Choosing your Place

Hegemony means the dominance or dominant influence of one nation, group, or class over another or others. An example of it is, after WWII, the United States became the hegemonic superpower worldwide because of their thriving economy, strong military, and politics. During the Cold War there was a hegemonic ideological conflict between communism and democracy. All three writers this week show this idea/term of hegemony in their work. 

E. Pauline Johnson talks about how "every race in the world enjoys its own peculiar characteristics, but it scarcely follows that every individual of a nation must possess these prescribed singularities, or otherwise forfeit in the eyes of the world their individuality" (Johnson, 385).  I believe that this relates to hegemony because she's talking about forfeiting your individuality vs. possessing the prescribed singularities. The standards in order to reach hegemony are created by society. Each culture, each society is different. What makes one have power in one place could be completely different than another place. If one person would like to be in power, they have to be able to fit into a certain mold of sorts---so they could achieve and possess all the standards necessary. 

Since society creates the standards needed to have hegemonic power, it also limits who can reach the top. For example Henry Louis Gates Jr said,“Since the beginning of the 17^th century, Europeans had wondered aloud whether or not the African “species of men”, as they most commonly put it, could ever create formal literature, could ever master “the arts and sciences.” If they could, the argument ran, then the African variety of humanity and the European variety were fundamentally related. If not, then it seemed clear that the African was destined by nature to be a slave”(Gates, 8). Standards like the ability to harness “reason” were used so to speak in order to rank the power and worth. The people who met the highest standards had the hegemonic power. 

Regarding the Africans, people assumed the worst of them--that they weren't smart enough to read, write, or be an intellectual at all really. Because of that, they were never taught how to be an intellectual, and were abstained from learning skills that would help them advance in society such as skills to read and write.  This situation makes me feel like hegemony isn't a fair system. During the Cold War, the United States ended up as the supreme hegemonic superpower since they technically "won the war" but, I feel like this is a lot more fair than something like cultural hegemony. Regarding a war, there's practically always a clear loser and winner. In society, how can one determine what is best? What gives someone the right to dictate who can do what and why? Society makes the idea of hegemony a lot more complex, because of all of the unclear and ever-changing standards in place and being created.  It's like in society, one can choose their place in the system based on who they are and what they can do. But sadly, if you're in a position where you're limited in which skills you can learn, you'll never be able to choose your place in that society. 

Works Cited
Cooper, Anna Julia. “Excerpts from A Voice From the South” (1892). Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2009. 379-384.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1-20. JSTOR.      http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343459 

Johnson, E. Pauline. “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” (1895). Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2009. 385-389.