Introduction: Generations of Empire in American Studies

Abstract

pecial issues of American Quarterly are usually dedicated to understudied or neglected topics, but even a cursory glance at scholarship in recent decades quickly shows that empire is one of the most often-deployed keywords in American studies. The much-vaunted “turn to empire” that started in earnest in the 1990s has largely established the imperial nature of the United States as a foundational claim in the field. Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan’s coedited volume Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993) serves as a convenient marker of this turn. Drawing on Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and (less overtly) William Appleman Williams’ Empire as a Way of Life , Kaplan and Pease aimed to deconstruct the remnants of American exceptionalism that had long shaped the field. 1 Published soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War, this text highlighted the urgency of theorizing US empire at a moment when American hegemony seemed triumphant. Both then and now, to claim that the United States is an empire is not only to reject exceptionalism but also to situate the US in the world vis-à-vis histories of colonialism and imperialism. To be clear, these arguments did not originate in the 1990s, but the turn to empire certainly intensified these debates by renewing interest in anticolonial and anti-imperialist thought and practice around the world in order to create multiple linkages to present-day struggles against US empire both within and beyond its borders. So issue We planning issue crises within Board Editors local pandemic obvious: the anti-Chinese anti-Asian racialized