Michael Rogin on American Empire: A Retrospective

This essay assesses the contribution of Michael P. Rogin, one of the few political theorists to take US imperialism as an object of sustained analysis. My aims are three: (1) to reconstruct across Rogin’s oeuvre his central argument that the United States acceded to imperial status through the violent expropriation of Native American land and African labor; (2) to articulate, via contrasts to the work of Aníbal Quijano and others, how Rogin developed a signature analysis of empire by fusing Freud’s and Marx’s methods of symptomatic reading; and (3) to offer some modest speculations on what a Roginesque analysis of the assassination of Osama bin Laden and numerous police murders of African-Americans would be, while suggesting a critique of the heroic-individualist focus in Rogin’s work.