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Foucault had a lot to say about power, but he was curiously circumspect about the ways in which it has operated in the arenas of race and colonialism. His virtual silence on these issues is striking. In fact Foucault’s work appears to be so scrupulously eurocentric that you begin to wonder whether there isn’ta deliberate strategy involved: consider, after all, the context of the Paris of Sartre, Fanon, Althusser, the traumatic defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Algerian War of Independence and the National Liberation Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Foucault’s few explicit writings in these areas are sometimes curious: take his comments on the revolution in Iran, where he discusses the Iranian revolution in terms of what he considers to be its expression of ‘an absolutely collective will’which he contrasts to the more mediated forms of European revolutions. 1 This distinction is constructed according to …