Coercion has never been a sufficient strategy for empires since their inception. To legitimise their powers, they had to leverage strategies such as religion. “Reddite quae sunt Caesaris Caesari et quae sunt Dei Deo”( Matt. 22.21), ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, give to God what is God’s ‘. Through this sentence we can dwell in front of the evidence: Religion has been used since the beginning, as a strategy to legitimise the power of empires and thus to obtain the consensus both from the colonisers and from the colonised through identification. The latter is a form of imagination. In the central part of this essay, I will explain what is imagination and it’s relation to the phenomenon of identification. Empires need to work on people’s imagination whether internal or external to the Empire.
One of the first devices used at the time of colonialism was the ‘word’ of the missionaries, ‘the word of God’. In the period of time between the modern and the contemporary world, the knowledge of the people had to be compared with several devices. Through this essay I will analyse three classic devices comparing them, presenting various views about their functions, and exposing my personal criticism where is necessary. This will be: books, cinema, and satellite television. They might not be the strongest in our modern times, but they have made the history behind us, they have created the representation of our world.
However, the first topic that in my opinion must be analysed is the work of the missionaries and how they contributed to the creation of Empires using the work of imagination. Through the article of Roberts, “Is Conversion a Colonisation of Consciousness?” (2012), the theory exposed provides a vision of conversion as an aggressive act, since it invades the deepest part of an individual, in other words, his consciousness. According to this article, the conversion of consciousness is tied to one type of power in particular: that which produces universal knowledge.
According to Roberts (2012), Christian missionaries played a big part in European colonialism: they helped to establish colonisation and it’s colonial regimes. Many important writers agreed that evangelisation is kind of a “colonisation of consciousness”. However, also the comparison between conversion and “spiritual conquest” is very common, since it seems to be the ‘capture’ of souls. At this point in the article “Is Conversion a Colonisation of Consciousness”, Roberts makes an important observation: conversion and colonisation are not the same thing. They establish themselves with different processes and in different times. Nevertheless, according to the author, conversion is a type of colonisation without political rule. The metaphor between ‘conversion’ and ‘conquest’ derives from the concept of power, in particular of power relations.
Conversion is played basically between two subjects: the one who is ‘civilised’, the powerful one, and the ‘other’ who as to be ‘educated’. In fact, conversion can seem to be a movement of interests. Conversion has a violent nature because there are no rational reasons to adopt another non- verifiable belief instead of the one that we already have, which is in the same way non-verifiable.
Two keywords, when we talk about Christianity and other religions, are: knowledge and truth. Truth is an important element in Christianity, and it takes an important place in the conversion process, helping power to persuade people. As Bhabha said in his book “The Location of Culture” (1994), “In order to understand the productivity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime of truth” (pp.96). The process of legitimisation made by a colonial power, demands an articulation of difference (racial and sexual). Thus, this is the rule of imagination.
In particular, he focused on the Tshidi, which was a population of the Tswana. For example, it was a common thought through missionaries (like Broadbent, Livingston, Campbell and Moffat) that the rite of rainmaking was a huge impediment to the dissemination of the gospel. If the rite worked, and so the rain came, the chiefs were assumed responsible. At this point is it clear to see how Christianity and its missions opposed to the ruler’s control over people. Missionaries changed not only the social life of these people, but also the entire political process changing the imagination of people. Missions were very useful to the colonisation because of the inculcation of European values.
At this point is essential to have a look at the possible effect that this “politics of religion” had on the colonies and on the mind of colonised people. An example of changing tradition is what happened in New Guinea. As Roobins, the author of “Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society” (2004) affirmed, the Urapimi culture is a perfect mix of two different cultures: the traditional one, and the Christian one. This hybrid is visible if we take magic as an example. Robbins explains that magical practices were very common through the people of Urapimi. However, with the conversion to Christianity people started to condemn it (only few people continued to practice it, but in secret). They have taken on Christian culture as a whole, rather than assimilating bits and pieces from their old culture to create a hybrid. Robbins made an important observation: why did Christianity often have such a deep impact? Why people did not refuse it?
Christianity did not just presume to change a person and his/her belief, but it expected to change an entire culture, as we have already said, in it’s deepest nature. Christianity was so important for colonisation, mostly due to its capacity to change the morality of an entire culture by influencing their imagination and their identity. We can make an equivalence of image and identity. The articulation of difference is a negotiation that authorises hybrids, that are created in moments of historical transformation. Also Bhabha, in the first chapter of ‘The Location of Culture’ (1994) invites the reader to think about the American forces during the Gulf War.
