Imperial Logic Research Articles

‘Bombable geographies’ and the international Monroe: a global south history of the unwilling or unable standard

ABSTRACT This article argues that the history of the Unwilling or Unable Standard has been misunderstood, usually framed as either a longstanding principle or a recent, modern innovation in the context of the War on Terror. In taking a Global-South-centred approach to history, this article concludes that it is neither. Instead, it is framed as an imperial logic that emerges and submerges from history, depending on whether imperial and colonial powers need to determine specific geographies as ‘bombable’. The article finds key similarities between the Unwilling or Unable of today and the Monroe Doctrine of the early twentieth century, concluding they are manifestations of the same imperial logic in a history of discontinuity. The article concludes that in a South-centred history, the use of force rules is not expansive, but rather that non-Western states have consistently defended a much more anti-interventionist international law than Eurocentric history might otherwise suggest.

The Translating Subject: Self-Assertion and Edges of Mediation in Ali Ufkî’s Bilingual Dialogues

Abstract Why did translation matter for early modern translators themselves? Approaching Ottoman court translator and religious convert to Islam, Ali Ufkî’s (né Wojciech Bobowski, ca. 1610–1677) intellectual endeavors, this article explores the multilayered relationship among translation, commensurability, and transmission of cultural knowledge by focusing on the translating subject. It argues that translation was an epistemic posture taken on by translators operating in complex cultural landscapes to navigate their self-assertion within the contours of cultural mediation in late seventeenth-century Istanbul. In so doing, it suggests reading translations beyond imperial logics and their concomitant historiographical terms.

Gender and Empire in Mozambican Fictions of Ngungunyane

Abstract: This article considers twenty-first-century Mozambican works of fiction that contest the foundational status of nineteenth-century Gazan emperor Ngungunyane (circa 1850–1906) to Mozambique's postcolonial nationalism as a symbolic representation of ongoing imperial patriarchy. A century after Ngungunyane's defeat by the Portuguese, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa published Ualalapi , widely read as a devastating critique of Mozambique's FRELIMO party's postcolonial politics as a continuation of Ngungunyane's bloody reign. A series of subsequent works respond to Ualalapi 's critique: Mia Couto's As areias do imperador trilogy, Khosa's As mulheres do imperador , and Paulina Chiziane's As andorinhas . These works deploy female protagonists and narrative experimentation to respond to Ngungunyane's famous final speech in Ualalapi . I argue that each of the contemporary works break the speech's imperial logic in different ways. Khosa, Couto, and Chiziane show that an excess of empire pervades contemporary rewritings of this history. These works draw on female voices and a constellation of anti-imperial communities of Black women—what philosopher María Lugones has theorized as a coalition and through Michelle M. Wright has analyzed through the dialogic—to break colonial-postcolonial continuities of power and imagine different futures in their wake.

Coproducing “Planetary” Eating Futures from Dakar

Reform of the global food system needs to be initiated and coordinated on a global level to meet the challenges of sustainably producing sufficient food within planetary boundaries. The EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet sought to establish a set of “planetary” eating norms that would constitute “healthy and sustainable” diets “for all.” In this article we present the findings from a co-production workshop held in Dakar that examined dilemmas of defining “healthy and sustainable” diets and “planetary” eating norms from a Senegalese perspective. We describe the concrete strategies for negotiating dietary change that emerged from the workshop, including interdisciplinarity, reciprocity, reparation and substitution, and collective reflection on eating histories. By working within the fraught project of planetary dietary design in a manner that resists an imperial logic that we designate as “dietary diffusionism,” we argue that theories of “planetarity” can be used to leverage deliberative approaches to the design of more just, inclusive, and effective food policy.

