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Course Description

Summary

This course works to give a more exacting definition to the imperial shape of the United States, as much to name its haunting presence as to more effectively confront its unjust operations. As the first successful anti-colonial revolt, the United States has a long history of narrating itself against empire. Yet for anyone who has lived under the heavy hand of its territorial expansion westward, its proxy wars against the threat of communism/terrorism, its manipulation of domestic policies elsewhere, or its global chain of military bases, the United States has always been an empire. Yet it’s an empire that often breaks the given mold since WWII: accumulation without colonialism, coercion without occupation, and imperial supremacy without self-identification. This course reviews the recurring discovery of the US Empire in scholarship and the public imagination, and works towards developing a critical anthropology of the US Empire: that is, a way of describing its presence in our lives with an aim to overcome it.