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This chapter examines the intellectual context of Edward Gibbon's monumental and highly influential work The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and its role in the complex history and genealogy of imperialism. It also addresses the impact of the notion of ‘decline’ both on Gibbon's contemporaries and on later writers, thinkers, and politicians in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when imperialism and the idea of British imperial decline had become major topics for discussion and debate. As a historical work, The decline and fall particularly influenced the writings of the prominent Oxford ancient historian Francis Haverfield (1860–1919), whose publications absorbed many contemporary attitudes about imperialism. Haverfield's work, in turn, influenced the development of the discipline of Roman archaeology for decades to come, especially concerning the themes of cultural superiority and decline.

Acculturation was said to have occurred inside early modern Europe, largely in association with the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The cultural distance that separated the aims of the religious reformers from the ideas and behaviour of the mass of the laity seemed to be great enough to invite comparison with the colonial confrontations overseas. The very broad extent of the popular beliefs and practices that the reformers hoped to eradicate, or drastically modify, also indicated the proscription of a whole culture, rather than piecemeal or narrowly focused change. And the methods chosen for the task, including surveillance, forcible conversion, repression, and punishment, as well as huge educational programmes, suggested the imposition of cultural superiority by dominant elites on subject populations. Europe, it seems, had its own internal missions.

This chapter talks about the relationship between Filipino immigrant parents and their daughters. It argues that gender is a key to immigrant identity, and a way for racialized immigrants to claim cultural superiority over the dominant group. The author uses epigraphs, or statements, by a Filipina immigrant mother and her second-generation Filipina daughter. These suggest that the virtuous Filipina daughter is partially constructed on the concept of White women as sexually immoral. The chapter also shows that their enforced “morality” and the sexuality of women are essential to the structuring of social inequalities. These narratives indicate that racialized groups also criticize the morality of White women as a resistance strategy, or a means of asserting a morally superior public face to the dominant society. The chapter is primarily concerned with understanding the actions of immigrant parents instead of the reactions of their second-generation daughters.

The exacting nature of legal legitimacy demanded that Englishmen who ruled India project their public persona in the new hegemony of the rule of law. Yet this new hegemony left many loopholes in the practical, day-to-day functioning of the colonial government, which enabled traditional forms of governance and indigenous hierarchical power structures to retain their hold on local authority. This chapter argues that the rule of law, as introduced by the colonial rule, had cultural implications for civilizational superiority and explores the levels at which the government interfered, and the niches it left undisturbed. It discusses the functioning of criminal courts, the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, how the government dealt with the Zamindars, and issues of women's criminality. The indigenous elite took on a specific character in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to their interaction with the rule of law, both as an expression of sovereignty and as a language of cultural superiority.

This chapter discusses the importance of the Cold War struggle over ideas and mass culture, which was as crucial as the confrontations in the political, economic, and military arenas. The United States strove not only to demonstrate cultural superiority over the Soviet Union but also to defuse widespread anti-Americanism in Western Europe. The French and Italian Communists privileged cultural resistance because they recognized that their leverage was strongest on those issues. By the late 1940s, however, both the Communists and the Americans had come to realize that culture was the most elusive element in their confrontation. Even so, both concluded that a core challenge came from their opponent's “soft power.” Recent literature has covered separately each side's actions and debates in the cultural Cold War. The purpose of the chapter is not to revisit these debates in detail but to add perspective to the ideological cultural struggle by juxtaposing and comparing the perceptions and responses from both sides of the Atlantic.

This chapter examines Theodor Adorno's arguments regarding the role of the concept of classicism in German literary history by focusing on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It considers Adorno's essay “On the Classicism of Goethe's Iphigenia,” delivered as a public lecture at the Free University in Berlin in 1967, in which he articulated his position in the complex postwar discussion about the function and value of the German literary tradition. It argues that Adorno's essay on Goethe's play Iphigenia in Tauris is anything but a polemic. It also explains how Adorno opens up a dimension of meaning that calls into question the notion of cultural superiority commonly associated with the concept of German classicism without dismissing it as pure ideology. Finally, the chapter discusses Adorno's critical assessment of the concept of realism through his two short essays on Honoré de Balzac, in which he explores the link between representation and social reality.

Chapter Six discusses migrant women’s and syndicate members’ encounters in KL’s contact zones. The analysis begins with migrant women sex workers’ experiences living and working in urban spaces that, at the outset, are multiracial and multicultural but upon closer examination such spaces are claimed by residents from specific intersections of class, race-ethnicity, and nationality. The focus then shifts to syndicate members, especially men who provide support services to the migrant women. Significantly, and despite the centrality on earning income, migrant women’s and syndicate men’s encounters are not entirely utilitarian based. From views on humanity to acts of reciprocity, they genuinely desire to know and appreciate alternative ways of living, being and doing by people born and raised in communities other than their own. Still, some endorse deprecating stereotypes premised particularly on gender and/or racial-cultural superiority. In KL’s stratified contact zones, migrant women and syndicate men evince emerging cosmopolitan subjectivities, and paradoxically affirm colonial-like ascriptions and ensuing worldviews and treatments of the Other.

Orientalist stereotypes pervade everyday journalism about the region. In spite of unabashed and unrefined forms of Orientalist representation, one may take issue with Said's claim that nothing has changed in representations of the Middle East in the West, particularly in the United States, during the past three decades. This chapter explores a phenomenon called “neo-Orientalism”—a mode of representation that, while indebted to classical Orientalism, engenders new tropes of othering. Neo-Orientalism entails a popular mode of representing, a kind of doxa about the Middle East and Muslims that is disseminated throughout the world. Although the term “neo-Orientalism” designates a shift in the discourse of Orientalism that represents a distinct, and in ways novel formation, it nonetheless entails certain discursive repetitions of and conceptual continuities with its precursor. Neo-Orientalism is monolithic, totalizing, reliant on a binary logic, and based on an assumption of moral and cultural superiority over the Oriental other. Neo-Orientalism should be understood as a supplement to enduring modes of Orientalist representation.

This chapter provides an overview of the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trades, which brought the majority of Americans to Fiji and through which much of the earliest information about Fiji spread to the rest of the world. The American seafarers who came to Fiji for sandalwood and bêche-de-mer earned a slight share of the wealth generated but derived additional satisfaction from their time in the islands. Their unique experiences granted them a rarefied, socially elevating expertise. Returning home with fantastic stories and curiously wrought souvenirs, they became knowledge brokers whose firsthand observations shaped American perceptions of Fiji and Fiji islanders for decades to come. They produced two kinds of knowledge, one pragmatic and logistical, the other ethnographic and ideological. Practical knowledge made navigation safer and faster, fostered commercial networks and routines, and identified exploitable natural resources. Ethnographic knowledge intersected with pragmatic knowledge but resulted in more than monetary rewards. By reporting on the bizarre customs of Fijians, Americans consigned its people to the opposite end of the humanity spectrum and affirmed for a larger public Americans' cultural superiority.