만리장성의 동쪽 끝과 낙랑군의 위치

Since China's Warring States Period (403-221), successive dynasties have built great walls for various purposes. Among them, the Yan and Qin great walls were built to block the southward advance of the northern equestrian people, and this characteristic continues in the Han great walls. In this respect, the Great Wall of China is also a structure through which various Chinese dynasties marked their territory. It was also a border line, meaning that the inside of the Great Wall was the territory of the Chinese dynasty, and the outside was the territory of the northern equestrian people. Historically, the easternmost end of the Great Wall of China was Shanhaiguan, built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). However, the Chinese National Museum now depicts the Great Wall as having reached near Pyongyang during the Qin and Han Dynasties. This was the logic of imperialist history first devised by Japanese colonial historian Inaba Iwagichi in 1910 as a peninsular view of history that sought to confine the power of Korean history to the Korean Peninsula. Inaba Iwagichi claimed in 『Treatise on the Eastern End of the Qin Great Wall and The Capital of Wangheom of Gojoson』 that the Qin Great Wall was connected to Suan of Hwanghae Province, present-day North Korea. In 1931, China's Wang Guo Liang accepted this theory of imperialist invasion in 『A History of the Chinese Great Wall』, slightly modifying it to say that the Qin Great Wall reached Pyongyang. Even after liberation, Korea's Kangdan History academia has been criticized for following the Japanese imperialist view of the history of invasion. Lee Byeong-do, who is considered to be the leader of the Korean Kangdan History academia, plagiarized the logic of Inaba Iwagichi in “Nakranggungo (樂浪郡考)” and claimed that the Qin’s Great Wall came down to Suan, Hwanghae Province of North Korea. Therefore, the claim that the eastern end of the Qin’s Great Wall, which is the logic of Japanese imperialism's invasion, reached all the way to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula is currently being accepted around the world. During the Ming Dynasty, the construction of Shanhaiguan, the easternmost mountain in history, was to prevent invasion by the Manchurians. The Qing Dynasty, founded by the Manchurian people, no longer built great walls. Not only the Qin general, but no Chinese general has ever entered the Korean Peninsula. The reason why the Qin Dynasty built the wall was to block the Huns and Gojoseon. The border between Jin and Gojoseon was near Galshi Mountain in present-day Hebei Province, and to the north of it are the remains of the Qin and Han Great Walls. There is evidence that says. The ancient Qin and Han generals could not climb this brown stone mountain. The eastern side of Galshi Mountain was the area of Gojoseon.

SOCIOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM AND MEDICAL EXTROVERSION: PROVISIONAL INFLEXION ON COVID-19 RESPONSE AND THE PRAXIS OF MEDICAL IMPERIALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL SOCIETIES

This paper engages medical practice as a human rational response to ill-health that is not generic to all human society albeit in different practices and forms. It examines how the COVID-19 pandemic and response reveal global dynamics in medical research and knowledge production – itself a product of imperial logic. This paper invites a critical re-reading of the COVID-19 pandemic and response to a context of Western-centric or hegemonic (re)production of coloniality in general and extroversion of disciplinary practices in particular by laying out some preliminary basis for interrogation. In particular, this paper attempts to highlight how the association of superiority to (Western) academy is redacted in (medical) practice and manifests as the tension between cultural/local and ‘scientific’/global knowledge systems. Through decolonial reflection on literature related to the COVID-19 pandemic, epistemological concerns and imperialism, it argues that Western medical praxis embodies and articulates ingrained cultural assumptions and biases against non-Western medicinal skills and practices.

Between Empires: Al-Amīra Nazlı Fazıl Hanım, a Middlewoman in the “Question d’Orient” around 1900

Abstract Late nineteenth-century Tunisian history has primarily been studied from a European perspective, in the colonial context of the French Protectorate. Yet, the North-African beylik was still inscribed within the realm of the Ottoman Empire long after 1881. The strength of the Mediterranean network was epitomized by Ḫayr al-Dīn’s political figure and by his going back and forth between Tunis and Istanbul. Later on, the princess Nazlı Fazıl Hanım (d. 1913) created another layer of relationships, extending the zone of contacts to Paris and Cairo, putting Tunisia at the heart of Mediterranean intellectual exchanges. In her tow, the famous Egyptian scholar Muḥammad ʿ⁠Abduh had a notable influence over Tunisian ʿulamāʾ, and Bachir Sfar (al-Bašīr Ṣfar), forerunner of the Young Tunisians, paralleling the Young Turks, created his own path through a complex geo-political space. This article documents these personal links and the circulation of ideas within this cultural space: Maghreb in Mediterranean context, at the meeting point of provincial and imperial logics, and at the crossroads of traditionalist and reformist agendas.