However, religion is not the only authority used by Empires to act upon the strategy of the imagination. And here we are, at the heart of this essay. Why Empires require the work of the imagination. I will reach the core of the issue by the light of one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, Homi K. Bhabha. In his book “The location of Culture” (1994) he describes the concept of the “image” as a representation which is always spatially split.
He writes that this is given from its capacity to make “present something that is absent” (pp.73). The image is an addition to authority and identity. We can compare it to a metonym, because of its illusionary nature. According to the author, the place of the Other must not be imaged as something merely opposed to the Self. The issue is more complex than this. The Other must be seen as a negation of a cultural or psychic identity through which is generated a differential system that allows a culture to be as a historic and symbolic reality. It is consequentially, in my opinion, that Empires need imagination. And that it is because there is the necessity to legitimise power, authority, sovereignty. Coercion is not enough, or anyway it needs a mask and there is no better cover than that of imagination and of representation, and so also of identification.
We can conclude this paragraph affirming that there is a binary identification in the colonising world: that of the coloniser, and that of the colonised.The last one is the identity of a marginalised, whoever has to live under the sign of an identity and a fantasy that denies their difference. The first, one of the coloniser is a paranoid identification: between fantasies of megalomania and persecution.
According to Diks, as he writes in ‘Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India’ (2001), imagination finds it’s place in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. In other words, that which creates the dependence is a false promise of a step into the modern world without destroying the traditions. So an illusive expectation. A false promise that can change the entire way of being of a culture. To demonstrate Diks shows how the “traditional Indian system” (the system of caste, which could be seem to be the Indian consciousness of them-selves) is the product of the junction between India and Western colonial rule, which born under the British domination (Dicks, 2001).
However, in the contemporary era, stronger devices are born. One of them is the Cinema, born in 1895. I’m going to analyse how this ‘new’ device was used by Empires to work through the imagination. In order to do that, I will use an important reference: “Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media” (1994), written by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. The point of the hypothesis of the two authors is that Cinema encourages the elite, working on their imagination and on their mind, to identify themselves in films (in the white characters of the film) and so in the values of the Empire, against the colonised people.
Media like Cinema, has always played an important role. As the authors explain in the third chapter, the first goal of the film- production in the end of 1800 was to laud the colonial enterprise and, I would like to add, to legitimise it through all the social classes. Rescue in the colonial discorse is another interesting topic on which the two authors focus. In fact it is another big strategy used by Empire to work on the imagination of people to legitimise colonialism. As the two writers say, and I agree with them, rescue is not just about “rescuing natives from non-civilisation”, but also rescue the land, a “virgin land” as they call it. Anyway, we have to turn to the point of the issue: Cinema encouraged europeans to identify themselves in a single European nation, but with the whole imperial project. So an english man could identify with a french one, and so on.
At this point Shohat and Stam analyse the differences between the cinema and romance literature (and novels in general). They claim that the imaginary power of the cinema is stronger than that of the literature. However, in my opinion, this is only true if we make a synchronic analysis, in a precise historical moment. And this is definitely not our case, since I am presenting what Ferdinand De Saussure would call a “diachic” view. Nowadays I think that is exactly the opposite. Films, now, are a source of manic and cheesy enjoyment of information and entertainment.
Thus Empires changed strategy (again). Of course film production stay a way in which it is possible to influence the imagination of people, but what I am saying is that it is no longer a device through which Empires can internalise values as other devices are able to do.
In fact, reading is a process that requires the attention of the reader and it is a source of reasoning and assimilation, or in other words, that which television is no longer able to do. Thus the books are more powerful, because they are able to activate a process of internalising concepts.
An example is the book of “Memory of a Geisha”, written by Arthur Golden. This romance was a mass media blitz, published on the New York Time, on October 1997. It captured the American popular imagination. The setting, as Anne Allison wrote in “American Geishas and Oriental/ist Fantasies”, was not important. Someone called it “Japan”, others “the Orient”, anyway the relevant aspect is that it was set in a “faraway place” and this it makes it more exciting. The active ingredient is the following: the cultural differences that luxuriated in exotic otherness. The American readers were fascinated by the exotic beauty and at the same time they felt kind of fear to read about a far world completely different from the one which belongs to them. Anne Allison focuses on how European people looked at the Oriental in the years between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, years where Europe was colonising the Orient. Orientalism depends on the strategy of power- relation of superiority.
