Dwelling in American: Dissent, Empire, and Globalization

1. Empire and Dissent

a c h a p t e r o n e A Empire and Dissent After the United States went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, critiques of America as a global empire gained critical purchase in public discourse, both in the United States and abroad. This book makes three central arguments about most of these critiques: they tend to internationalize American national history as world history; they fail to acknowledge that people outside the United States are social actors with agency; and they often view contemporary globalization as a singular form of American economic, political, and cultural global domination. When dissent about empire is transformed into a disambiguation of empire, as José Limón pointedly observes, “the very category of empire is itself then up for discussion.”1 When it is left unexamined , dissent can create its own regimes of truth and legitimation, implicate itself in illiberal forms of protest, and engage in ahistorical pursuits of social and cultural critique. In this chapter, I analyze instances of dissent offered by literary and cultural critics, anthropologists, journalists, and historians, and I examine the rhetorical maneuvers, critical models, and ideological motivations that shape their critiques of empire. American Empire and the Transnational Turn In her presidential address to the 2003 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Amy Kaplan examines the rhetoric of war, homeland, freedom, and liberty in the United States to underscore the “violence of 2 d w el l i ng i n a merican belonging” in constructing “America as the homeland.”2 Since hasty evocations of America as homeland reify “a sense of racial purity and ethnic homogeneity that even naturalization and citizenship cannot erase,” immigrants, migrants, undocumented workers, and especially Arabs and Muslims are targeted for increased surveillance and subjected to illegal deportation proceedings.3 Kaplan emphasizes our “obligation to study and critique the meanings of America in their multiple dimensions, to understand the enormous power wielded in its name, its ideological and affective force, as well as its sources for resistance to empire.”4 In the issue of American Quarterly in which Kaplan’s address appears, the responses to Kaplan by two scholars—Limón and Paul Giles—highlight the need to think about empire in international and global frameworks. Giles writes: “Rather than specifically indicting the Bush administration for the state of American empire, then, a longer perspective might suggest that this state of conflict is an inevitable product of the fraught political relationship between the declining hegemony of United States and the emerging pressures of what Wallerstein calls the ‘world-system.’”5 World systems analysis complicates the centrality of the United States since it examines the historical creation of international economies that produce and manage centers and peripheries. However problematic Wallerstein’s proposal, Giles’s suggestion to historicize the emergence of American empire is valuable. To Limón, General Ricardo Sanchez’s role as military general in a foreign country where America is currently exercising its global power deserves a “translation” of Kaplan’s dissent about American empire, which she articulates in “somewhat abstract terms.”6 How General Sanchez ’s experience as a Mexican American—growing up as part of a family raised by a single mother in the border town of Rio Grande City, and getting an education and pursuing a career in the U.S. military—informs his role in the Iraq war and his perspectives on the ambivalent nature of the war underscores, to Limón, the need to translate empire. That is, Limón argues that we must avoid insisting on the United States as the only new avatar of empire in a global age because “when translated into local specificities , the very ideas of U.S. empire, U.S. violence, and U.S. minorities as well as the U.S. military become complicated sites with multivalent social and moral meanings and outcomes, frustrating any effort to give them a singular interpretation.”7 If we accept Limón’s insistence on the need to translate empire, another question emerges: How would our understanding of empire change if American empire is examined in international frameworks? Unfortunately , it becomes a redundant question in Elaine Tyler May’s essay, emp i re a nd d i ssent 3 “Echoes of the Cold War.” May perceptively notes that the heightened desire to own guns; view certain ethnic groups with skepticism and, in...