Unmasking Maps, Unmaking Empire: Towards an Archipelagic Cartography

On the surface, maps enable the planning and development of human dwelling, the visualization of connections, and drawing of boundaries. Throughout human history, however, maps have also acted as antidotes to chaos by generating spatial imaginations as pathways to meaning, belonging, and yearning. Exploring both theoretical and practical trajectories of transnational mappings, this article traces cartographies through the spatio-cultural nodes of the mainland United States, Hawaiʻi, and Micronesia. By revealing hidden connections, interstices, mobilities, memories, flows, and polysemic knowledges, it argues that an archipelagic approach to cartographic creation and interpretation reveals the significance of ‘minor’ spatial imaginations, mobilities, and historical practices. Although these may appear interspersed, fragmented, or insular, I suggest that they form nodes in archipelagic networks of resistance against colonizing cartographic regimes that aim to homogenize, police, and commodify spaces according to imperial logics—thus casting doubts on the authority of continental, national, and imperial/colonial geographic vocabularies. The article’s findings make apparent the need for a methodological turn that takes into account the methodological relationality and social agency of maps as actors in the generation and interpretation of discursive networks of spatial imaginations. Engaging with these imaginations, it becomes clear, means reevaluating and redefining conventional understandings of oceans, islands, continents, archipelagos, as well as those yet unnamed, unmapped, and unwritten places that exist between or submerged below these categories.

Becoming an African Techpreneur: Geopolitics of Investments in “Local” Kenyan Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs in Kenya are heterogenous, with diverse backgrounds, career goals, and personal histories. However, during five years of working long hours at the iHub, Nairobi’s co-working space for technology entrepreneurs, we observed the emergence of the trope of the “Kenyan Techpreneur” that came to be latched onto by the state, development aid, and philanthropic sectors and gained its own circulatory power. Through an analysis of the figure of the Kenyan “Techpreneur” and its production in Nairobi, this paper reveals how imperial logics and structures continue to underpin apparently independent initiative, pointing to the limits of thinking in simple binary terms and to a need for inventive, cosmopolitan constructs of Kenyan entrepreneurism. In recent years, Kenyans figured as Techpreneurs have contested the narrow construction of its parameters, which ironically appear to disproportionately benefit non-Africans working in the Kenyan tech sector. Describing some of the quotidian ways that transnational geopolitics and capital continue to heavily shape what happens within the bounds of the nation-state and the “local” Kenyan tech scene, we seek to emphasize how the local is in fact heavily tied up with enduring imperial formations of neoliberal development. This is an important prompt for a global STS to bring new, more complex subjects into relief.

Invert Syrup, Feminist Snap: Anzac Biscuits and Feminist Resistance to Imperial Logics

Baked for Anzac Day in April but eaten all year, Anzac biscuits memorialize the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) participation in the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. The chemical and culinary capacities of one of the biscuit’s key ingredients, golden syrup, offer strategies for figuring snaps, breaks, and refusals. Golden syrup catalyzes a feminist digestion of a food often perceived as culturally conservative or nationalistic. Sara Ahmed describes “feminist snap” as a moment of fury that confronts and changes history. Snap can additionally refer to crispy batter-based desserts that often call for golden syrup. Classified as an “invert syrup,” golden syrup was formulated from sugar refining waste products that were fed to pigs before being adapted for human consumption. “Invert” refers to the assessment of syrups using a beam of light, which inverts its angle of rotation as fructose and glucose separate. Reading the chemistry of inverting sugar alongside the feminist-led “anti-Anzac” day movement of the 1980s, this paper proposes that edible everyday militarisms might be snapped, inverted, spun, and reshaped. Anzac biscuits bring domestic everyday militarisms into Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand kitchens.

Vale in Mozambique: Creator and destroyer of jobs, livelihoods and communities

Millennial mining projects like Vale's coal mines in Mozambique operate within the logic of the new imperialism, driven not by states and politicians in search of territorial control but by restless corporations in quest of short and long-term profits. The mining discourse cloaks this logic with fulsome promises of jobs and local development and making African commodity suppliers into significant players on global platforms. This case study looks at the efforts of those actually employed by Odebrecht, and later Vale – and their global labour partners - to use the inherited union structures to protect themselves from Vale management's arbitrary power. It then examines the civil society initiatives that emerged in response to livelihoods destroyed by Vale's massive footprint not only in and around the extraction site in Moatize but also along road, rail and sea links to transport Mozambique's coal onto global commodity markets.Both those impacted by Vale through loss of land and livelihoods and those directly employed by Vale had to contend with the overly intimate relationship between Vale and their government. in the, by now, classic neoliberal reversal of roles, The Maputo government over the years virtually abdicated its role in defence of workers, communities and the environment, ceding to Vale the right to govern in Tete. Trade unionists from Brazil and Canada making regular visits to Tete for mining health and safety training seminars found themselves as front-line observers.

Re-thinking Colonialism and Social Policy: With the Logic of Imperialism

This article explores the relationship between colonialism, imperialism, and social policy. Drawing on critical theories of colonialism and imperialism and the role of science and race in the bourgeois ‘imperialist project, we argue that social policy cannot be fully understood without considering the ways in which colonialism and imperialism's thought and practice shaped the historical development of social policy. The article examines key concepts such as hegemony, power, race and ‘science’ and demonstrates how they can be used to analyze the impact of colonialism and imperialism on social policy. By rethinking the relationship between colonialism, imperialism, and social policy, we propose a new framework for understanding the role of social policy in the reproduction of global inequalities. Social policies on welfare, informed by the imperialist logic of race and science, were all ingrained in the practice of colonial authorities and the colonial state as rationales for maintaining the empire. Ultimately, the article suggests that a critical approach to understanding colonial social policy, which considers race, is necessary to analyze the origin of social policy and the legacies of colonialism and imperialism in contemporary society.

How to Do the History of Sexual Science

This introduction maps the ways in which sexual scientific thought circulated during the fin de siècle, tracing the interconnections between and breaks in the global circuits of sexological thought and how this circuitry continues to structure sexuality in the present. In so doing, Kahan and LaFleur position their approach and that of the special issue as a whole within the larger field of sexology, placing it in more robust dialogue with sexuality studies and attending in particular to sexology's racial and imperial logics. They examine the ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous object, one with a problematically vast reach that contributes to contemporary understandings of racialization and undergirding colonial infrastructures. And yet, they argue, sexual science is not something that can be wished away or easily left behind, for its taxonomies and ways of knowing continue to structure identitarian frameworks of gender and sexuality.

Review: Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America, by Aaron M. Hyman; Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Review: <i>Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America</i>, by Aaron M. Hyman; <i>Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820</i>, by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Rekinning the homeland: Rurality, gender-based genocide, and Indigenous sovereignty in colonial Canada

In the colonial state of Canada, rurality is quintessentially necropolitical, a technology of colonial nation building that has forcibly displaced hundreds of sovereign Indigenous nations to accommodate white occupation. Throughout vast rural social geographies that remain conservative political strongholds, Indigenous peoples living in their ancestral homelands are positioned as contaminants of dignified white rural life and obstacles to food and resource exploitation, agri-industrial expansion, and growing multicultural diversity. Under colonial rural logics, Indigenous bodies are disposable and ungrievable, in deeply gendered and sexualized ways. In this paper, I draw on Achille Mbembé’s concept of necropolitics to examine rural genocide as a form of colonial and neocolonial settler placemaking, with a specific focus on gender-based violence as one form of enacted necropolitics. I examine how stark racial rural inequities precipitate racialized-gendered death by enabling incessant white entitlement to Indigenous lands and bodies, allowing what the United Nations has called the gender-based genocide of Indigenous girls, women, and 2Spirit people to occur with impunity. I then consider the imperial logics of homesteading as a new/old settler tactic emerging under new anthropogenic and pandemic-related pressures, where urbanites seeking rural escapes fuel the colonial appropriation and commodification of sacred Indigenous land-based knowledges while eroding already precarious Indigenous territories. I conclude by exploring how reimplicating increasingly mobile and urbanized Indigenous young people in kinscapes—mobile, temporal circles of relations with their kin and homelands—might fortify vital Indigenous land and body sovereignties and unsettle colonial necropolitical rural ontologies.

From Past to Future: The Soviet Union and the Russian Empire in Discourses of Rupture and Continuity

ABSTRACT In the still highly politicized question of rupture or continuity between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, elements of continuity are not hard to find, nor should this be a surprise, since a new state arose in the same geographical space and made use of the economic, intellectual, and demographic resources inherited from the Russian Empire. At the same time, the Soviet Union could not have been more different than the Russian Empire. It rejected a number of key elements of the sociopolitical project that underlay the nationalizing tsarist empire and introduced radically new political and social principles for organizing that space. In particular, the Bolsheviks purposefully engaged in dismantling the tsarist efforts to build a great ethnic-Russian nation to stand at the center of the Russian Empire’s nationalities policy. The irreversible disintegration of post-Soviet space into separate nationalizing states became possible only toward the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the imperial nature of the modern post-Soviet Russian core permits us to say that the imperial logic has survived. This is where we can find an element of inescapable continuity. We present studies of “continuities” and “ruptures” in modern academic discourse and in an updated format, gravitating toward “empirically nuanced” tools for analyzing multiple historical temporalities.

