Department of English Studies

Faculty of letters and Human Sciences

Abdelmalek Essaadi University

Tetouan, Morocco

Academic Year : 2021/2022 Exchange Program : Global Scholars Achieving Career Success
MA : English Literature and the History of Ideas Monday, November 15, 2021.

Elizabethans in Context
Moroccan Partner : Dr. Layachi El Course
Habbouch
S7 Reducing Racial
American Partner : Dr. Anna Focus
Inequalities
Larsson

Critical Cultural Discursive Analysis of Interracial Love and

From 08:00 to 10:00
Tools Discourses Relations of Power Fascination as Discourse

I- Concepts to Remember : Critical Tools to Use

1- Orientalism

From the latter half of the 18th century there was a massive
European academic and professional interest in the Orient. The Orient’s
languages, history, literature, religion, law, architecture were studied,
documented and commented on. In the case of England’s interest in India,
theAsiatick Society, established in 1784, and associated with figures like
William Jones, was an institutional embodiment of this interest and
expertise. ‘Orientalists’ was the name given to such scholars of the Orient.
In 1978 Edward Said published his study of Western attitudes toward the
Arab and Asian world, and titled it Orientalism. Said identified
Orientalism as more than a European academic interest in the Asian and
Arab world. Orientalism was an apparatus of representation through
which Europe saw the East, and posited this East as the radical racial and
cultural Other.
Said argued that fiction and fantasies, travelogues and scientific
reports all generated a desire for the Orient. This desire was at one level
genuinely epistemological, but it was knowledge for the political purpose
of domination over the object of inquiry.The Oriental native would be the

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object that the European would investigate and about which the European
would make authoritative pronouncements. The European would therefore
be the subject, whose very subjectivity emerged in this process of inquiry.
Thus Said made the link between textual knowledge (in the form of the
colonial archive) of the Orient produced by the European and the political
dominance of the Orient by the Europeans.
Orientalism for Said is a systematic process through which the East
is studied, researched, administered and ‘pronounced upon’. Orientalism
produced static images of the Orient, positing it as unchanging, barbaric
and occupying the lower end of the civilizational scale. By positing the
Orient as unchanging, the European representation ensured that it could be
comprehended, that any threat of change would be avoided. Further,
Orientalism’s repeated emphasis on the barbaric primitivism of the Orient
offered the European the justification for his civilizational mission and
political dominance over the helpless ‘native’ of Africa or Asia.
Administrators to the East were trained, Said argues, on Orientalist texts
so that their very perceptions of the East when they physically arrived
there were organized through the texts consumed. Territorial expansion
and knowledge of the territories occupied went together here. Said
identifies a latent Orientalism that is made up of the fears and anxieties
about the East, and a manifest Orientalism which consists of the
articulated, expressed opinions of the East.
Said’s main contribution was to bestow texts with considerable
political weight, showing how stereotypes in Western representations of
the Arab or the Brahmin produced political effects in terms of policies that
then proceeded to dominate, improve or modify these ‘types’. Said
brought to the forefront the textual component of the imperial project,
showing how, even before the political homogenization of the world
under European powers, there was a textual empire. Said argued that but
for the East there would not have been a Western sense of itself: the West
built its identity in contrast with the East, by constantly drawing on this
difference (encoded in texts) of ‘us and them’.
Orientalism was instrumental in producing a series of binaries such
as ‘East versus West’, ‘civilized versus barbaric’, ‘modern versus
primitive’, ‘free versus oppressed’, and ‘centre versus periphery’.
Through these binaries produced in the textual archive of the Empire the
West retained its cultural and racial difference from the East. He further
proposed that over a period of time even the fictional stereotypes of the

