mentality where whiteness is superior to anything else, the colonized peoples seek to assimilate to this dominant culture; therefore, internalizing this hate of one own’s culture. The colonized tries to disavow themselves of their native culture and force to embrace a white capitalist culture—a culture based on a single standard that the Eurocentric (Orientalist) view determines, a culture rooted in the ruthless endless cycle of consumption and production.
One must observe that this culture seeks a global integral hegemony—a mastery and control over all other cultures—in other words, to espouse a single capitalist culture, one that homogenizes culture. For example, McDonalds sought to expand in every corner of the globe, and it achieved to spread the gospel of the Big Mac. This McDonaldization hints at the capitalist tendency to go overseas and gorge on as much surplus wherever available. One may argue that McDonalds does not homogenize, but in fact, highlight cultural diversity when they tailor their menu to the country that they are operating, in a way where Malaysia and Philippines have rice in service. This scenario, in fact, serves as an argument for the culture industry. The sacred cuisine and staples of Southeast Asia is commodified and used to further the endless cycle of consumption. McDonalds serve rice not to celebrate culture but to expand the capital culture of accumulation. White capitalist culture does not espouse other cultures—it nullifies diversity and other subjectivities. The desire of many colonized peoples to whiten their skin and straighten their hair is born out of the belief in white superiority. Capitalists exploit such a mentality by selling whitening products and hair straighteners. The white culture of consumption and production is constantly expanding. The practice of labor has become unified across the globe. Most importantly and dangerously, the colonized peoples are turning against their own subjectivities and culture.
Because of this homogenization, colonized peoples often find themselves in a conflicting situation of wanting to assimilate to whiteness yet cannot be fully white. They have turned their backs on their native culture only to be rejected by white culture. This creates a scenario where the colonized begins question the white capitalist culture and return to their native roots. As Fanon argues, the colonized intellectual begins to salvage and reconstitute their shattered identities.[92] Multiple subjectivities—white and non-white—begin to clash within the colonized intelligentsia. To reclaim their narratives, the colonized begins to develop emergent cultural forms to foster a subjectivity that counters the white capitalist culture.
Cultures find ways to survive the currents of the culture industry by way of hybridizing and critically adapting to the dominant culture. As discussed earlier, negotiation requires a high degree of organization, a compelling mastery of the battlefield’s terrain, and a flexible attitude to adjust to the currents of the hegemony. As Derek Walcott proposes, “culture must move faster,” and colonized peoples must look beyond the chaos and “look for patterns.”[93] They find that these patterns contain “contradicting strains” which were meant for survival.[94] However, as cultures is an unending process of forming subjectivities, hybridity must not simply be an act of picking and choosing as one pleases. It must be an act that finds authenticity in its hybridity.
To be authentic, I propose that a colonized culture repeatedly materializes what it borrows from other cultures—in other words, it must continually reproduce aesthetics that realizes hybridity. If a culture simply borrows certain practices and fails to iteratively perform them, this cannot be called a hybrid culture. These practices are grafted and temporary. The reason why authenticity requires an iterative performance is to root these borrowed and hybridized practices into the lived experiences of the individuals in that society. Performances and aesthetics can only be a part of a culture if they are part of daily cultural and critically examined life. As Hall emphasizes, culture is “experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.”[95] In search of this type of life that covers multiple lived experiences, we can perhaps look at the life of an exile—a crossroads of multiple subjectivities that can resist the white capitalist culture.
As discussed earlier through Said, “exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss.”[96] To be an exile is to reach a high level of consciousness of one’s native culture and of “other” cultures. However, the exile does not practice attachment to any of them, but that they detach themselves from all, being able to criticize toxic units in any culture and have affection for elements of all cultures that may uplift their personality. Because of this position, an exile “[feels] as if [they belong] to more than one history and more than one group.”[97] Therefore, they can stand equally in those cultures, allowing them to understand each culture’s positions. Consciousness is a critical step in disengaging the ideological force of the white capital culture. To be an exile is to be conscious of these cultural currents and contend with the dominant ideology as a way of helping in the struggle of dismantling and exposing how the dominant culture neutralizes and homogenizes other cultures.
4 Conclusion
Our discussions around culture barely touches the surface of the complexities and debate surrounding this highly contested concept. However, our quick survey of Geertz, Hall, and Said offers us rich insights to the development, significance, and dynamics of culture in relation to society. As a system of signs and representations, human civilizations necessitate that culture enables humans to make sense of the world—to make their surroundings interpretable: to explain the strange and to find affection in the familiar.
The unending process of building subjects and subjectivities is at the core of culture, and perhaps can be the impelling reason why humans continue to live, survive, and struggle amidst the hardships of daily life. Without culture to foster subjectivities, human life would have been unvarying and perhaps homogenous. While these same subjectivities are what drives conflict among different peoples, they give humans reasons to progress and persevere, to seek and live out experience, and to form meaningful relationships with other people.
Because the white capital culture poses a danger to all other cultures, it is imperative that all peoples must seek to critically examine their native culture and learn those of others—eventually appreciating the uplifting elements of both and rejecting what diminishes the human personality. While thinkers try to achieve this consciousness by observing how cultures may progress, I think that the best way to learn about culture is to experience one’s own life and critically examine it. Said is a testament to how examining one’s own life can bring a such an important contribution in understanding culture and in dismantling imperialism and the oppression of other peoples.
As Socrates once said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”[98] A human life is a product of various forces, both beautiful and ugly, and to appreciate and to be conscious of life’s richness—its meaning and purpose—is perhaps the singular struggle, among all struggles, that each of us face.
Endnotes
[1] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1993), xiii.
[2] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2017), 5.
[3] Ibid., 55.
[4] See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[5] See René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. John Veitch (New York, NY: Cosimo Classics, 2008).
[6] Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 43.
[7] Ibid., 74.
[8] Ibid., 75.
[9] Ibid., 97.
[10] Søren Kierkegaard, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,” in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1980), 187–246, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hpd3.18, 207
[11] Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 211.
[12] Ibid., 219.
[13] Ibid., 221.
[14] Ibid., 237.
[15] Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 33.
[16] Ibid., 33.
[17] Ibid., 64.
[18] Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1963), 211.
[19] Ibid., 212.
[20] Ibid., 76.
[21] Ibid., 90.
[22] Ibid., 93.
[23] Ibid., 91.
[24] Ibid., 93.
[25] Ibid., 136.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid., 134.
[30] Ibid., 137.
[31] Ibid., 152.
[32] Ibid., 172.
[33] Ibid., 162.
[34] Ibid., 165.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., 187.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid., 188.
[39] Ibid., 189.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid., 190.
[42] Ibid., 197.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.
[45] Ibid., 66.
[46] Ibid., 51.
[47] Ibid., xxii.
[48] Ibid., xii.
[49] Ibid., 9.
[50] Ibid., 83.
[51] Ibid., 64.
[52] Ibid., 44.
[53] Ibid., 75,
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid., 70-71.
[56] Ibid., 72.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid., 70.
[59] Ibid., 73.
[60] Ibid., 75.
[61] Ibid., 226.
[62] Ibid., 209.
[63] Ibid.
[64] Ibid., 200.
[65] Ibid., 212.
[66] Ibid., 211.
[67] Ibid., 213.
[68] Ibid., xxvii.
[69] Ibid.
[70] Ibid., 336.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 167.
[73] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, 33.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii.
[76] Ibid., 75.
[77] Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 237.
[78] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, 172.
[79] Said, Culture and Imperialism, 44.
[80] Ibid., 75.
[81] Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 200.
[82] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, 189.
[83] Ibid., 134.
[84] Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxii.
[85] Ibid.
[86] Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, 2 edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001), 108.
[87] Ibid., 100.
[88] Ibid., 107.
[89] Ibid., 109.
[90] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1968), 38.
[91] Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii.
[92] See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, Reprint edition (New York: Grove Press, 2005).
[93] Derek Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16, no. 1 (February 1974): 3–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/174997, 55.
[94] Ibid., 56.
[95] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, 33.
[96] Said, Culture and Imperialism, 336
[97] Ibid., xxvii.
[98] Plato, Apology 38a