From Home Rule to Homeland: Counterterrorism as a Way of Life

From Home Rule to Homeland:Counterterrorism as a Way of Life Alex Lubin (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution US soldier patrols the streets of Baghdad, February 2007. Credit: US Army by Command Sgt. Maj. Anthony Mahoney, 2nd BCT, 10th Mtn. Div. (LI)). [End Page 556] The US War on Terror reached its twentieth anniversary while I was teaching an Introduction to African American Studies course, a coincidence that inspired a historical comparison of racial terror, minority rule, and state violence across time. More specifically, on September 11, 2021, my students and I discussed W. E. B. Du Bois's essay "The Propaganda of History," from his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois discusses how Reconstruction—the unprecedented opportunity for the United States to realize a vision of abolition democracy following enslavement and Civil War—was viewed as a failure by many US historians. A consensus developed—propaganda—within the historical profession that Reconstruction failed because it was imposed against the will of the former Confederate states by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and radical abolitionists and because the freedmen, when they achieved political power, were incompetent and corrupt. This consensus understood Jim Crow segregation, supported in law and by white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, as restoring order to the nation while enabling continued white supremacist power as a governing rubric. As my students and I considered how the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution helped realize and guarantee abolition democracy, and how Jim Crow limited those possibilities, we noted that the forces of white supremacy, including the Ku Klux Klan and so-called Red Shirts, constituted a sort of insurgency and that terrorism had undermined Reconstruction's promise.1 Viewed in the context of 2021, on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the federal abandonment of Reconstruction and the failure of abolition democracy at the hands of white supremacy and minority rule seem especially uncanny. As the United States commemorated its fight against terrorism, my class and I were studying how white supremacist insurgency—terrorism—established the conditions for US democracy for nearly one hundred years after the Civil War. Furthermore, as we thought about how the United States entered the War on Terror to defend "freedom- loving people," to paraphrase President George W. Bush, we wondered whether, in another one hundred years, students across [End Page 557] the world might ask why one nation, the United States, had the authority to establish a vision for global democracy and governance over the planet. Might the United States' defense of "the homeland" during the War on Terror be part of the same imperial logic as the southern Democratic Party's "redeemers" after the Civil War, who defended "home rule" and white supremacy as a bulwark against the presumed intrusion of the state and the federal government? How might minority rule in global governance, in defense of a "homeland," carry traces of the "home rule" movement of the Reconstruction era? These questions, and others, call for an analysis of the time and place of counterterrorist warfare. Writing about the US War on Terror poses special challenges due to the ways that it describes a discrete historical event—the militarized response to the events of September 11, 2001—as well as a longer way of life that has been a strategy of empire deployed throughout the history of US imperial culture. As my students and I experienced, when cast in the shadow of the insurgency against Reconstruction, the contemporary War on Terror appears connected to deeper histories. Further, the War on Terror not only confounds its temporal boundaries; it also exceeds the cartography of the nation itself. The War on Terror sutures together a range of security infrastructure within the US and abroad that reinforces the geographies of the war as well as the meaning of the war's organizing keywords: home and abroad, or domestic and international. While the Bush administration appealed to the exceptional nature of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks to mark a "post"-9/11 mentality that could justify an undeclared global war, in actuality, the US has waged many wars, within the boundaries of the nation and beyond, in the name of...

Health Apartheid during covid-19: A Decolonial Critique of Racial Politics between Taiwan and the who

Abstract While racism has spread rapidly as the covid-19 pandemic disrupted global health systems, this study focuses on the case of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the first African Director-General of the who, and his allegations of racism against Taiwan, which has been excluded from the who for decades. This study theorises ‘health apartheid’ as a conceptual framework to critically analyse three forces—global racial politics, imperial logics of global health, and state-centrism of international institutions—that relate to Taiwan’s exclusion in various ways. We argue that Tedros’s allegation was instrumentalised to overshadow the systemic, structural, and institutional racism reproduced by the who during the competition between Chinese and American hegemonies. This study shows that the pandemic exacerbates health apartheid against unrecognised nations, like Taiwan, when global solidarity is desperately needed. We call for a systematic transformation of the who to resist racist state-centrism and pursue a people-centred approach to global health governance.

