Cultural Dominance and Its Effects

Paper Summary:

The paper explores how a dominant culture can create a devastating effect on the less dominant groups of a society in a variety of ways namely; isolation, usurpation of power and economic deprivation. The article cites American literature to qualify the view points stated.
Isolation
Power
Economic Deprivation

From the Paper:

"When a dominant culture exerts cultural influence so strong that it eliminates cultural influences of any segment of society, the result is isolation of the subdominant culture. This isolation is both physical and psychological.
Toni Morrison describes such a dynamic in eloquent simplicity in her book The Bluest Eye. The book opens with words familiar from early reading primers in which a white family is so strongly presented as the norm, the black children in the story are surrounded by stereotypes with no one that is remotely similar to them or to their families. The author emphasizes the constant bombardment of these "foreign" cultural influences by repeating the passage while gradually running all the sentences and, finally, even the words together to represent the effect of a virtual backdrop from which they feel completely detached."

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