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racial‐cultural Other began to acquire the status of scientific truth, and
there was no need to offer explanations and examples for the claims made
in these texts.
Eventually, the natives of the colonies, forced to read Western texts
about themselves, came to believe these stereotypes about themselves, and
thus conceded that they were exactly as the West had portrayed them.
This meant that, having conceded racial and cultural superiority to the
European, the native also consented to being governed by the superior
race. Said thus argued that Orientalism and its knowledges were integral
to colonial‐imperial rule because the texts Produced within this structure
enabled the European to dominate the native through the latter’s consent,
that is, without coercion. The native enters the imperial system because
s/he accepts the system as benevolent and beneficial and simultaneously
concedes, after years of training, that this dominance is essential for the
native. Said’s reading of the textual and epistemological foundations of
imperialism might be said to have inaugurated the field of postcolonial
studies and scholars like MacKenzie (1988, 1989), Suleri (1992),
Teltscher (2000), Sharpe (1993), and McClintock (1995) extended the
Saidian paradigm in their reading of colonial discourse. ( Pramod.
K.Nayar , 2015) Palestenian-American Edward Said is the founding
father of postcolonial studies.

2- Representation
“Representation is the process by which meaning is produced and
exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language,
signs and images which stand for or represent things.” ( Stuart Hall,
1997). Stuart Hall is a Cultural Theorist

3- Discourse
“Discourse (is a mode of talking ) which transmits and produces power; it
reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and
makes it possible to thwart.” ( Michel Foucault , 1998: 100-1). Michel
Foucault is a French postmodernist Philosopher.

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 4- Hegemony

Italian Communist thinker, activist, and political leader Antonio Gramsci

(1891-1937) is perhaps the theorist most closely associated with the
concept of hegemony. As Anderson notes, Gramsci uses “hegemony” to
theorize not only the necessary condition for a successful overthrow of the
bourgeoisie by the proletariat and its allies (e.g., the peasantry), but also
the structures of bourgeois power in late 19th- and early 20th-century
Western European states (SPN 20). Gramsci, particularly in his later work
encompassed in the Quaderni del Carcere or Prison Notebooks (written
during the late 1920s and early 1930s while incarcerated in a Fascist
prison), develops a complex and variable usage of the term; roughly
speaking, Gramsci’s “hegemony” refers to a process of moral and
intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinate classes of
post-1870 industrial Western European nations consent to their own
domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or
coerced into accepting inferior positions. It is important to note that,
although Gramsci’s prison writings typically avoid using Marxist terms
such as “class,” “bourgeoisie,” and “proletariat” (because his work was
read by a Fascist censor), Gramsci defines hegemony as a form of control
exercised by a dominant class, in the Marxist sense of a group controlling
the means of production; Gramsci uses “fundamental group” to stand in
euphemistically for “class” (SPN 5 n1). For Gramsci, the dominant class
of a Western Europe nation of his time was the bourgeoisie, defined in
the Communist Manifesto as “the class of modern Capitalists, owners of
the means of social production and employers of wage-labour,” while the
crucial (because potentially revolution-leading) subordinate class was the
proletariat, “the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of
production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order
to live” (SPN 473 n5). Gramsci’s use of hegemony cannot be understood
apart from other concepts he develops, including those of “state” and
“civil society” (see Caste in India). Antonio Gramsci is an Italian
philosopher (1891-1937)

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https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/20/hegemony-in-
gramsci/

5- Epistemic Violence

“The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely

orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the
colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical
obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivitiy. It is
well known that Foucault locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul
of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European
eighteenth century. But what if that particular redefinition was only a part
of the narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the
two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and
unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine?” Gayatri Spivak is a
postcolonial feminist cultural critic and philosopher.Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak 1988

4- Epistemic Resistance

“ Epistemic resistance is the use of our epistemic resources and

abilities to undermine and change oppressive normative
structures and the complacent cognitive-affective functioning
that sustains those structures.” José Medina , The
Epistemology of Resistance.

II- Interracial Love and Fascination: Reducing

Racial Inequalities and Dismantling Ethnic
Hierarchies

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 A- Tasks to Do : Students are invited to read
The Memoirs of the Life of Mrs.Sumbel( From
page 186 to the End) and Identify Discursive
Statements of Fascination and Rejection
1- Discursive Statements of Fascination
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2- Discursive Statements of Rejection

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3- Commentary : Choose some statements of

Fascination and some Others of rejection and
comment on them. You are welcome to record
your comments into a video. You are also invited
to share with both Moroccan and American
students.
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Hard Work is your True Friend. If you Believe in it, It will Never Ever Say
Good Bye.

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