We Happy Few: Imperialism and Orientalism

Imperialism is a mindset that goes beyond the acts of creating colonies of political control in other territories, though it is a precondition for this. It is an appropriative attitude towards other nations and cultures. While imperialism itself has receded, it has not disappeared, and is traceable in the rump of territories held by western powers, particularly Britain, France and the United States.

Neo-imperialism is a cultural mode that imposes cultural dominance of means of production and control. Two tropes of travel predominate our understanding of cultural exchange between Iraq and Britain which, in the context of simulacra discussed above, inflect all other travel between them. The trope of western travel to Iraq cannot escape the simulacrum of imperialist invasion in imitation of those who have travelled in that direction armed and enacting the precession of violent and dangerous simulacra; and travel from Iraq to Britain is a return or response to a colonial centre, most usually by refugees or asylum seekers whose cause for travel is the destabilising of the colonial endeavour (if one understands the colonial endeavour to be the primary cause of Ba'athism and the subsequent invasions). This deeply unequal dynamic of exchange further inflects this imperialism with the mode of Orientalism.

Orientalism, in brief, is a signifying practice identified by Edward Said as,

a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident' […] the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient […] by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (2003, pp.2-3)

The implication of this dynamic is that knowledge is produced for the producer; the object of study within Orientalism cannot escape this designation – to put it in Gayatri Spivak's terms, the subaltern cannot speak.