Where We Stand: US Empire at Street Level and in the Archive

"Where We Stand" takes the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism as an occasion to survey the last forty years in both the lived experience of and the growing scholarship on US Empire. Capping a generation of critique and inquiry sparked by the Vietnam War, Cultures of US Imperialism is a poignant benchmark in the interdisciplinary study of US Empire, and also in the recognition that empire must be central to the study of the United States even in its "domestic" dimensions. In the twenty years since its publication, however, even as this turn in the scholarship has matured, the US Empire itself has not sat still. New paradigms are called for to conjoin the state-centered history of empire that Kaplan and Pease represent, on the one hand, with the geoeconomic contours of the corporatecentered neoliberal empire that have become increasingly apparent in recent decades, on the other. The address concludes with reflections on the relationship between the current forms of empire and the challenges to higher education in a neoliberal age.