Governance & Domination
Definitions & Examples
Imperialism
• “Superior” country’s/force’s economic,
political, territorial and/or sociocultural
control over an “inferior” country through
subjugation/violence for resources, such as
raw materials, capital and human labor.
New-Imperialism
• Cultural imperialism
• Media imperialism
• Covert project/process for economic, political,
cultural control
Colonialism
• Dominant power conquers a “weak/inferior” region
and settles there—establish institutions such as
government, bureaucracy, militarized force, industry—
to expand territorially and conduct imperial business
for an extended period of time.
• The dominant power’s population doesn’t fully (may
partially) assimilate but affects local culture by
introducing aspects of their own culture, affecting
religious practice (conversion, syncretism), labor,
changes to economic (currency) system, legislation,
language, education, leisure, social dynamics (gender
roles).
Post-Colonialism
• State after decolonization
• Dismantling of colonialist institutions
(mimicry/alterity)
• Development
Decolonization
• The ridding of colonial power
Neo-colonialism
• Covert form of colonialism
Psychology of Domination
• “The longstanding rationale that the ‘superior’ cultures
associated with imperial powers were necessary and
beneficial to the ‘inferior’ cultures they controlled”
(Ritzer:65)
• “Without the doxa-esque sense that Middle Easterners
are not like ‘us’ and don’t share ‘our’ values, there
would have been no war. Othering was necessary to
decimate them—to kill them in order to teach them
we’re superior.” (Said: xx-xxi)
• Noam Chomsky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pis5f085P3M
Self v Other
• The definition of the Other as different than
(opposed to) the self constitutes the Self
• Enables the domination/subordination of
peoples
• Political, economic, social, psychological
implications
• Alterity: The construction of cultural Others
(Taussig)
Self v Other, West v East
• This process of collapsing the ontological and
epistemological has enabled the West to define
itself as a contrast to the Other, the East.
According to Said, writers, “poets, novelists,
philosophers, political theorists, economists, and
imperial administrators,” have willfully accepted
the terms East and West, Orient and Occident,
and thus further reify the terminologies (2). “The
Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition
of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have
given it reality and presence in and for the West”
(5).
Orientalism (Said)
• Foundational text/theory in post-colonial studies
• The Orient is not an “inert fact of nature” but “was almost a
European invention” (1)
• Meanings of Orientalism:
1.
2.
3.
4.
•
Mode of scholarly study, thought, practice
Style of thought: Ontological and epistemological
Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority
over the Orient
Something historically and materially defined
3 qualifications for the discourse of Orientalism:
1.
2.
3.
The Orient isn’t not real. It’s not just an idea.
Ideas, cultures and histories cannot be understand or studied
without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power.
Can’t assume that Orientalism is just a structure of myths
Violence (Fanon)
• Foundational theorist in post-colonial studies
• Dehumanization: destructive, detrimental to mental health
• Analyses supported by Lenin’s statement that imperialism is
a degenerate form of capitalism, which requires greater
degrees of human exploitation to ensure growth
• “Decolonization is an always violent historical process; the
replacing of a certain species of men with another species
of men.” (79).
• Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to
each other by their very nature (79).
• Solution/catharsis: Violent resistance
Structural violence
• Form of violence where some social structure or
system may harm people by preventing them from
meeting their basic needs; leading to social inequality
• Examples: elitism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism,
nationalism, racism, sexism…
• Structural violence and direct violence are highly
interdependent.
• The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber believes
bureaucracy is a form of structural violence and that
structural violence always holds the threat of direct
physical violence.
Resistance
• “Literary texts can be used as a way of
exercising cultural control over the
‘natives’…[or] can be subverted by those who
oppose the colonial power and can be used to
help bring down its regime” (Ritzer:70).
• Détournement, mimicry, hijacking, culture
jamming
Shift in Systems of Punishment
• http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.ht
ml
Governmentality
• A pervasive logic or technology of rule that
socially organizes/directs society through
myriad everyday ways of life
• State employs governmentality to reach its
own ends but governmentality reaches
beyond the state
• Dualism between state and society
(superstructure and base)
Biopower and Anatomo-Politics
• Strategies of power to govern a population
through biopolitics and anatomo-politics to
maximize human potential
• Biopolitics: Expert knowledge
• Anatomo-politics: Technologies of power that
act upon the individual (body, soul) to
discipline/manage subjects. Tools for selfgovernance
Subjectivities
• Being a subject: collapse of the ontological
(theory of being/existence) & epistemological
(theory of knowledge/ways of knowing)
Foucault’s Four General Rules
1.
2.
3.
4.
• The power exercised upon the body need not be violent or
as property, but rather can be subtle and strategic. Foucault
refers to the knowledge and the mastery of this subtle
strategy as the political technology of the body (26).
Foucault’s notion of the body politic refers to the material
elements and techniques that subjugate bodies by turning
them into objects of knowledge (28). Foucault stresses that
this power exerts pressure upon those “who do not have it;
thus the power is transmitted by them and through
them…this means that these relations go right down into
the depths of society” (27). By this definition, the
prisoners—or all those subjugated by this power—are
contributing to their own subjugation and reproducing the
hegemony of those in power.