The First Ethnic Studies Courses
In the Takaki papers, I found the professor's notes to some of the first ethnic studies courses that he taught. From his notes for the first day of class:"Cultural hegemony is an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotations." --Gwyn Williams, summary of Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony
Importantly, his and other professors' approach marked a distinct turn away from "Area Studies," which approached the study of non-Western peoples and people of color from a positivist point of view: making people the object of investigation in order to maintain an implicitly Euro-American-centric point of view (and, in the post-World War II Cold War era, to maintain world political and cultural hegemony).
