AMERICAN EMPIRE
EDITED BY LAUREN BELLATTI AND I. B. HOPKINS
In his second inaugural address earlier this year, Donald Trump blustered that in his new administration, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” While the rhetorical figure of American expansion toward an ever-Westward horizon has long exceeded Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis,’ it is nevertheless chilling to reflect on this appeal to the nation’s acquisition of stolen lands. Trump calls for a return to a style of outright imperialism and, in doing so, both denies the brutality of these expansionist histories and negates the imperializing activities that have continued within the relatively stable borders of the post-45 United States. The reviews that comprise this special section spotlight some of the ways that American imperialism materializes in the conditions of peoples living both under and alongside US power—from the structures of work to the racialized ways in which we conceptualize futurity, to public health and personal loss, and the borders that dictate who is legible to the state and gets to call themselves ‘American.’ At a moment when what it means to be an American is constantly being negotiated by politicians, pundits, and in pop culture at large, our contributors review four works that each uniquely describe the realities that are created by the perpetuation of the myths of Manifest Destiny and American empire.
This section opens with problematizations of the future—or, rather, of the notion of the future as it is mobilized for hegemonic ideologies. Asking who owns the right to envision the world to come, Giulia A. Oprea’s review of Speculative Whiteness focuses on uses of science fiction to condition the nation’s social imaginary. Their observation that speculative works provide tremendous opportunities to discuss past and present dimensions of identity in the classroom meets author Jordan Carroll’s analysis of the long history of white supremacists’ affinity for sci-fi and the racist myths of progress that underlie it as suggested by the title. “[I]maginative interventions,” Oprea reasons, “are crucial in challenging speculative whiteness, offering alternative visions of the future that refuse the inevitability of fascist domination.” Also holding the inevitability of power consolidation together with the impulse towards futures imagined otherwise, Chapman Matis’s review of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy offers less optimism. Hope for change from within the current system, in other words, remains limited and limiting. Benjamin Studebaker’s analysis of American institutions in light of our grim political economy is, for Matis, precisely the “well-reasoned downbeat note” needed in the current moment. By emphasizing the book’s reconfiguration of class delineations and party politics in particular, this review surfaces the distinct challenges impeding real movements for equality under the American regime. Matis summarizes Studebaker’s dark prognosis: “politics have become increasingly despairing and desperate while simultaneously infiltrating virtually every one of our possible escape routes.” Conceptually speaking, the future will not save us.
Looking to the recent past, however, Mary Fons’s review of Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art offers potential tactics for survival and hope in the face of national crisis as found in the moments of both care and conflict that shaped queer coalition building during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles during the early 1990s. Braiding historical and statistical data together with reflections on the form and purpose of memoir as a genre, Fons challenges scholars and creative nonfiction writers alike not to shy away from connecting their personal experiences to the power structures that shape the historical moments in which they are living, urging them to “analyze why things happened; not just how or when.” The affective power of shared stories—especially the transfer of intergenerational knowledge—anchors this review as Fons concludes that, “Today, as the Trump administration rolls back legal protections for queer and trans Americans, insights from those who navigated similar struggles are needed more than ever.” Our futures are only as strong as the solidarity we forge with one another. A model for working towards this kind of collaborative, action-oriented futurity can be found in Jo Hurt’s review of All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession. Detailing how Monisha Das Gupta constructs a queer and feminist framework that disrupts “the heteronormative and masculinist structure of US settler coloniality in and beyond immigration policy,” Hurt begins to map ways academics and organizers can leverage interdisciplinary scholarship in service of “transformative abolitionist agendas” and enact concrete change. Inviting scholars and activists focused on immigration to develop alliances with disability scholars, Hurt posits that discussions of ‘crip time,’ “could prompt questions of how ableist logics undergird and reinforce immigration policy and carcerality;” she also imagines the possibility for partnership between migration justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements to leverage Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 and its public construction of the ‘criminal alien’ to further interrogate the ways in which anti-immigration laws also enact “settler colonial claims to the territory of the United States that are anti-Indigenous.” It is our hope that by boldly naming and confronting the ways in which the racist and capitalist ideologies that have always been the engine behind American Empire while simultaneously highlighting marginalized communities’ histories and methodologies for enacting change in the face of severe oppression, the reviews in this section might invite readers to seek out opportunities to work towards intersectional futures in their own communities.
