Discuss Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge with the concepts of colonialism and Orientalism.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

For Foucault, power/knowledge are two sides of the same coin: power is exercised through knowledge, while knowledge is an exercise of power. Knowledge is constructed and communicated through discourse—words that declare a state of being while simultaneously declaring how things are not. For example, when a person says or writes that Palestinians are terrorists, he is constructing an identity that at the same time excludes other possible identities. Yet, Palestinians are no more any one “thing” than Israelis, Americans, Germans, Mexicans, or Koreans. Nevertheless, such a claim often is offered as “knowledge,” and to the extent that it gains credibility, it also becomes infused with the power to produce a reality that does not exist outside of the discourse that constitutes it. Colonizing powers use language to fix the meaning of the colonized “Other.” how do colonizing powers use texts—the written word—to simplify complex civilizations, to erase the existence of a rich cultural heritage, and to deny the humanity of a population as part of the effort to legitimate the subjugation of those nations they seek to control? Such efforts demand that a population be torn from its history in order to create a new future—a future literally written by the West. Colonization is premised on the notion that the colonized Other is inherently inferior, weak, and evil. For colonized groups, or those who have won political independence from colonial rule, the question remains as to how they can shed their identity as an inferior Other. Said’s most basic contention that the Orient, “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages,” was in an important sense invented by the West through the process of Orientalism (Said 1978:1). Orientalism has three dimensions to it. First, it refers to all the scientific and academic disciplines whose purpose is to study Oriental cultures and customs. A second dimension refers to Orientalism in a more general sense as a “style of thought,” the “ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about a region of the world called the Orient” (Said 2000:199). The third dimension speaks of Orientalism as a source of power for “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978:3).