Summary Of Foucault: Power, Knowledge And Discourse

Colonialism, as Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society mentions, is “the expansion of a sovereign nation to other territories and sovereign nations. The colonizing nations exercise administrative, political, cultural, military, and socioeconomic power over the indigenous population in the colonized lands” (Schaefer 317). That is, colonialism itself involves not only the occupation of a place but also the rule over the local people. Schaefer further adds that “[t]he development of the European colonial project since the 16th century coincide[s] with the development of the concept of racism and ethnocentrism, as well as theory of Social Darwinism ” (317). With the belief of white supremacy and European pre-eminence, Europeans reckon that they have authority to take the action of colonialism.

According to Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson in De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, “[c]olonialism (like its counterpart,

All knowledge, once applied to the real world, has real effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’” (76). When Stuart Hall refers to “become true”, it suggests that knowledge is not the truth at all; however, through power, those unreal(to match not the truth) things can disguise themselves in the appearance of knowledge. Moreover, by claiming unrealities are real with power, people would believe. In this way, knowledge has lost its reliability and become questionable. Ashcroft and Ahluwalia in Edward Said name a particular term “social knowledge” (63) to indicate this knowledge. In addition, they assert that discourse, in Foucauldian perception, “is a firmly bounded area of social knowledge, a system of statements within which the world can be known”