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Colonialism : Colonialism And Colonialism

Good Essays

Jáfia Petersen
ENL 110B
Professor Evan Watkins
November 18th, 2014
Post-Colonial Colonialism
Although Edward Said is one of the intellectuals who helped start the field of post-colonialism, the topic of colonialism in Orientalism raise the following question: is there such thing as “post-colonialism”? Is colonialism not happening every day in various forms? It seems that the only difference from modern colonialism to its classic meaning is that a ruler representing the colonizer has physically left the colony but colonization, though less visible, still thrives. In our society, the effect of ideas does not try to forcibly control but instead they work by consent because consent allows knowledge to be spread out and to form biases. …show more content…

There is a difference between the power exercised by force and the power established through the ways that knowledge circulates and becomes authoritative or “hegemonic” (1871). Said focuses on this more passive mean of control established by the relationship between power and knowledge. He points out how viewpoints generate a colonized world and augment the supremacy of those who produced those viewpoints. But going back to Foucault, he argues that authors are not authorities but instead a receptacle of opinions. For Foucault, the closest an author can get to being an authority is when the author creates a field of discourse such as Saussure for instance. Said, however, disagrees with this because “Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me…” (Said, 1887). He believes that authors who have reinforced “Orientalism” are indeed figures of authority because through them biased opinions are spread as power/knowledge. The question posed on the first paragraph of this essay, Is colonialism not happening every day in various forms?, is reinforced by Said in the following passage,
One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced

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