Egyptian Soapbox

The images of women free to choose between jeans and the hijab, and of citizens lining up to cast their ballot, systematically elide the deeper, more radical meanings of feminism and democracy. Again we find ourselves not so far from the colonial exhibition which served “to ‘construct nationalist feeling,’ to build a sense of identity, of pride, of national unity” and which “displays the negative counterpart of the European image, an image that reassures the visitors of their modernity and ‘normality.’

Globalization is a process that has been supported, enhanced, pushed and made dominant by the Anglo-American hegemony that is taking so many different forms worldwide. The language of this process is, no doubt, English and without any form of competition by other languages at present. This phenomenon has been perceived as a threat to local identities and cultures even by very strong nations like Japan and Germany as shown in this paper. The Arab culture in particular for political reasons related to East-West relations is more threatened than other cultures and identities. The hegemonic and imperialistic nature of English is sometimes masked by native and foreign scholars alike for obvious reasons chief among which is the political reason or the lack of political awareness on the part of the scholars writing about globalization and the teaching of English. English is not, as many of those scholars claim, a property of the world and it is at the same time being imposed as a culture on people all around the world in the form of Americanization.