The Spectacle of the Other

But this regime of representation is reproduced and maintained in hegemony because black men have had to resort to ‘toughness’ as a defensive response to the prior aggression and violence that characterizes the way black communities are policed

Through such collective, historical experiences black men have adopted certain patriarchal values such as physical strength, sexual prowess and being in control as a means of survival against the repressive and violent system of subordination to which they have been subjected.

Power not only constrains and prevents: it is also productive. It produces new discourses, new kinds of knowledge (i.e. Orientalism), new objects of knowledge (the Orient), it shapes new practices (colonization) and institutions (colonial government). It operates at a micro-level - Foucault’s ‘micro-physics of power’ - as well as in terms of wider strategies. And, for both theorists, power is to be found everywhere. As Foucault insists, power circulates.