Power relations

Zarefsky, in the article, "Argumentation in the Tradition of Speech Communication Studies" that "Power enables those who hold it to impose a partial perspective as if it were holistic," which he calls "hegemony." These partial perspectives become so normalized in society that they seem obvious, commonsensical, even natural. They become ideologies. In the U.S., we have a European understanding of history, because European Americans maintain the power. Through our education system, the hegemonic ideals that European knowledge is the only knowledge is repeated and recreated over and over again. For instance, all teachers are expected to have a knowledge of European histories. English teachers are expected to know all of the European writers, the canonical literature. However, they are not expected to know any other writers from any other area of the world (excepting the token piece of African, Asian or Caribbean literature often found on syllabi). Yet my professor for Latin American literature, for example, is expected to know not only Latin American literature, but American and European as well. And while classes in Latin American literature are offered at JMU, one would be hard pressed to find a book by a Latin American author on any other syllabi, as I know from my experiences as an English major. For some reason, this area of the world is unimportant. Perhaps by teaching alternative canons, hegemony is threatened. Therefore, U.S. education is overwhelmingly eurocentric as a means to uphold the power of white European Americans in the United States.