Love and Resistance in a Time of COVID: American Studies and Utopic Critique

Love and Resistance in a Time of COVID: American Studies and Utopic Critique Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio) Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It’s a love note for our people, but it’s also a demand. Even if we are going to get an indictment or a guilty verdict, that actually would not provide us with the larger vision of liberation that our communities actually deserve. . . . we deserve to live in a world where we are not murdered. We deserve to live in a world where there’s no impunity, but beyond this question of impunity there are all these structures that are actually doing a disservice to our people. —Opal Tometi, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter (2015) Indicative of noncompliance, suggestive of opposition, and connotative of defiance, “resistance” is a seemingly aspirational, out-of-reach idea in the face of contemporary pandemic polemics, present-day white supremacist politics, and ongoing rights violations. Congruently, these dystopic actualities, dishearteningly experienced and rendered overwhelmingly visible in daily reports of “COVID-related deaths,” “big lie” recounts, “January 6th arrests,” “election integrity” disenfranchisement, and border-enforced catastrophe, render ostensibly impossible an affective turn to love. This current state of US affairs makes decidedly more relevant and correspondingly more accessible less optimistic emotions associated with grief and grievance. As further context and now-familiar recapitulation, in February 2022, an estimated 990,000 Americans have died from SARS-CoV-2. In the months following President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, four states (Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania) engaged ballot recounts that—despite costly expenditure and considerable labor—consistently reconfirmed a Biden presidential victory. Trump’s “big lie” allegation was by no means limited to challenges at the ballot box, as evidenced by the insurrectionist storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; almost one year after those attacks, 725 individuals have been arrested and investigations concerning other participants is ongoing. And, as 2021 came to a close, nineteen states passed laws limiting access to the ballot. To pessimistically surmise and depressingly summarize, the start of the second decade in the second millennium uncannily corresponds to what [End Page 225] the sixteenth-century social philosopher Sir Thomas More characterized in his fictional satire, Utopia. Published in 1516, Utopia is not surprisingly a “product of its times” via genre, form, and thematic preoccupations. As parodic commentary and learned treatise, Utopia begins in a present marked by multiple civil wars abroad (in Europe), increased monarchical tyranny at home (as emblematized by King Henry VIII’s “divine right” rule of England), and border-crossing religious movement (specifically the Protestant Reformation). Such dystopic imaginaries function as evocative backdrop for the more hopeful visions that dominate More’s most famous work. Consonant with the imperial logics and “New World” vistas of the so-termed Age of Exploration, Utopia repeatedly accesses US namesake Amerigo Vespucci’s travel accounts as the basis for its fictive figurations of an isolated, uncharted island west of Europe. In an exchange concerning the recently encountered Americas, More writes, “We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations; but examples of wise planning are not so easy to find.” More’s allusion to “horrible creatures who prey on human beings” unintentionally yet pointedly encapsulates the contemporaneous institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade and regimented settler colonialism in the Americas. Furthermore, despite the passage of almost five centuries and notwithstanding More’s non-US nationality, Utopia’s overt acknowledgment of presentist monstrosity and concomitant imagining of a nonmonstrous place encapsulates the vexed dimensions of twenty-first-century US nationhood while engendering alternative visions of love and resistance. On one level, such sanguine visions, dialogically connected to this year’s “Creativity within Revolt” conference theme, concomitantly serve as “past is prologue,” “present is epilogue,” and “future as afterword” foundations for this address’s confessedly ambitious consideration of American studies as previously imperial (and correspondingly imperiled) field, currently configured critical interdiscipline, and prospective site of utopic critique. On another level...

Conquest by Contract: Property Rights and the Commercial Logic of Imperialism in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Southern Mexico)

Property rights and contracts were important to the legal foundations of the Spanish Empire from the sixteenth century. The recognition of the property rights of indigenous people was part of the legal foundations of empire, but offered weak protection from the commercial logic of imperialism. In the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, the national and international recognition of indigenous property rights has increased at the same time that indigenous property has been threatened by the expansion of commercial interests in the name of development. Focusing on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (southern Mexico), this article charts the historic tension between indigenous property rights and the expansion of commercial interests, and how, despite new rhetoric about protecting local communities and their natural resources, the shift to ‘sustainable development’ has not changed these dynamics.