In the late 1990s Japan played a powerful role in the American popular imagination. Imagination has always been a strategy to intrude places and communities. The goal of the author of ‘Memoirs’ was to write something familiar and exotic for the American readers, in other words something that had the capacity to awaken fantasies. According to Allison this exotic fantasy had so much success because it reminded the readers of times of American global superiority. We are talking about a real sense of nostalgia. “Fans repeatedly described this world as ‘exotic’, ‘foreign’, ‘forbidden’, and ‘vanishing’” (Anne Allison, 2013, pp.302). One important aspect of the book is that it focuses merely on descriptions, to keep the reader’s imagination and fantasy alive.
However, what stems from this book is not only the concept of passion, but also that of power. This book has the power not only to move its readers mind, but also their body, in a sexual way. The eroticism derives most from the distance from this world, because it is something new, it is a desire which has sprung from something different and unknown.
So Anne Allison presents different interviews that she had with different readers. Some of them criticised the book and the “oriental” values of marriage. What we can understand from the work of Allison is not only the “Orientalism”, but also that the book, from the moment that it has to be understood, needs the concentration of the reader, thus a process of internalisation of values takes place, which has to pass through previous notions and opinions.
Anyway, it is is obvious that the written novel, as a medium, is older than the new technological devices of our days, as in social networks or any kind of new media, which are able to create new forms of subjectification as well as establishing links and communities across distances. However, as Anne Allison says in her essay, “if e-mail messages and cell phones foster the linkage of conversation across distance, a novel like Memoirs links readers to the intricacies of a distant world made imaginable through storytelling” (2013, pp.300).
To conclude this paragraph we can summarise that the power of imagination which stems from novels is more powerful than that of films, because it requires an active participation of the reader. Cinema in modern times is characterised by a form of maniacal fruition by a spectator now superficial and difficult to surprise. In any case, Cinema is more accessible because it requires less mental effort.
There is another important device through which Empire works on the imagination and on the universal ‘true’ knowledge: the satellite tv. This can penetrate the minds of people with the maximum of power, always passing for truthful and does so with extreme efficiency having wide access. To analyse this last aspect I will present the Al- Jazeera Channel, to comprehend how this last device can work on the imagination of people.
What is Al-Jazeera Channel? Al-Jazeera Channel is a pan- Arab 24-hour satellite news and discussion channel beamed out of the tiny Gulf peninsula of Qatar. Through the book “The Al- Jazeera phenomenon: critical perspectives on new Arab media”, written by Mohamed Zayani in 2005, we are going to analyse this Arab 24-hour satellite news and the changes that it made. In chapter three, the author affirmed that “Al Jazeera Satellite Channel has played a central role in liberalising the Arab media discourse” (pp.66), putting an end to the media control of the Arab regime, and that the death of this type of control derives from the unsuccessful preservation of sovereignty acquired after decades of colonial domination. However, there are critics around this channel. For some, Al Jazeera Channel was created by the American administration to repress the hostility of people in the Middle East in opposition to the American hegemony and, consequentially, to legitimise “the setting of American troops in the Gulf” (pp. 68). It follows that for them Al- Jazeera is merely an American media escape. However, Mohamed El Oifi critics this theory, he argues that Al- Jazeera Channel is the principal vector and the most efficient critic of the US policy. Anyway, I don’t feel as I can agree with him. As I have already exposed in my hypothesis, Empires’ strategies are ambiguous and treacherous.
Therefore, during Colonialism when Empires worked with the use of imagination, it was enough to send missionaries through the Third World. But then, during the start of the era of the Information things changed. Information is comparable to any product of Capitalism. And it is on Information that our Imagination works.
Thus Empires took on the industries of Information. Constructing World reality, sowing an universal knowledge. As post-structuralist theory claims, people do not have a direct access to reality. I have never been to Japan, but I can imagine it. Thus Empires require the working of imagination, which operates through a web of countless devices. As Foucault says in his essay “The Subject and Power”: “power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social”(Foucault, 1983). We are sociable animals, we need this network.
