International Journal of Linguistics and Translation Studies Volume1, Issue 3, 2020 Homepage: http://ijlts.org/index.php/ijlts/index DOI: https://doi.org/10.36892/ijlts.v1i3.94
Cultural Hegemonic Discourse: From Imperialist Eurocentrism to Homogenizing Americentrism Mohamed HamoudKassim Al-Mahfedi Assistant Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Education and Sciences, University of Al-Baydha, Republic of Yemen. Mahfadi76@yahoo.com ARTICLE HISTORY Received:28/08/2020 Accepted:25/10/2020
KEYWORDS Americentrism; Imperialism; Globalization, Orientalism; Capitalism; Eurocentrism; Hegemony; Homogenization.
Abstract This paper is a Saidian reading of the concept of Americentrism as a continuum process of Eurocentrism. Culture as a symbol of one's identity is being constructed by the global cultural politics. World cultural, political and economical charters, organizations and committees are Western dominated agencies. This internationally oriented system is nothing but a continuation of the previous centuries of Western imperialism yet in a new attire. If the nineteenth century cultural imperial enterprise was based on repressive tools of direct rule and invasion, the contemporary global system of cultural hegemony takes the form of economic and intellectual consent as a means for the same end. Similarly, if the politics of place was the corner stone of the imperial project, the idea of homogenized place is the yardstick of the homogenous and hegemonous neocolonial system. This new geopolitical and cultureo-economical venture operates both on personal and collective identity levels, reinforcing the localized colonial rule wherein the local and the national are assimilated within the operative mode of the global West.
1. INTRODUCTION Culture is a determining force of one's personal and national identity. It signals a personal choice and freedom as a way of living distinct from one another. Furthermore, identity and ethics are culturally based, and, hence, any universal, homogenous or monolithic code is likely to "disinherit some from their cultural base and therefore be perceived as an attack on their identity" (Mark, 2001,p.1186). With the emergence of the global identity, culture becomes more of an assimilated entity, threatened by new waves of homogenizing forces that propose the loss of diversity of culture between two or more cultural groups and the entailment of a polar cultural system. This is not different from the nineteenth-century Eurocentric cultural imperialist project where national identity was silenced, overlooked and erased by dominating European colonial identity. According to Appradurai "globalization is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and localizing process" whereby modernization is nothing but "vernacular" labeling of globalization. (1997, p.10) It is commonly argued in the postcolonial critical and cultural circles that there is an organic unity between Eurocentrism and Americocentrism as politico-cultural concepts. The latter has evolved as a contemporary term from the former. Ameli (2006) wrote: "Eurocentrism and Americanism are two interlinked concepts which explain parallel International Journal of Linguistics and Translation Studies
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