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.

power cannot be captured by thinking exclusively in terms of force or coercion: power also seduces, solicits, induces, wins consent.

However, there are also some important similarities. For Gramsci, as for Foucault, power also involves knowledge, representation, ideas, cultural leadership and authority, as well as economic constraint and physical coercion

Power, we recognized there, always operates in conditions of unequal relations

It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism its durability and its strength

Interestingly, however, Said goes on to define ‘power’ in ways which emphasize the similarities between Foucault and Gramsci’s idea of hegemony:

Said’s discussion of Orientalism closely parallels Foucault’s power/knowledge argument: a discourse produces, through different practices of representation

Within the framework of western hegemony over the Orient, he says, there emerged a new object of knowledge - ‘a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy